Just finished my first attempt at making banana bread! I added chocolate chips and walnuts (because I can) and it looks really good. I haven't tried it yet, but I love the smell hovering in my dorm View attachment 5140
To return to the naga jolokia discussion: I just found what I consider possibly the best-tasting hot sauce ever. It's a product made by a local web shop that sells all things hot and this one's called Poppamies (Finnish for 'medicine man') Naga Jolokia Purée. It's 88% Naga with a bit of vinegar and salt thrown in so it doesn't go bad too quickly. Anyway, yeah, there's tons of heat in this one, but the taste is what makes this product so amazing. So far I've used it on home-made fried chicken and rice and though the plateful is a battle, the taste makes it all worth it (and of course heat lovers get that other reason too). This one will definitely become my main go-to hot sauce since if you compare its flavor to that of, say, Blair's (my other favorite hot sauce company; their Golden Death is divine even though it's mild) Mega or Ultra Death, there's just no contest even though this purée is much hotter. Next I think I'll try it with steaks.
Well, I've always loved spicy food, even as a kid when red Tabasco was the hottest thing I knew (I think I used it the first time when I was around 10). Then it just went from there and now after two decades I guess I'm just used to the burn and what e.g. is too hot for my wife, is perfect for me (she's a chilihead too, but hasn't as much practice under her belt yet). I'm just sorry that she can't eat this sauce yet because the taste truly is amazing (very, very fruity and just salty enough). Oh well, all in good time. Funny coincidence: tomorrow we're going to a local restaurant and I'll try out their chili challenge. We'll see if I come back triumphant.
I made pad thai tonight for the fam. It's the one Thai dish they like, so long as I make it mild for them. Luckily, tamarind fruit is very popular in PR - we have several tamarind trees down in our woods - and that's the main bulk of the sauce for pad thai. I make it mild for them, but Thai hot for me: paint stripper hot.
I hear ya, dude. I don't think I've tasted that dish yet, but my dad's wife makes some pretty good Thai food, being a native. I'll google that one though. I remember when we went to an Indian restaurant in KaTrian's old home town and I told the waiter that I wanted my curry extra extra extra hot. After he brought our food, we started eating, and about halfway through, the waiter peeks out of the kitchen, looks at me, then disappears. After a couple of seconds, the cook peeks out, looks at me, and disappears. After the meal the waiter said that they'd actually expected the meal to go pretty much untouched, but since then we've taken to going there every time we visit her folks, so by now they know my order by heart: chicken curry, two naan breads, a pint of milk, no rice. Gotta admit though: I was surprised since that tiny restaurant in a city 450km from the capital actually has the best curry and the best naan breads I've ever had, hands down, and I've tried several of the most famous Indian places in Finland.
I dig naan, but I like parotta better. I like the flakiness of it, and the recipe couldn't be simpler, but there's a skill to making it. A skill I have yet to master.
Looks good. I'm the exact opposite though: I like naan that isn't flaky, but softer so it's easier to use for dipping into the curry. Btw, can I ask what you use for heat in your Thai food? I'm always looking for both, good, tasty ways to spice up a food as well as ways to make it hot without interfering too much with the original flavors of the dish (which is why pure naga powder is so great: tons of heat, not much taste).
I use local peppers that unfortunately I have no idea what type they are. Here we call them hijo de putas (or if you want to say it like a real PR, hijue putas), which means sons of bitches. They are small, thinnish, and rather short. They look like this:
Yesterday, I ate at a local diner. And for the first time, I had Cauliflower and Cheese soup. I've had Broccoli and Cheese soup many times, but never Cauliflower and Cheese soup. And I must say it was even better than I thought it would be! Furthermore, a good-sized bowl of this delicious soup and three pieces of bread cost me less than four dollars!
They look like Thai peppers or bird chilies. And, as an aside, yes, putanesca sauce is just what it sounds like (Italian has a lot in common with Spanish). A bowl of freshly simmered Putanesca sauce on a windowsill was a come-hither signal.
