A Toast To Sweet Potato

Just this morning, I discovered that #sweetpotatotoast (that's Sweet Potato Toast) is a thing. I'm trying to scroll down the Instagram feed of some 13,000 posts to see when the fad began but I still haven't gotten past posts on it from the last week of November. For me, it was a serendipitous discovery last year that simply some cinnamon sprinkled on sweet potato slices could replicate the smell and taste of French Toast. I'm no nutritionist but I do know that sweet potato has a lot of vitamins and fibre and is one of the healthiest foods. I went looking for a comparison with bread and I found this.

 I had this brainwave sometime last year when sweet potato was in season. I think I was looking at desserts made with sweet potato, but as usual, I lost interest, probably because there were too many ingredients I would have to buy just for this, and left it to languish in the vegetable basket. Then when my conscience nudged me, I baked it or pressure cooked it - I really don't remember now - and sprinkled it with cinnamon. And the strangest thing happened - the smell of my grandmother's French Toast arose in my kitchen. She used to make it for breakfast often when I was a child, with bakery bread that came in thicker slices than today. I've never been able to replicate the taste. I even took it to work and shared it with a couple of colleagues who liked it.

My method

This time, I simply steamed the sweet potato in a colander over a pan of water that was boiling something else.

I peeled and sliced it, put it on an oiled tava/skillet, and let it cook on both sides, adding a few drops of extra oil whenever I felt the slices would begin to burn.

Once they are crisp and brown around the edges, sprinkle a tiny bit of salt and some powdered cinnamon, let sizzle, pause for a few seconds. Turn them over. Repeat.

I've even got step-by-step photos for you below (from bottom upwards)!

I'm not recommending any amount - I went with pinches of cinnamon till I arrived at the taste I liked. A few slices make a great mid-workday snack.

Bon appetit!

Snack Vegetarian Sweet Potatoes

Lazy Beans, Cool Beans

I came up with the idea for these beans on a lazy Saturday. Now when I say lazy Saturday, don't for one minute think the Saturday was one when i lazed about the house. (Recently, all my plans to laze about the house and watch nothing but travel and food shows on TV are coming to naught for some reason or the other.) Oh no, it was a day a friend was coming for lunch, and I had drawn up a decent list of things to make for her. However, I didn't feel up to slaving over the stove for long, and one of the things I made was a brainwave - from years of Internet exposure to whole cooked beans, I suppose. No topping, tailing, chopping, none of that tiresome stuff. However, the poppy seed addition was my idea. Their appeal is mostly visual, but tell me, how often don't we look for style over substance. (And the substance here is not half bad!)

"Cool beans!" is an expression a young friend of mine uses, fairly new to me, but Urban Dictionary tells me it's been around since the Sixties, and is used to describe something very favourable or pleasing. It fits this dish well.

Here's the no-fuss recipe where I didn't bother with measurement or proportion.

Wash green beans well.

Pressure cook them with just a little water, don't immerse them. One whistle will do. (Alternatively, boil them for a couple of minutes.)

Open cooker, and plunge the beans in cold water. Leave to drip in a colander.

Heat some olive oil, saute the beans for a minute or two. The important thing is to ensure they don't turn colour.

Add some crushed/ slivered almonds, mix, and let cook for half-a-minute.

Throw in a very small fistful of poppy seeds, some salt, mix once again, warm through, and you're done!

Bon appetit!

Carrots for Curry

Don't you like these carrots? I grew, nay, drew them myself, and when I found out I couldn't colour them in Paint for some reason, I altered them to look all beta-carotene-y in an app on my phone. It's a good way to illustrate a blog post when there is no photograph of the actual food. Of course, this has no resemblance to the finished product, but I'm so thrilled I thought of it. It's certainly better than my photography!

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself at my friend's place, feeling low and worked up. She called me over for lunch to divert my attention and I ended up infecting her with my sadness. But this was after lunch, for which she had made the most amazing cauliflower roast (with gram flour and a bit of ground rice to make it crisp), sambar and a beetroot-green gram stir-fry. She said carrot could be used instead of beetroot, and I've tasted similar stuff she's made with greens as well. So the following week I made this stir-fry/curry with carrot at my place. My grandmother would use green gram with raw banana to make a stir-fry. I should make that next.

There are many recipes on the Internet for this. Here's mine:

Carrots, diced: 1 cup

Onion, chopped: 1

Green gram/moong dal, soaked for a while: A big fistful

Green chillies, slit: 2-3

Salt (I used 1/2 tsp)

Oil: 1-2 tsp

To temper: 1/2 tsp each of mustard and cumin; 5-6 curry leaves; 1 broken red chilli

Heat the oil, add the mustard, let it pop, then add the other ingredients. They will splutter right away, so once they do that, add the onions and green chillies and fry them for a couple of minutes. Then add the carrots and the gram, cover and cook till softer. Add the salt and cook a little more. Take it off the heat. Garnish with coriander, if you like.

