Where I Have Been

All of last month, I was here. I was fortunate to have got the time off and I think I made good use of it, walking around the city one area a day. The following are foodie sights and scenes from my trip to New York City.

I met a few friends from the blogging world: Susan, Rajitha, Sandeepa and Paz, and spoke to a few others: Sig, Asha and Mallugirl. My operating principle was 'No Indian food' but I relaxed it in Sandeepa's case as I haven't had authentic Bengali food except in a couple of restaurants. My camera battery was dying and I used the dregs of its energy to take a picture of her rather than of the food she made.


Rajitha made all this great food for me one fine Tuesday. She picked me up at the subway station and we stopped off at the Indian store to pick up some supplies and then went on to her cozy apartment, but not before picking up some sweets. "I can't let you go without dessert, Sra, I have to buy you dessert. What will it be?" As I didn't want Indian, we opted for a Middle Eastern bakery near her place, where we picked up two pieces of each variety, and after this huge meal, steadily proceeded to demolish all but one. She has a great collection of world vegetarian cookery books, and I'm inspired to make the avocado, tomato and feta salad that you see in the foreground. Thanks to her, I tasted quinoa for the first time.


I met Susan downtown and we had a great day of walking and photographing, not to mention lunch and dinner. The crackers and biscuit that you see here are part of the meal she treated me to in one of the restaurants at Grand Central Terminal. We had different varieties of clam chowder and oysters each. That was the first time I ate oysters. For dinner, her husband Scott joined us and we ate at a French restaurant.


Paz took me on a walking tour of Harlem, treated me to some glorious cathedrals and chapels, and showed me a side of New York City that I didn't really expect. There was a wide choice of restaurants to eat in, and I picked Cuban because I had not tried the cuisine before. I must say the Zesty Corn (seen in the second tier), was the best and the most unusual.


My family and I went out to lunch at a Greek diner in Times Square where I ordered these dolmades. Initially, I didn't like these cold treats, but began to appreciate them after I tried a second one.


This and the next few pictures are from the Monday farmer's market at Union Square. I even picked up a printed recipe for peach salsa, samples of which were set out by the market organising committee. There were several other recipes available. I tried the salsa. Nice.


These are varieties of squash. I've only seen them in pictures earlier, and the ones right in the front, never before.


Peppers galore!


I never saw purple capsicum before, either. Nor for that matter, such light green ones.


Ahh! Fressshh!


I have never come across a cookie called Chop Suey before. Interesting, isn't it?


On a Sunday in NYC, there was a street fair near the restaurant in which my family was having lunch and a very involved conversation, I slipped away to see this street fair that I noticed earlier. There were several other foodie goodies on offer - kebabs, gyros, pita pockets, Italian sausage ... This was the most colourful food stall as far as I could see.

New York City Travel New York City food Meeting bloggers

My Fame Spreads

I didn't know I had 193 recipes on my blog!!! If you want to know more such wonderful facts about me and my blog, and a recipe to boot, go here. It's one of the newest food blogs on the block and a rollicking fun read too. Thanks for the invitation, Cynic!

Guest Blogging Dessert Eggless Chocolate Condensed Milk Humour

How Dost Thou Reach Me? Let Me Count ...

After a long time, I found some new hilarious search terms again in my stats - here they are:

Moong dal ladies squats - You'd think this is an unlikely pairing. But no! Among the many combinations these search terms threw up, here's one!

Do guinea pigs eat wheat pearls? I guess the reasons they landed in my blog are here.

Drooling sentences went here.

How can I sell my soup came here.

Rayalseema biscuits company case study solution found no solution here.

Humour Keywords Search Terms

Legumes, And a Bit of Cheese

A few weeks ago, our air-conditioner went kaput and we spent as much of the day as we could outside our house. Quite a few air-conditioned stores that day saw us wandering about aimlessly, touching and feeling the goods, never buying. Our last stop before we went to dinner in another air-conditioned place, was a bookstore. Or rather, as large bookstores tend to be, a books, music and gifts store.

For a while now, my favourite bedtime reading has been cookbooks, when mysteries and chicklit are hard to come by, and though my conscience knows I don't need any more cookbooks, I succumbed when I saw this well-produced book called Pumpkin Flower Fritters on Bengali cooking. I told myself that it had recipes my other Bengali cookbooks didn't, paid for it, and walked out without daring to look at it any longer in case the guilt got compounded.

It turned out my justifications to myself were well-justified - it DID contain some recipes that my other books didn't. Here's one recipe that I tried from it - it's unusual in that paneer/cottage cheese is mixed with moong dal, delicately flavoured, very heavy, and I don't think I'll try it again.

It's not really this yellow!

Warning: The quantities here make A LOT!

Roasted split moong dal: 250 gm
Paneer: 15-16 pieces
Potatoes: 2-3, medium-sized, cubed (The book recommends 8-10 small new potatoes, halved)
Chopped ginger: 2 tsp
Green chillies: 8-10

Crush
Cardamom: 2-3
Cinnamon: 3-4 pieces

Tempering
Red chillies: 2-3, broken into pieces
Cumin seeds/jeera: 1 tsp
Fennel: 1/2 tsp
Bay leaves: 2

Sugar: 1 tsp
Salt, to taste
Oil: 2 tsp
Ghee: A little

Boil the dal in hot water. Cook till half done. Set aside.

Heat the oil in a pan, fry the paneer pieces and remove. Fry the potatoes.

Add to the dal, and boil till cooked. Add half the chopped ginger and sugar.

Heat more oil in the pan and add a little ghee.

Add the red chilli pieces, cumin seeds, fennel, and bay leaves. Now add the rest of the ginger and the crushed garam masala.

Add the dal.

Bring to a boil and add the panee pieces and green chillies.

Simmer a few minutes.

This goes off to Susan's My Legume Love Affair, hosted this month by Annarasa.

