Whole Masoor Dal, Some Nostalgia for Grindless Gravies, and Other Things

I recently got a pack of whole masoor dal and wanted to make misal or usal with it, as I had taken a fancy to it after seeing some picture on Instagram. Soon enough I tired of that whim as I'd have to sprout the dal and that would involve some waiting. I kept looking for brown masoor recipes but all I came across were recipes for dal (plain brown gravies) which I found unappetising. It then struck me that I could probably adapt the Kerala green gram thoran recipe to these lentils.

When I was in hostel, this dish would appear in our mess once in a while. The first time it did, I thought the cook, Mr Nair, had run out of vegetables for the day and was making do with the green gram. I was not curious about food those days so I kept thinking that till many years later I ate this at a friend's house and realised it was a full-blown dish all its own!

I followed this recipe with one change. I use very little coconut when I cook, and do not enjoy having to grind stuff, all the more so now as my mixie is in poor health. I do have a jar of desiccated coconut, though, and I needed to begin using it. So I looked for ways to make the coconut fresher, and I found this. It involves soaking the coconut and straining it in a colander but I was using only a tablespoon so I used a tea strainer. The next time I make this, I will use the desiccated coconut directly and see if there's a difference in taste.

Talking about mixies ... In 2007, I came up with a food blog event called Grindless Gravies, much to the amusement/annoyance/frustration of the participants. I guess I was pretty anal about the rules and even changed them once or twice. But many indulged me and participated. The round-up is here. So many good memories!

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Then, recently, I came across this recipe for Turmeric Fried Eggs with Tamarind and Pickled Shallots by Yotam Ottolenghi. I adapted it to brinjal (eggplant) and used an extra chilli. I didn't use tamarind at all but combined a lemongrass wok sauce and hoisin sauce to make a dressing. It was very oily but good enough. It was a hit with the Spouse. You can see it in the picture below.

This salad that you see below is a combination of a few recipes for spinach-sesame salad in Korean/Japanese style. It was excellent. I saw so many recipes I cannot list them all here. I even used a couple of Guntur chillies and they smoked up my kitchen so much we coughed and hacked for about twenty minutes straight - and worried that the neighbours would wonder if we had COVID-19.

The next picture is my attempt at making a broken glass/stained glass jelly dessert. Some of the darned jellies did not set well and I could not make it more colourful than this. I found blue and green jellies too, for once. Too bad they did not cooperate!

A fruit vendor who appears at our door every few years and vanishes for the next two or three years brought some wonderful guavas at varying stages of rawness and ripeness the other day. This seller always wants me to buy two or three kilos but of course, that's too much for a small household like mine. This time he handed me a packet with many fruit and I did not feel like refusing him as he was coming after a long time. It was just Rs 50. Later on, I discovered there were eleven guavas inside! I doubled this recipe, added raisins to make up for the jaggery I fell short of and realised I had added too much chilli powder and too many chillies. I then toned it down by adding a cup of tamarind juice. It was still hot, but tolerably so.

Of Parties & Peanuts

As inadequate as pop quizzes are, they are fun to do. Often, there are questions where none of the choice of answers apply; heck, even the question doesn't apply.

Like this question, for instance:

What's your usual pick-up strategy?

• Dress in something revealing, then go to a bar or dance club and mope at the counter with a martini until someone notices me.
• All I have to do is walk out my front door, it seems. I get a lot of people - both guys and girls (regardless of which i am) hitt (sic)
• People notice me I make sure of that. If I can beat 'em at arm wrestling, or show off my hot dance moves, I pretty much have 'em
• Just be there for them, get to know them. People trust me and are attracted to me because they know I don't play head games
• Uh ... tell them I like them?
• I 'get' whoever I damn well want however I damn well want. Nobody says no to me.
• Impress them with my intellect. Poetry doesn't hurt, either.

(Taken from the Internet)
This time, though, I think I do know what my party personality is. It’s ‘wallflower’ or ‘group wallflower’. Let me tell you why.

Last year, I attended something called an ‘offsite’ as part of work, the evenings of which included much entertainment, food, drink and dancing. Many polite hands were proffered, and all declined - I can’t and don’t dance. At the end of the day, the hosts said they wouldn’t let me escape the next day. Indeed, someone dragged me on to the dance floor but I clapped rhythmically and as long as some part of me was moving, I figured, there would be no pressure. Then the dancing picked up pace, everyone forgot about me, and I began taking a step back, and then one, and then one more, till I was back on terra firma.

Then

Last week, I attended a party thrown in honour of some folks visiting here from abroad. They were from The Spouse’s side and I had never met them before.

I didn’t meet them at the party either.

