Biriyani Turns Over A New Leaf

Every year, when Id comes around, a friend of the family sends over biriyani and other festive delights for us to consume. He usually calls to tell us not to cook anything for the day as the amounts he sends are huge. One year, the call hadn't come yet, and Dad, who was eagerly looking forward to it, got antsy.

This friend is my grandfather's friend. My grandfather's name ended in Rao. "How about we give our friend a reminder?" Dad suggested. "We call him, chant 'Pulao, pulao, X X Rao, Pulao pulao X X Rao' and hang up?" Naturally, that led to a lot of giggles, but happily, the friend called soon after and we had ourselves a feast as usual.

That was a very involved biriyani which spared no effort, I'm sure, but this biriyani/pulao that I made the other day was chosen for its no-fuss method. The inspiration came from another recipe which I will post and acknowledge as soon as I make it, but the tweaking I did with the herbs and spices is all mine.

Chicken: 500 gm (Vegetarian can subsitute chicken with potatoes, peas and carrots)
Basmati Rice: 550 gm (note the volume)

Curry leaves: A handful (Read more about curry leaves here)
Crushed peppercorns: 1.5 tbsp
Thick coconut milk: 200 ml
Water: 1/2 cup + twice the volume of the rice
Coriander powder: 1.5 tbsp
Turmeric powder: 1/4 tsp
Powdered cinnamon and cloves: 1/2 tsp each


Cinnamon sticks: 3
Cloves: 4
Marathi moggu, crushed a bit: 3
Whole pepper: 1.5 tsp
Ghee/Oil/Mix of both: 75 ml/4 tbsp
Salt to taste


Soak the rice for 10 minutes and strain.

Wash the chicken and set aside.

In a heavy bottomed pan or pressure cooker, heat the fat and fry the cinnamon, cloves, Marathi moggu and pepper.

Add powdered cinnamon and cloves.

Add coriander and turmeric powders and fry again for a couple of seconds.

Add the curry leaves and the chicken pieces, sauté well. When the chicken changes colour, add salt and crushed peppercorns.

Add the coconut milk plus the 1/2 cup of water and cook the chicken for a couple of minutes.

Now add enough water (If the rice came to 3 cups, add 6 cups of water)and allow it to boil.



Add rice. Cook till done after sealing the lid. In a pressure cooker, let it cook for 5 minutes on simmer after two or three whistles.



One eater said it was alright, but that it didn't taste of anything in particular.

Another liked it, but that the whole pepper interfered with the eating. I liked it for that very reason. And the fragrance imparted by the spices boiling in the coconut milk - that was Joy of Discovery.

Yet another, bless his kind soul, said it was tasty, and served himself twice.

I made a raita to go with it but it wasn't really necessary - I've never really felt the need for any accompaniment to biriyani, though that's not to say I don't like them. I even believe it robs the biriyani of its taste. Have any of you felt this way?

As I believe curry leaves in biriyani are unusual, and this would make a great main dish for Christmas or any other festival/event where biriyani or pulao could be the main attraction, I am sending this off to Kalyn's Weekend Herb Blogging, organised and hosted by Haalo.

Weekend Herb Blogging Rice Biriyani/Pulao Chicken coconut+milk Non-vegetarian Humour

Of Coconut Milk and Bengal

As schoolchildren in a small town, we only had a few schoolmates from other ethnicities. So when someone came in on a transfer to this district headquarters from a strange town or bigger city, and if they spoke no other language but English to us, their exotica didn’t fade for quite some time. We also had the other kind – children who were originally from our State but who had rarely lived there, and who would fondly refer to their past place of residence as their true home, often discounting or denying the influence of Telugu and Andhra Pradesh in their lives, amusing/irritating/angering us as we saw fit.

One such of my classmates was a Telugu girl who had some family connection to Bengal, I think her grandparents had worked there; I remember that much about her though I don’t remember where she herself came in from. She was not like the others, spoke Telugu quite well, but constantly referred to Bengal, aloo dum and curds mixed with sugar. To put it mildly, that last thing took us some getting used to, but it was also my first exposure to Bengali cooking, if only in hearsay.

It was not till about seven or eight years ago that I found my first Bengali cookbook – not a very slick production, the author didn’t even sound Bengali (though there’s no rule that ethnicity determines authenticity), but the recipes worked very well. Though I have added another book or two on the cuisine to my collection since then, I always turn to this book when I look for Bengali recipes because the tastes of whatever I made from this were the same that I experienced in an ethnic Bengali feast I was lucky enough to sample a few years later (ratification, I mean).

