You are currently browsing the Food and Drink category
You know your knitting isn’t going well when, tired of being frogged and carried around aimlessly for weeks, even your sock yarn needs caffeine. So badly, in fact, that it takes advantage of a sudden lurch in the car, and leaps rebelliously into a cup of half-drunk coffee and happily sits there, soaking it in.
Worst part was I had to let it sit there for miles until I reached my destination. I couldn’t bring myself to knit from it any more even though there was a fair bit between the ball and the needles. Instead I clutched the half-done sock in fear that it would jump into the cup too, and took a photograph of the soaking ball instead. Later I washed and squeezed it out, but that skein, and any sock that eventually comes of it, is always going to stink of coffee.
I pretended to be all upset about it, and cheered myself up by buying this cool implement, which I have long coveted. The wait for it to arrive is already killing me.
Calcutta in the winter is always delicious – the crisp bite of cold air a welcome contrast to the humid hell that it is for much of the year. It is especially cool this year because of a severe cold wave across the northern Indian plains, and I am enjoying it very much indeed. But more than the weather or the music season, winter trips to Calcutta for me is about one glorious creation: notun guR. This is the fresh (literally, new) jaggery drawn from the date palm tree, that is available only at this time of year in these parts: a rich, molten mass of sweet divinity, a winter tan that lends a deep, golden hue to all the milk-based sweets that Bengal is famous for.
Of all these, the notun guRer shondesh (the crown-like piece with raisins to the top right) is, in my firmly unbiased and scholarly opinion, the best dessert in the whole wide world. Shondesh is of different soft and dry textures and shapes, and this one has a soft inner core with sugar syrup; in winter, along with its tan, is filled with notun guR instead. Truly, a bite into a fresh, soft piece is to transport oneself directly into heaven. (In the foreground is a notun guR infused roshogolla, also a milk-based, spongy thing that is very famous but, trust me, a poor competitor to the shondesh, and the darker rolls at the back are standard issue pantua-s, which look like gulab jamuns, but which every Bengali will hurriedly assure you are NOTHING like them.)
So, with this plate of goodies I wish you all a (belated) happy new year, one that is full of fresh, golden sweetness.
Last year I had asked only that 2009 bring me no surprises, and be uneventful. Naturally, it did not heed my request. 2009 took away many people I loved and respected, and knew since my childhood. I lost Bandu mama, one of the few likable people among my mum’s siblings, whom I had only recently begun to get to know as a fellow traveller in the world of Marathi letters, politics and history. He had no time during his work life to indulge many of his literary interests, but after retirement he had taken to learning Kannada and Urdu with great gusto, and wrote regularly and eloquently in the local daily Sakal on a range of topics. It is an irony that despite having been around him for so many years, I will have to use my skills as a historian and pore through this archive he left behind to deepen my acquaintance with this, unfortunately abbreviated, side of him.
Two formative, and ubiquitous figures – known to all of us in school as Singh-sir and Gijare-sir from my earliest memories – also left us. Singh-sir taught us Hindi in school, and was a good friend of my father’s; Gijare-sir lived right next door, in a divided bungalow, and his kids were our friends. Our families were quite literally close. We lived on a residential school campus, and so they were much more than just teachers – they were people you hurriedly wished on the way to class, dodged when playing truant, harangued for advice, chatted with, and made a point to meet when visiting back from college. I shall always remember Singh-sir with his slow, tall gait, popping nuts into his mouth as he made the rounds or dropped into our house for some tea, with some Hindi wisecrack or school gossip on the ready. So many years after leaving school and campus, I never stopped nodding my head and saying a singsong “goodmorningsir” to Gijare-sir, who lived right above us in a happy continuation of our school quarters arrangement.
Also taken, well before her time, was my first friend at work in Berkeley, Linda. She was funny, smart and warm; she helped settle me into the new workplace and we soon discovered common interests in yoga, fabrics and knitting. I used to like taking my tea cup in the afternoon into her office for a little chat and catch up on various campus news, and of all the reasons that made returning to work after my sabbatical so dreadful last semester, Linda’s absence and sudden death was the worst.