Upholding Upma

Upma is making national headlines - and I am cashing in on it to come out of blogging hibernation. An innocuous comment by a film director on his love for upma - that it deserves to be the national dish - stirred a news channel to rage, chef, nutritionist and reporters in tow, whether it wasn't culinary chauvinism to make such a demand. I saw it a day later on YouTube, but I hear it ran on prime time. The outrage and the self-righteous discussion made me laugh out loud. Whether news channels are losing their sense of humour and proportion is a debate I will leave to other fora, but let me hereby reaffirm my love and affection for this blob of nourishment which sustains many of us on days when there is no time or energy for the preparation of better nutrition.

How much simpler can a dish be? Just a couple of spoons of oil, a tempering of mustard, urad and chana dal, ginger, green or red chillies, whichever is at hand, curry leaves to add zing, if you have them, water, salt and semonlina/rava. That's all you need. Add plump cashewnuts for oomph. Onions for taste. All done in less than 10 minutes. With enough lubrication or enough moisture (oil or water), its journey is a smooth glide down your throat. Not for me chutney or sambar or powder or even lime juice as an accompaniment. Try squeezing the chillies in it lightly to release the bits of upma trapped in them - that's heavenly, if you like some heat.

A few months ago, I met a friend from college at her hotel for breakfast. Both of us ordered upma, room service. It came, unctuous, glistening, crunchy with well-fried dal. We lapped it up as we rehashed old memories, gossiped and exchanged notes about growing older. The years melted away. Laughter and upma filled our heart and soul. That day, upma was extra-special.

Upma is as unpopular as it's popular, I know. But I'm one of those who love it. It's easy to make, fulfilling, elemental. It's easy to enhance too - bathe it in tomatoes and it becomes 'tomato bath', add more nutrition by adding chopped vegetables, using quinoa or millets instead of semolina, use buttermilk or curds to cook it,  or add mushroom, chicken stock and coconut milk to recreate a $100,000 prize-winning version. That sounds like something I would draw the line at, truth be told, but then I haven't tried it. I haven't ever eaten it with sugar, a popular accompaniment. I don't intend to start now. Give me the good ol' classic version any day! I would even recommend it to be the national dish of the world!

Delhi Belly, Daulat ki Chaat and A Decade of Blogging

Best wishes for the new year!

It's the beginning of a new year today. Another round of hope for happiness, goals and milestones begins anew. I had a significant milestone last year. Is it a sign of maturity that I haven't celebrated my tenth blog anniversary? It was in September. It would be so marvellous to be detached from such milestones, but I suspect it's more of dullness and less of detachment that has me blogging less and less. I keep wishing fervently every year that this blog could go back to its heyday, but the rest of life seems to have gotten in the way in the last few years. Over the last one-and-a-quarter years, I've had a new hobby as well - I've been dabbling in art, you see the result above - and that has consumed a lot of my free time. I have also been cooking less and less, and trying to cut down on eating out.

Some of the life that got in the way was pleasant. It involved some travel, mostly to familiar pastures, but also to Taiwan, which I visited in 2010, and most recently a trip to Delhi. It resulted in me making something I thought was blogworthy. I went there on work and had half a day ahead of the day-long workshop I had to attend. I hoped to visit the famous Paranthewali Gali in Chandni Chowk and a friend's pictures of her own trip to the place where she had the famous Daulat ki Chaat jogged my memory of this confection.

I remember reading about it as Nimish from Lucknow. It's made with milk and the dew that settles on it in winter nights. I have never made it to Lucknow and don't see myself doing so anytime soon, but I'm glad to have had this version. I heard that the Daulat ki Chaat would not be available after 11 am. I knew I would probably have such disappointments so it wasn't a disappointment - my maturity kicking in, you see - but my friend who lives there said she would take me to Paranthewali Gali anyway. I had done no research as my trip to Delhi was short and my schedule unclear till the last minute so I was happy to wind my way through Chandni Chowk's narrow streets and absorb the sights and sounds.

As soon as we disembarked from the car and approached PG, what confronted us but a vendor with a huge container of Daulat ki Chaat!

I've been reading that the genuine thing is very difficult to find nowadays, and that cream of tartar or hydrogenated fats are used to retain its light and airy consistency. My knowledge of science is rudimentary but even I can understand that something that is made with dew can't last as the sun shines high and bright. Well, that's what I have deduced. It will flop - and when my friend's husband passed on the information that Daulat ki Chaat would not be sold after 11 a m, I thought that was the reason why. We probably had the modern, engineered-to-stay version, but I am glad that I did. It was really of a delicate consistency, creamy and sugared just right and garnished/mixed with nuts.

I took this picture for the signboard saying Parathewali Gali. I did not buy or eat anything at this store.

