Daily Dose of English 83
(American) Indian Food
Daily Dose of English 83
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about American Indian food. This is a continuation of a little series that I'm doing, a couple of related episodes, where I talk about the American version of different cuisines, of different foods from around the world. because the U.S. is full of different kinds of food that are from other parts of the world. A lot of people call the U.S. a melting pot. There's a lot of different reasons, and plus, food is delicious, so why don't we talk about it? We've already done episodes on American Mexican food, American Japanese food, American Thai food, I think, as well, and another food that I love is Indian food. And I want to talk a little bit about that today. So we'll first start with the most famous dish in American Indian food, which is chicken tikka masala. That is the most famous thing that you'll find on pretty much every Indian menu, Indian food menu here in the US, or there in the US. and it is usually very good. It's a relatively simple dish. It's done with rice and then with a sauce, typically a tomato and cream base, and then some spices, and then chicken. That's more or less the entire thing, and you can put it together in different ways, and it's usually very, very good. It is definitely something that I will eat. It is not a dish that I am not fond of, I guess. It's very delicious, it's very rich and buttery, spicy, very, very good. But there's a lot more to Indian food that we have, especially if you go to places that are a little more specialized, you could say. Because there are some sort of more generic Indian restaurants that just have the simple things that you might expect. Some curries, that sort of, wait, what was it called? Chicken tikka masala, other masalas, other whatever it is, some mango milkshakes, that sort of thing. I don't eat a ton of Indian food, so I don't really know the names that well. But there's a lot of those that are relatively common, sort of like the Thai restaurants where there's, they feel very similar regardless of where you go in the country, which is interesting. But I wanna talk a little bit about some of my... own memories of Indian food because there's two specific restaurants that I have in my mind about when I think of Indian food and I think that they're on average a little bit better. The first one is the first time that I ate Indian food which was back when I was in middle school or yeah middle school so I was I don't know 10, 11, something like that. But I went with my class, we went on a field trip. A field trip is where you and your class during school go somewhere. So in this case, we went to a restaurant, but you might go to a museum or go on a hike, right? When you go out into the field, right? That's what you might call it. You go into the fields on a little trip, a field trip. And so we went on a field trip as a class to an Indian restaurant, an all-you-can-eat restaurant. All-you-can-eat is fairly common here in the US. If you ever visit, I'm sure you'll come across a bunch of them. But the idea is simple, you pay one price and you eat as much food as you want. They have a large buffet style food, so you can just go up and put food onto your plate and then eat. There are some rules about how much you can eat. leave behind, right? They don't want you to put a bunch of food on your plate and then not eat any of it because that's really wasteful. Sometimes they often charge for beverages or liquor, for example, or have special order things that you have to order on the menu. There's a bunch of different things on top of all-you-can-eatness that you can... There's a bunch of different rules. But the general idea is you go in, you pay one price, and you eat as much as you want. And so this place was All You Can Eat, and it was an all-you-can-eat Indian restaurant. which had a lot of different foods to choose from. There was tons of different meat dishes, rice dishes, curries, spices, sauces, desserts, all sorts of things that you could choose from. And all of us, whatever, 20 something kids were enjoying the food and eating a lot of food. And I remember there were a couple of specific dishes that were really, really popular. and of course being children we ate a good amount right we weren't like super young to the point where we didn't eat very much and we also weren't to the point where we were worried about what we were eating or anything like that and so the couple of things that were popular we ate a lot of. And one thing that I remember specifically, I don't remember what it was called, but it was this red chicken. It was just normal sort of chicken drumsticks or legs that were covered in this red sort of spicy sauce that we really, really liked. And I remember like people waiting for them to bring up more of it because we would eat people would take it, they'd go back to then eat it, and then other people would want more of it, and there just wasn't enough of this chicken for everybody to have, but it was really, really good. There was also the naan is a really popular thing for eating with Indian food, which is a flatbread. So it's a bread that isn't, it's flat rather, which is very skinny. It's still fluffy, right? There's still bread to it and it's got a lot of bite usually. So when you bite into it, there's a lot of substance there. And it's typically covered in butter, maybe garlic and other herbs or whatever to make it really delicious. And it is delicious usually. And you can dip it into your food or your sauce or whatever you're having. The places where I usually eat Indian food is that you get like these bowls of, I guess it's sort of like a stew almost is what I might call it. So there might be meat and sauce in there. And then on the side, apart, you also get some rice and then some bread, some naan or maybe some rolls that you then dip into the food and you eat that. Yeah, so that was my first, I guess, experience with Indian food. Very good, I've gone there a couple times. I don't know if they're still open, but it was very good. And the other place is somewhere that I've been going more recently in the past couple of years, and every time I go back to Portland, I make sure to go. It's this Indian restaurant called The Bollywood Theater, and it is frickin' delicious. It is so good because I don't know, they just use a bunch of spices and it's spicy, it is insanely good. And some of my favorite things, there's these kati rolls that have this sort of thin bread on the outside and then they're filled with this amazingly delicious chicken, some sort of vegetables that are chopped up. I don't think they're cooked, I think they're mostly marinated in a sauce. And there's other things in there, but it is just so freaking good. There's also this like lentil doll that is really good. It's just basically just lentils and spices, but oh my God, it's so good. There's these delicious rolls that you put everything on. And I would highly recommend it to anybody who ever goes to visit Portland because it just tastes so good. But one of the coolest things about that place is actually, the vibe, like the inside of the restaurant feels very different, right? It's decorated in a very different way than a normal restaurant. There's a ton of things on the walls that look like they're from India. I don't know if they necessarily are, but they kind of look like they are. They always have Bollywood movies playing, or other Indian movies. There's actually several different parts of the country that produce films. But they always have those playing. There's just cool decorations. There's great art on the walls. There's a lot of stuff written in the Hindi script. There's just a ton of just cool things to look at, I guess is the best way to describe it. And so not only do they have good food and good drinks, but they also have a really cool vibe. It is expensive, they do charge a pretty, like it's pretty expensive, but that's also because they end up paying their workers a pretty good amount, like a living wage, which is good, because it's a very expensive city to be in, and the food is definitely worth it. So, yeah. The last thing I want to say on Indian food is the American style and kind of just Indian food in general is very, very good for vegetarians because a lot of the dishes don't necessarily have to have meat. They can, but they don't have to, and they're still really, really good. So if you're a vegetarian and you struggle to have a lot of flavor in your life, definitely look into Indian food. You can almost always find Indian spices in smaller markets or even if you need online. And it's a pretty inexpensive way to make your food just taste way better. And so, yeah. Anyways, I'm already at time. That's all that I have for this episode. I hope that you enjoyed this episode of Ben's Language Lab, A Daily Dose of English. And I will see you again tomorrow for another episode. Have a good one and stay hungry. Bye.
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