Paper masala dosa: crisp and light as air, except for it’s full middle.
Why did we order two?
Paper masala dosa is one of my favorite meals. I order them at every opportunity when I’m in India, Singapore, or Dubai. It was a restaurant in Phoenix, though, where I was served the biggest one I’d ever seen.
Dosas are hard to find in the U.S., but I discovered Udupi in Phoenix, where they serve 17 kinds. 16 kinds I don’t care about. It’s paper masala dosa, every time. I dream of its shiny mahogany surface complete with streaky tracks from the dosa-maker’s spatula, the intoxicating fragrance of ghee, and the traditional accompaniments. I like the drama of its arrival, even when it isn’t this gargantuan; even when I fetch it from the grill myself. And I like the eat-it-while-it’s-hot urgency, even though it’s impossible to eat it while it’s hot.
Paper masala dosa
Paper dosa is a thin, crisp pancake made from a fermented batter of rice and lentil flour. They’re always large, but I’ve never before come across the three-foot long version. Then again, I’ve never before been to Udupi—the restaurant, or the city in southern India.
A giant version of the paper dosa, with its three little bowls of accompaniments.
A paper dosa always comes with a little bowl of sambar (a thin tomatoey broth) and two fresh chutneys. Indian chutneys are not the sweet-hot preserved fruit bits in jars, as sold in U.S grocery stores. Those are “pickles.” Chutneys are fresh. With a paper dosa, you get one of ground coconut mixed with chilies and fresh green coriander or mint leaves, and one other, complimentary chutney (the kind varies).
If you order paper masala dosa, your dosa is rolled around a ladle of potato-onion curry, and the meal becomes hearty. They are always too much for me, but this one was amusing in its hugeness. It was no joke, though.
The paper dosa is cooked on only one side, with ghee (clarified butter). A hidden surprise of potato curry lies within.
Indian restaurants are everywhere now; unfortunately, they all seem to have the same predictable menus: butter chicken, chicken tikka, lamb korma, beef vindaloo, aloo gobi… They’re all north Indian restaurants and they all must use the same boring, failsafe recipes. If you’ve never had the cuisine of south India, it’s worth seeking out. You’ll get dosas (maybe 17 kinds!), other unfamiliar crepes, pancakes, and “donuts,” and dishes rich with coconut and chilies.
Udupi Cafe
1636 N Scottsdale Road
…¨Tempe, AZ 85281 …¨
Phone: 480-994 8787
At the Atlanta airport last week, a limo driver stood holding a sign marked “Bob Arno.” Next to him stood another driver holding a sign marked “Kevin Mitnick.” You remember Kevin Mitnick, the young hacker imprisoned for five years, released in early 2000. Remember the “Free Kevin” campaign? The guy who popularized the term “social engineering”? Kevin calls himself a non-profit hacker, since he hacked into computer systems for the fun and challenge, and gained nothing of significance.
We knew Kevin would be in Atlanta—we were all there to present at ASIS, the huge security industry conference. But Kevin was flying in straight from a job in Colombia, so we didn’t expect to arrive in sync.
First we social-engineered his driver to learn where Kevin would be staying. Same hotel as us. Then the chatty driver said that Kevin had been due in two hours ago. Huh. We left a note with the driver inviting Kevin to dinner later and left.
The airport parking attendant held us hostage. Our driver had given him the parking ticket, but he wouldn’t raise the barrier to let us pass. Something was wrong with his computer, he said. We waited. After five minutes, we requested our ticket be returned so we could go to one of the other booths, which were all empty. No car was behind us, either. The attendant refused. Bob got out of the car and demanded the ticket back, fed up with our driver’s polite style of dealing with this ticket moron. No luck. The man kept his head down in his glass booth, impervious. Neither logic nor threats worked, and it was twelve minutes before we were allowed to exit the airport parking.
We caught up with Kevin several hours later, and he told a hold-up tale that made thoughts of our little delay evaporate completely. U.S. Customs had detained him and questioned him about his many trips to Colombia.
“I have a girlfriend there,” Kevin said.
“Have you ever been arrested?”
“Yes.” Kevin couldn’t lie to federal agents.
“What for?”
“Hacking.”