I have resolved to hold my breath with 2010, focusing only on the newness, and seasonal bliss of the jaggery.
Thanks so much for the great feedback and encouragement on the blogging, you guys, it really made my day! Am glad to know I’m not the only one who misses the process-blogging, and now that this semester does look like it might end after all, I hope I will pick up the needles with gusto too.
I sneezed 74 times today. I’m sure I did, because I counted till about 53 and then there were many after that. My nose fell off and I put it back on, and I definitely remember doing that a few times. Then there were the times I thought my vocal chords were going to cannon out as well and I sniffed just in time. You can’t blame me for losing count. But trust me, it felt like five hundred.
I don’t know what it is. It’s not allergies. It’s not flu. It’s not even the regulation 7 day cold. But I have had this sneezing with a side of runny nose and a dash of headache as a staple diet all semester, with supersized helpings all last month. It’s not so serious that I can stay at home (I had to cancel class once), but it’s enough to make me cross and crabby. That’s the worst combination ever. And everyone looks at me warily wondering if I have swine flu.
So I’ve been on a soup kick, trying out simple variations for a hot, quick dinner. Today, I made some really tasty, spicy and garlicky soup with butternut squash. If you’re feeling a bit blue and flue-y, and want something that soothes the throat and hits the spot, try this one out. Peeling the squash is the only pain, but it’s even easier if you get it already-peeled. I had very few ingredients – no onions, chives, cream and other whatsit that many recipes call for, so I was all the more pleased when such a bare-bones mix turned out nicely.
Recipe:
What you need: (makes enough for two largish bowls)
Half a regular butternut squash, peeled and diced
half a medium russet potato (the squash-potato ratio was roughly 3:1)
2 tbsp ginger, finely minced
1 tbsp garlic, roughly chopped (less or more depending on your taste)
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp red pepper flakes (less or more depending on how spicy you want it)
salt to taste
2 tbsp milk
Chicken/veg stock, or water
What to do:
Melt butter in a saucepan, add ginger and garlic and brown.
Add the squash, potato, pepper flakes and just enough stock/water to cover the vegetables.
Bring to boil, then reduce heat and simmer till potato and squash are soft. (about 25 mins)
Let cool a bit, then puree in a blender, or with hand blender.
Add milk, and salt to taste.
Return to saucepan and heat.
Enjoy piping hot, with or without bread.
Accha, I have sneezed seven times in the course of writing this post, so I think I shall now go to bed.
Has anyone seen this new release? The film was quite interesting, nothing really great, but the songs are quite catchy. And, um, Abhishek Bachchan is looking more fetching, somehow.
(Chandni Chowk as seen from atop the Fatehpuri Mosque):
In the last two weeks, I went twice to “Delhi-6″ which, I learnt from the movie of all things, is the local shorthand for the Chandni Chowk area of the old, walled, historic city of Shahjahanabad-Delhi. No, I didn’t go because I saw the movie, I went to eat and shop; this is a good time of year to enjoy a lot of seasonal sweets in the city, and the weather is just right to wander out all day in the sun. Flanked by the Red Fort at one end and the Fatehpuri mosque on the other, the long street leads off into many small lanes of culinary, sartorial and historic delights, ranging from 17th century markets to 18th century bankers’ havelis to 19th century poet’s houses to 20th century madness and beyond. We visited the house of arguably the greatest Urdu poet of all time, Mirza Ghalib (the archway to the left below).
