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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!
One of the reasons I’ve taken so long to post is that I’ve been very busy – meeting friends in Delhi and Pune, learning Modi, stuffing my face.. all the things that have to be done slowly, carefully without distractions. Also, after the 115-degree oven that was Delhi, the 90 degree humidity of Pune is making it feel like a brisk fall day in comparison, so long walks in the city in the late afternoon after my class, when the sky looks heavily pregnant and occasionally delivers, have been fun. I do wish the monsoon would stop being coy and explode, though.
<watch this space for some venting about being waterlogged and washed out, er, a couple of weeks from now..>
Anyway, another reason this post is late is that I’ve been taking photos over the last week of the many ways a mango is eaten in our household (and in western India in general) every year. In late March and April, the kairi or raw mango starts appearing in trees and markets. (btw, all italicized names are in Marathi)
It is one of those tragedies of life that the time to clamber up a mango tree’s branches to pluck kairis is also the time of final exams, and all parents and teachers can think of is that kids will fall down and break their arms and not be able to take their final exams. This happened often on the campus where I grew up and my folks regularly plucked kids from trees along with kairis.
The simplest way to eat a fresh, white hard kairi is to chop it up, rub some salt and red chilli powder on it (tikhat-mithaachi-kairi), and wash down the incredibly spicy-salty-sour thing with some cold water as all your senses tingle. I didn’t have gin & tonic with me as I munched on these a couple of days ago but they were just as delicious:
There’s a cool drink that is often made as a concentrate, called the kairiche panha (the recipe at this link is very good). It tastes good just with some ice and water, but in Delhi this time I discovered that it makes a good gin cocktail too. Unfortunately, I forgot to photograph it.
April, May and June are mango pickle, chutney and preservative season. My mum made five of these over the last week:
At two o’clock is a simple sweet-sour mango pickle. Very oily, not my favourite, but still quite delicious. I much prefer the chutneys at 10 and 12 o’clock. Very simple to make: for every cup of finely grated kairi, take a cup of dry gul (molasses, use brown sugar if you absolutely must), a tsp each of roasted and ground methi (fenugreek) and mohri (mustard) seeds, half a cup of dry coconut powder. For the red one, take a couple tsps of red chilli powder. For the green, take a few green chillis and half a cup of coriander leaves instead. Blend everything together (the texture is best on a hand stone grinder, electric blenders tend to make it too smooth). Heat a tsp of oil in a pan, put a tsp of mustard seeds in it with some hing (asafetida) and when the seeds crackle (wait for these to crackle, otherwise they taste raw and bitter), pour over the chutney. You can avoid this last step, it’s not absolutely necessary. Also, if using Mexican kairis, go easy on the molasses, as these are much less sour than the ones you get here in India.
Others in the family like sweet kairi concoctions more than I do. The lighter one, at 7 o’clock, is saakharamba (sugar-mango), made by steaming the kairi slices and then boiling them in an equivalent amount of sugar, then adding a pinch each of powdered cardamom and maybe saffron. The darker one to its right is gulaamba (molasses-mango) and is made the same way, but with dry gul instead. They’re like desi jams, and having some wrapped in a chapati was a common evening snack in childhood.
Lest you think that nobody allows the kairi to ripen in these parts into the amba (generic for ripe mango) here is the haapus, one of my favourite mangoes, and about which there has been much hoopla this year in the States (its called the Alphonso in English). I fear that it’s going to be a disappointment though, because all the preservatives and high prices and hype are going to ruin its enjoyment. In mid-May, though, it reigns supreme over all others here and I was lucky to catch a good late batch in early June:
A good fresh haapus from Devgad is almost completely fibre-free with very firm, thick and sweet orange flesh and has a lovely fragrance. It is to be eaten sliced, not sucked, but I also like eating the skin. Sometimes the flesh is made into a pulp called ambrosia of the gods aamras:
This is one of my serious summer weaknesses, something that instantly puts me in a good mood. It is eaten with chapatis, puris, or simply with a dollop of cream or ghee on top, sometimes with cardamom sprinkled. My mum likes to add just a pinch of salt as a counterpoint. I like it neat.
Well, there you are, some mango moods. There are many many other incredible mango delights from different parts of the subcontinent and around the world, which some food bloggers, many of them desis, put together recently. This fruit totally makes the summer worth it. My mum is most tickled that her concoctions are being photographed and posted online.
Incidentally, this post is meant especially for NSG and A, both of whom I remembered with every bite and click this past week.
Cloverleaf Socks Free Pattern
Okay, so I charted the cloverleaf pattern and wrote it up, and it’s available as a .pdf download on the left under "free patterns." You can also click here. As I was writing it, I realised, I used Wendy’s toe-up pattern, but you can adapt it to any toe-up or cuff-down pattern. You can just use the cloverleaf charts for the cuffs and feet. This is my first attempt at writing up a pattern; if you do take a look at it or even – gasp – knit it, please let me know how to make things clearer and shorter, and if there are any mistakes. I have a lot of respect for pattern-writers all of a sudden.