As for the paranthas, I had a bhendi parantha for the first time ever. I had never even thought it could be used for a filling. I also had a peas paratha and a green chilly paratha. I loved the mustardy, pickled vegetables that were dumped in bowls on the tables. The parathas we got were served with a potato curry and a pumpkin curry, along with a few pieces of banana in a jaggery-chilli powder syrup.

Nankhatai, I'm told. So different from the ones in the bakery!

The day after the workshop was a Saturday. I didn't have to work so I spent the day with my friend. She took me on a short walk through her locality. She lives at the end of a lane that opens out on to a busy road overtaken by the Great Delhi Metro, but the other end and further up was so peacefully small-town I could easily have forgotten I was in India's capital city.

For perhaps only the second time in my life I saw hara channa/choliya, and brought back some to cook. My friend said I could freeze them too, for later use. Well, I froze half of them, and converted the rest of them into this

Choliya and potato curry

As usually happens when I am impatient to get on with a culinary discovery, I chose, shed and fused elements of several recipes to come up with this gravy. I cannot find any of those recipes now, I even searched History on my computer but it isn't helping. Most of those recipes contained tomatoes and no potatoes, while I had no tomatoes and several potatoes. I used curds for the tang. I came up with a gravy of intermediate thickness but ate is as soup.

In a pressure cooker or pan

Fry

3 chopped onions

in 2 tsp of oil

I can't remember if I added ginger-garlic paste, but add it now, after the onions have wilted.

Add

1/2 a tsp of turmeric
1-2 tsp of coriander or cumin powder
1 tsp of red chilli powder

and fry.

Add 2-3 diced potatoes, 250-300 gm of green/ hara channa/choliya and salt. Mix well.

Add water to cover the vegetables. Close the pressure cooker. Let it whistle 4-5 times before you switch off the flame. Let the pressure drop on its own before opening it.

If the gravy is too thin, mash a few pieces of the potato into the gravy and cook a little longer without the lid till some of the liquid evaporates/thickens.

Top with 1/2 a tsp of garam masala.

Confession: I don't know if I used cumin or coriander powder. My sense of smell failed me.

Qapsicum Qurd Qurry

Last month, I went home to my parents for a week. It was something of an old-fashioned summer vacation. There was a new baby to visit, an older child with whom we played a lot of indoor games – I must have played carrom board after more than 20 years – lots of mangoes and other summer fruit to eat, much sighing over the heat and hoping the monsoon would somehow arrive early, and some kitchen experiments with the aforementioned older child, my eight-year-old niece.

One of those games was Name Place Animal Thing (NPAT). It’s where the players take turns to name a letter and then everyone has to write down a name, place, animal and thing that starts with the letter. In one of my turns, I landed on a Q. (A player tells you to “Start” – reciting the alphabet silently – and when they tell you to “Stop” you have to mention the letter you were stopped at and that’s the letter you use for the next round.)

I finished my turn and was waiting for my niece, whom we give a little extra time as she’s still very young. After a few minutes she said she couldn’t proceed as she didn’t know anything much with Q. “Then you get a zero,” I said gleefully, :and I get a 40", ten for each of the four words/nouns we have to write down in the game.

 “No way! I don’t agree,” my niece ranted. “How can I write anything if you throw a Q at me? I don’t know anything with a Q. Even Mom doesn’t. How can you give me something I cannot do and then say I get a zero? I won’t accept it,” she stormed.

After I came back, I was exchanging notes with my neighbour who too has an eight-year-old niece. Her niece too had trouble with a Q, she said. Her excuse was that she hadn’t been taught much Q in school yet. “Queenie, Queensland, quail, quilt,” we rattled off almost in unison and burst out laughing when we realised this list hadn’t changed in the many years since we played NPAT with the same ardour as 8-year-olds.

Quill was another ‘thing’. I remember seeing a picture book with a bird called a quetzal. When I used it once, I seem to remember my co-players refused to accept it saying all I was making it up, no one has ever heard of a quetzal. They were easy to overrule, not my niece.

In the food blogging world, on and off I’ve come across alphabet-based challenges. Some bloggers get really inventive with names of dishes when it’s the turn of alphabets such as Q and X and Z. So in time-honoured tradition, here’s the Qapsicum Qurd Qurry, inspired by Tarla Dalal’s Achaari Dahi Bhindi, two shrivelling qapsicums and no coriander powder.

 Notes
The tweaking I did with the recipe was to halve the amount of ladies’ fingers, add about three cups of diced capsicum, increase the amount of curds to 1 cup and the spices by just a pinch.

As the capsicum didn’t need to be fried, unlike the ladies’ fingers, I added them directly to the gravy as soon as it began to ‘pulse’ a bit in the pan. I didn’t cook it too much, I let it remain a little crunchy, it would get softer as the gravy cooled.

I added the ladies’ fingers just two minutes before I took it off the stove, about seven minutes in all.

 Dalal recommends rotis and parathas to go with it but we ate it with good ol’ rice and it was just fine!