After the snazzy new metro was built, it’s now a piece of barfi to get from central New Delhi to Chandni Chowk – max 12-15 minutes, and it seems to be quite the yuppie Delhi-ite thing to do now, to go and eat at all the old and historic street eateries in the crowded old neighbourhood. I went with a couple of friends, big SLRs in tow, playing local-cuisine-connoisseur-cum-shameless-yuppie-tourist to the hilt. I have a few ponderous posts in the pipeline about living and commuting in Delhi, but since this post is mostly about food, the old philosophy of maximum visual, minimum commentary will now apply. A couple of the photos in this post are courtesy Ami and his wonderful Nikon:
Daulat ki Chaat, a sinful, frothy, light-as-air whipped cream thingy:
Regular Chaat
Samosa:
Samosa innards after the first, hot bite:
Narcissistic potatoes:
Nankhatai baked in pure ghee:
Possibly the world’s best gajar ka halwa, also in pure ghee:
Fresh, piping hot jalebis, also fried in pure ghee:
Rabri, for those who like thick, gooey cream:
One of the most delicious things about Chandni Chowk, however, is the old silver market lane, Dariba kalan. Remember my silver earring splurge last semester? Well, I.went.a.bit.nuts.this.time. I was too ashamed to photograph all the gorgeous pieces I bought, but really, the stuff there is exquisite: even the mirrors in one of the shops just lured me in. I cannot believe I didn’t spend all my money there in my previous lives in Delhi. Needless to say, I will be making up for all time lost…
In the nearby Delhi University area, we ate the best ever Chhole Bhature in the whole wide world, at Chacha di Hatti: (I think this might technically be the pin code Delhi-7, but whatever):
Gujarati snack shop in nearby Kamla Nagar, also the Delhi University area:
Enjoy!!
If you’ve eaten a south Indian meal, you have probably come across a variant of what is often called ‘gunpowder’ in Indian English – spicy roasted lentil powders that go as accompaniments to various dishes. The Tamil name is molagaapoDii (literally spice powder, I think), but in Marathi and Kannada we call them chaTNiipuDii, or chutney powders. Each family has some tried and tested way of making them, and there is always one visiting aunt who insists that one lime leaf or lentil or coriander instead of cumin makes all the difference. And so the versions grow. In my family, one combination of two lentils is a favourite. I was sous-chef-cum-photographer for this afternoon’s batch.
Ingredients:
1 cup split chana dal (Bengal gram)
1 cup split urad dal (black lentils that are actually white when split)
3/4 cup sesame seeds
3/4 cup dried and grated coconut
A handful of peanuts
approx 6 tbsp red chilli powder
1 small lemon-sized piece of tamarind, soaked and squeezed of all water
approx 2 tbsp of grated jaggery
salt to taste
For tempering - 4 tbsp oil, 3 tbsp black mustard seeds, 2 tsp cumin seeds, a pinch of asafoetida and turmeric, and lots of curry leaves
What to do:
So first, in a heavy-bottomed pan, you roast each of the dals, the sesame seeds and coconut separately, till they’re all nice and brown. You can roast them in the oven, I think (about 10 minutes at 350 deg with a couple of turnovers), but my attempt at doing that in our little electric oven resulted in blackened seeds and a fresh batch in the pan.
Then, you grind each one separately in a dry grinder very coarsely – first the chana, then the urad, then the sesame, coconut and peanuts together. After the tiny coffee grinder I use in Berkeley, my mother’s large dry grinder (which admittedly gets a lot more use than mine does!) was a treat. Then, you mix all together, and make five equal parts. Eyeball the parts, and add chilli powder the equivalent of one part. This is how my mum does it – you could add less or more depending on how spicy you want the powder to be. One-fifth of the total packs quite a punch, but is quite moderate compared to how some people like it.
Add the jaggery and tamarind and the salt, and mix well. The dry powders absorb the slightly moist jaggery and tamarind. These two, incidentally, are the two gatekeepers of my family’s mixed Kannada/Marathi cuisine. They feature in practically everything. The chef in action:
In a separate pan, make the phoDNii, aka tadka aka tempering – heat the oil, and then add the mustard seeds. When they start spluttering, add the cumin seeds, turmeric and asafoetida, and finally the curry leaves. Set it aside and let it cool. The leaves become nice and dry and crunchy. Then grind the chilli-lentils mix together once more to make it a bit more fine, and finally add the tempering to the powder. Mix well till all the oil is absorbed.
