Banh Mi cart on St. Marks Place/2nd Avenue

When I was walking home with my fiancé Patrick last night, I happened upon a new banh mi cart on St. Marks and 2nd Avenue. Banh mi is a Vietnamese sandwich prepared on a soft baguette with a hard outer crust. Each sandwich came with one meat–either Vietnamese meatball, chicken, roasted eel, tuna, beef or pork– and sweet pickled carrots and cucumber, cilantro and optional jalapeños for an added kick.
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In Indian cooking the combinations of spices are often what make the dish.  The word masala translates to a blend of aromatic spices.  The cookbook Classic Indian Cooking says that garam masala is the most important of all of the spice blends.  It is possible to do the leg work and make the masala ones self, but much easier to find a spice store that carries these ingredients already blended together.  At Dual Specialty Store on 1st Avenue in the East Village, they have the entire gamut of spices, dried beans, dried fuits, nuts, rices and chutneys someone would need to make any Indian dish.

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Garam masala in a blend of cardamom pods, cinnamon, cloves, pepper, cumin seeds and coriander seeds. For recipes that use garam masala or other masalas, check out Sailus Kitchen, an food blog on Indian recipes, Andhra food and flavors from around the world.

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