A Trifecta of Lassis, Of Friendships and Trips

Lassi is not something one looks to when they are looking for a pick-me-up, is it? That role is better played by something like coffee or tea, all dark and smouldering, with some bitterness to offset the rich brown good looks. Lassi, by contrast, is a fair, chocolate-boy kind of offering that would be my last choice of beverage (or boy). But what would I know? I, who have been blogging for almost 10 years now, have turned into an occasional, even desperate blogger you’d say, resorting to drawing similarities between lassi and the males of the species to inject some life into my blog. You may be right, in part, but this post is actually to reinforce and put on record the importance of giggly girl friendships in one’s life. And, of course, how to stay current and blog away to glory. (Were we envious? You bet!)

A couple of months ago, some of us, your favourite bloggers, went on a short holiday. We took trains, we took cars, we walked, we traipsed along trodden ways, wielded our cameras big, small and medium, ate and drank – not lassi or alcohol, but lots of the rich brown stuff – and laughed to our hearts’ content. And as it was a bloggers’ meet, deliberated on the future of blogging, bloggers, us bloggers (vs Them bloggers), how to make our blogs more popular, and find simple, stress-free ways to blog frequently and visibly.

I know I’ve mentioned in the past the state of my life and fridge and home and work and the insomnia and the pressure and all that keeps me away from blogging nowadays. The bloggers’ meet was useful in that there were some important takeaways:

1.       Anything is a recipe.

2.       There is no recipe too ordinary or common-sensical (I know it's not a real word) or unworthy of blogging.

3.       Lassi can be enhanced in three different ways (or four, or five, or fifty-five.) And each variant can be a recipe.

And so I have for you a trifecta of lassis today.

If you’re like me (life, fridge, work, insomnia, so on and so forth), here’s the smart girl’s way to making and blogging about lassi.

Buy lassi, any brand. I’ve tried not to let the brand show here as I don’t drink lassi and don’t intend any endorsements, but there are several brands, each with several flavours.

Buy some chopped fruit (or chop some fruit. Actually, just shave some off the top of the fruit, that will do.)

Empty the lassi into a pretty glass, top with fruit. Photograph. Blog.
(This is Lassi No 1.)

Too simple?

Well, blend lassi and fruit and some more sugar, if you like. Put in a clean tray and photograph. Blog.

(This is Lassi No 2.)

You can vary the colour and the taste of the lassi depending on the number of additions. The addition needn’t just be fruit. It could be essence. It could be fruit concentrate. It could be saffron. It could be spices. It could be even be another juice, like litchi juice. It could be chocolate spread.

It needn’t even be lassi.

No, really. It could be vegan. Lassi in spirit, if you like. You could substitute the lassi with almond milk. I found one in my supermarket for the first time today. (Again, this is no endorsement, I haven’t even opened the pack.) Or you could use cashew curd.

You could add the litchi juice or the chocolate spread – I’m assuming they are vegan, do check the label – to it, beat it a little with a fork or blend it mechanically, and your vegan litchi/chocolate lassi is ready!

(This is Lassi No 3.)

But, dear readers, do go on trips with your friends, eat, drink and be merry. I am lucky to have several such friends in my life and though such trips are not as frequent as I would like, I know we will be bound till the end of time by the things we have done, eaten and discussed – such as these lassis. You may or may not need lassis but you do want a smashing good bunch of friends with whom you can guffaw and hoot and snort and howl with laughter well into the night. And I’m sure Aparna, Harini, Lata and Sanjeeta (names in alphabetical order) will agree.

Zippy Zesty Za'tar Zeanuts

Well, I had to keep up the alliteration, didn't I? I mean peanuts. At my workplace, colleagues often bring a snack called Congress Peanuts (read about the name here) from Bangalore, which I love for the combination of chilli powder, curry leaf, asafoetida and sugar that they seem to be spiced with. I usually have peanuts in stock thanks to The Spouse who thinks peanut chutney goes with anything and everything - from idlis to khichdi to biriyani.

 I swiped his stocks and set out to make them but as I am always in fridge-cleaning and pantry-cleaning mode, I remembered the stock of za'tar I had and proceeded to use that. It didn't make a dent - I used only 1.5 tsp, but it made for a snack that had my colleagues at work compete for it. One of them said it woke her up, and hence the title of this post!

 I used olive oil since it went with the za'tar, Mediterranean thing.

 What you need

 Extra-virgin olive oil: 2 tsp
Turmeric: a pinch
Za'tar: 1 tsp + some more
Salt: 3/4 tsp of iodised fine salt, to begin with

Peanuts, roasted, skinned and halved: 300 gm

 Heat the olive oil gently. Continuing to keep it on low heat, mix the spices with the oil and heat for less than a minute. Add the peanuts and mix well to ensure they are coated well with the spices. After you take them off the stove, let them cool and taste for seasoning. Add some more of the salt and za'tar if you like.

snack za'tar Za'tar Peanuts

Of New Year Wishes, Surprising Yourself and Perfect Trials

Last year, I made this greeting to wish family and friends on Facebook a happy new year! The photo is mine, from my trip to Newport, Rhode Island in December 2014.



