Last night, Joe and I went on a double date with some friends from church, Nami and Tina Nahid. Nami is Iranian and Tina follows a strict diet that avoids starchy foods. Tandoor, and Indian restaurant in Clarksville, Tenn., is the restaurant they frequent most. I forgot to bring my camera, but Joe and I did check out Tandoor more than a year ago and I had the same dish both times. I think we even sat in the same low-tabled booth as we did before.
Tandoor has a very nice atmosphere-- The booths are made of dark wood lattice with colorful pillows and a curtain of beads that must vex the servers.
Their papadams were painfully hot from a generous amount crushed peppercorns...but I was still eating them because of an addictive toasty crunch and I liked the mint chutney a lot. Joe and I ordered some plain naan (a flatbread) to blot our tongues from the papad. It was very tender and slightly crisp with a drizzle of ghee (clarified butter) and sesame seeds on top. I liked my Aloo Gobi-- the flavors were more complex than the versions I've had at restaurants near the University of Illinois, where I first fell in love with Indian cooking. At first taste, the dish is all garlicky tomato, then cloves and cardamom and then chili and coriander. And probably a bunch of other stuff that I'm not keen enough to pick out. The rice was also very fluffy, but not in the Uncle Ben's sense of fluffy. Tina explained that they rinse and wash the basmati rice until most of the starch is taken out, which made for an extremely light and tender pilaf.
The meal was made nicer by a slow pace and plenty of fellowship as we shared our stories of salvation, meeting our mates and our future hopes.
1 comment:
What a wonderful article! I enjoyed our time together so much. Thank you for spending that time with us. I hope that we will have many more meals together with plenty of fellowship involved. I am very excited to see what the Lord has done and is doing in our lives. What a blessed people we truly are.
Your friend,
Tina
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