Indian Food in Cincinnati

Here’s the surprise: It’s some of the best I’ve had anywhere in the United States, including New York and Los Angeles. We’ve been eating at a new place called Sankalp that has specialties from southern Indian in addition to the more common northern fare. These include dhosas made with rice flour, to be dipped in a soupy lentil gravy that’s delicious. The tandoori chicken and vegetable palao are also very good. At another one of our favorite Indian restaurants, Baba India, the spicy saag paneer (chopped spinach with cheese cubes) is absolutely to die for.

I get hungry just looking at it

At Sankalp, we are sometimes the only non-Indian customers in the place, which is a stark contrast to the local Mexican restaurants, where we almost never see Latino customers. And that, I think, is the reason that Indian places here serve terrific, spicy, authentic food, and the Mexican establishments don’t. Latinos in this metro area are scarce, while Indians are much more common — drawn over the years, I’ve been told, by the demand for IT personnel at the many corporate headquarters here. These folks long for an authentic taste of home, and restaurants not only cater to them but compete with each other to serve the best food. Any restaurants that don’t measure up simply don’t survive.

As an aside that also illustrates my general point, Mrs. SR013 and I stopped recently in Cave City, Kentucky, a very small, rural crossroads just off a major freeway, and went to a Mexican restaurant that was virtually the only alternative there to the usual fast-food stands. Hello-o! The food was really good! The chips were freshly made; the refried beans were delicious; the chile relleno was better than many I’ve had in Los Angeles. About halfway through our meal, a group of four Latino men in dusty work clothes came in and sat down. Hmmm…..

Seasons

It’s only August, but the light is already changing. Darkness is falling earlier; the long, long summer evenings are starting to wane. It’s a bittersweet time; the suffocating summer heat seems mostly behind us now, but there are hints of fall and the barren winter ahead.

Our culture typically measures a year in four seasons, but the landscape here is so full of life that there are really almost countless mini-seasons that unfold throughout the calendar year. The Indians had names for many of these, and I’m sure they would have taken notice this spring when serious-thunderstorm season spawned frog-chorus season, which was in turn followed by firefly season. That was followed by cicada season, and though the cicadas still put up a wall of noise 24/7, lately it has become clear that deer season also is getting started — that time of year when deer become more active and visible as their annual mating rituals approach. In recent weeks we’ve seen a six-point buck who seems to have paired up with the local mother doe; meanwhile, her two fawns, so frail and frisky a couple of months ago, are looking rather large and muscular now. Teen-agerish.

School buses are plying the roads again, and local tomatoes have finally ripened and appeared in the markets. Soon leaves will begin to turn. And on and on.

Passholes and Other Joys of the Ohio Road

Drivers here often try your patience. I’ve posted before about tailgating, which seems to be an Ohio state pastime — I get seriously tailgated almost every time I drive on a local freeway. The “Passholes,” as I like to call them, who are responsible, are completely clueless as to how dangerous their behavior is. My experience is that a slim majority are women, and many (of both sexes) are on cell phones.

Among other annoyances:

Too often when Cincinnati-area drivers come to a four-way stop, they don’t proceed based on whether they got there first, or whether they’ve got the right of way. They proceed only when there are absolutely no other cars visible in any direction.

A general rule of thumb seems to be that people drive 10 miles per hour under the speed limit. Thus, if the allowed speed is 45, you go 35. If it’s 35, you go 25.

God help you if you get behind one of these drivers.

Mexican Food in Cincinnati

It should come as no surprise that it’s not very good. With a scant Latino population, the demand and expertise that would power a quality Mexican restaurant scene just doesn’t exist here.

What is surprising is that even so, there are Mexican restaurants everywhere. We’ve tried a dozen or more. Many are chains and nearly all serve amateurish, Americanized versions of Mexican food, often laundered through the prism of Tex-Mex, which is a dubious category to start with. Here are some of the bad or mediocre dishes I’ve been served:

Fish tacos with flavorless shredded fish in them. As most Mexican food aficianados know, the essence of a fish taco, as invented and perfected in Ensenada, Mexico, consists of a fried fish fillet.

Chicken tacos that are so soggy they’re falling apart.

Tacos with ground turkey in them, worthy of a junior high school cafeteria.

Chile relleno: Not that hard to get it right

Chiles rellenos smothered in so much cheese, inside and out, that you can hardly taste the chile. I have yet to get one with queso Mexicano in it — instead, the cheese used is almost always mozzarella. In addition, chiles rellenos here usually come with an oddly flavorless tomato sauce.

Taquitos that consist of a folded — not rolled – flour tortilla that has been fried (for starters, fried flour tortillas with a filling are flautas, not taquitos). This represents a regionwide approach to “taquitos” among the restaurants that even serve them.

Chips that must’ve come right out of a Doritos bag. Most of the salsas that go with the chips are thin, overly tomato-y and bland.

It’s worth noting that many of the Mexican restaurants here have largely Latino staffs and/or ownership. And I have to say, the service at all has been quite good. These people must know they’re putting out vaguely Mexican pap, but I suppose they’re either too timid to serve the real thing, or weary of dealing with Midwesterners who don’t want it. Either way, their approach stands in stark contrast to that of the Indian restaurants here, which consistently provide a wide variety of authentic and often quite spicy dishes.

Another Climate Record

After a record-setting amount of rain this spring (40 inches in 3 months), we’ve headed into record heat. Today marks the 17th straight day of temperatures over 90 degrees, tying a record from 1901. Yes, that’s 110 years.

I have discovered that here in the Midwest, though, the heat index is more pertinent than the temperature alone. The heat index measures humidity as well as temperature to calculate how hot it feels to human beings. It’s more complicated to calculate, but today, for example, the temperature of 95 was essentially 100 when you figure in the humidity, according to the National Weather Service.

By any measure, it’s really, really hot.