MLLA Paneer/Cottage Cheese Lentils/Moong Dal Potatoes Vegetarian Bengali Humour

A Stack of Goodies

Heaven melts in your mouth

Is it paper? It looks like it," said a Bengali colleague when I held out a box of this and asked him to try some, many years ago. I didn't know too well myself but hazarded a guess. As it turns out, my little knowledge was no dangerous thing, and I was right, though not detailed. (The details are further down.)

Last week, we went home for an important party and came back with enough stuff for a party of our own. At least, it seems that way. We brought back several of two varieties of mangoes, home-made mango pickle, sweetu, haatu (to put it in typical Indian English - that's sweets and "hot"/savouries for the uninitiated). Just before we drove out of the city, I visited the supermarket close to home and when I saw these, it struck me that I could use them for Click - Stacks.

I'd always wanted to do a post on pootarekulu but didn't know much about them beyond their taste. Then, some time ago a Telugu cookery show on TV featured the making of this very traditional, very regional and quite tough-to-make delicacy.

And delicate are they! No wonder they are called paper sweet or mica sweet outside Andhra Pradesh. Can you guess what these sweet rolls of thinner-than-tissue sheets are made from?

Starchy rice flour. According to the people featured on the TV programme, a variety of rice called 'Jaya Biyyam', which is found only in and around that village in the East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh (it could be Aatreyapuram, I'm not sure) is soaked and ground to a very watery consistency.

An inverted earthen pot is heated from inside, and a cloth dipped in the rice paste is spread on the pot and removed almost immediately. The result is a thin, gauzy sheet of starch - like the one that forms around the vent of the pressure cooker sometimes after cooking the rice. You can see it in the first one in the stack.

The sheets (rekulu) are transferred to another surface, to be given a coating (poota) of finely powdered sugar and ghee. It could contain powdered cardamom too, for extra flavour. A few such sheets are layered and folded to form one pootareku.

The miracle, I believe, is one of texture and experience. At first glance, it looks compact - more and more of the same thing folded over and over. I would judge a good pootareku by this: Just bite into it, and it should literally melt in the mouth, leaving a cool, sweet feeling. It shouldn't smell overwhelmingly of ghee, either. (Sadly, supermarket versions smell both of ghee and plastic.) It looks light. It isn't.


I knew only of the white variety of pootarekulu but the TV show also showed a jaggery version and a "modern" version, which came as rather a shocker to me. The modern version, in addition to the jaggery or the sugar, was filled with cashew nuts and raisins. The next 'value addition' could be coloured pootarekulu - if you begin seeing some after this post, you know where they flicked the idea from! Let me know, I could claim some royalty.

An Uncle tells me more about pootarekulu (also known as mallinga madupulu):
They were usually made by families from the Raju community in East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh.
The tougher but more traditional way of making a pootareku renders it crisp - for this, the sheets in a single unit have to be alternately coated with ghee and sugar, not coated with both as that will make it soggy. (The TV show's guests were preparing them the second way, which Uncle calls the lazy way.)
Uncle didn't know about Jaya Biyyam but said that rice harvested from a crop solely rain-fed (as opposed to one cultivated by flooding the fields) is used to make this sweet (and feed new mothers) as it contains less water.

Here's a recipe if you must absolutely try it, though I doubt the results will even approximate the original.

The first photo is off to join a stack of other treats at Click-Stacks.

Pootarekulu/Pootharekulu Dessert Traditional Sweet Click-Stacks

The Onerous Task Of Consuming My Own

This evening, when I came home at the end of the day, I found The Spouse had retired for the day early but had left the food out on the table for me, along with a samosa from somewhere. These little bits on the side are making their way to our table with alarming frequency. I ate, dipping the samosa in the mango-drumstick dal I'd made yesterday, enjoying my first experience ever of samosa soaking up thin and tangy dal. But then, not only is it disheartening to have three different kinds of home-made dishes go virtually uneaten, it's worse to have to eat it steadily every day and night till it finishes so that you can make something more interesting the next time you have to cook. Especially when your own cooking has begun to bore you with the unfailing regularity of a ... {clever comparison to be added later, whenever it occurs}

I could give it off to S, the lady who helps me at home, but she also doesn't seem very enthused by my cooking. Moreover, she laughs at my having a cookbook constantly by my side.
I could give it to an uncle but he either doesn't like "squishy vegetables" or has already got an invitation for the day.
I could employ a cook, but that's an experiment I've tried with mixed success - The Spouse enjoyed the food, I didn't really care, and we had loads and loads of leftovers. I was relieved when she quit for her own reasons.
I wouldn't cook at all but get a dabba delivered instead, which would make our meals infinitely interesting, and this blog very, very finitely appealing.

Sometimes I can't bring myself to eat the things I've made (and even put up on this blog - but that was because somebody or the other liked it). A lot of people I know would love to have someone else cook for them. "Doesn't matter if it isn't tasty, it's enough that it's not mine," is how we feel. How do all of you retain interest in your own cooking?

Musings Food Cooking - own Humour

A Date With A Broken Heart

In my previous post, I mentioned how we ran away from home two Sundays ago and finished off the day in a restaurant where the service was very slow. For that meal, I had ordered a 'health salad' - fruits in a citrus-honey dressing topped with dates, a tender coconut drink with lime and mint and Dil Ke Tukde, the restaurant's fancy name for Shahi Tukda, the Hyderabadi dessert of fried bread topped with cream and nuts.

Dil Ke Tukde is a curious name for something that should give you joy, but it turned out to be rather apt because it broke my heart into several pieces. On the rare occasion that I eat dessert, did I have to be confronted with stale, fried bread fried in rancid, re-used oil, most of it so toughened I couldn't cut it with a spoon? And whatever substituted the cream on top, did it have to be so warm? The entire dish was neither cool nor cold nor hot, and only my maturity stood in the way of my pronouncing the entire day a failure because of the failed dessert.