However, I have to admit that this recipe sounded most un-Bengali to me, though I do know that coconut milk is used now and then. Only, I was familiar with chingri malai curry, not with egg malai curry – well, either I’ve not been reading the Bengali blogs too attentively or I haven’t been cooking or eating enough Bengali food, but this curry seemed as South Indian as it could get.

IF you don’t count the deep-frying of potatoes and egg yolks that is prescribed.

However, in the interests of our arteries, we can safely avoid this portion and go ahead with the discovery of Bengal.

This, of course, goes to RCI-Bengal, hosted by Sandeepa.

Egg Malai Curry

Eggs – 5, yellows only
Tomatoes – 3, big; blanched and sliced
Onion – 1, big
Garlic – 2 cloves
Ginger – ½ inch
Sugar – ¼ tsp
Potatoes – 2, medium-sized, boiled, peeled and quartered
Coconut Milk: 1 cup
Ground cumin – 1 tsp
Bay leaves – 2
Turmeric powder – ½ tsp
Garam masala – ½ tsp
Salt – to taste
Chilli powder – to taste
Coriander leaves, chopped – to garnish
Oil, to deep fry
Ghee, to sauté – 3 tbsp (I used oil, and only 1 tbsp)

Grind onion, ginger and garlic to a paste.

If you want to be true to the recipe, deep fry the egg yolks and potatoes on both sides. If not, you can use the boiled potatoes and fried eggs (a bulls eye, fried both sides, no runny yolk).

Heat the oil, add the bay leaves and onion-ginger-garlic paste.

When that seems well-fried (changes colour, loses smell is my cue), add the blanched tomatoes, salt, sugar and all the spices. Fry till dry.

(Well, dry isn’t exactly what I noticed, but it does become thick and concentrated.)

Turn down the heat, add the potatoes, then the coconut milk. Let simmer.

Once it begins simmering, add the yolks.

Simmer for five more minutes. Garnish with coriander leaves.


You can use the egg whites to make an omelette or scrambled eggs. Here’s an idea.

I'm away for a week or more, so until then, Ugadi greetings!

Regional Cuisines of India Bengal Bengali Potatoes Eggs Coconut Milk RCI Bengal Tomato Telugu

When Pomegranate is a Leafy Green

We foodies often do strange things for our blogs. We have had our moments of the crazy, the ridiculous and the farcical – this has got to be one such moment.

I have a recipe for a pomegranate leaf kadhi – I found it in Shyamala Kallianpur’s book ‘Cooking With Green Leafy Vegetables’.

When it came round to me to host AFAM-Pomegranate, started by Maheswari of Beyond the Usual, I blithely announced the fruit without much idea of what recipe(s) I would come up with and went off to Japan, but the presence of a pomegranate plant/bush in my compound waved me on reassuringly.

Late last night, at a loose end, I leafed through the book, and found out this kadhi required coconut. Which I don’t stock. And I’d gotten into one of those moods where I had to get it over with.

I had long ago decided the plucking of the leaves would be a covert operation under the cover of night – don’t want any funny looks from the neighbours, nor questions – but I’d forgotten to pluck the leaves, and I’d changed out of my work clothes. I changed back into my day clothes, went down with the white cup you see in the second photo and skulked under the pomegranate plant/bush trying to pick half a cup of leaves.

Problem! The recipe asked for young and tender leaves - and the plant/bush mostly had leaves that various plant-dependent creatures had feasted on. It was also located in a dark corner of the building, so yours truly couldn’t see the young and tender ones too well if they existed at all - but she was on a roll - so she quickly got herself as many unblemished ones as she could find and hightailed it back to her apartment.

She substituted the coconut with a handful of cashewnuts and a cup of coconut milk, and faltered several more times during the making of the recipe, but will not bore you with those details. Suffice it to say that it tastes like sol kadhi, bringing back the memories of a trip to Goa almost a year ago!

The pomegranate leaves aid digestion and is an ideal remedy for a bout of indigestion, says the author.

Here’s how I bumbled through the recipe:

½ cup tender leaves of pomegranate (chopped) – I didn’t chop them.

1 cup fresh grated coconut (I used a handful of cashews, soaked, and 200 ml of coconut milk)

A lime-sized ball of tamarind (I soaked it a little ahead)

2 flakes of garlic

4-5 red chillies (roasted)

Salt, to taste

Tempering:

1 tspn ghee (clarified butter)

8 flakes of garlic, crushed

Method:

Cook the leaves in a little water.

Grind together cashews, tamarind, garlic and chillies to a smooth paste.

Add the leaves to the paste and grind again.

