The Big Lunch

In my safe and cosy un-momentous world, some momentous things happened recently. No, no, I haven't quit my day job to go into blogging or all things foodie full time, I've not been invited to do a TV show, I haven't been discovered by a publisher - the momentous things are momentous enough for an un-momentous life.

 I stuck to a resolution of sorts to travel a little more, spend at least two days outside my city and I'm glad to say I've done that. I've visited four places and had a very fun, relaxing and restful time with my friends.

 I shaped up a bit within two weeks of starting a new workout - I always do but not so fast. I haven't lost any kilos, though!

On one of my trips, I found out that my friend considered me the fittest of our girl gang, and that when I went to Pune's Shaniwarwada, I was the only one to reach the top of the fort without any trouble. To add to that, she said she had noticed it that every time we went somewhere together, I had been the first to reach the peak. Now this was a revelation - I thought years and years of working out had not worked out because twice when we went to visit the Gomateshwara statue I huffed and puffed all the way up, always falling behind the rest of my companions - and the two visits were years apart, by which time I had racked up many years of aerobics and gym.

 Then the most momentous thing of them all - I finally hosted a lunch that was due to my colleagues for several years. The true old friends that they are, they never let me forget it, often ribbing me into embarrassment but somehow I never plucked up the courage to do it. Some of them had visited individually but never as a big group. Even when one of them said, "What Sra, come on, can't you just do it, all you need to do is cook a couple of simple dishes, order some and get us to bring the rest," I could not. I don't believe the first formal meal at my house should be a potluck - and I don't believe in calling people over and giving them only a little to eat. I know how it feels.

I cooked for eight people two years ago, who were older friends from my college days and whom I had never invited for a meal with family, either, but somehow this office lunch never materialised.

However, I finally gathered my guts and issued an invitation which was accepted with alacrity and this past Sunday. I had the previous day off and resolved to cook through the day and keep myself free and fresh with only the pulao to be cooked the next day. The biriyani was outsourced. We were a group of nine altogether, with six guests.

As soon as I woke up on Saturday, I realised we were still in the first week of the month and that we had not had our 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. power cut yet. My suspicions were proved right and the electricity went off a little before 9 a.m. At 11, I started cooking - by 2 p.m., I had only cooked two dishes. By 3.30, I had made another. I took a break then and started cooking again at 5.30 and went on till about 8 p.m. Then the next morning I made the vegetable pulao.

First, here's a look at most of what I made, I forgot to take pictures of a chutney I had made.

And here's the vegetable pulao for which the recipe is given in this post

 

I have a recipe on this blog which I vaguely remembered as containing coconut milk. I thought I was making that, but it turned out to be completely different. It even acquired a bright green hue, how I have no clue.

 I used a big pressure cooker.
 Vegetables, chopped: 3 cups (I used mixed frozen vegetables)
Basmati Rice: 2.5 cups
Mint: 20 leaves, washed and chopped
Green chillies: 2-3, slit
Thick coconut milk: 400 ml (2-1/2 cups in my measure)
Water: 2-1/2 cups
Garam masala powder: 1.5-2 tsp
Star anise: 2
Marathi moggu: 2
Bay leaf: 2
Ghee/Oil/Mix of both: 75 ml/4 tbsp
Juice of 3 limes
Salt to taste

Soak the rice for 20 minutes and strain.

In a heavy bottomed pan or pressure cooker, heat the fat and fry the whole spices.

Add the garam masala and fry for a few seconds.

Add the mint, green chillies, fry a bit and then add the vegetables.

Fry well "till raw smell goes and good smell comes".

Add the coconut milk and the water and let it come to a boil.

Add salt. When I tasted the mix at this stage, it seemed salty.

I had not yet added the rice but I didn't want to take chances, so I added the juice of three limes then and there, praying it would not turn bitter. It didn't.

Add rice. Turn off the heat after three whistles. My friends loved it and one of them said she found it extremely unusual, that she had never tasted a pulao with such a tang, so I thought it was worth putting on my blog.