I was determined to right the wrong, however, and this past Friday evening, bought some bread and condensed milk to make my own Shahi Tukda. However, when Saturday morning rolled around, the thought of frying bread, pounding nuts and such tasks made me weary. The Net had some recipes for a quick paneer burfi so I added to all that and came up with my own stuff. At the end of it all, there was more condensed milk than paneer in that recipe. It was extremely sweet and that kept me from eating more than one piece at a time.



Condensed milk, sweetened: 400 gm (1 tin)/ 19 tbsp
Paneer: 200 gm
Dates, seedless: A fistful
Bread: 4-5 slices, crusts removed
Ghee - to grease the baking dish

Whiz all the above in a blender. Pour into a greased baking dish, cover with foil and bake in a pre-heated oven at 200 C for 30-40 minutes or till a toothpick/knife inserted into centre comes out clean. Let cool completely and cut into pieces. It gets much harder after you put it in the fridge, and it's tougher to cut, but it is more burfi-like.

I'm sending this off to Valli's Mithai Mela.

Mithai Mela Paneer/Cottage Cheese Dates Condensed milk Sweet Burfi Bread Humour Dessert Eating+out

The Story of My Mango Fish Curry

On Sunday we ran away from home.

The voltage fluctuations got the better of our air-conditioner, stabiliser notwithstanding, and just the thought of spending most of the day at home had us hot and bothered. Our flight took us to various destinations, all of which had air-conditioning - a visit to The Spouse's colleague and then his office, a good one hour away, to finish a pending job; lunch at a new restaurant on the way back; vegetable shopping and then, back home, by which time it was late afternoon. Two hours later, we showered for what seemed like the third or fourth time in the day, and went fish shopping, followed by aimless wandering in various air-conditioned stores in the vicinity and finally to a restaurant where the inordinate delay in service did not bother us much as we were enjoying the cool interiors.

I had bought a green mango to cook with dal. However, I used only a little of it for the dal. Most of it was left over, and the memory of a rich red and green fish-and-mango curry supplied by some friendly neighbours many years ago floated into my mind. I did not have a recipe, however, and surfing the Net or my numerous cookery books did not yield a satisfactory recipe, so I came up with a hotch-potch of several.

Where's the mango in the picture? The thin, curved sliver in the centre, which looks like it could be anything else, is it. I had peeled the mango for the dal, but there's no need to peel it for this recipe.

Here's how it goes:

Fish (I used barracuda): 10 small pieces, cleaned
Green mango: 200 gm, sliced, discard the seed (Need not be peeled)
Onions: 2, chopped
Tomato: 1, chopped
Salt: To taste
Turmeric: A pinch
Red chilli powder: 1 tsp

I had this ground masala (below) ready, I used two spoons of it
Fennel seeds: 3tsp
Black peppercorns: 8-10
Cinnamon: 1 inch stick
Cloves: 4
Cardamom: 4
Bay Leaves: 3

Amchur/Dried mango powder: 1 tbsp

Water: Some

Tempering
Curry leaves: 1/2 a cup
Mustard, black gram, fenugreek, fennel: 1/4 tsp each
Oil: 1 tbsp

Heat the oil and temper with the mustard, black gram, fenugreek and fennel.

Add the onions, tomatoes and curry leaves. Fry for a while and add the masala powder.

Fry this on low heat for 15 minutes, then add the mango slices, amchur, chilli powder, salt and turmeric along with less than one cup of water. Boil for about 10 minutes.

Add the fish and let it boil again till the fish is cooked and the gravy is thick.

Fish/seafood Amchur/Dried Mango Powder Curry Summer Humour

Delights, But No Longer

The other day, a sapota tree caught my eye. Not only was it full of fruit, it was the small fruit of the old kind, not the smooth, round, plump and rather tasteless sapota we see everywhere nowadays. It reminded me of how our fruit seller, a couple of years ago, rang my doorbell and said "Sapota, paala sapota" before I could shake my head and send him away. These fruit literally ooze sweetness.

I was tempted to pluck a few from the tree but the branches were a bit too high for me. I regretfully continued walking away, thinking of the sapota tree we had had in one of my childhood homes. Then I read Cynthia's column which triggered off memories. Since then I have been compiling a mental list of things I no longer see or do not easily get nowadays.

I never liked it much, but one fruit that I hardly see nowadays is Seema Chintakaya. You can see a picture here. I think it was on my recent Goa trip that I saw one fruit lying on the ground. And no, I wasn't tempted to pick it up and consume it. This is the kind of fruit that you down from trees with the help of rocks or sticks, if you don't climb yourself, the kind that you find heaped on carts in small towns.

I'm not sure if it's living in a city outside the native place that deprives you of such delights or that such foods have more or less gone out of circulation and existence nowadays, but it's been more than 10 years since I've seen tender tamarind tree leaves (chinta chiguru) which are used in dal, both here and at home (maybe I just haven't been there at the right time); a rarely-made-even-then vegetable called tammakaya, of which I can find no trace, even on the Net; pommelo, which makes a half-hearted appearance in my city only around Vinayaka Chaturthi; vakkaya, which was used to make a really sour and tart dal; snaky, twisty, mile-long snakegourds which are just coming back into fashion; and isn't it a pity that until I called an uncle I could hardly remember what could bring back the memory of 'vagaru', one of the six tastes? (Zest and pith of citrus fruit, pomegranate membrane, seema chintakaya - anything that's bitter but not quite so and disturbs the peace in your throat and even in your nose.)

What are the foods that you don't see/find anymore? Tell me all about the fruits, vegetables, snacks and even processed foods that you miss. Hopefully, they're alive and kicking in some corner of the world.


Nostalgia Old forgotten foods Rare foods Memories

Bendi-t Like This!

