It is highly unusual for me to put my head above the parapet but here goes.
There have been recent threads about the ongoing viability of CRO and whether or not it is effectively finished. I certainly hope not as I have posted many recipes to the site since I joined on the very first day of 2005 and I often use it as a repository; coming here to look for an old favourite recipe that had been ignored for too long rather than trawl through books to find the original source material.
I also noted a recent post linking a Facebook page for Goan cooking that not everybody wanted to access as they prefer to avoid Facebook.
My posts over the years have mostly been to the Traditional section as I moved away from trying (and abysmally failing) to replicate BIR, and I started to experiment with the more traditional recipes. I would take a dish, Rogan Josh being the most memorable, and would try any number of so called authentic recipes to find the one I preferred (Madhur Jaffrey won that battle by a clear mile).
My question therefore is why do we not expand the traditional section to the various regional cuisines which are rich in history and offer an amazing diversity of flavours and ingredients? The web is full of sites offering regional Indian variations and it would be great to attract some of that experience here, under one roof, as the site did with the BIR journey.
Could the Traditional section therefore be renamed Regional with sub-groups listing the different regions, e.g. Kashmir, Goa, Sri Lankan (Mmmm beautiful black curries), Pakistan, Afghan etc, etc, etc. There are regional and religious variations on the food of the sub-continent that a lot of people would be unfamiliar with and may enjoy exploring.
How many people know that, for instance, a Dhansak is from the Parsi cuisine and that its origins are Persian? With that knowledge curry aficionados may then delve further and experiment with the Patio type dishes and the other Parsi specialities.
Or that the Kashmiri Pandits eschew garlic and onions and offer variations on otherwise well known dishes.
These are just thoughts that I share with you to see if anyone else would be interested in trying to expand the site, maybe attracting a new group of subscribers, and breath new life into the forum?
T63