“Were you hacking in Colombia?”
“Yes, but that’s my job. I was hacking for a company that hired me, to see if their system is secure.”
As Customs officers began examining Kevin’s luggage, his cell phone rang. It was his girlfriend in Bogota, hysterical. Meanwhile, an officer lifted Kevin’s laptop. Kevin wasn’t concerned about it. He routinely wipes his hard drive before crossing borders, shipping an external drive containing his data to his destination. Everyone in the field of information security knows the Department of Homeland Security’s new policy:
Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies…
“FedEx called,” the girlfriend said in her poor English, “they found cocaine in the hard drive!”
Kevin’s face went white and was instantly drenched in sweat. He wondered who could have put cocaine in his hard drive: his girlfriend? the packing/shipping storefront where he dropped it off? He assumed, understandably, that the hard drive seizure somehow prompted this Customs search.
“What are you doing here in Atlanta?” the Customs officer demanded.
“Speaking at the ASIS conference, moderating a panel on internet abuses. Here, I’ll show you.” He took the laptop and launched Firefox, intending to open the ASIS keynote web page. First, he hit “clear private data” and glanced at the officer, who instantly realized his own stupidity. The officer snatched back the computer.
HID card spoofer.
Other officers pulled suspicious items from Kevin’s bags. Out came another laptop, which they started up, thinking they’d found gold, unaware that they’d need a password and dongle to access the real guts of that machine. Then they pulled out a large, silvery, antistatic bag and extracted its weird contents.
“They thought they found the mother-lode,” Kevin told us, able to smile in retrospect. And we could imagine why, looking at the thing.
“What’s this, huh?” the agent smirked. Like, how are you going to explain this one away? We gottcha now!
“It’s an HID key spoofer,” Kevin explained to a blank face. “Like your ID card there. You just wave your card at the door to go through, right? I just need to get close to your card and press a little button here. Then I can go through, too. This thing becomes a copy of your card key.”
“Why do you have it?” the officer demands accusingly.
“Because I demonstrate it at security conferences like ASIS.”
Somehow, Kevin kept his cool throughout four hours of grilling. When he was finally allowed to use a phone, he called an FBI agent who was to be on the panel he’d be moderating, and the FBI agent cleared him.
Having lost so much time, Kevin declined our dinner invitation, since he needed to prepare for his presentation. After listening to his long tale, Bob and I headed out to dinner alone. We found the French American Brasserie—quite worth raving about. http://www.fabatlanta.com/ Although we both ordered moules marinière, hardly a test for a brasserie, we enjoyed the meal thoroughly, along with the decor, ambiance, and service.
Kevin had been red-flagged, of course. He found out later that Customs knew nothing of the cocaine in his hard drive. He also found out that there wasn’t any cocaine in his drive. There may have been a few grains on the outside of the package, but it came from Colombia, right? Still, the drive had to be ripped open to determine that it was drug-free, and it wasn’t clear whether or not the disk itself had been damaged.
So many airport ticket agents spend their work hours in terrible environments. In particular, I notice the noise level. Baggage belts and security scanners can be deafening, and they are constant. Screeching security door alarms and PA announcements add additional layers of racket.
I’m amazed at how little attention is paid to the sound of things, especially things that people have to work with day in and day out. Airports have a lot of these sounds. I guess it’s assumed that the target market passes through these irritations briefly and seldom, making them ignorable. But what about frequent flyers, like me, and airport employees?
Tired travelers in terminal misery.
Take the electric carts that carry late, handicapped, tired, or overburdened people to and from the gates. Some carts are silent, but in some airports, they beep with a piercing insistence whenever they are in use. Those poor drivers! Inter-terminal trains and trams: some, such as those at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, beep-beep-beep blastingly to signal the approach of the next tram. At the gates, jetway doors shriek shrilly when opened, or when they simply misbehave. And the sound I most dislike? TSA employees who pace the security line and shout orders like boot camp drill sergeants. I spend a lot of time in airports, so I have time to notice these things.
Alaska Airlines notices, too. The company provides custom earplugs to its flight attendants (though not free—they pay half). The earplugs are individually molded to their ears and muffle the engine roar while allowing them to hear voices. Wonderful. Yet, only half the airline attendants were wearing them, on the recent flights I took.