In our house, trash doesn't go only into the dustbin. It goes into our refrigerator too, only to be discarded after weeks and months of making a home there. But I've been getting better at waste management lately. The zillions of sauce sachets we've collected over the last year with deliveries of pizza and fried chicken went into some home-assembled pizza, and the jackfruit seeds I saved, intending to roast in the oven, went into some 'bendi'. Within just 10 days of our having consumed their flesh.

I am so proud of myself.

I am lucky enough to own a book, now rarely found, called Green Leafy Vegetables, by Shyamala Kallianpur. Yesterday, after buying some amaranth (thotakura) and Malabar spinach (bachalikura), I leafed through her book to look for something other than dal to make. And sure enough, my eye fell on this Amaranth and Jackfruit Bendi, which is described as a dish native to the Dakshina Kannada region of Karnataka. Some not-so-intensive searching on the Internet gives me the information that Bendi is so called when it is tempered with garlic.

The other stashed away leftovers I used to make this curry were half a small carton of coconut milk and a cup of grated and frozen coconut. More importantly, I didn't have to buy anything new to use up the old supplies I had. The amaranth, of course, was happy coincidence.

The recipe is from the book. My addition was the coconut milk.

Amaranth/thotakura, chopped along with tender stems: 4 cups
Jackfruit seeds: 16
Water: Some
Salt, to taste

Grind to a paste

Grated coconut: 1/2 cup
Coconut milk: 1/2-3/4 cup
Red chillies, dry-roasted: 8-10
Tamarind: Large lime-sized
Coriander powder: 1.5 tsp (The recipe suggested 1 tsp of coriander seeds sauteed in a few drops of oil)

Tempering

Oil: 1 tsp
Garlic, crushed roughly: 8 cloves

Remove the outer skin of the jackfruit seeds and soak them in warm water two hours ahead.

Pressure cook the jackfruit seeds with water for 10 minutes. I used fresh water, not the water in which they were soaked.

Put the seeds along with the water in which they were cooked into a large pan. Add the amaranth and some salt, along with some water, and bring to a boil.

Now reduce the flame. Cover and cook till the greens are tender, about 5 minutes.

Add the ground paste, bring to a boil and temper with the garlic fried in the oil.

Cover immediately to retain the aroma. Of course, this doesn't apply if you're a food blogger - at this point, you pour it into a pretty dish, wipe the splashes, lick your fingers and start the photography session.

Amaranth/Thotakura Jackfruit seed Garlic Bendi Humour Using up leftovers

Toughtan? Taftan.

Some old flour, a much, much older oven that clung to me, refusing to be given away, some yeast bought expressly for this purpose, a casual remark about how we made this only once and ages ago at that - these were the elements that combined to have me make the Taftan. It was a tough enterprise - though I didn't do most of the kneading by myself, the little that I did pained me, and the end result, while edible, wasn't desirable.

Most of you don't know, because I have mostly forgotten myself, that I used to be an acknowledged baker. In my own right, of course. I can't even say my repertoire was limited, because what I baked didn't extend to any breadth that can qualify to call itself a repertoire, but I achieved some success with brownies which my cousins would request me to make repeatedly, the summer/s they visited. We didn't have an oven at home those days but my dad repaired an old one that used to belong to his sister and I launched into cooking, with baking. I made a savarin, some crumbly cakes, some souffles, and then I went on to post-post-graduation and my experiments took a break.

When I became the chief cook in a kitchen a few years later, The Spouse and I went shopping for an oven, one of my dream buys. I then made some more cakes, some more puddings, some kababs and Taftan. It was quite a long time ago so I don't remember how it turned out, but I don't remember it becoming crisp, like it did this time.

Then I stopped baking such stuff but managed to use the oven for the odd baked potato. I even sent it away recently because it was taking up too space in my small kitchen in my once new but now not-so-new home. For various reasons, I brought it back recently, and am I glad I wasn't able to give it away!

Despite the middling result of the tough experiment, I decided to post it all the same hoping you can tell me what went wrong with it. The recipe is taken from Rotis and Naans of India by Purobi Babbar. The recipe was for eight taftaans, I halved the amounts and made four.

Plain flour/maida - 2 cups
Dry yeast - 2 tbsp
Plain curds/yoghurt - 1 tbsp
Sugar - 1.5 tsp
Salt - 1 tsp
Nigella/Kalonji - 1 tbsp
Milk - 1/4 cup + 1 tbsp
Some ghee

Sprinkle yeast and sugar over warm milk until it starts to froth.

Sift flour in a bowl with salt. Make a well in the centre and post the yeast mixture with curd and 1 tbsp of ghee. Mix well.

Knead well for 15 minutes until the dough is smooth and elastic. Rub oil in a warm large bowl. Place the dough, cover and leave it to swell for 6-8 hours.

Knead the dough again. Divide into four equal portions and shape into balls. Keep aside again for 20 minutes.

Pat the dough into a circle in your palm, keeping them think in the centre and thicker around the rim. Now pull one side to give the naan the shape of a tear drop.

Brush the top with melted ghee and sprinkle the nigella. Place them in a baking tray.

Bake in a pre-heated oven (190 C/375 F) for 2-4 minutes until brown specks appear.

My experience:

It took much longer than 2-4 minutes, maybe 10 or more minutes per batch of two.

It was crisp outside, and the inside was not well done - it was moist/sticky.

AND THE NIGELLA SEEDS GAVE OFF COLOUR AND SMUDGED THE NAANS WHEN I SMOOTHED THEM ON TO THE NAANS BEFORE I POPPED THEM IN THE OVEN!!! Yes, I'm shouting.

This goes to Think Spice Think Nigella/Kalonji, the event started by Sunita and hosted by Dee this month.