Put this paste in a pan, add some water to give it a pouring consistency.

Add salt and bring to a boil, stirring well. Do not allow it to rise and boil over.

To temper, heat the ghee, add the crushed garlic, sauté and add to the kadhi. Cover the pan immediately. Serve hot with rice.

And the pomegranate arils you see in the cup – that is artistic licence, you don’t really need to do that. I was lucky they even showed up – because they initially sank to the bottom of the kadhi when I was setting up the shot!

Googling led me to this bit of info unexpectedly - now let's find a way to use this minus the cashews and the coconut milk!


AFAM Pomegranate Pomegranate Leaves Kadhi Cashew Coconut Milk Humour

My Introduction to Kerala

This has got to be the fifth or sixth vegetable stew post for RCI-Kerala, hosted by Jyothsna of Curry Bazaar. This was also one dish that wasn’t dished out to us at our hostel mess, run by a Malayali chef and his sons and nephews and staffed by a number of assistants whom we addressed as Chechi (older sister).

If you were from Kerala, or spoke Malayalam, you would be sure to win the Chechis’ favour – you could come away with an extra papad, and on the weekly 'sweet day', you could be rewarded with an extra ‘apple cake’ – these were restricted to one per student, unlike the sambar and rasam which we could have any amount of but didn’t really want.

My introduction to Kerala and its food was largely at this hostel. In a college where Kottayam was called The Homeland and our Malayali friends introduced us to many treats from their tuck boxes, I first heard of aappam. “Think of it as an idli with frill,” said my roommate from Changanachery. Then there was the meat pickle which only later I found out was beef and not mutton, the diamond cuts, the prawn and fish pickles, a novelty to me, and the rose cookies flavoured with coconut milk. Evening tea once in a while featured a cold, grey pancake with bits of coconut in it. To someone who was not exposed to Kerala food, it was a mildly sugary ootappam!

The main meals, however, did not feature much Kerala food. I don’t remember if the rice was of the parboiled variety but it was the simplest of food, and also the most flavourless. (I came to appreciate its goodness only after I moved to another hostel which offered much tastier food but also gave me a month or two of tummy trouble.)

I don’t even remember if we got avial in that mess, the first one. What we did get was the whole green gram curry. Or a very dry sauté, as it was made there. I would be completely clueless as to the method of eating it - in general, people from Andhra don't treat vegetables, even dry preparations, as side dishes for sambar rice or rasam rice. They are eaten mixed with the rice, usually with some ghee. I used to think it was something the chef would rustle up every week when he fell short of vegetables at the right price; little did I know it was a traditional item. We also used to get a few vegetable preparations that were spectacularly unidentifiable and undistinguishable in looks and taste to a person such as I who had had no exposure to cooking and kitchens – I ate them for three years thinking they were such-and-such but they turned out to be something else totally.

I do have that mess to thank for a good habit, though – the lack of choice made me eat whatever was available and now I don’t dislike any vegetable.

The stew, however, is a different story. I only came across it much later in a book on Kerala cooking but didn’t really probe. I don’t remember where I first tasted it, or when I had my first aappam. Friends of ours invited us for lunch, and something like this featured in the menu. They had a nifty little tool which helped them cut the carrots and potatoes into wavy shapes, and the stew, with a peppercorn or two peeking through, dotted with orange and pale yellow and green from the beans has been one of the prettiest sights I’ve ever seen.

Here we go then, from memories to now:

Carrots, 1-inch pieces: 100 gm
Potato, peeled and diced into 1-inch pieces: 150 gm
French beans: 6-7, cut into 1-inch pieces
Onion – 1, sliced
Green chilli – 1, sliced
Ginger – ¼ inch, peeled and chopped
Coconut milk – 1 pack of 200 ml
Crushed pepper – 1 tsp

Green cardamom – 2
Cinnamon – ½ inch
Cloves - 2
Curry leaves - 4-5

Oil (I used coconut) – 1 tsp
Salt – to taste

Boil the vegetables till they are tender – they should hold their shape and not get squashed. (I used a pressure cooker, put about half a cup of water, and let it hiss once.)

Heat the oil in a pan, sauté the cardamom, cinnamon and cloves.

Add the onions, ginger, curry leaves and the green chilli, sauté till onion is transparent.

Now add the vegetables and salt. Mix gently.

Reduce the heat to the minimum. Pour in the coconut milk and heat for a minute or two. Add the crushed pepper, remove from fire.

I’m not sure if this is the way it’s made traditionally, this is made from the memory of a recipe, but it tasted very similar to what I have had in Kerala homes and restaurants.