When I made it and found the words to go with it, I had no more hopes than my usual - that the year should not bring any earth-shaking changes and rock my boat, and that if there was any change, it should only be for the better. Then I forgot all about it as the year went by. (I even had a moment's trouble recently remembering the name of this place that I visited.)

When Facebook prodded me to 'See Your Memories' this New Year's Day, this greeting came up. I was surprised to see that I had actually done a few of those things it said.

I 'made some art' as the picture exhorted one to - I took to colouring late in 2015, in end-October or early November, and have been having a lot of fun. I know much has been written of its therapeutic and stress-busting value. I don't know about that, really. I'm not one to take to every new-age hobby or discipline and declare them a marvel but I enjoy it thoroughly. I have accumulated a bagful of sketch pens, pencils, a few paintbrushes, and three colouring books. I am also planning to go and buy a few paper supplies tomorrow. The pictures you see below are a mixture of the designs I've found on the Internet (search for 'adult colouring free prints') and those from my colouring books.

I've even arranged to go for a certain art class this Saturday!

I 'read and re-read some fine books' (A Spool of Blue Thread, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Painting The Darkness, I Do Not Come To You By Chance, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and quite a few more, fiction and non-fiction).

I went on a completely unexpected trip - the nice part was that it was unexpected. The trip itself, well, let me say I was glad to have taken two days off for myself after the first three days which were important - I really found the time to unwind and not feel too bad about the earlier part.

I kissed someone who thinks I'm wonderful (my 7-year-old niece, who really does, but would never admit to it) dozens of times.

And I did 'surprise myself' with handling a certain challenge which I shall not discuss as I'm superstitious about it. Another thing I surprised myself with was getting off one of my two Facebook accounts and not missing it. It was linked to this blog but it wasn't delivering what I wanted it to and I decided I would no longer waste any time on it.

It has nothing to do with how I feel about this blog, though. I'm still keen on keeping it going. I haven't had the time in the last few months to do much blog-hopping either, given the pressures of my job, but I will set time aside for it once a week at least.

At home with my parents, I watched my cook make a favourite colocasia fry and got it right when I tried it in my kitchen. Now that was a solid achievement. It also reminds me of what one of my friends says, that cooking is one area where it's possible to get instant gratification.



Before I get to the ingredients, I'll tell you what I learnt first

Boil, not pressure cook, the colocasia. Keep poking it with a fork or a knife to check for just-doneness. If you pressure cook it, it gets squishy even with just one whistle.

Do not turn the pieces immediately after you have slid them into the oil. Just de-clump them if you have to, with the ladle, but don't turn them over deliberately. They have to fry a bit before being turned over. Once you turn them over, don't disturb them again till you see the colour deepening a little more - then use your good sense and sense of sight to determine when they are golden brown and then remove them from the oil.

For the amount seen in the photo, you will need

1/2 a kilo of colocasia, arbi or taro root, boiled as above and sliced
Oil to deep fry (try deep frying in a small but deep vessel, I think we use up lesser oil that way)
Salt
Red chilli powder

Heat the oil well, lower the flame and then slide some of the colocasia pieces into the oil. Do not crowd them. Some will stick to each other. Separate them with the ladle. Let them fry for a minute and when you notice them turning brown, turn them over. Repeat the process as the colour deepens, once or twice, and remove them when they are a golden brown.

Put them on paper napkins so that the extra oil is absorbed.

Sprinkle salt and chilli powder little by little, tasting at each step, and mix lightly to coat with the spices.

I am very greedy when it comes to this dish but miraculously I managed to save some for The Spouse. So I guess the year did have some 'magic' that is mentioned in the greeting - it was magical that I wasn't so much of a glutton and he got to eat something he never would have otherwise. As for dreams and good madness - yes, there are always the dreams and the craziness in all spheres, too many examples to recount here.

How was your year? What did you do? Did you surprise yourself?

The same wishes are what I wish for you, and of course, I wish that we see more of each other this year, much more than before. Happy new year!








 

A Rough Guide to a Tomato Soup

We could have grown up eating/drinking something but never have had more than a vague idea, if that, about what went into its making. Despite cooking for myself ever since I set up home, there are some things that I haven't made very often with success. I usually try them, give up, don't attempt it for years, then try again, give up, don't attempt ... you see the pattern emerging. Along the way, I even forget this particular dish exists, unless I have it somewhere else, or someone asks me to make it, which is when I make another supreme effort, and end up with a decent or even winning formula. This tomato chaaru/ rasam/ soup is one such.

Earlier this year, my niece and her parents came to spend a week with me in the summer. My
sister-in-law said my niece had liked the tomato chaaru her aunt in Hyderabad had made and that she would likely relish another bout of it. How did that aunt make it? What followed was a rough guide - a little bit of this and that and that. Since the summer, I have evolved my own prescription for it and I am glad to say I have arrived at a combination of ingredients that makes a flavourful, spicy, thin soup, just the way I like it.

