Hummusgirl's Blog

India, as I have heard and read about, is intense, but it’s a democracy for crying out loud!  There are so many issues facing a country in order for it to become a superpower and India has more or at least very different ones than the US.  Wouldn’t it be interesting if their was an Indian Market or Indiatown instead of the Italian Market or Chinatown?  Maybe this is why Indians have their own specialized grocery stores; because they don’t want things to get too commercialized.  How would one commercialize India?  Because every time I go into an Indian restaurant (which isn’t too often, but they’re memorable), I see authenticity everywhere! You don’t see that in every Chinese or Italian restaurant, but I wonder if you ever did see it in them?

One thing that fascinates me about Indian food is that it’s supposedly this big vegetarian country where I imagine most of the people don’t eat meat, but yet the cookbooks I have show a lot of meat dishes.  The cow is sacred to them and thus my fascination with India because they eat chickpeas and lentils a lot.  I don’t think you could find another country who worships as much as they do, but yet has all these conflicting ideas about caste systems and maybe they just want us to eat their Indian dishes with meat because they know that we butcher other country’s foods enough as it is. 

Do we forget about what the poor eat?  In honor of all the vegetarians in India, I made naan, a lentil dish, and a potato and yogurt dish.  The lentils and potato dishes were really spicy, which surprised me because I thought our spices were too old, but we ate it with rice, and it just smelled of authenticity.

I wonder if a lot of the women in India work on their food lifestyle all day?  I can just imagine the marketplace as one teeming with energy and smells!  Maybe in the marketplace, everyone has their place and the caste system doesn’t really exist.  That could be wishful thinking, but if you’re going to be prejudiced in India where everyone looks alike, the least you could do would be to learn someone’s different method of preparing food. 

I might like to learn how African Americans make soul food, as I have eaten it in college, or other ethnic dishes.  That’s the great thing about America; there’s so many different choices, so maybe if we all tried to cook different ethnic foods, we’d be more friendly with other immigrants.  Or at least we’d get the prejudices out of our system if we cooked different ethnic foods.

I like soy milk, but hate tofu.  Is that ok?  I understand that soy overrules chickpeas in 230 million tons of the stuff is grown in the world, as opposed to only 9 million tons of chickpeas, according to Wikipedia.  Soybeans are far more versatile than chickpeas.  I understand that and they’re probably more suited to vegetarianism than chickpeas.  But you can’t buy soybeans plain which could be a tragedy because all other beans you can buy in cans or in bulk somewhere. 

Soy is probably the vegetarian equivalent to corn and is more popular in Whole Foods than even that special Macrobiotic/ Middle Eastern section where hummus is, but maybe they will overstay their welcome.  Can you make a dip out of soybeans?  Is edamame just like soybeans?  We all know, or hope you know that soy sauce, tempeh, soy chips, soy burgers are very healthy, but they’re definitely in a different section of the store then corn infused products.

Soybeans also have more dietary fiber, protein, energy, fat, and anything else, in that I wonder why hummus is the fad right now?  I did not know that the soybean was introduced to the US in 1765 and soybean oil is used on cars.  Obviously, we have invested a good deal of time on this oilseed, not a pulse like what chickpea is called. 

I get disgusted when I see chickpeas plain, which may explain why soybeans by themselves are not to be found.  I can imagine roasting them just like the chickpea, but in the meantime, I guess I’ll have to settle for them in fake meats and milks.  I bow down to the mighty soybean in that chickpeas have a long way of genetic engineering to take on the food industry like the soybean has.