Appealing To The Universe, With a Gourd

I haven't meant to become a columnist on my own blog, writing just once or twice a month, but that's how things are turning out, much to my dismay. The only good thing, among many bad things, that prevents me from doing that is that I wind down for the day earlier than I used to. I seem to be going through a slow and sluggish phase and I really wish things would change.

Let's see if the law of attraction works for me. Here I go throwing my wishes out into the universe: I wish things would change for the better, for you, me, everyone, the world. I wish we could be peaceful and content, with just enough desire to propel us on to achieving whatever we want. I wish for the strength and will to accomplish those dreams. I wish for patience and fortitude to stand me in good stead while I'm waiting. (But really, I just wish I get what I want without much struggle!)

I have several material wishes too: I wish we have a lot of time to follow our passions and interests, whether they are travelling the world, decluttering a life and home, or writing a blog or a book. Make that books. I want the abundance of health, time, energy, money and peace of mind to follow my dreams independently, and I want to look back on life and see one for which I can pat myself on the back. I wish the universe grants me this and much more. I wish it gives you whatever you wish for, too.

And of course I wish none of these wishes, when they come true, fall into the be-careful-what-you-wish-for, you-might-just-get-it category

Now while we wait for the universe to pool its energies and help us (and that may sound irreverent but I certainly don't intend it that way, the above-written portion of this post was written with much deliberation), let me show you how to make some snake gourd chutney.

There seemed to be a time in my mid-20s when the snake in snake gourds seemed to be going out of circulation. Till then, I only saw long, curly, grey-green snake gourds a mile-long suspended from their vines, draped over an uncle's arm when he visited from the village (this image is not mine, but it's one of my favourite movie cliches), sold whole in the market. It was also that smelly vegetable I never ate, among others, before I went to live in the hostel. Then when I set up a kitchen in a new region, I only saw what I thought was the antithesis of snake gourd or the form that gave it its name. It was very short and stubby, more gourd than snake. Curiously, the ridge gourd, which I knew only to be shorter and smaller, was very long and tiresome to process. They still are. While I see the long snake gourds back in existence, I rarely see the small ridge gourds.

I think this was made with the short and stubby ones.

Saute
2 cups of washed, peeled and chopped/diced snake gourd

in

1 tbsp of oil

after tempering it with

1/2-1 tsp of mustard seed
1/2 tsp of cumin
6-7 green chillies (or fewer)
1 tsp of black gram/urad dal
3-4 cloves of garlic

You need not tend to it constantly if you sprinkle some water on it and cook it covered on a low fire till transparent and tender, but not soft and wilted. You can add some salt midway.

Cool.

Grind to the consistency you like. I prefer it to have some texture so I don't grind it fine.

Add this mixture to

1-1.5 cups of beaten curds

Garnish with coriander, and curry leaf fried separately in a spot of oil. Or you can choose to add the curry leaf with the rest of the tempering.








Vegetarian/Vegetable Curds/Yoghurt

The First Time Happiness Bubbled Over - The Fifty-2 Weeks of 2013

Let's call it The First Time I Remember Experiencing Total Happiness. Many people say it's the day they had their child or the day they got married or the day they got a job, a carat(s) (or carrot(s), but not a stick), or the day that was marked by similar achievements, but for me it's nothing big like this.

This is something I persevered with and accomplished. Many times since, I've thought to myself that this was one of my happiest moments. Some of you might remember reading of my foray into cooking. You can read about it here.

I was waiting to join the University and needed to do something with all the free time I had, so I took up baking. Without knowing the ABC of anything culinary, of course. There were no blogs then to tell us how fulfilling baking bread was, and the few recipe books that we had at home didn't have much in them.

So I bought a book and would sometimes try out the cakes and desserts. Apple and ginger souffle. Caramel pudding. Devil's food cake. Pumpkin halwa. One of them was something multicoloured, and involved creating a dent(s) in the pudding by weighing it down with another vessel(s) - the hollow(s) that formed after it set was filled with other colours. Something like that.

