I first fell in love with Indian food while working at a company in West Hollywood and my boss, who was a true asshole with excellent taste in food, always ordered lunches from Anarkali. I would drive to pick up the large order for practically everyone in the office, and savored the few minutes I spent inside there while waiting for the food. Anarkali's low ceilings and uber-decorative booths offered a sweet escape from my days at work. And they always gave me free beer, which I would give to the head of the company because I was still 18 and not quite ready to drink on the job.
The array of foods on the table in the center of the office would bring everyone together and I slipped in and out of taste bud sensations. I had never liked Indian food, until Anarkali. Then I started eating it all the time. It worked perfectly for my family because now they didn't have to wait until I wasn't home for dinner before ordering Indian. I still remember the styrofoam platters (a rare allowance for my mother) lined up across the kitchen counter as everyone served themselves buffet style.
Panko crusted fish tacos, with a Chipotle-Lime Mayo and Chipotle Spiced Corn....sheer yumminess. Best of all was the Wild Alaskan Halibut I received from the 
For the longest time I didn't know what a real taco was. As a kid we ate tacos from the store-bought kit, and on rare occasion we might have fast food tacos from that place with the bell. But the first time I had real tacos was at a popular Mexican restaurant in New York during my college years. It just so happens that those first tacos were fish tacos. Since then they've been my all-time favorite.
When it comes to cooking the food from another culture, the ingredients and techniques can be unfamiliar. Going to a foreign country and taking a cooking class is great, but not a readily accessible opportunity for most. Fortunately there are local cooking classes and cooking kits.
Before I tell you this story, I have to tell you how I met Bobby in the first place. I was in Century City with a friend of mine and we ran into this group of Persian guys. It was all very high school and they were all very hung over. I wasn’t really paying much attention until one of them, within two minutes of having been introduced to me, starting feeling up my arm. I mean, really, feeling up my arm—you know, the underneath part of the upper arm that so many women (and some men) are sensitive about? Yea. To make matters worse, every time I tried to pull away he’d respond by saying, “Give me that filet.” “Excuse me?!?” “You ate a lot of hoomoos as a kid, didn’t you?” “Are you saying I’m fat?!” “Don’t insult the filet this way.”