RCI-Kerala Vegetable Stew Potatoes Coconut Milk Humour

On The Gravy Train

There was gravy drain too, but more about that in the next post!

As I found out, this is another great pantry cleaner – take some odds and ends, vegetably speaking, dress up some coconut milk and you have a great curry. I had some potatoes that were sprouting; sweet potatoes, all twisty and runt-like to begin with that steadily shrivelled with each passing day; a portion of the cauliflower that I had used the greater part of in the gravy drain and some beans.

Now, all I needed was some carrot to give it a bit of colour but seeing as some had gone to pot in my fridge last week, I denied myself any in penance this week! As I debated using the sweet potatoes, Musical’s Thai Curry came back to me – I had wondered about the combination with coconut milk, so this was the perfect occasion to try it. It’s an unusual taste – sweet, sour and mellow all at once. The gravy itself is like silk. And Bee has posted another dish with some of the same ingredients today.

This recipe is adapted from Sanjeev Kapoor’s Khazana of Indian Recipes. This is another entry of mine for the Grindless Gravies event.

Potatoes, peeled, diced into 1-inch cubes: 3 small
French beans, cut into 1-inch pieces: 12-15
Cauliflower: ¼ of a flower
Sweet potatoes, peeled, diced: 1 cup
Shelled green peas: ½ cup

Coconut milk: 200 ml (mine came out of a pack)
Tamarind pulp: 2 tbspn (about three dry strips soaked in half a cup of water)
Red chilli powder: ½-1 tsp
Cumin powder: 1 tsp
Coriander powder: 1 tbspn
Turmeric: ½-1 tspn
Ginger-garlic paste: 1 tbspn
Salt: To taste

Oil: 1 tsp
Mustard seed: 1 tsp
Split, hulled black gram/urad dal: 1 tsp
Curry leaves: 8-10
Dried red chillies: 2

You will need thin coconut milk to cook the veggies – I diluted about a third of the coconut milk with 1-1/2 cups of water.

In a pressure cooker, or a pan, boil vegetables with salt, tamarind extract and thin coconut milk till ¾ done. (In a pressure cooker, this took about three minutes before the weight needs to be put on.)

As that’s cooking, mix the ginger-garlic paste with the cumin, coriander and red chilli powder.

Now, add this to the vegetables and cook for ten minutes. (In a pressure cooker, this could take about 2-3 whistles. Let the pressure drop on its own before you open the cooker.)

Heat the oil, pop the mustard, black gram and the red chillies. Add curry leaves and add this to the curry.

Now add the thick coconut milk and simmer for two or three minutes. You can eat it on its own or with some rice.

Hope you've all put your thinking caps on for Grindless Gravies. The deadline is December 22, that's a whole month more!

Grindless Gravies Coconut milk Mixed Vegetables Vegetarian Vegan Gluten-free

Paneer Makhmali

All I need to do is enjoy the rain beating an irregular tattoo on my windowsill, revel in my fever for which I took the day off from work and curl up with a mystery under a reading lamp, but here I am at my computer, under the glare of tubelights, trying to post something. It’s not even as if I badly want to post this or that I’m meeting some deadline I set for myself, but sleeplessness and a regularity with which I now gravitate towards the blogs that’s making me do this. Posting doesn’t feel like a chore, though – it’s quite a mixed-up feeling.

From the confusing to the simple: what I have for you today is a paneer/cottage cheese recipe. It’s taken from Nita Mehta’s book Still More Paneer, and the only change I made was to use mango ginger instead of the regular ginger.
That's mango ginger in the photo.

This gravy is a velvety affair (hence the name Makhmal, from the Persian), given that the ingredients are pressure cooked and ground, the base being coconut milk. It’s something of a shocker, essentially being paneer in tomato chaaru (rasam/soup South Indian style, with a dash of tempering), but it’s not as odd a match as it sounds. On to the recipe, then:

Paneer/cottage cheese – 200 gm, cubed

Pressure cook (2 whistles) with ½ a cup of water:
Tomatoes – 4, chopped roughly
Coconut milk – ½ cup
Mango ginger or ginger – 1-inch piece, chopped
Garlic – 8-10 cloves, skinned, chopped
Green chillies – 2, chopped roughly
Salt – to taste

Cool and puree in the mixer.

For the tempering:
Mustard seed – 1 tsp
Red chillies – 2, broken
Curry leaves – a sprig
Oil – 1 tsp

Transfer the puree back into the pressure cooker, bring to a boil.