That looks great! How did it taste? I've actually never tried making banana bread, but my sister has, and it was a disaster. Do you have a recipe?
Made this last night; it was fantastic. Never really attempted Indian cuisine before. Thanks for sharing the recipe!
It came out really good! This is the recipe I used: http://www.foodnetwork.com/.../index.html Though you can find different recipes online and blend them. With this one, I used about 1/4 cup of milk, and I added 1/4 tsp of nutmeg and 2 tsp of vanilla extract. 1 Cup of Sugar seemed like a lot so I used 3/4ths and it came out fine. (and of course you can buy walnuts and chocolate chips to put in too! Or raisins if you prefer, just be creative.) Also, it will tell you to mix certain things in separate bowls; that is not important. Other recipes don't make that distinction, but if you choose to it won't hurt you.
Veni, vidi, vici. Frankly, it wasn't even that hot until one of the cooks very kindly hooked me up with some pure naga sauce (just mashed peppers, essentially) which I ate in addition to the challenge meal, a bonus, if you will. Now, having eaten pure naga, I can honestly say that claiming it has no taste is BS. There's tons of this amazing, fruity flavory goodness that you have plenty of time to savor before the heat comes (I counted around 30-45 seconds after eating it). While she picked up our plates, the waitress told us that some people who had tried their naga sauce had started vomiting while one had been taken away with an ambulance etc, so I guess it comes down to tolerance (Finns are famous for finding milk too spicy). I'm definitely not a huge chili head, but after eating foods spiced with naga (among other things) for a few weeks (a few times a week, not every day), well, yeah, there's a lot of heat and it's really sharp, but it's nowhere near overwhelming. It does clear your sinuses, that's for use, so keep a tissue handy, but it really wasn't this out-of-this-world-hot lava explosion I was expecting. In a way a bit of a let-down, in a way a pleasant surprise, because now I've experienced another excellent flavor that can add a lot to a hot dish, taste-wise. KaTrian snapped a photo after I doused the competition burger with naga sauce and the other one is of the survivor's shirt they give to those who've finished the meal.
You have no issues eating one of the hottest peppers on the planet. Pretty sure that makes you a huge chili head. I, personally, will go nowhere near one of those peppers. I supposedly like spicy food; many people won't eat the level of heat I eat. Your level of hot eclipses mine exponentially. If what I like to eat is hot as lava, you like the heat of a sun going supernova. Funny enough, Minnesota is similar to Finland in cuisine. In fact, it's made up partially of Finnish cuisine thanks to the state's inhabitants being a high percentage Scandanavian (I'm even half Finnish as my great grandparents came to the US from Finland about 100 years ago). So, when you say Finns find milk too spicy I understand completely. Milk is on the level of Minnesota-hot, as we put it.
I dunno, I have a sauce called Da Bomb Beyond Insanity, which is ranked somewhere around 120 000 on the Scoville scale whereas pretty much all nagas hover around the 1 000 000 mark. The weird thing is that after a long break, I just tried Da Bomb, and although it's supposed to be significantly less hot than all naga sauces (with more than 80% naga), yet when I tasted the sauce as is, it actually felt somehow hotter. I'm a little confused. Then again, with naga, the burn comes quite a while after you've eaten it whereas habanero (main ingredient in Da Bomb) hits you right away, so perhaps that affects the way it feels. Huh, I didn't know that. Do you know what kind of Finnish or Finland-influenced dishes are popular in Minne
/Minnesota, I mean. For some reason, the forum doesn't let me edit the message (that bloody internal server error again)...
Oh hey random. Anyone ever read "I Loved, I Lost, I Ate Spaghetti?" It's a book of nonfiction anecdotes about the author's love life... but for every story there's a pasta recipe that somehow came into play during the story's run. Taught me the best way to cook pasta and the greatest eggplant/chicken parm I've ever had. I love cooking so the idea of having a cookbook of nonfiction essays just plain appeals to me.