Think Spice Think Nigella Kalonji Taftan Nostalgia

A Time For Rediscovery

By some strange and interesting twist of fate, the year so far has been full of getting in touch with old friends and classmates. One of them left a comment on my other blog last summer. I don't subscribe to comments by e-mail as I find that the comments come into my Inbox only after I've read them on the blog, and as that blog is dormant, I've missed the two or three comments that have been left there since I last checked, which is probably well over a year ago. I only noticed them last month. Another friend, whom I've known since I was four or five, and who I'm in touch with occasionally but haven't seen in some 13 years, came and stayed with me last weekend.

It's fun to see what these old friends are like now, as adults, professionals, householders. It is a fascinating journey of discovery and rediscovery. As is the recipe that's being featured here today - drumsticks in a milk gravy.

I rarely cook with drumsticks as The Spouse doesn't like them and I don't care to eat the leftovers for days on end but when these came from home, so fresh and tender and unblemished, I couldn't bring myself to give them away. I had been thinking of making this curry for a while so I guess it was a matter of things falling into place by themselves as I discovered a bit of leftover gram flour (besan/senagapindi) in my kitchen and I had everything else necessary on hand.

I also had a Telugu cookbook to guide me but I find that the editing leaves a lot to be desired. My pet peeve with this class of cookbooks, often expressed in these posts, is that items in the recipe make a sudden appearance or disappearance, and very often, we just have to make the most of it. So the cookbook shall go unnamed but here's how I made it.

Drumsticks/mulakkaya: 4, cut into 2-inch pieces

Besan/Gram Flour/Senaga pindi: 1 tsp

Mixed well with

Milk, boiled, cooled: Approx 1.5 cups

Onions: 2, chopped
Green chilli: 2-3
Red chilli powder: 1/2-1 tsp
Salt: To taste
Turmeric: A pinch
Oil: 2 tsp

Tempering

Dry red chillies: 2-3, broken into bits
Mustard seed: 1 tsp
Curry leaf: A sprig
Urad dal/Black gram, hulled: 1 tsp



Heat the oil in a pan and temper with the ingredients listed under 'Tempering'..

Add the onions, green chillies and saute well.

Now add the drumsticks, mix well and season with salt, turmeric, chilli powder and cook covered till the vegetables are soft.

Reduce the heat to the lowest and add the milk-besan mixture to the curry. Mix gently.

Simmer till the mixture thickens a little and remove from fire. It's usually eaten with rice. I ate it for four glorious days, for once not feeling the burden of its leftoverness.

Drumstick/Mulakkaya Paaluposina Koora Vegetarian Rediscovery Musings

Puns Use Key Words

Puns. The lowest kind of wit or more picturesque speech? As you know, I believe they are the latter. Susan recently pointed me in the direction of an NYT article on puns which I'd like to share with you.

The inglorious pun! Dryden called it the “lowest and most groveling kind of wit.” To Ambrose Bierce it was a “form of wit to which wise men stoop and fools aspire.” Universal experience confirms the adage that puns don’t make us laugh, but groan. It is said that Caligula ordered an actor to be roasted alive for a bad pun. (Some believe he was inclined to extremes.)


Addison defined the pun as a “conceit arising from the use of two words that agree in the sound, but differ in the sense.” “Energizer Bunny Arrested! Charged with Battery.” No laugh? Q.E.D. Puns are the feeblest species of humor because they are ephemeral: whatever comic force they possess never outlasts the split second it takes to resolve the semantic confusion. Most resemble mathematical formulas: clever, perhaps, but hardly occasion for knee-slapping. The worst smack of tawdriness, even indecency, which is why puns, like off-color jokes, are often followed by apologies. Odds are that a restaurant with a punning name — Snacks Fifth Avenue, General Custard’s Last Stand — hasn’t acquired its first Michelin star.

You can read the rest here. As Susan points out, "a pun's wit and entertainment is in the very groan that it produces."

My predilection for puns has me and my blog landing into a soup often (pun fully intended), if one were to go by the weird keywords or search phrases that I get. I've left off the usual risque ones so here are a pick of the past few days:

"I was just sitting there, eating my soup"

"Caterpillar in my soup"

"Can turnip greens be used in wedding soup"

"My love is alive summer begins"

"How we came alive"

Keywords Humour Slice of Life

This Ugadi, Full of Beans

There's not much of a story to this dish, except that I saw these beans shelled and packed in my store and they looked so nice and green and convenient that I had to buy them.

Naturally, I had no clue what to do with them as I often don't after buying something which I usually don't.

Are your eyes glazing over after that sentence? I don't blame you, I would be confused myself if I hadn't been the one writing it. But anyway, the clutter-free, waste-free side of my conscience kicked in and I asked the woman who helps me at home what could be done with them. She said we could make a curry of them with tomatoes, onions/shallots and brinjal/eggplant. And that's what I did though I didn't really think it would be a good bet. But it was, we enjoyed it thoroughly. And you can bet that me being me, I will look for a completely new recipe next time I see shelled and convenient beans and forget all about this!

Before I get to the recipe, however, Happy Ugadi! Here's an article I want you to read on the occasion:

We eat neem flowers mixed with jaggery on New Year’s day to remind us of the bitter and sweet flavours that co-exist in life,” declared Gundu Rao, one of my favourite ‘uncles’, as he tugged affectionately at my plait. “Come tomorrow and taste some!” Never having ever eaten neem flowers, I screwed up my face at the thought, quite relieved that in my family we had no such custom. The next day, I hid from him. His words, however, made a deep impact on me as a 10-year-old, and I never forgot them.

Tender flowers, jaggery freshly obtained from the harvest of sugarcane, nascent green mangoes, young tamarind pods, the very things that make up the Ugadi pachadi burst into existence in this season and herald the coming of spring. These ingredients, perishable, short-lived, combine year after year to create something eternal and deeply symbolic, the readiness of human beings to accept and ride out the ups and downs of life. It is also true that most events, even those of a terrible nature, do not recur in our lives and these flowers and fruit, newly come into existence, serve as a visual reminder that the crises and joys of yesteryears are transient too.