The final texture should be grainy, but not totally fine. In Tamil cuisine and some other parts of south India, the molagaapuDii is often eaten mixed with sesame oil, as an accompaniment to idlis. In our parts, or in our family at least, it’s eaten nearly every day with lunch or dinner as a side dish for pretty much everything. Either with yogurt, or with ghee. With chapatis, rice, dosas, mmmmmm.
I’ve been travelling a bit, and away from my computer, so I hope I didn’t miss replying to anybody from the last post…. more photos of my trip to follow shortly!
Some snapshots of the Thanksgiving dinner I had in San Diego. Nearly everyone was vegetarian, and even those that weren’t were ardent turkey-haters, or pumpkin-neutral. So the idea was to make it a healthy meal, which we did.
Some Potatoes au gratin absolutely dripping with cheese:
Baked zucchini, with lots of cheese to neutralize any benefits of the vegetable:
Black bean soup, where the celery by no means dominated:
More beans (yes, these were appallingly low fat, inspite of all the olive oil they were drenched in):
Pear Crisp with whipped cream:
and a Banana Cream Pie with more whipped cream:
But the most important servings were large dollops of giggles, reminiscences and the warmth of college and grad school friendships with two beloved old roommates:
And, finally, stiff cosmos, good cheer and the promise of many more such healthy gatherings in years to come:
Hope everyone celebrating had a happy thanksgiving weekend! Thank you all for the generous comments on my Ogee Tunic! I think I replied to everyone, but in case I missed anyone, thanks again. I got a lot of knitting done these past few days too, so stay tuned for some significant progress pictures on my WIPs…
Two years ago on this day, I took the plunge into blogging. I gave myself three months, then six, and then a year to see if I was really going to stick with it. I had picked the name randomly for a knitting forum login and just went with it. My first anniversary didn’t even register. In between periodic bouts of angst about ‘Why Am I Photographing This’ and ‘Who Is Reading This Anyway’, doing a roughly weekly post over the past two years has validated my tag-line about keeping me (almost) sane more than I realised. I have learned so much about new techniques, adapting patterns, and am much more disciplined (in a good way) about my knitting now. (This is clearly not the time to ponder how obsessed I am with it). The best part has been making blog-friends from all over the world and being part of a wonderful circle of creativity that has taught me so much about the craft. Thank you all! I know there are many who read regularly without commenting, but if you can, do stop today to say hi.
I had hoped to have an FO post by today on the Ogee Tunic, but it has to wait a few more days – definitely by this weekend. Instead, am sharing with all of you a plate of my Diwali faraal.
Clockwise from top –
1) chiwdaa, which is spiced, flattened rice, available in Indian stores as ‘thin poha’. Basically you roast it and make it crumbly and crisp, then mix it up with a bunch of spices. An excellent recipe for this snack is here.
2) karanji, a deep-fried crescent filled with a mix of fresh grated coconut, brown sugar, powdered cardamom and crushed almonds. The dough is a mix of all-purpose flour and semolina. I made myself sick in childhood once by eating too many of these. This was my first attempt at making them from scratch, and they didn’t disappoint! If anyone wants to try them, the recipe I followed broadly is here.
3) chirote, a kind of south-Indian beignet, if you will – layers and layers of a deep-friend pastry dusted with powdered sugar. As my friend Spud said recently, this combination is a *very good thing* and she is quite right! Here is a good recipe for it.
And now, I think I must celebrate my second blog anniversary by going to the gym!
It’s Diwali: the annual festival of lights, spread over these four days from now until Sunday. Diwali wishes to all! May the new year bring good cheer and happiness, renewal and fulfillment all around.
This is the one festival that my family celebrates with abandon, and the one festival I can never be home for, given the dratted semester system. To be sure, there are religious ceremonies, and a mythical tale of good triumphing over evil that ensures renewal and prosperity – but what is Diwali without new clothes, fireworks, and food? The centrepiece is a snacks package called faraal in Marathi – about twenty different types of eats are made specially in each family, depending on their resources, taste and enthusiasm. Everyone exchanges faraal over the Diwali weeks and you give yourself over entirely to fried dough, powdered sugar and clarified butter. It is a good time. I am attempting an ambitious faraal myself this time, but more about that in the next post – cross your fingers that I manage to get it all together.