At the other extreme, Air Canada forced me to remove earplugs during takeoff and landing. “It’s a Canadian law,” the flight attendant said.
There’s a funny sign at the international terminal at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas: “No liquids or snow globes past security.”
I love the various scooters employees zip around on in Scandinavian airports. The police use Segways at O’Hare.
The ticket machines confuse a steady stream of travelers.
Rome, Italy—Termini Station serves up buses, trains, and the subway. Four long rows of ticket machines busily dispense tickets and confound travelers. Traffic is brisk. Meanwhile, thieves and con artists loiter, watching. Bob and I loitered, too.
An unkempt man pushed in close to a family trying to figure out the machine. The man kept offering advice, though he clearly hadn’t a clue about the machine. The family repeatedly waved him away. After a while he moved to another group at a machine halfway down the row, where he was equally unwelcome.
A pair of cops sauntered past and Bob had a conversation with them. Berlusconi’s drastic anti-immigrant program has not made a dent in crime, these and other cops told us. Bob strolled with the patrolling police while I took up a position next to the new plexiglass wall that protects ticket-buyers at agent windows from pickpockets and bag thieves. No longer do mobs press against passengers who must set down bags and fumble with wallets while buying tickets.
A new glass enclosure keeps the crowds away from travelers as they buy their tickets. Still, station police get about 50 reports of theft per day.
Unattended luggage caught my eye. A large suitcase topped with a sleeping bag stood several yards away from the ticket machines. Who could have turned his back on his belongings in such a place?
Bob returned with the police, who removed the troublesome wastrel from the midst of the ticket machine crowd. I could be wrong, but it appeared they photographed him first with a mobile phone camera.
Bob and I scrutinized the messy line of machine-users, trying to guess who the unwatched bag belonged to. Few by few, people left the machines and the bag remained. Eventually, only one young couple remained, the rest of the crowd being freshly arrived and unattached to the lonely luggage. But this couple never glanced toward the baggage at all. Either it wasn’t theirs, or they were part of a sting, as demonstratively ignoring their stuff as I had years before in a casino coin-pail operation.
The suitcase at left was unattended for at least 15 minutes.
As the minutes went by, Bob’s and my amazement grew. We discussed the possibilities: police baiting bag thieves; a daring drug deal in which the suitcase contained cash or contraband; a frazzled traveler who’d shortly return for the forgotten thing, panting and train long gone. We kept our eyes on the bag.
A man came up to us and began a long tale in Italian. He was 60 or so, and looked like a grizzled businessman dressed in city-casual: a button-down shirt tucked into belted gabardines. He might have worn a sport coat, I’m not sure. We glanced at him and let him ramble as we kept watch on the suitcase, wondering what his scam was. His tone was moderate, a little confidential, a little urgent. He asked a question and from his baggy pants pocket pulled out an enormous wad of euros, bound by a thick rubber band. He switched to mostly unintelligible English, something about a bank, and persevered.
The suitcase was gone.
How? We’d been determined to see its resolution and barely looked at the interloper who’d accosted us. Had he come just to distract us? He’d certainly succeeded by flashing his money roll. We left him and rushed to the ticket machines, not twenty feet away, hoping to catch a glimpse of the bag, but it was gone without a trace.
Porcini, at right, make my day.
We were angry and disappointed in ourselves. But not to despair: this was a good excuse for a consolation dinner. By accident, we found Ristorante Pizzeria da Francesco, and they had fresh porcini! Porcini will always perk me up, and Francesco served them the ultimate way: on thin, crisp pizza with a bit of mozzarella. No wonder the place was jammed with locals—well, anyway, the waiters didn’t kiss me.
Montreal—Read anything about this city’s vibrant dining scene and you’ll be pointed to Au Pied de Cochon. You’ll also be warned: dining here entails a serious lapse in a heart-healthy diet. Pigs, of course, are featured heavily on the menu. Foie gras is the restaurant’s other specialty.
I don’t eat pigs, or any four-legged animals. I’m not big on two-legged winged creatures, either. But foie gras makes me swoon. In Montreal, it comes from ducks, not geese, and I find it slightly inferior. Slightly.
