review: green land vegetarian indian restaurant

I have wanted to try this restaurant out for a while. Located in the souq mubarakiya area, close to the entrance that faces al ahli bank (29°22'24.63"N,  47°58'29.76"E), green land has been serving good, clean vegetarian food for years. In summary, the restaurant is clean and efficient and I will definitely be coming back for more.

Compared to other vegetarian thali places in Salmiya, green land is cleaner both in terms of the food and the premises. Upon entering, you are greeted by friendly staff. The menu has a vast selection that has menu items described in transliterated english and translated arabic. After a thorough look, we decided to go for the friday special thali.

The thali included several vegetarian dishes and was served with spiced rice, naan and puris. We ordered a saag paneer + veg dish as well as daal makhani. The spinach was excellent, but while good, I've had better daal in a few other places. As usual with thalis, the selection was mostly savory, yet there were a couple of sweet dishes too. The thali goes for 1.500 KD per portion, including refills of rice and bread. I was told, though, that the regular thali, at 1.100 KD is actually tastier. For my first time, I was quite impressed with the food and wish to go back and try their other dishes.

Following the feast, we had fruit lassis. This was one of the most impressive lassis i've had. The balance between sweet and sour was great, it reminded me of really good greek-style yoghurt. With chunks of pinapples and apples, this was a great cap to a satisfying, filling meal.

I would try this restaurant again, but having been at a friday lunch service, I may try it again on a less crowded day. Not that service was at all affected, but with the tables not too far apart from each other, I generally like my sense of space. Or else they could have turned the volume of the music up a little bit.

I generally rate this restaurant 4 out of 5. The food was great, very cost effective. The location is convenient, but finding parking at mubarakiya isn't always easy. The premises were clean, the staff pleasant. I would definitely recommend green land for some good veggie thalis.

white asparagus

Sometimes I pick up random ingredients from the supermarket to see what I can do with them. This time it was relatively well-priced white asparagus at the new Lulu's hypermarket in Qurain. I remembered Heston's tip for cooking asparagus in Kitchen Chemistry, asparagus should be cooked in oil. If cooked in water, all the flavour of the asparagus would dissolve into the water, leaving the asparagus without taste. White asparagus is also interesting. It's basically like green asparagus, but as it grows, the farmers cover it with soil so that it's always growing without exposure to the sun, so photosynthesis never makes the chlorophyll green. Honestly, the result was good, cooked in some butter and olive oil, salt, black pepper. But I wanted more of the oyster mushrooms than the asparagus.

eggplant

My recent fondness for vegetables developed a particular liking for eggplant. A filling, tasty vegetable that can almost seem meaty if cooked in certain ways. There are so many kinds of eggplants from the big purple ones to the small thai green ones, which can be confused with peas and go really well with green curry.

Above is a very simple grilled eggplant salad / side that goes with almost anything. Lemon juice, olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic, dill.

steak and polenta

At Martin's wine cellar, about three blocks from where I lived for the last couple of years in New Orleans, there was a deli. I used to go there all the time, mostly because they had great sandwiches and fries. But they had specials, and one of those was a steak on grits. Grits are basically cooked ground coarse cornmeal, usually cooked in water and butter. The steak, with some sauteed vegetables, was placed on top of the grits and then blanketed with a sauce.

Polenta is not very different from grits. Often cooked in water as well, it is a staple in Italian food. It can be served, as shown above, as a kind of porridge and goes with almost everything, from meat to chicken to seafood... it has a mushy consistency, as expected, but it has a nice subtle play of flavours that tend to highlight flavours from what you serve with it. It can also be allowed to dry and then be cut into blocks and fried for some crunch.

I haven't played much tennis in the last few weeks, so my cooking output had reduced. Strange how they're linked. But I've started again with dedicated intent and my food production will provide me with the energy I need. The plate you see above is basically polenta cooked with milk and cream, sauteed peppers, zucchini and mushrooms, and steak. The flavours went very well together, as expected. I based this on a recipe from Locatelli's book but changed around some things. His suggestion of some rosemary with the steak was maintained and it helped to marry the steak and the polenta even more. He had another recipe close a few pages off from this one that had a lamb stew with peppers and polenta. I think the extra sauce from a stew will help the experience. The polenta wasn't dry but the consistency of cornmeal and milk needed another flavourful liquid, a stock, a demi-glace or something similar. I will try that next time.

potato salad

i seem to be keeping an interest in side dishes these days. i made this salad recently for a bbq / outdoor food event at my sister's the other day. eating it within minutes of a perfectly grilled burger was great.

just a side note:  about the burger. it was a wagyu striploin burger. i was not eating it like i would any other burger. it's practically a reformed steak. sacrilege to overcook. the red velvet juices soaked up into the standard kuwaiti white burger bun were perfect.

back to the potato salad. mustard in two forms, dill, celery, and the sauce. the mustard seeds explode as you eat them, releasing a haphazard, yet delicate, punctuation to the experience. as do the other ingredients. they are balanced with the undertones of the potato, baby and cooked until just done. i also like this salad with red potatoes.

there is nothing wrong with focusing on the side notes of a meal. in fact, in a true study of anything one must pay attention to everything. understand the composition, the cosmology of the experience. the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts, but you have to know the value of the parts first to understand what the whole is. and more specifically, every part of a meal has to be great, from the smallest to the greatest detail.

gnocchi with taleggio

taleggio has become one of my favourite cheeses over the past few years. in kuwait, dean and deluca had some taleggio every once in a while, but as usual, they'd have a small quantity then nothing for months. then they changed their supplier and the taleggio they have now is pretty awful. carluccio's opened up and their deli has taleggio. i'm a happy man.

pictured above is a meal that took me no longer than five minutes to put together. gnocchi is one of the easiest, and quickest, pastas to cook. i make it myself sometimes, but this was from sultan in a packet. the sauce was basically taleggio, a spoon of milk, a couple of sage leaves, some nutmeg that i let melt in a separate pan. once the gnocchi started floating, i transferred it straight away and let it cook for a minute more, the sauce being absorbed by the potato and flour pillows. shredded some parmesan on top, done. didn't even add salt or pepper, it didn't need it.

taleggio isn't a very mild cheese, nor a very strong one either. it smells stronger than it tastes. but the complexity of flavour is what's great about taleggio - the strong aromas, the salty taste, hints of fruit maybe... i'm not really good at explaining these things. it's texture is also great. by my estimates, somewhere between a double- and triple-cream cheese, this cheese is made for melting. it doesn't need a strong temperature before the barely firm cheese turns into rivers of white, as i would imagine warm marshmallow in the factory before getting cut up into smaller pieces.

recently i had some taleggio and raclette that were going to be going bad soon, so I made some great grilled cheese sandwiches. just with some standard kuwaiti white bread, cooked in a pan with some butter. i though honey would be a good dipping sauce for it, and it was. this cheese also goes really well with leeks on some pastry. it needs that accent, either sweet or savoury, to bring out the subtleties of the flavour.

edit: yes, according to wikipedia, taleggio is 48% fat, which puts it right between double cream (40%) and triple cream (60%)

sides to go with everything

the eating experience should be a balance of tastes, textures, colours and aromas. sometimes you get a beautiful cut of meat and grill it, but you can't just have a steak without anything on the side. steak and chips, steak and salad, steak and vegetables. sometimes I want nothing more than a few of the freshest vegetables simply prepared. lightly marinated with some olive oil, salt and pepper as well as an acidic elements as well - vinegar, lemon juice, etc. in fact i could eat grilled green onions with every meal.