You will need

Tart tomatoes (I use the country/naatu varieties, you can add a few hybrid ones for their
colour)- 8-12
Shallots/onion, chopped - about 1 tbsp
Tamarind - 3-5 pieces, soaked just enough to be moistened
Green chillies - 2-3
Salt - about a teaspoon of iodised salt, to begin with
Cloves - 2-3
Garlic, smashed, without skin - 3-5
Pepper, powdered - 1/2 -1 tsp
Coriander powder - 1.5 tsp
Jeera powder - 0.75 tsp
Curry leaves
Coriander - a big handful, chopped roughly
Water

Make a plus sign in the tomatoes and boil them in water till the skins burst and you can peel
them off easily once they cool.

Puree them smoothly.

Add all the ingredients mentioned, except the coriander, as much water to thin down the puree as you like it, and boil very, very, very well.

Keep tasting it as you go along and add more salt or the other powders if it doesn't taste
quite right. If this is the first time you're making this and wonder what you should look for,
look for a slightly sour but mostly spicy taste.

Once you decide you are done with it and take it off the stove and transfer it to a serving
dish, add the chopped coriander and cover it. You can savour it in a cup, or eat it with rice
and papads, or sauteed/fried vegetables, or even kheema (minced lamb).

Eating Out Etc in San Francisco

This blog turned nine last week. I'm glad I've kept it going, even though the number of posts is vastly diminished as compared to a few years earlier. Thanks, dear readers! What better way than to celebrate with a report of something that combines travel and food! 

In July, I went to San Francisco rather unexpectedly, for just five days. This, of course, is the Golden Gate bridge but I was put up in a hotel fairly close to the piers so I managed to walk down to them everyday and take in the sights and sounds a fair bit.

This is my second trip to San Francisco. The first one was in 2003. My cousin and I spent five days there and did quite a bit - apart from visiting the city we went to Napa Valley and Yosemite too. This time, I spent three days in the city on work and spent two more days with a friend who lives outside San Francisco, just relaxing and exploring the little town of Lafayette where she works.

This shot is from a farmers' market at Ferry Plaza. Aren't they vibrant, these macaroons?

Don't you just love going to farmers' markets? I do. I even like going to grocery stores. I visited quite a few grocery stores in Lafayette and got my first pack of farro from there. 

I didn't buy any vegetables though I bought a lot of fruit at the farmers' markets and other stalls along the piers.

Tomatoes galore! I enjoyed seeing the variety.

Our hosts took us to this Italian restaurant where we ate a lot of ravioli. This ravioli in a basil tomato sauce was filled with ricotta cheese and spinach. This dish is vegetarian.

I think this was lamb or beef. Probably the latter.

This was ravioli with chestunuts in a butter and sage sauce topped with crispy pancetta.

This snaky vegetable was at one of the stalls in the farmers' market. There wasn't anyone around for me to ask what it was.

The first time I'm seeing rhubarb in the flesh. In the original form, that is. I've had a rhubarb pudding a long time ago.

I had been looking for tamales at Mexican restaurants here in India but had never found one. I was still in a tamale mood when I found a stall at the farmers' market on Ferry Plaza. It was filling but really very bland - I went on adding chillies to it from the accompaniments that were available. I may not have it again.

This is a pharmacy. It was quite a task to spot the medicines amidst all the food that swamped the pharmacies - and there were several of them around my hotel. The food wasn't restricted to fruit and breakfast - there was chocolate, there were vegetables, deli food, quite a variety.

This was a starter at a nice but crowded restaurant our hosts took us to in Sausalito. It is made up of kale, jicama and pecorino.

I've seen too many of these blistered peppers on friends' timelines and so did not pass up the opportunity to order a plate. They were very nice and mild, and occasionally a hot one would pop up. I would have eaten everything if it weren't for the fear of a runny tummy from the hot ones.

I was surprised to find out that this was what the restaurant called salt cod fritters. I've always imagine fritters to be flat, or like pakoras.

This was the wild rucula, medjool dates and gorgonzola pizza we had there.

And this, the Black Mission Fig with goat cheese and frisee. 

It's always a lot of fun to meet a blogger friend. I think of them as old friends who I'm meeting for the first time. ET, who has also been blogging for nine years, at Evolving Tastes, and I met the day I was leaving San Francisco. We met at Ferry Plaza, my luggage in tow. She treated me to lunch at the Mexican restaurant there. I had a bean taco and a shrimp taco. 

This was a pink lemonade in a shopping complex in Lafayette. I liked how the malls in California were not multi-storeyed but spread out. I rarely consume juices or drinks in India. But the ones in CA really had me thirsting for more. They were flavourful and not weighed down by sugar. I even had a couple with lavender in them. I think I would like to go back and try some more.

