Straight from the Punjab

Newly opened Cumin will comfort your belly with authentic Indian cuisine

*This article was printed in The Tulsa Voice in partnership with TulsaFood.com

“I’m eating the best Indian food I’ve had in my life!” I was digging into a pile of lamb chops strewn with green leaves and covered with a fiery red sauce mottled with specks of brown. “I can’t name all these incredible flavors, I’ve never even tasted these flavors. So how on Earth can I write about them?” “Well,” Cathe said, “begin with that.”

I spent a year on the Indian subcontinent, trekking from the lunar landscape and Tibetan monasteries of Ladakh in the Himalayas to the palm-fringed beaches of Tamil Nadu. I ate in many restaurants along the way. But you don’t find good food in restaurants in India, the best food is cooked in private homes, served behind closed doors the tourist can never enter. (And when I did enter those doors, spending weeks in tiny villages, I was too ecstatic to notice the food.) So my dream now would be to go back to a tiny village somewhere in India and eat a meal prepared by a village woman who learned traditional recipes from her mother, as handed down by her mother before her. But as of a month ago, anyone in Tulsa can have this dream come true. Just go to Cumin.