... the important truth that we cannot talk about food without stumbling against the harsh realities of the world. Hunger and thirst exist, people die of famine, starvation. The question of hunger is a very disturbing one. Why is it that there are some endowed with plenty to the point of disregard and waste while there are others who have to beg food everyday in order to survive?

Now here's the recipe:

Broad beans, shelled: 1-1.5 cups
Shallots: A handful, peeled
Tomatoes: 2-3
Round Brinjal/Eggplant: 2, cut into 4-5 pieces each
Oil: 1 tsp
Mustard seed: 1/2 tsp
Cumin/Jeera: 1/4 tsp
Turmeric: 1/2 tsp
Chilli powder: 1/2-1 tsp
Water: A cup
Salt: To taste

Cook or pressure cook the beans till just done.

In a pan, heat the oil, temper with the mustard and the cumin.

Now saute the shallots and once that's done, add the tomatoes. Add the turmeric and chilli powder and let the tomatoes cook for a while. Add some water to help them along.

Now add the brinjal and salt. Add the cooked beans. You could add more water here if you like. Let it stew until everything is cooked and thick. You can eat it with rice.

This is my entry to MLLA-9 being hosted this month by Laurie of Mediterranean Cooking in Alaska for Susan of The Well-Seasoned Cook

My Legume Love Affair Broad+Beans Vegetarian Curry Ugadi Humour

Goan Interlude

This past week, I was in Goa, mostly on work. For the most part, I was confined to the hotel and its surroundings so there aren't too many photos. The real treat came at the end of the week when I spent a day with Aparna and she treated me to some delicious food from her diverse kitchen. Too bad there aren't any pictures of that - I was too busy wolfing it all down and revelling in really homely cooking that wasn't my own!


This was in the shop outside my hotel! Who would you trust - God or (Wo)Man? :-)


The road as it progressed outside my hotel. I went for a long, long walk and took these pictures.


Lanes on the road kept turning off and ending at points from where I could see the Fishermen's Wharf. This is one of those.


A jackfruit tree in one of the hotels on that road - there were so many trees all over the place with tonnes of jackfruit.


The Fishermen's Wharf, from another point off that road. It was a hot and humid evening but that was only to be expected. That didn't spoil my enjoyment.


En route to Margao in lazy bus on lazy morning. Not for these schoolchildren, though!

Goa Travel Musings

Attaining My Sugar High

I'm due to go to the land of feni and other freely available alcoholic delights shortly, and I've had a couple of requests to ferry some goodies back to this land of not-so-much variety. I'm not worried about fulfilling at least one of the requests, because a small sample from an earlier trip to the same land is still in my pantry. Two years later. Which I had a niggling suspicion of once the request was made. And confirmed happily a few hours later.

The friend for whom I'd originally brought it is rarely in touch now and I would hate to disappoint the current friend who made this request so it shall go to her. I was relating this whole episode to another friend and she said, "I like the way you keep finding things in your pantry from two years ago! It must be a veritable treasure trove." Well, I often think it's more a liability and a sign of management failure but this item is going to have a happy ending for sure!

The flip side of Treasure Trove is Bottomless Pit, and despite some periodic and concerted cleaning, I still end up with a lot of stuff. Anyway, I've said all this before on this blog, and found out that I have a lot in common with many among you, dear readers, but there was one item that I intended using up soon.

Soon came after a couple of years.

It was a packet of couscous that I had forked out a lot for at an organic store so I didn't really mind the couple of insects that revealed themselves by rising to the top once I finished boiling it; I just skimmed them away telling myself that they were too flimsy for me to feel any disgust. There was much more left over than I had estimated, and it was much more than we could reasonably eat without feeling we'd never want to eat couscous again. Not with two more fresher, recent packs of it in the fridge.

Finally, the lion's share of the remnants went into this dessert. It really was a brainwave, even if I may say so myself, and we just have half a cup of cooked couscous to use up - maybe I'll just toss it into some rice or gravy tomorrow but for now, I've come up with a strange but tasty mixture of that hoary old dessert: pudding/payasam.

This is going off to Scrumptious who's hosting Sugar High Friday this month. The theme is The Test of Time which endeavours to display ancient recipes.

Kheer (Sanskrit: क्षीर/ksheera, Hindi :खीर, Urdu: کھیر/kheer) a traditional dessert in the Indian subcontinent, usually a rice pudding made by boiling rice with milk and sugar. It is often flavored with cardamoms, saffron, pistachios or almonds that have been soaked overnight and made into fine paste. Kheers are also made with grains other than rice, and barley kheer is a common variant in Northern India and Pakistan.

It is an essential dish in many Hindu and Muslim feasts and celebrations. While the dish is most often made with rice, it can also be made with other ingredients such as vermicelli (sayviah). The recipe for the popular English rice pudding is alleged to be descended from kheer, but this would be hard to prove, since similar rice recipes (originally called potages) go back to some of the earliest written recipes in English history (when there was practically no contact between England and South Asia).

For more information, go here.

The traditional payasam in India is commonly made with milk, sugar/jaggery and rice, vermicelli or sago. I used couscous instead. Also, instead of flavouring it with cardamom powder, I used a spoon of vanilla essence and a big stick of cinnamon, partly for a Western taste and also as I suspected that the couscous would absorb the milk rapidly and solidify into a puddingy mass, but that didn't happen.

Here's how you do this:

Cooked couscous, not small: 3-4 fistfuls
Milk: 750 ml - 1 litre
Sugar: 3-4 fistfuls
Cinnamon: 2-inch piece
Vanilla essence: 1 tsp
Ghee: 2 tsp
Cashews/raisins: A fistful of each

Boil the milk and turn off the heat.

Add sugar, stir until dissolved. Add the cinnamon too now.

Now add the couscous and heat on simmer till the milk reduces. (I must say I used too much milk and even reducing it wouldn't bring it even close to pudding consistency.)

While this is going on, fry the nuts and raisins in the ghee and keep them aside.