Au Pied de Cochon’s version of poutine starts with potatoes fried in duck fat and topped with a large lobe of seared foie gras. And get this: the sauce is made of foie gras puree, egg yolks, and cream. The eyes and mouth say yeah! while the heart runs for cover.
It was fabulous. Bob and I shared a plate, and we could have walked away satisfied after just the foie gras poutine and glasses of chenin blanc.
Toasted bread spread with celery root puree, waiting for the contents of the can
Duck in a can
But no. We had to experiment. Bob had a fresh bluefin tuna dish, rare and complicated. I had duck in a can. My chef brother-out-law had told me about it. The waiter brought out a piece of toasted bread covered with celery root puree. He also brought a hot sealed can, which he opened with a can opener at the table.
Duck in a can: hot and freshly cooked
Slowly and ceremoniously, the steaming contents were dumped atop the bread. A duck breast, a large lobe of foie gras, buttered cabbage, a head of garlic, fresh thyme, and mysterious juices were cooked to a fragrant, unidentifiable heap that looked sort of… well, pre-digested.
Duck in a can: not a pretty sight
It was not a pretty sight, though it smelled divine. The structure stood tall on its bread foundation for a minute, until the bread soaked up enough fat and juices to lose its ability to support such a heavy burden. Neighboring diners’ eyes bugged out. Mouths gaped. Oohs and ahs for the spectacle of the duck.
Duck in a can: devine
Needless to say, it was delicious. The duck was chewy and gamey, the foie gras meltingly luscious, the garlic an occasional bright surprise, and the cabbage a vegetal counterbalance. The celery root and juicy-crusty bread could have been a meal on it’s own. As you can see, the dish was enough for six people.
No surprise that the combination, foie gras poutine followed by duck in a can, was not a wise choice; I knew that when I ordered. I just had to try both dishes. There were many others I managed to pass up.
Fresh shellfish at Au Pied de Cochon
So this is my recommendation. Go to Au Pied de Cochon. If duck in a can doesn’t intrigue you, try one of their spectacular seafood platters. Or probably anything on the menu.
A family visit to Stockholm turned into a media circus. How did they know we were in town? First was an interview for an article in the Sunday supplement of Aftonbladet, one of Sweden’s national newspapers. (See it here.) Then Bob (Arno, the criminologist) was asked to speak to Stockholm’s street cops and detectives. Halfway through his two-hour presentation on street crime, TV4 showed up for an interview and demo.
The tv news reporters had to wait an hour for us, while Bob and I analyzed some tricky footage of a bag theft in Stockholm’s main subway station. The subway surveillance cameras are excellent, with high resolution and enough frames-per-second. We recognized the finale of a version of the pigeon-poop ploy, but earlier footage of the set-up was no longer available. Video footage is only kept for a few days before it is destroyed. The department’s looseleaf “book of criminals” is thick with mugshots. Stockholm is not what it used to be, even just a few years ago. Sad.
We drove Bob’s 97-year-old father out to his country house on an island in the archipelago. The old man built the three houses on the property with his own hands, and has maintained them reasonably well until the last year or so.
The grounds have always been a loosely-controlled wilderness, but now the meadows of wild orchid, lilly-of-the-valley, lupine, and Swedish soldiers are overgrown with tall grasses that hide the colorful flowers. As we arrived, a huge male deer munching leisurely on the trees looked accusingly at us, as if we were the trespassers. Within arm’s reach of the car, it didn’t bolt until we aimed a camera at it.
The weather was glorious and the old man was happy to be at his “summerhome.” I picked handfuls of smultron, tiny wild strawberries, until I was dragged away. I find it excruciating to walk on such delicacies, but they cover the ground and there’s no choice. I brought home a tick, but didn’t find it until the next day.
For a cross-country flight, I packed a lunch of deconstructed sandwiches. Slices of homemade walnut bread, a handful of arugula, a tomato, and a repurposed deli-container full of homemade crab salad. The crab salad was moist with mayo, lemon, and chopped apple. Spreadable, if not quite liquid, mostly filling an 8 oz container.
I didn’t expect it to pass security, so I was ready with Plan B: I’d back out of the security area, construct the sandwiches, and try again with the less-dense contraband.