 There were other confections that needed yeast. The bakery we patronised stored dry yeast and I bought a packet. I would religiously soak it in hot water, count out the sugar grains (yes, I've been watching my weight forever), slip them into the cup and wait for it to rise. Twenty, thirty, forty minutes would go by and nothing would happen. It would stink a bit but that was it, there were no bubbles, nothing to indicate it was working. It would lie there muddy and despondent, and it mirrored my mood.


I even have a recipe that involves yeast on the blog, you can find a recipe for Qatayef, stuffed pancakes here.

 After a few tries, I asked the owner of the bakery why it wasn't working. He said, "You have to use warm water, not hot water. You're probably using hot water. If you use hot water, the power of the yeast will go away," he said in his Malayalam-accented Telugu, his hands mimicking a running-far-away action.

He was right. I had been using boiling hot water and it was killing off the yeast. I went back all recharged and followed his instructions. The yeast worked beautifully. I still remember gingerly going back into the kitchen and peeping into the dish with great trepidation. There it was, tiny bubbles on the surface, a little bit of white foam, and a smell so yeasty it seemed nothing less than fragrant in that flush of triumph. I could see some movement too! I must have used a steel katori or a cup but it was nothing less than a petri-dish that day!

I don't remember what I made with the yeast but I do remember a savarin that was a great success, it could have been that same day or later.

Now tell me, what was the first time you felt total, total happiness?

This is my entry this week to The Fifty-2 Weeks of 2013 Project.

 Fifty-2 Weeks of 2013 Humour Musings Nostalgia

Of Failures, Going Back to My Roots and All That

Over the last one week, I had a spate of culinary misadventures that took me back to ordinary, everyday stuff. As I'm always trying out something new, and I cook only every other day or once in three days, I don't make too many dishes traditional to where I grew up, except dal with some vegetable or greens in it. The nice part about that is that they always remain special that way.

Last Sunday, I plonked myself down in front of the TV and patiently cut up half a cabbage and two onions for "Zunaka", from a cookbook of the West Coast. The Indian West Coast, that is. I tended to it patiently, trying not to shudder when it turned a sludgy green-brown after 2 tsp of chilli powder and 'jaggery to taste'  went into it. Then I added the asafoetida.

Now, I have some 'pure' asafoetida from my trips to Delhi and Dubai which I powdered - I stumbled on to a blog post for that and it was useful, though my house stank for the better part of the day and my eyes burned  - and The Spouse swore that it wasn't him but the hing (asafoetida) that turned the sambar bitter. I was determined to prove it wasn't the hing so I used it in the cabbage. I can be cussed sometimes, so I used a large pinch as the recipe dictated knowing rather well I should have used just a smidgen because this was 'pure' (not cut with wheat and turmeric).

Bitter defeat.

That's not the end of the recipe or the cabbage dish. The recipe also said to add about 1.5 or two cups of gram flour/besan in small lots and keep frying it till it turned dry. By the time I finished adding about a cup, I knew the dish was going into the bin. Neither had the besan masked the bitter taste of the dish nor had the besan itself cooked. The Spouse smirked, I scowled and we dumped it after it cooled down.

Only as I write, it strikes me that my next set of misadventures too involved besan. Half a kilo of it was consigned to the flames in two days. I set about making something called paat vadi, a Maharashtrian dish which seemed easy enough. The first time, I got the instructions wrong, involving nothing less than an entire cup of oil, so the recipe went wrong. I tried persevering but it didn't taste right. The next time, which was just a few minutes later, it just didn't work out  - is it supposed to remain slightly under-cooked, or how should I test for doneness? I don't know because in both attempts the finished product tasted raw. I don't see how I could have cooked it further. I dumped all that too.

My friend V berated me in both instances that I should not follow any recipe to the T. I should use my brain, instead, she said. You should read through it and then decide, she said. I told you so, she said. Well, I don't know about brain but  I'm a much humbler person now. My confidence in even simple things such as cooking has taken a beating and I decided any culinary effort for the next few days must be tame, ordinary.

So I ended up making this

At the back is dal with greens, a cabbage and peas stir-fry and on the left is the dosakaya (lemon cucumber) chutney.