Once you give up on the consistency, turn the pudding off heat, remove the cinnamon, cool a while and add the nuts and raisins.

You can eat it warm and liquidy or you can chill it for a day and eat a slightly thickened version the next day. I, of course, ate both!

Sugar High Friday Couscous Payasam Humour Leftovers Dessert

Eggs, Forgotten & Recreated + Keyword Humour

I know I promised to make my search terms a regular feature and I'm going to stick by it. But before I list the most hilarious search times since the last such post, I have a "peculiar egg curry" for you (yeah, that was a search term I just saw in my stats.)

I keep talking of how I always ignore recipes that are very familiar and traditional family favourites in quest of the unfamiliar and the exotic. Sometimes the presence of the former on someone else's table really jolts your memory, and this recipe is one such. It's a very Indian, very my-home style recipe that I've quite forgotten - I saw this at an aunt's a few months ago and recreated it at home from imagination - not that there was much to imagine or take credit for, but it was very much like what my grandmom made.

Eggs: 4
Onions: Chopped, 1/2 cup
Cinnamon: A finger-sized piece
Cloves: 2-3
Curry leaves: 1/2 a fistful
Coriander leaves: 1/4 cup
Garam masala/curry powder: 1/2 a tsp
Turmeric: 1/2 tsp
Salt: To taste
Red chilli powder: 1/2-1 tsp
Oil: 1-2 tsp

Break the eggs into a deep bowl. Beat them well with the turmeric, salt and chilli powder.

In a pan, heat the oil and add the whole spices.

As soon as they sizzle, add the onion and curry leaves and saute.

On low heat, add the beaten eggs and as soon as they show signs of setting, scramble them well.

When they are cooked, add the garam masala powder and scramble them again to make sure it's evenly distributed.

Garnish with coriander leaves or mix them into the scrambled egg. Tastes especially nice with spicy pepper charu/rasam. I like to eat it with curds/yoghurt, as gag-inducing as that sounds.

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Now for the search terms; the 'fingering' and 'Malayali chechi' are old hat, they always pop up so I won't highlight any unless there's something really strange, but have a look at the rest!

"What happened to the guy who ate ten pounds of powdered food for dinner?"

"Puke babes" (like there's a variety!!!! It also sounds like the name of a particularly rebellious girl band!)

"Inscribings on mementos"

"What does it mean when your cabbage is turning purple?"

Eggs Scrambled Search terms Humour

Keywords

Singapore: Sights & Smells

We went to Singapore two weeks ago. We checked in and promptly fell asleep. When we woke up, it was 2 pm, and by the time we freshened up and went out looking for lunch, it was 3 pm. We discovered a small food court near our hotel. One counter was managed by two friendly women. They had various dishes and rice, and a heaping of five curries with rice cost us S$ 5. There was fish cake, fried tofu, greens, fried fish and several others, including a vegetarian gravy that had cauliflower in it. The rice was flavoursome too. An extra helping of the accompaniments a few minutes later cost us S$2. I really enjoyed that meal, though The Spouse said he could not take the smell anymore.


One of the vegetable stalls we saw at a local market.


We went on a bum boat ride and took some pictures of Singapore by night.



My S$20 salad of shrimp satay, mangoes, glass noodles and pommelo with tender ginger dressing at the Singapore Botanical Gardens. The stated price was S$17 but the taxes added up.


S$5 Lunch at an Indonesian restaurant somewhere in a mall on Orchard Road. This was a dish of crispy fried prawns, rice, a fiery sambal with tiny dry fish, basil and what I thought was fried roe.


There were several restaurants offering froggy delicacies. I had just had lunch so I didn't have to contend with the thought of whether I would have tried them or not.


We found this Grass Jelly Drink in another food court. It's one of the classic drinks of South-East Asia, we couldn't get through this, and this was supposed to be the smaller serving which came for 0.80 cents. We found it somewhat smelly though I enjoyed targeting the jelly with my straw and slurping it in.


We were walking to Chinatown and I noticed these on the pavement, pineapple and durian.


Our first tour when we landed in Singapore was a Singapore by Night Tour. Our first destination, at 6 pm, turned out to be dinner!!! Having eaten at 3 pm earlier, we weren't very hungry, and that was true of most other tourists in our bus. So we nibbled at most of the offerings. The dinner, representative of the various ethnic cuisines of Singapore, served up a single claw of Singapore Chilli Crab and Roti Prata.


Paper-wrapped chicken, at our dinner


Paper-wrapped chicken unwrapped. That's a bit of chicken and a mushroom


Pork spare rib soup, flavoured with what I thought was star anise. Nice.


Fried rice, with crab meat. I don't know what the cripsy, thread-y stuff on top is.


A vegetarian dish of cabbage. I could even taste saffron in that dish, but I could be wrong. It was very tasty.


The mango pudding that ended our dinner. The waitress asked us if we liked it and when we nodded, she excitedly said she had made it herself.

Singapore Food Sightseeing Travel

Bean There, Done That!

If it's epiphany one day, it's serendipity another. Want something so bad and the universe will conspire to give it to you? I don't know if such lofty ideals/statements can be applied to the smaller delights of life, and it's not as if I wanted this so bad that the entire universe had to get conspiring to give it to me but if it did, I'm happy.

The bane of living in big cities is that services and conveniences you get in small towns are hard to come by. (As are certain vegetables, foods and treats of other kinds, but that's a different story) Whenever I need some clothes altered, I can't give it to any tailor close by but have to go to this poky little shop in a poky little road that features a smelly, open drain to meet the "alterations specialist". It's a right task, hauling myself and my bundle of "alterations clothes" collected over the weeks, to his kiosk, but that day, it was doubly worth it because I noticed these broad beans, my absolute favourites and rarely to be found where I live, on a vegetable cart close by. I immediately bought half a kilo.


