Month: December 2014

“Amma, what do you call ‘ancestors’ in Hindi?” asks my twelve-year old daughter, coming home from a Hindi exam. Now, as everyone knows, there is no exam that quite fazes a Chennai-based kid as the dreaded totally ‘firang’ language as the Hindi one!

Nothing seems to make any sense in that textbook, why does everything have to have a gender and for heaven’s sake, what does Chandragupta Maurya have to do with my life??? rises the cry… Chandragupta Maurya, an emperor of the Maurya dynasty who lived and died over a thousand years ago, still inspires much passion – of the wrong sort – a sort of passionate despair would be more like it! – amongst kids of twelve and thirteen who have to learn about his interminable exploits and spill them out on paper during the exams! 

So back to our ancestors – i think for a minute before tentatively venturing a “buzurgon?” (the Urdu word for ‘elderly people’). Think some more and then correct myself – “It’s ‘pracheeniyon”.

“Oh”, comes the response.

“Why, Kanch, was it there in the exam today and what did you write?”

“Well, i thought and thought and thought (ok, i get it – she thought HARD!) and answered, ‘Mare hue oopar wale parivaar'”!!

“WHAAAA… ???? WOOOHOOO, WHAT WAS THAT AGAIN??” I ask – not quite crediting my ears! The literal meaning of what she had written was – the dead family above!! Phew – wonder what the Hindi teacher made of it!

The next day, a Hindi speaking friend comes home and we (obviously – how could it be resisted???!) related this tale without telling him what the original question was. Gave him Kanchana’s translation and asked him to guess what it could actually mean. He scratches his head for a while before offering up a truly priceless “ The dead family on the first floor?”!!!

Tales of Hindi horrors emanate from every household in Chennai which has a kid trying – with precious little success – to learn an alien tongue! Am sure the same is true for kids across the world…

What is learnt much easier, of course, is the cuisine of the Hindi-speaking states of the North of India. Food, after all, has only the language of deliciousness – or otherwise!

One of my favourite North Indian dishes that I learnt – of all places – from a very South Indian cook in a guesthouse in the deep South (he’d worked for a couple of years in the North) – is a very simple, everyday bhindi subzi (okra/bendakai/vendaikai curry)

EVERYDAY BHINDI SUBZI – NORTHERN STYLE

• Bhindi – 1/2 kg – cut into 1/2 cm pieces. It helps to spread it out on a newspaper after cutting for about haf an hour – to remove some of the stickiness.
• Onion – chopped very fine – 2
• Green chilies – minced – 2
• Ginger – 1/2″ piece – grated
• Jeera (cumin) powder – 1/2 tsp
• Saunf (fennel seeds) – 3/4 tsp (roughly pounded)
• Turmeric – 1/4 tsp
• Salt 
• Red chili powder – 1/2 tsp
• Oil – 2 -3 tbsp

Heat the oil in a large, flat saucepan. (Deeper pans tend make it clumpy). 

Add the onions and green chilies and fry for 3-4 minutes on a low flame. Add the rest of the ingredients (except the bhindi and salt) and stir gently for 2-3 minutes. Add the bhindi and cover and cook on a low flame for 10-12 minutes till the bhindis are tender, stirring occasionally. The bhindi shrinks during cooking so add salt AFTER it has shrunk to get the right amount of salt in. Cook on an open flame, stirring occasionally till the stickiness has gone and the bhindi is tender. 

I usually microwave the bhindi on high for 4-5 minutes before dropping it in the pan – speedens up the cooking process!

Goes best with rotis.

And you DO NOT HAVE TO SERVE IT TO THE DEAD FAMILY ON THE FIRST FLOOR or even write a Hindi exam!

A very small, almost two-year old little boy comes out of his room in the morning, still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. 

“Good morning, Shriram”, elicits a mumble “Gmum” out of him. 

His eyes fall on a large and luscious-looking watermelon on the table. All sleep disappears and the eyes shine with excitement as he looks around for an adult provider of food – and fall on his aunt – me.

“Anu atha, I bhaunt, I bhaunt, I BHAUNT BHAUTTERMELON” – the words tumble out of his mouth. 

“Come brush your teeth, Shriram and drink your milk and then we’ll have watermelon.”

“Please, please, PLEEEZZE! Can I have BHAUTTERMELON?” 

I might have been able to resist the plea if it was for just a watermelon but a BHAUTTERMELON – no way! We arrive at a compromise – teeth first, the the watermelon, then milk.

 Slice after slice disappears as he holds his tummy to say he is too full for milk. Offered another slice of watermelon instead, he gauges me carefully to see if I might be pulling a fast one on him – “what if I say yes and then she says I have to drink milk instead?” Never underestimate the bargaining powers of a two-year old!

One of the greatest pleasures of an otherwise unbearable Indian summer (the first being mangoes of course!) are these delicious, sin-free (try putting on weight on a watermelon!!)  fruit and anything made out of them – juices and ice creams and sorbets and even gazpacho!