This was the lunch I treated myself to as I was roaming around Lafayette's main street. Tomatoes baked in feta with olives and walnut toast. Not bad at all!

And I leave you with this. No, I didn't dare.

A Plum Post

This post could have had many other headlines: I Grilled A Cake, How My California Dream Died, Holding On To A Memory - and Failing, Salvage and Redemption, etc, etc. You get the drift.

I went on a work trip to San Francisco last month and was housed in a hotel fairly close to the piers. At Ferry Plaza, I came across a farmer's market twice during my 4-day stay there. On Pier 39, there was a fruit stall that carried glorious cherries and strawberries and several other fruit.The farmer's market was full of plums and peaches and I tasted each variety and bought lots and lots of fruit. The fruit was very sweet and juicy, unlike the tart plums and peaches we get here in India.

I should have left it at that and not tried to convert a memory into a reality, however impermanent. I came back the next week and promptly bought some small plums (locally known as alubukhara, I think) and four big ones. They are sometimes called nectarines, but mostly, they go by 'plum'. What's in a name, though? They were as sour as ever. California slipped away a little more.

There was no way I was going to strip the enamel off my teeth any further. I set about looking for recipes where I could use them in a cake or a pudding and came across several. Some of them were for something called a plum buckle. Naturally, I knew that was what I would try as I had never before come across anything called a buckle. It seemed fairly easy to make too.

I combined a few recipes I found on the Internet. I marvelled at my brainwave to use Yakult as a substitute for the buttermilk the recipe demanded. I was slightly perturbed when the plum pieces sank in and didn't look like rubies studding the batter, as they did in the pictures on the Internet. They will rise when it bakes, I told myself. I was not overly worried that the sugar still helped its crystal shape. I put it in to bake.

Almost immediately I smelt it burning. I thought it might have been the sugar melting - in the pack I used, the sugar came in large crystals and I added a little extra because the plums were really, really tart. "Do not overthink everything, just do it," I told myself (channelling my friend, not Nike), and resolutely let the timer tick 25 minutes off the dial.

The burning smell did not cease to waft. I gave in at the 26th minute, switched off the oven and checked. The top was charred. I stuck a knife into the centre and it came out moist. I baked it some more and cooled it for an hour. Then I flipped it over and while it looked really pretty, like a plum upside down cake, it was all gooey and eggy as the batter had not baked all the way to the bottom or all around the cake. It was a wonder it held its shape even after being flipped.

And then I noticed that the oven was in 'Grill' mode from a previous experiment, not in 'Bake' mode. No wonder the top got charred right away! No wonder it didn't bake all the way down or around. I changed the setting on the oven and baked it for 20 minutes.

I cooled it again, cut and discarded the charred portion, scraped the rest of it into a box and took it to the Refuge of Failed Experiments (aka The Office) where my indulgent colleagues ate it, giggling, and even complimented me. Though one of them took the trouble to tell me he didn't like it, and that one had to have imagination to call it a cake. I forgave him.

After all, I had been resourceful. Earlier, such experiments would have gone straight into the dustbin. I would have been sick with guilt over the time, materials and money wasted on the effort. But now, I had made the most of a bad deal. I had managed to get it out of my house where it would serve as a reminder of my guilt and managed, instead, to create some 'colleague delight'. I had forgiven myself by doing all this. And I will not forget to check the settings on the oven in a hurry, here on. I managed to get it out of my system.

What lessons did your dessert-gone-wrong teach you?

Just Peachy, This French Toast!

Oh yikes! I can’t remember which of these pictures is the pre-baking and which the post-baking one. But I shall begin my post nevertheless.

I have mentioned my grandmother quite a few times in this blog. Her breakfasts were quite surprising, I now realize. Growing up, I thought they were normal. Crisp ootappams with tomato sauce, thick, well-browned chapattis served with a jaggery-sweet and tamarind-sour onion gravy,  and dosa with lime pickle, not chutney, and especially not coconut chutney. Toast was another regular item on the breakfast menu. By toast, I mean French Toast, but back then, we just called it toast. I am pretty sure it was called Bombay Toast in my other grandmother’s house. Only much later, I learnt it was called French Toast across the world.

Now I learn French Toast is not just French, though it got the name ‘pain perdu’ (lost bread, literally) from French bread, in whose nature it was to go stale quite quickly. Lots of nations had thought of this sweet, puddingy mixture earlier, and ‘retrieved’ or ‘recovered the loss’ by soaking this bread in a mixture of milk and eggs and then frying it.

When my grandmother made this, it was quite a treat even though it was a regular. When I was a kid, freshly baked bread wrapped in butter paper would be brought around homes from the bakery. A man called Rahman from Hanuman Bakery would come on his cycle, box attached to its rear. There would be fruit bread too, with tutti-frutti in it. And bun. If the bread hadn’t been sliced that day, we would slice it with a red-handled bread knife. Bakery or us, we would slice it pretty thick, and it wouldn’t disintegrate like today’s does on being immersed for just a few moments in the eggs and milk. It would come off the skillet moist and hot and sugary, patches of brown adorning it where it got a little too roasted, and transport me to heaven.

