(Many of the fairs, festivals, and other wonderful food events that usually fill my calendar each spring have been postponed or cancelled. This post is based on a past year's event.)
There are still times when someone cuts up my food for me.
Samosas often take the form of stuffed, deep-fried pastry pyramids, and at most Westernized restaurants they're presented intact. But for this samosa salad they were snipped in pieces, adding a crunchier layer to a base of chunked potatoes and shredded lettuce. An excellent dressing — made with tamarind paste, ginger, garlic, parsley, cumin, and sugar cane — was spooned on, then washed though the salad with a ladle of soup. Fish sauce and lime, I added myself. (See also the samosa chat at the former Spicy Mina, in which the pastries were swamped in yogurt, and likewise delicious.)
Those orange-handled scissors appeared at numerous tables, often to cut glutinous desserts down to size. My Flickr album captures those, as well as a small fraction of the other food on offer.
Citizen of Burma Award food fair
P.S. 12 (The James B. Colgate School), 42-00 72nd St., Woodside, Queens
(Although the organization behind the Citizen of Burma Award is still active online, it hasn't hosted a similar food fair in recent years)