After hearing me complain about eating so much junk on the road and missing my kitchen and some decent home-cooked dal and rice, Manisha rightly figured I was feeling nostalgic and tagged me for a "meme", so here we go.
Ten things I miss of my mum’s cooking:
My mum isn’t one of those legendary cooks who can put a fabulous meal together within no time with no effort. I don’t say this negatively; I admired her for freely admitting that she did not like cooking that much, and cooked because she had to. She always said that left to herself she was fine with some bread and butter. Amidst all the women in our colony who wore their culinary skills with pride and fell all over each other at festivals and colony get-togethers, this must have been tough to admit, but also liberating. She can put together a comfort meal like nobody else, though, and try as I might, I can never replicate some of her dishes. All of them are Marathi/north Kannadiga vegetarian preps.
Amti. A Marathi version of toor dal (yellow lentils) with tamarind and jaggery and Marathi "goda masala". I can live on this and rice all my life and indeed, have, come to think of it, for most of it.
Pithla, aka Zunka. Chana-dal (chick pea?) gruel. Very difficult to screw up, but with the right combination of jeere-khobra (ground cumin-dry coconut), heavenly. My dad and sister prefer this with green chillis and I with red chilli powder. Nowadays since I live so far away the latter gets made more often when I’m home.
Sabudanyachi Khichadi. Sunday morning brunch, alternated with Idlis or Dosas depending on how much time she had to soak, grind and ferment everything. The best part of the khichadi (which is a kind of spiced sago with ground peanuts, cumin and green chillis) was the slightly burnt part at the bottom which I got to peel off the pan. With the idlis or dosas she makes this Tomatocha saar (kind of tomato curry?), with a little jaggery and ground sesame seeds instead of the usual sambar, which is heavenly. Also, I like that her dosas are always thin but soft, not the papery restaurant things that poke around in your mouth.
Puran poli, which I had blogged out a while ago. Also, Godi kuttada payasa, broken wheat with poppy seeds and jaggery. Mmmmmmm. Oh, and some Tambittu, which also have poppy seeds and jaggery and coconut and some kind of flour, which are made in the month of Shravan (around August) for Nag-panchami. We’re big on jaggery-lentil based desserts in Maharashtra/north Karnataka, rather than the milk-sugar ones in the north and east, and I love these:
More than actual dishes (there are lots of simple ones, like Gajarachi koshimbir, or carrot raita or Pushpicha kanda, a kind of spiced onion salad named after Pushpa, its creator and a relative), though, my mum is a specialist at using every part of a vegetable, fruit or whatever and creating different dishes out of the same thing. This developed out of sheer necessity initially but now she’s honed it to a fine skill. So the flesh of a gourd goes into a curry, the peels into a chutney, the seeds roasted and salted for afternoon snacks, that sort of thing. If it’s edible, it’s to be eaten.
This wasn’t as traumatic in my childhood as it may sound. Over the years I’ve really grown to respect it and try to follow her example as I use the cauliflower florettes in a curry and chop and save the stalk for adding to the sambar the next day and scour the net or ask some serious food geeks for ideas. I prided myself on wasting very little, but when Aai visited me last year , watching her in my kitchen was still an eye-opener on how much one ends up wasting on a daily basis and how one can do better. I think of her every time I save the dratted peels off something.
All this nostalgia is making me really eager to go home now. Maybe next month I’ll take pictures of some of these things. Thanks, Manisha!
As a rule, I prefer eating to cooking. Anyday. But some stuff in the fridge could not be ignored any longer, and my atta (flour) needs to be finished quickly before it goes bad. So some pumpkin parathas are to be attempted this evening. The dough needs to be *really* soft and pliable. As I kneaded it, I realised that making parathas might not be such a bad idea when stuck on a research paper you’re trying to write quickly for a deadline. All day I’ve tried to write to articulate an argument that is not blindingly obvious and lame; kneading some dough really allows you to work out your irritation without physical damage to self, computer or family members. I think I might even have thought of some decent sentences.
But this kneading also reminded me of the last time such a dough was made, and a dish that is simply out of this world, was prepared in my kitchen: Puran Polis. These are polis (Marathi for layered roti/bread, for non-Ghatis reading this) stuffed with puran (lit. stuffing, but in this case made of cooked chana dal/Bengal gram, jaggery, cardamom and nutmeg) and rolled out, roasted and then eaten with ghee and, if you like it, milk. The idea is to mash it all up and slurp and lick it off your fingers. If some dough is leftover, you can always stuff it with mashed potatoes and have aloo parathas the next day. My mum was here then and made them for Ganesh Chaturthi; I remembered to take some pictures for my foodie friends at Another Subcontinent:
The dough, followed by the puran stuffing (pressure cooked and mixed with the melted jaggery)
Then the delicate task of stuffing the elastic dough with the puran and rolling it out:
The final product folded in half, before ghee is poured over and massive
gorging causes it to instantly disappear.
For those who know about him, this is reportedly Sachin Tendulkar’s favourite dish. Not that this means anything, of course, but still.
Anyway, back to more pedestrian pumpkin parathas and papers….
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