My festivities began spectacularly today. I had a very intense, exhilarating graduate seminar class, and came back home to open a package from Finland, containing this:
Silja sent me the most gorgeous sock ever in the whole wide world, encased in a wonderful little bag, along with a spare skein of Regia silk for me to knit the second one in the pair.
I love the colour, the fit, the pattern – thank you, thank you, thank you single sock partner! You chose everything just right, and this is just the perfect, timely festival gift. I cannot wait to knit its pair. I have been wearing the lone sock all over the flat already. That Cookie A. is a genius designer, just look at the twisted flower stitches:
Finally, this evening concluded on a pleasant note with this finished object:
Although not mine, I am proudly featuring it on the blog, as the first FO of my friend who learnt how to knit not two weeks ago! Isn’t it gorgeous? Just look at the elegant shape. She switched to DPNs in our neighbourhood Chinese restaurant this evening over dinner, and we walked home to cast off and photograph the hat amidst much squealing and glee. I am amazed at how smoothly she transitioned from circulars to DPNs, and from ribbing to stockinette to decreases. Definitely a natural at the craft! I think I have some idea of what evangelists feel like, finally. She left the house muttering, “cabling without a cabling needle…” even without my broad hints about knittinghelp.com, Ravelry, Zimmermann, etc….. I think we might have a convert!
It’s not for nothing that all the photos in this post have a warm glow, eh?
I’ve been eating very poorly of late, with very little impetus to do any cooking or housework in general. But today the kitchen was in a crisis situation, so I cleaned, took stock of the fridge and swore not to buy veggies from the market just so they can decompose merrily in my crisper. On one such zombie-like trip to the market a while ago, I had brought back two leek stalks, a sweet potato and a bunch of asparagus, with very little idea about what to do with them. This evening, back from the gym,* I took the sorry veggies out and looked at them. They were on their last legs, and had to go.
They went into an unvented soup with some desi twists, and it has hit just the spot on this suddenly chilly night. I thought I’d share the recipe. It’s rough and ready, mind you, so feel free to improvise.
Asparagus Soup with Yam and Leeks
You need:
A bunch of asparagus stalks – chop the tips off and keep aside, and chop the rest into into one-inch bits
A smallish yam/sweet potato – chopped
Two leek stalks, chopped
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 large bay leaf
1 tsp sambar powder (or curry powder, or madras powder or whatever the commercial stuff is called in English)
2 tbsps fat free milk (optional)
2 cups water (or stock, if you have it – I didn’t)
salt to taste
Heat the oil in a stockpot and add the bay leaf and cumin seeds. When seeds sizzle and leaf is browned, add the chopped vegetables (except for the asparagus tips). Saute everything for a couple of minutes. Then add the water (just enough to cover everything), and add the sambar powder. (If you don’t have a premade curry powder, you can dry-roast some cumin, black pepper, cardamom and cinnamon, and some coriander seeds if you have them, and grind the whole mixture together, and add it. The roasting brings out the fragrance and flavour of the spices.)
Mix, reduce heat to medium and cook till everything is soft. About 15-20 minutes. Add salt to taste.
Then take the pot off the flame and let it cool a bit. I added the milk partly to cool it down a bit, but water will do nicely. Puree the whole thing in a food processor. The soup turned out quite thick, so you can choose how much water depending on what consistency you prefer.
Throw the asparagus tips into some boiling water, (with a pinch of salt and a drop of olive oil – I confess I added the much richer ghee you see in the picture above), and cook for 3-4 minutes. Drain.
Pour into bowls, and garnish with asparagus tips. Enjoy!
The spices balance the sweetness of the yam really well, somehow. The alternative combo suggested above will, I think, give the same kick and balance to the soup. I didn’t think it would taste this good, but it turned out to be a fine one-bowl dinner.