They were all the more a serendipitous find because just a few days ago, I had been looking for some ideas for Feta cheese, of which I possessed a small carton, and had come across recipes for a traditional Greek salad of broad beans and Feta.


This recipe is a synthesis of several recipes that I have in my cookbooks and on the Net. It's been a month since I've made it so treat the quantities with a pinch of salt. And if yours is the salty variety of Feta, like mine, don't bother to add any extra.

What you need:

Broad beans: 500 gm, shelled
Feta cheese: 200 gm (a cup), crumbled
Tomatoes: 4 medium-sized ones, quartered
Garlic cloves: 4-5, crushed
Mint: A fistful, chopped
Green olives (I didn't have any black): A few
Olive oil: 4 tbsp (I used EVOO as that's what I had)
Freshly ground black pepper
More mint for garnish

Shell the beans and boil them in a pan of water until just tender. Drain and set aside.

Heat the oil in a frying pan and add the tomatoes and garlic. Cook, stirring, until the tomatoes begin to change colour.

Add the feta cheese and toss for a minute. Remove from fire. Mix with the cooked beans, mint, olives and salt and pepper. Garnish with more mint.

Off this goes to Susan, to the eighth helping of My Legume Love Affair.

My Legume Love Affair Feta Salad Broad beans

Our Years of Togetherness

Ever since we unsettled down together, down these years of wedded not-always-bliss; in spite of moments together being cause for mourning rather than celebration; despite the truth in the statement that the best way to a man's heart is through his chest, we've made it so far ... Honey, thanks for the many you-know-whats-I-always-thank-you-for, no thanks for the things that you should do and don't, and may we have even more fun, togetherness and happiness forever. May my every word be your command and may you snap to attention and fulfil my wishes always.

I don't usually celebrate personal milestones on this blog but as it was my wedding anniversary recently, and Valentine's Day has a way of getting my goat, I thought I'd pull all this out of the mush and give those of you who need it a respite from all that hype, hoopla and marketing.

Now be nice and wish us good luck!

Anniversary Wishes Valentine's Day Humour

What Brought You Here?

From time to time, I look at the 'keywords' that have visitors landing in my blog and never cease to be baffled by the permutations and combinations that operate in the rather mysterious innards of the Internet. Goodness knows what the poor surfer was looking for when s/he looked for 'Desi Bullock' pictures but amid the Sandra Bullocks and other 'desi' references, nestled a search result mentioning my blog. Whoever was looking was not an idle surfer, I guess.

Then, someone who presumably wanted to know about the goodness of 'coconut oil for fingering blogspot' also made their way to my blog, again a second page result amidst more exciting ones. Guess s/he WAS looking for (or not entirely disinterested in) culinary advice.

It must have been an ornithologically-minded person who typed in 'What Do Crows Eat' and happened on this post. S/he must have been quite keen on the research, because I have tired of clicking on 'Next' after some six pages of results to see how fast the blog came up.

'What happened after dinner?' could have been a teaser for a murder mystery or a romance, but whoever wanted to know visited my blog too. Hopefully, they've learnt some useful lessons.

Someone who had 'too much tomato in my soup' was, in the sane order of things, probably bound to land in my blog, given its name and ingredients, but wouldn't have found any remedy. I'm a 'Slice-of-Life Chronicler', remember (heh heh!) and food is only a perspective, or an excuse, so those looking for tips and kitchen hints here may have been disappointed. Or may have stumbled on a great blog!

Beauty treatments are absent too, and so is health advice, as the seekers would have found when they asked 'Is kala chana powder good for my face' (I couldn't make out which page they landed on) or 'I enjoy curry but it makes me nauseous - what can I do to prevent this' and chanced upon this.

Oh yeah, blogging's fun alright! Yeah, I came alive when I came alive. That, dear readers, is also a 'keyword', though it is, in its unwittingly glorious pun-niness, a most evocative affirmation of how much I enjoy blogging.

On Blogging Humour Keywords Search Terms

Of Colours, Carrots & Chutneys

• A friend who's self-employed and has resolved not to stir out of the house till she finishes a project says lunch and a long conversation with me is the carrot spurring her to get on with it and finish it.



• I had a packet of carrots unusually refusing to rot even after a week in a plastic packet in the fridge.



• A discovery in recent years has been carrot chutney, made to perfection by Aunt, often recreated to imperfection by yours truly.

Now with so many carroty references and occurrences, why I could only think of papaya and pumpkin when FIC-Orange was announced I can only attribute to a moment of absent-mindedness (Aside: if it's absent, can there be a mind? Why does that sound like a smart thing to say?) but blog-hopping rescued me from much thought when I discovered people were sending in carroty concoctions to the event, created by Sunshinemom.

Take 2 cups of diced carrot, boil till not quite tender.

Grind it on the lowest speed in your mixer with

1. salt


2. some tempering/talimpu/tadka (2 tsp of mustard seeds; 3-4 tsp of fried black gram dal; 1-2 tsp of cumin/jeera; 3-4 cloves of skinned/crushed garlic; 3-4 slit green chillies; a few curry leaves, all fried in 2 tsp of oil) and


3. 3-4 pieces of soaked and softened tamarind

Check taste and texture and temper once again if it's not crunchy enough.

And when carrots are mentioned, can carats be far behind? Here's a quote attributed to American actress Mae West, who was also known for her quips:

“I never worry about diets. The only carrots that interest me are the number of
carats in a diamond.”

Here's another, by American humorist and social commentator Will Rogers:

"Some guy invented Vitamin A out of a carrot. I'll bet he can't invent a good
meal out of one."

(Well, this chutney's a good meal; just swirl it in some thick curds/yoghurt and you won't need anything else.)

Dreaming of carrots? Then prosperity and health is predicted; for a young woman to eat them denotes she will contract an early marriage and be the mother of several hardy children! Don't believe me, go here and find out for yourselves.

Food In Colour- Orange Carrot Chutney Event