Add the paneer and simmer for 4-5 minutes. Check for the consistency of your liking. Switch off the heat.

In a separate pan, heat the oil, pop the mustard, add the red chillies. Remove from fire, add the curry leaves, and add to the pressure cooker.

You can find a somewhat similar recipe here.

Paneer/Cottage Cheese Coconut milk Tomatoes Mango ginger

Pandan-Coconut Milk Jelly

DO CLICK ON THE PICTURE, IT'S BETTER VIEWED LARGE!

For someone who doesn’t use any form of coconut even once a month, Jihva seems to have put me in overdrive. I never thought I’d submit even one dish for Jihva for Coconut, leave alone two. But my thriving pandan shrub and unused packs of coconut milk and sugar are making for some very uncharacteristic behaviour, and so here it is!
This is a Thai/Malay recipe that I arrived at after reading various versions in books as well as on the Net. You can use agar agar for a more authentic and as a vegetarian option in place of the gelatin but I’m not sure of the proportions. The pandan didn’t lend its usual fragrance to this dish but just smelt like sap, even after I put in some vanilla essence. But I guess this is a dish high on texture and looks (though my photo may not do justice to it); it has a strong smell but a delicate flavour – what attracted me was the double-layered looks of the jelly.



For the pandan layer:

Gelatin (unflavoured): 1 tbsp
Water: 1½ cups
Sugar: ½ cup
Pandan leaves: 8-10, cut into strips

For the coconut milk topping:
Coconut Milk: 1½ cups
Gelatin (unflavoured): 1 tbsp
Sugar: ¼ cup

Preparation: Bruise the pandan leaves – you can pound them in a mortar and pestle, or whiz them once in the grinder. Boil them in a cup of water and strain the liquid.
Reserve one tbsp of the pandan water.
Dissolve gelatin in the hot pandan water. Stir well over low heat. Add the sugar, let it come to a boil and allow to simmer for a couple of minutes.
Put the reserved pandan water into this and let it come to a boil again. Pour it into a small-ish container/mould and put it in the refrigerator.

For the topping, dissolve gelatin in coconut milk on low heat, add sugar and stir well. Let it come to a boil.
When it’s still hot, pour the topping over the pandan jelly.
Before serving, cut the jelly into small pieces/shapes.

Tags: Pandan Coconut Milk Jelly Pudding

Jihva for Coconut - Fish Curry

This is one vegetable technology hasn’t improved. I’ve seen vacuum, hand-held, electric – but nothing as effective nor easy to use as the coconut graters of our childhood.
Sit on the floor, rest your knee against the wooden base the lever and grater are affixed to — turn the lever on the right and the rotary grater on the left scoops out the fleshy part of the coconut held over it into zillions of soft, white snowflakes. Even the kattipeeta (the traditional implement used to cut/slice vegetables – usually a curved blade attached to a piece of wood), which ends in a sharp, serrated disc of steel meant for the coconut is not as effective.
That being said, I must say that when Ashwini announced Jihva for Coconut, I had to rack my brains long and hard to come up with an entry. For me, my fascination with coconut lay, and still lies, in the grater I described, the spray of fresh white against newsprint – but apart from the coconut-red chilli-tamarind chutney and kobbari louzu (coconut-jaggery balls) that used to be made at home, I don’t remember other ways we used it, perhaps to thicken a meat gravy? I’m not sure.
When I grew up and got interested in cooking, cookbooks made using coconut an often tiresome and doubt-ridden process. When it had to thicken a curry, the grinder never seemed to do its job properly, at whatever speed, pulse, frappe, whip, beat – the ‘paste’ would end up a loose mix of water, bits of chilli, coconut that refused to grind — and imparted an overwhelmingly coconutty taste to everything it was used in. I don’t think we used coconut milk at home, ever, so which cookbook was right? Squeeze the grated coconut with bare hands, put it in hot water and whiz it in the mixer, thin milk, thick milk, second extract, first extract? So out the coconut went, out of my kitchen and now and then makes an appearance in milk carton form, whence this recipe originates.
Fish curry
Seer fish: ½ a kilo - skinned, boned and cubed
Onions: 3 small, chopped
Thick coconut milk: 1½ cups
Dry red chilli, ground: 6
Pandan leaf: 2
Basil: A little
Cinnamon: 2-inch piece
Curry leaves: A few
Turmeric: A pinch
Fenugreek: ¼ tsp
Ginger-garlic paste: 1 tsp
Limes: 1-2, juiced
Salt: To taste
Put in everything but the limes into a pan and cook till the fish is done. Once it cools, add the lime juice. That’s it, you’re done!