*(y’all! After years of knee pain and bitching about it on the couch, the word pronation, followed by a trip to a specialty shoe store a few weeks back, has resulted in me running over a couple of miles on the soft and forgiving treadmill. Like I said last time, this is admittedly nothing for many people, but for me it has literally been leaps and bounds!)
I don’t think I could ever be a vegan. I could easily give up meat, which I eat rarely anyway and didn’t eat at all for half my life, and perhaps milk and cream, but never dahi (curds / yogurt). It is one of the staples of my diet and something I absolutely adore.
Dahi Bhat or Mosaru Anna (curd-rice in Marathi and Kannada) tempered sometimes with curry leaves, mustard seeds and spice-stuffed dried chillis, and garnished with fresh coriander is a common south Indian dinner item. With some lemon or giner pickle or raw mango chutney, it is my ultimate comfort food.
Then there’s Mishti Doi (sweet yogurt in Bengali) a divine, divine Bengali dessert that’s made with reduced milk, caramelized sugar (often palm sugar) and set in earthenware pots. On a hot summer afternoon or evening, a few spoonfuls are enough to make you forget the sweltering madness around you. I had way too much of it this summer (as the scale, ahem, testifies) but it’s totally worth it. Coming back, I was seized with a longing to have some more. No earthenware pot or palm sugar, but a good detailed recipe.
Some Strauss milk, some Pavel’s yogurt, and some demerara sugar – the result was less than ideal, but it’s a work in progress.
Another yogurt favourite of mine, with which I have more success, is a beloved dessert of western India, Shrikhand. This is made with yogurt drained overnight of all the whey, and the resultant curds (called chakka in Marathi) beaten with powdered sugar, a pinch of saffron and some ground cardamom seeds, very occasionally some pistachio or almonds. This is a rather sweet dessert, and it’s often made so sweet that one dollop of the thick, thick yogurt in your mouth takes a while to work through. I often alternated dollops with some spicy pickle to balance the sweetness, much to everyone’s annoyance at the heresy. An excellent shrikhand recipe, with pictures and detailed procedure and personally tested by me, can be found at Evolving Tastes.
A famous sweetmeat-wala in Pune, Chitale Bandhu Mithaiwale, came up some years ago with amrakhanda, shrikhand with alphonso mangoes. This became a raging hit in the summers. The firm flesh of the alphonso makes it ideal for blending with drained yogurt, but since I didn’t have any in Delhi this August, I used the local Dussheri variety, which are a littler juicier, but incredibly sweet:
Of late I’ve seen other fruit flavours too. Manisha made shrikhand with blackberries, which looked scrumptious. I’ve been wanting to try this dessert with anjir (figs) ever since I read her post, and since I had some lovely fig and honey icecream in Delhi. I love figs only next to mangoes, and the ripe, luscious figs in the market now tempted me even more. So this morning I made some for a visiting relative:
I wanted to try out a slightly healthier, low-fat option, so all this contained was
1) a tub of Pavel’s non-fat yogurt, 2) ten ripe, peeled and mashed figs and 3) three tablespoons of honey. It made about 6 of the serving pictured above.
Really, all you have to do is:
- Take the yogurt and pour it into a bowl lined with a large, thin cotton cloth. Cheesecloth will do, but make sure it’s relatively firm.
- Tie up the yogurt in the cloth and hang it on a hook with a bowl below to catch the draining whey. I just take a thin muslin towel and tie the yogurt over the sink.
- Leave overnight.
- In the morning, take the drained dahi into a bowl.
- Peel and mash the figs separately, then add to the dahi and keep beating the damn thing till it’s all blended and fluffy. the drier the yogurt, the better the shrikhand consistency.
- Add the honey and mix well.
- Dress with fig pieces and an extra dollop of honey when serving, depending on taste.
I’m not sure if the excising of sugar from the recipe still makes this a shrikhand recipe, or merely a desi twist on a common Greek breakfast combination. Whatever it may be, it’s delicious, and I invite you to try it!
« Older Entries