So I’m pushing my carry-on along to the scanner belt when the TSA man on the x-ray calls for assistance. “Log-jam,” he says.
“They’re moving now,” I say, having straightened someone else’s bag. Mine goes through.
“I’m just trying to keep her busy [wink],” the TSA agent says, jerking his chin toward his colleague as she inspects the flow of bags.
I lock eyes with him. “Good strategy,” I wink back, and he doesn’t even glance at the screen as my bags sail through, crab salad and all.
Bob and I must not be working hard enough. We’re just not getting the message out. We had a very good dinner at the intimate, chef-owned EVOO, in Boston, where we found this woman, happily oblivious to her open invitation. See her red-lined purse gaping open, behind her back? We brushed against it in the tight squeeze getting to our table, but she didn’t notice. We, or anyone, could easily have plucked out her wallet or cell phone. When Bob spoke to her, she admitted that she (or was it her female companion?) had already been a victim of theft from a purse hung on the back of a chair.
Men: hanging a jacket on the back of a chair is just as risky if you’ve got goodies in your pockets.
Hong Kong hair salon? Seen from the street: Chinese torture unit, or what?
Can anyone tell me what this contraption is? I took this picture through a window in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, after a dinner at Spring Deer, the famous and fabulous house of Peking duck. What are they doing to those poor women? Does it hurt? Click the picture for a larger view. I saw several shops in the neighborhood with this weird torture unit visible through the window.
Turkey Vultures—We’re off duty in Istanbul, so we roam around the Grand Bazaar, buy a shawl, buy a cd, seize photo opportunities. We go out the back of the covered market and I can’t resist buying an ice cream cone and the show that goes with it. I’m delighted, even knowing each move before it happens. The ice cream cart has a row of deep bins, each holding a different flavor of the weird Turkish ice cream.*
In Istanbul, a sidewalk vendor works his pink ice cream.
To drum up business, the ice cream man bangs his three-foot-long spatula on the bins in a catchy rhythm. then he stabs the pink ice cream and raises it high out of its bin in a solid blob and lets it slowly stretch like pizza dough or silly putty. Turkish ice cream has a consistency completely unlike what we’re used to.
Layered with every flavor of chewy ice cream.
I ask for a small cone and the ice cream man goes into high-speed. He scrapes a bit of ice cream from each bin and creates a rainbow stack on the cone, layer by distinct layer. He hands the creation to me and I take the cone—and suddenly it’s just an empty cone in my hand. The laughing ice cream man holds my purchase over his head and makes a face. He takes the empty from me and offers the one I’m drooling for but as I reach for it, he lets it swivel upside down and I grab air.
The vendor has fun with customers, but no worry: the ice cream is thick and won't melt.
One more time he offers the cone, and this time I’m left with just the paper wrapper in my hand. As I finally chew my ice cream (yes, it’s chewable stuff), I watch a Canadian woman argue about the price of a cone. After grudgingly paying, she swears the man short-changed her.
Istanbul pickpockets
I cut Bob out of the photo, as it was the two thieves behind him I really wanted.
It’s 6 p.m. Just beyond the ice cream trolley is a major bus stop. Buses pull in and line up in three ever-changing lanes. Bob and I instantly notice a “suspect.” He’s wearing a navy pinstripe suit with a smear of caked mud(?) on the back of the left thigh, and he carries an odd shaped package loosely wrapped in a plastic bag—his tool.
"Pinstripe" works while "Teach," in the background, looks into our camera.
Soon enough we identify his buddies. I pretend to take a picture of of Bob while shooting two of the gang behind him. They’re not suspicious of us, and one (in the striped shirt) even steps up beside Bob and smiles at me, as if he wants to be in a picture. (I’ll call him Ham, but I should call him smug.) My damn camera is set on too high a resolution—I can’t snap a second shot because the first is still recording.
Now they perform for us, proving our fine-honed sense of thief detection. But we’re not ready with equipment! In fact, since we hadn’t planned to be on the prowl today, we don’t even have proper equipment. So Bob uses his new tiny camera in video mode, then promptly deletes the half-minute of footage by accident. I take a still shot, but a woman steps in front of the action and blocks the money-shot. We both get mediocre stills.