I have made dosakaya chutney only rarely and decided to refresh my memory about the method before I launched into it. So I Googled and my search led me to this recipe which was most interesting because it had a tip which I hadn't known of earlier: grind the 'seed jelly' along with the chillies and toss the raw pieces of cucumber in it.

In a nutshell, how you make it is: Peel and dice two cucumbers into thin pieces. Test seeds and pieces for bitterness. Scoop out the seeds and reserve them. In some oil, fry urad dal, mustard seed, a little bit of fenugreek, salt and many green chillies and a few red chillies. Add some tamarind to this, the seed jelly and grind it. I stayed away from the asafoetida and used garlic instead. Mix this with the cucumbers. Fry some more urad dal and top the chutney with this for some crunch.

It was great, and very much like what I am used to at home.

Then I made a dondakaya (tindora/ivy gourd/coccinea) chutney. Fry some jeera/cumin, tamarind, green chillies and lots of garlic in about 4 tsp of oil. Add sliced tindora to this (about 350 gm) and saute until brown spots appear. (I wouldn't cook it completely as it needs to be slightly resistant even after it's ground, for texture - traditionally, the entire mix is tossed into a grinding stone, given a few thumps with a heavy pestle and that's it - the chutney is thus ready.) Grind it all. Temper with some red chillies and urad dal.

And then, there's the tomato chutney we make.

Fry lots of tomatoes and garlic and green chillies in oil, grind with salt, and tamarind if the tomatoes aren't sour enough, and temper with mustard, curry leaf, cumin and urad dal in a teaspoon or two of oil. That's it!

We eat these chutneys with rice. The tomato chutney has other applications too - idli, dosa, and such absorbent snacks.

Truly, these past few days I've been feasting on the chutneys, like never before, well, at least in a long time. And if you're mulling over this post, will you please tell me what went wrong with my zunaka and my paat vadi?

chutneys vegetarian

On The Gravy Train, Again

I only rarely used coconut in my cooking till I got Mikcee. I don't think we've ever used it that much for me to miss it but I miss the old-style traditional rotary grater, which looked something like this. Grating coconut was a breeze with those things.

Then in the last few years, a store we patronised began offering grated coconut but we couldn't really use it well because I had a fancy food processor which couldn't do many tasks that an Indian kitchen demanded, so between the lack of a grater and a mixie, our coconut consumption was pretty limited.

I finally traded in the food processor for a regular, no-frills Indian mixie because the former was occupying too much space, and it's one of the best decisions I've made. We consume a little more coconut now in the form of gravies and avial.

I like mixed vegetable gravies and recently went looking for recipes for something a neighbour had given us long ago. It may have been Poricha Kuzhambu but none of the recipes in the first few searches were printable. I didn't have the patience to write them down. So I kept surfing and searching till I came across some recipe that used tamarind, another that used dal, another that used coconut and others that used all these and more!

I combined all these into one and only halfway through remembered a colleague telling me that poricha kuzhambu was made without tamarind. But the recipes on the Net said otherwise and anyway, I had soaked some tamarind already so I just went ahead with my concoction.

I had had more than a cup of soaked and boiled field beans in the bridge, and some broad beans as well (a dozen), which I boiled and chopped into big pieces.

I ground

1/2 a cup of coconut bits 
2 red chillies
A teaspoon of cumin
More than a teaspoon of peppercorns

I put a spoon or two of oil into a pan, heated it and sauteed a chopped onion.

Then I added the beans and the vegetables and sauteed them.

I cooked it for a bit in tamarind extract - a lime-sized ball in a cup of water.

I then added the ground paste and let it cook for a while.

At this point, I remembered I had some cooked toor dal (pigeon peas) in the fridge, so I added a ladle of it to that.

It was wonderful!

The next week, I did the same thing with a mix of 10-12 broad beans, one green banana, some soaked and boiled black channa and a drumstick. I omitted the dal, didn't miss it at all.

There are a lot of beans in the first dish and more than a handful in the second one, so I'm sending off this post to MLLA 55 hosted by Susan of The Well-Seasoned Cook.
  Vegetarian Coconut gravy My Legume Love Affair