Neither our cook back home nor I have been able to recreate that taste, but I keep trying when the mood strikes me, and am often disappointed. It is flimsy, and no amount of sugar can make it sweet enough. I rarely eat bread, and the loaves are too big for my liking so when I am not giving away the majority of it to the person who works for me, I try to make some French Toast. Bread upma, too, but maybe I’ll have a story about it another day.

Last week, it seemed as if the stars were in alignment for me to use up some bread which had seemed ‘perdu’ the moment I opened the pack, just an hour after I had purchased it from the departmental store. It was rough and dry. I masticated my way through four slices over two days and could take it no more, when the local newspaper carried a recipe for French Toast casserole.

Of course, I did my own thing with a few substitutions. To begin with, it was a slow cooker recipe; I only had an oven. I had opened a pack of tinned peaches to make dessert for a potluck a few days earlier. I had bought the peaches (and pineapple and cherries) in May to make something for guests but never did. I used up quite a few things that were lying unused around the house. The recipe below contains my substitutions, while the rest is from the newspaper. (No credit was given, probably because it was no one person’s invention. The Internet is awash with recipes for French Toast casserole.)

Whole eggs - 2

Egg whites - 2

Milk – 1.5 cups

Honey - 2 tbsp

Cinnamon – ½ tsp

Plain white bread – 10 slices

Salt - a teensy weensy pinch

For the filling:

Tinned peaches, chopped roughly – 3 cups

Honey – 3 tbsp

Lime juice - 1 tsp

Almonds and cashews, chopped – 1/3 cup

Raisins – a handful

Cinnamon – ½ tsp

Method

Put the first six ingredients in a medium mixing bowl and whisk to combine. Lightly spray the inside of a slow cooker with non-stick cooking spray or grease lightly with oil.

Combine the ingredients for filling in a small mixing bowl and stir to coat peaches; set aside.

Cut bread slices into triangles. Layer a greased dish with some slices, add some of the filling and repeat until there are three layers of bread. End with a layer of filling.

Pour the egg mixture over bread. Bake for about 30-35 minutes at 160 C

It was nice enough and I had it for breakfast for a few days. It tasted good both cold and warm. You can have it for dessert too. Bon appétit!

Things I Am Learning, Making, Doing From the Internet - 2

So I've figured out that this is a nice way to break what seems to me like interminable silences on my blog - put out a record of stuff that you've learned from the Internet. Barbecued poha, fantastic chicken curry, a discovery of ramen, there's quite a bit on the menu.

The most recent was this poha mixture, which I thought started off well, but in reality absorbed too much of the smoke from the ingredients that I fried ahead of mixing them into the poha. It tasted downright barbecued by evening. Repairing it by adding some more plain poha helped but I had wearied of the project by then and I gave it away.

Then, very unlike myself these days, I craved some spicy chicken curry that would remind me of homely flavours. I looked for 'Andhra Chicken Curry'  and came across this recipe. At first, I thought I would use the commercial garam masala that I had stocked in the kitchen, but found a lot of comments in that post saying the masala recipe given there was just right so I went ahead and made it, with good results. This is never how chicken curry looked in my home but it always looked like this at many others'. I followed the recipe to the T, didn't even stint on the amount of oil as I usually do.

I got very fascinated by ramen noodles (instant noodles) just before the controversy about many two-minute noodle brands being contaminated in India broke out. One recipe I read suggested not using the tastemaker in the noodles, but cooking them up with vegetables et al. I had also finally bought a bottle of Sriracha after hearing so much about it on the Internet.

I was very, very disappointed that the Sriracha (I learn it's pronounced Seeracha) was quite ordinary, another version of the 'hot and sweet' sauce that most brands in India carry. I thought it would be Something Else! Now I've got a huge bottle (there weren't any small ones) and no appetite for it. Gah! And the noodles? The less said about them, the better. Suffice it to say they tasted of upma!

I attempted my hand at a microwave mug cake. As usual, I plunged in headlong, the recipe a half-baked (pun wholly unintended) affair of vague memories from the Internet and my own callousness of not checking it once more. I used two tablespoons of floor, a small pinch of baking powder and two eggs. I arranged some nuts at the base of the baking dish and poured the batter in. After it baked, I warmed some plum jam with water and poured it over the sauce. It was tough, inedible. I threw it away.

Finally: It's not often that I get to hear of dishes that have been made after reading my blog. Finla of My Kitchen Treasures saw a picture of the fried eggs my aunt had made for me in the US and replicated it with her own choice of herbs and spices.

Here is Finla's picture, which she was kindly sent me. She added chives and Turkish pepper.

And here's my aunt's version, with dill and chives

What have you been making, learning, doing?