A pickpocket in Istanbul works passengers as they board the bus.
The pickpockets, of course, don’t get on the bus. Pinstripe hasn’t seen us, but another one has. He’s nice and clean-cut-looking, despite his three-day whiskers. He looks like a high-school history teacher. After blatantly photographing him, Bob approaches and offers his hand. We have no common language at all, but that doesn’t keep us from trying. We pull him aside and Bob lays some moves on him, borrowing his tool for cover. Teach breaks into a huge grin, but what does he think? That Bob is a pickpocket, or just that we caught him out, wink wink. He can’t know, and wants to get away, wants to get back to work. As if greeting a long lost confederate—or by way of desperate farewell—he kisses Bob roughly on both cheeks, then me, then Bob again, then me again. Bob is convinced it’s a sign of respect.
With no common language, Bob Arno's interrogation of this pickpocket in Istanbul did not go far.
Teach takes off, but Pinstripe doggedly continues, working the boarding passengers of one bus after another. All the thieves we observe here seem to work alone, even though they may be beside a colleague. During the 90 minutes we skulked about the bus stop, we observed about 20 suspects. Were there more?
The main drag in the "modern" part of Istanbul. Crowded day and night... but especially at night.
At 11 p.m. we wander up the hill to Istiklal Caddesi, the main drag in Beyoglu on the “modern side” of Istanbul. It’s still Europe, but on the other side of the Golden Horn. We talk about sitting down for a glass of wine or finding a sweet shop for some gooey Turkish desserts and tea. The street is jammed with pedestrians, and police cars are strategically parked at several intersections. I spot a suspicious character loitering around the atm, but Bob pooh-poohs my inkling. He pops into a deafening music shop to buy some new age Turkish funk while I, repelled by the volume, wait in the street and watch the people-parade.
The pickpocket we called "34," working in Istanbul at midnight.
By now it’s past midnight but despite being in r&r mode, my thiefometer kicks in. I can’t help staking out the lowlife who leans against the wall, clearly lurking, holding a sweater (tool) over his arm like half the other people on the street, but in that way.
Finally he lurches into the crowd and I see that (a), he’s got a limp, and (b), he’s onto a woman with a low purse. No surprise. I follow him until he gives up on the purse and leans against another wall. I dash into the cd store and pull Bob out. We easily locate the limper again, but soon lose him in the swirl of people. His shirt front identifies him as “34.” From the back he’s all gray, but his orange sleeve beckons like a beacon, and so does his bobbing head. Mostly though, this guy just leans and lies low. We watch him make a few more half-hearted attempts just to prove to ourselves that he is what we know he is, then Bob decides to enlist a translator.
A pickpocket in Istanbul, found working late at night.
He returns dragging a plainclothes security guard from the music shop.
Surprisingly, the limping pickpocket didn’t put up any resistance or hesitate to answer our questions. And although our translator required serious cajoling to enlist, he gets into the moment. “34” is a Kurd, not married, and has been picking pockets for 20 years. He claims to be the best operator on this street, and says it is his main territory. His leg was injured when he was a child. Bob notices how delicate his fingers are, how clean, how perfectly manicured the nails.
To demonstrate a move, Bob wants to borrow 34’s sweater to use as a cover. Like most criminal thieves, Bob simply can’t steal barehanded. At first, 34 was reluctant to release his sweater. But when Bob got into position behind the translator, 34 swiftly arranged himself in front of the translator and fell slightly back into him. Bob slipped out the translator’s wallet as if he and 34 had been partners for decades.
We ask how many others work this street, and 34 says there is a woman, and some children. This street is easy, he says. How often do you succeed in getting money, Bob asks. Every time, he lies. He repeatedly presses his hands to his nose, which is red and swollen. His cheeks are scraped and he might have the beginning of a black eye. Bob asks how he hurt his face. Three hours ago, he claims, he tried to break up a fight between some friends of his.
Yeah, right. We can think of a more likely scenario.
*Turkish ice cream is thick and chewy, totally different from “our” ice cream, but delicious. It’s thickened with salep, the dried powder of a wild orchid now endangered.
