Fucking Badass Guide to Eating India

Ah, India. The land of those fucking ridiculous Bollywood movies. Seriously, why is no one saying this? Their movies are straight fucking insanity. I realize that there's a big cultural thing there, but I'm savvy enough to know when something was created in the depths of an ether binge.
Back on topic... the funny thing about Indian food is that there's really no such thing. India is such a huge, diverse place that calling anything just Indian is like calling a specific song music and expecting someone to know exactly what you're talking about. There are more than 30 defined regions that produce their own, often wildly different cuisine.

Now, this doesn't mean that every time you walk into an Indian restaurant you're going to see a wildly different menu. Far from it. Your typical Indian place actually specializes in food from the Punjab region of Northern India and Eastern Pakistan. This is where you get your tandoori bread, tikka masala, Biryani, and most of the rest of the foods you're familiar with. Punjabi cuisine is well-known for its wide range of dishes, with everything from spicy to mild and vegetarian to carnivore, including beef. That's right, the country famous for its spiritual love of cows does serve beef in many regions. To make things easier, I will continue to refer to all things Punjabi as Indian, unless otherwise noted.

Shit You Should Know about India

1. As part of their quest to be the biggest dickheads in history, the British got their first foothold in India around the time of the American Revolution and ruled until the Indian people finally kicked their limey asses out in 1950. Despite the relatively peaceful end to British rule (thanks a lot, Gandhi) the Indians did their fair share of Brit killing. They also produced some awesome propaganda posters.

2. Much like the food, there is no "Indian" language. There are more than a thousand languages spoken on the Indian subcontinent, 29 of which are spoken by more than a million people each. The most common, Standard Hindi, uses its own alphabet called Devanagari which looks like a cross between Elvish and Klingon. Luckily for us everything is approximated in English, so it's spelled like it sounds. Pronounce away!

Mango Curry Pork Chops

Ingredients
Boneless pork chops (4 or 5)
Mango nectar
Olive oil
Garlic powder
Curry
Basil


The holidays are over and it's time to get back in the thick of things. Right after Christmas, I sat down and said, "Man, it sure would be nice for some combination throat/nose sickness to drop by and fuck me in the face." Wouldn't you know it, that's just what I got. It's a goddamn Christmas miracle. My favorite part of being sick, aside from feeling like I swallowed broken glass and downing hot tea like an eighty-year-old British headmistress, is the inability to taste or smell anything. This called for a dish that had both a powerful flavor and a strong scent. Sounds like a job for curry powder.

Curry versus Curry Powder
What we're using here is curry powder, not curry. There is a huge difference in the two, which you should be aware of, lest you look like a fucking idiot in front of friends and family. The word curry basically means sauce in the Indian language Tamil (Slurpee Indian, not casino Indian). Many people think that curry has a specific taste... it doesn't. It's used much like we would use the word soup. Curries from different parts of the Indian subcontinent vary widely in taste. Curry powder has NOTHING to do with actual curry. Curry powder is a mix of vaguely Indian spices including coriander, tumeric, red pepper, and cumin. There's nothing inherently Indian about curry powder. Much like chutney, curry powder was invented by some (undoubtedly British) wiseass who took the name without really caring to understand what it was. So, once again, fuck you India.