(Well, technically, I met one of them, the wife, who smiled and nodded as part of a perfunctory, fleeting wordless introduction that was all nods and waves with heads, hands and teeth. )

I spent the next few minutes clinging to a few aunts, then chatting with someone who looked equally lost and then being introduced formally to another. (I had seen her quite a few times earlier but we had had to ignore each other as we hadn‘t been introduced.) Another lost soul disengaged herself from a chair, hovered around us tentatively, and was immediately included into our little group.

“Relative or friend?” we asked each other, and identity being established, settled into our chairs and looked out on to the lawn where a huge screen was showing Brazil going going gone Dutch. And thus we remained, snacking on short eats that are typically served in clubs, till one of us received a text message from Mom somewhere in that long, narrow hall that dinner was, finally, being served upstairs. (Oh, in between, I ran into someone I actually knew a bit and amused myself teasing her that I would put the picture of her in her very fashion-forward, very plunging blouse on my photo blog. She threatened to slap me, of course, but when I told her I would morph it and jazz it up even more, she relented and asked me to send her too a copy.)


But back to the party - here’s one snack that’s super easy to make. It’s relatively quick too, though I’d call it super-quick only if it materialized out of thin air and presented itself all ready on my table.

What you need to do is mix

A big handful of dry-roasted peanuts/groundnuts, skinned
Half an onion - chopped
Half a green chilli - minced
Lime - one, juiced
Salt, to taste
Oil - a few drops

And you can have a party all your own!

This goes to My Legume Love Affair, brainchild of Susan and hosted this month by Siri.

I’m hosting Of Chalks and Chopsticks this month, so please put on your thinking caps, write those stories and send them to me. You have until the 28th of this month to do so!

My Legume Love Affair Peanuts Vegan

My Eggzacting Routine

As it turns out, I’m on a losing streak right now. Well, the word ‘streak’ here has nothing to do with the pace of my losing, because the pace is excruciatingly slow, but if I’m losing, I’m winning, because I am talking about weight.

My day starts at 5 a.m. My class starts an hour later and it’s no holds barred. “How much today?” demands the trainer, and I reply, not entirely oblivious to the other people around. The ‘much’ refers to the number of grammes I’ve lost since the previous day, and if I haven’t, the discussion moves on to what I’ve eaten the previous night, how much oil it was cooked in, and whether my bladder and bowel are clear. Whatever I say I’ve eaten is met with a raised eyebrow or a whoop of horror depending on the mood, and my requests/assertions that I will weigh in only once a week go unheard.

By this time, the others around get into the act, probing, analyzing, sympathetic, eyebrows raised or whooping in horror, as their predispositions might dictate. Gyms, by their very nature, have always been places to discuss figures, bodies, ailments, hormones, pimples, thyroids, hemorrhoids and other things biological, but the daily inquisition is a novel experience. All my exercising life, I’ve been told not to weigh myself everyday, here it’s the contrary. It also has to do, I suspect, with the trainers having to divest their wards of a certain number of kilos for their incentives to kick in, but maybe I’m simply being uncharitable and over-imaginative. My trainer’s face now hovers over every meal and morsel I have and I admit it has made me more vigilant than ever, and for that, I give thanks. Apparently, everyone in the gym has lost tonnes, even at their age, so why can’t I do it? Even as I, and you, ponder such questions, I present you with a recipe which I resorted to in the fond hope that it would be tasty and not too sinful.

As it happened, I ate three of them after breakfast (when I start cooking) and two of them for dinner, helas!!! My plan was to make patties and store them in the fridge to toast on the griddle as and when I wanted to eat them, but my assistant at home said, “Finish it off, ’ma, the batter won’t be any good if you put it in the fridge.” I didn’t argue, as they refused to form patties in my palm but did so in hers, and I didn’t want her to leave before I could deal with them!

Eggs, boiled, cooled and shelled - 4
Chickpea flour/gram flour/besan - 3 tbsp
Onion - 1, chopped
Coriander - a handful, chopped
Green chillies - 3, chopped
Garam masala - ½ tsp
Salt - to taste
Oil - v little

Crumble the eggs and mix everything else with them till you get a fairly dense dough - it shouldn’t lose shape when you fashion patties of them. (My assistant says the best way to do it is on a plastic sheet, a la vada batter.)

Put them on an oiled griddle/tawa and cook on either side till brown. Dribble a drop or two of oil off a spoon around the patty if necessary. This could take a while, and still taste of raw chickpea flour after you think they’re finished, so experiment with one first, taste it and then proceed.

I am sending this in to Sangeeth's Eat Healthy - Protein Rich.

I'll sign off by saying that I condemn the rampant and brazen plagiarism we're hearing of and seeing in the blogosphere, be it a large organisation that thinks it can get away with anything, a smaller one that thinks it can intimidate bloggers into silence and helplessness or just another blog like yours and mine that lifts pictures and posts to use, even without having an obvious commercial objective.

Egg cutlet Gym Losing weight Chickpea flour/besan/gram flour Humour