One summer, a couple of years ago, we had a ten hour drive and I made this juice which I froze overnight so we could drink it on the way as it melted. My dear friend Dipika (and her husband SN) with whom we were travelling, decided to subsist on just the juice and bypass all the eatables! Have also carried large jugs of it to innumerable sports meets for Kanch and her friends. Here it is.

BHAUTTERMELON JUICE

• Watermelon – deseeded and cut into chunks – any size. The easest way to deseed is to cut thin, large slices and shake the seeds out while pushing the harder ones out with the point of a knife. – 4 cups
• Juice of one lemon
• Mint leaves – 1 tbsp
• Sugar – 2 tsp (optional)
• Salt – 1/2 tsp
• Kaala namak (pink Himalayan salt) – 1 pinch
• Tabasco sauce – 1/4 tsp
• Pepper – 1/4 tsp

Put everything into the blender. Cover with a cloth – in case stuff whizzes out – and blend well till the juice is smooth. A few chunks are great though! Freeze overnight if you are travelling and you can keep sipping it as you drive – definitely makes the Indian summer more bearable and is a far better option to milk! Please brush your teeth first though!

“And now, guys, we’ll be passing a  wind farm – look out for it on the right” – announces husband as we drive down the eastern coastal road towards Kanyakumari from Tuticorin. Shocked silence from the backseat as my five-year old digests this information.

“Appa, they actually have farms that make WIND???! Won’t it stink??” finally squeaks Kanch, thinking this farmer who grows wind must be a guy worth meeting – after all, she’s been told umpteen times that it’s rude to even crack jokes about stuff like this and here’s an adult (presumably) who’s allowed to produce the stuff by… what? the sackful – for all she knows – WOW!!

The final sight of and explanations about windmills are a sad let-down for someone who’s been expecting something far more exotic!

Her remark passes into family lore as we nearly have an accident from the resulting laughter! 

This was a memorable trip in more ways than one. We finally reach Kanyakumari after much sightseeing along the way. I notice vaguely that Kanch seems a little more hyper than usual but put it down to enforced confinement in the car. As we walk towards the beach from our hotel, it is apparent that she is growing more and more nervous. When we finally reach the sea, she hangs back – quite unusually for a kid who has grown up in Madras and loving the sea. Refuses to put her toes in the water. 

“What’s wrong, Kanch?”

“Amma, we’ve reached the end of India, no? What if we fall off over the edge and drown?”

Phew!!!

More explanations follow – about the earth and it’s curvature and so on… but out of the mouths of babes…

We do very often fall off the India map in the kitchen, though! There’s only so many days that one can stomach any one kind of cuisine for our spoiled-for-choice urban palates! 

Here’s yesterday’s dinner – adapted from a recipe from another food group…

PASTRY-LESS QUICHE (LOW FAT) (serves 5 or 6)

• Boiled, mashed potatoes – 6 (about 3/4 kg)
• Spring onions (shallots) – both onion and greens chopped – 1 cup
• Broccoli – thinly sliced – 1 cup
• Capsicum – sliced – 1 cup
• Green chili – minced – 1
• Paneer (cottage cheese) – cut into small 2 mm cubes – 200 gm
• Onions – sliced – 1 large
• Butter  – 1 tsp
• Olive oil – 1 tsp
• Milk – 2 1/2 cups
• Eggs – 3
• Grated cheddar – 1/2 cup
• Salt
• Pepper
• Nutmeg – 1/2 tsp
• Dill – 1 large pinch
• Italian herbs – 1/2 tsp

Mash the potatoes togther with the olive oil, 1/2 cup milk, salt, pepper and dill and spread at the base of a large flan dish or any baking tray – to a thickness of about 1/2 cm. Bake for 15 minutes on 220 C.

Saute the green chili, onions, spring onions, capsicums and broccoli in 1 tsp butter. Add the paneer pieces and salt. Spread this over the top of the potato layer.

Beat the eggs, milk, cheese, salt, nutmeg, pepper and herbs well. Pour over the vegetables. 

Return to oven and bake for a further 35-40 minutes at 220 C till set in the middle and golden on top.

It’s a surprisingly light but filling dish and you only have to fall off the culinary map of India!

Every time I watch Masterchef on TV with my family and there’s this event where you have to cook with just three or four or five ingredients, my Indian cooking brain goes into a tizzy – HOW on earth CAN one cook with just that few? Everyone racks their brain to come up with stuff – the problem (also the sheer brilliance!) with Indian cuisine is the average Susila maami’s ability to get up and half asleep, throw a minimum of ten ingredients into a pan to make a (get this!) very simple breakfast of – say – upma!

At the other end of the spectrum – take a bisibele bhaat, for instance – with only thirty ingredients or a biryani with ’bout the same – festive dishes all right but the average housewife – househusbands are a new and untested species – at least in numbers large enough to constitute a reasonable sample size so I’m going to stick to “housewife” despite my feminist leanings – can and does make these on her own – and is not counted a Masterchef for having done so!

Also the sheer variety – India’s goddess of cooking – Tarla Dalal – may her soul rest in peace for the number of lives she has saved! – has over FOUR THOUSAND  recipes using potatoes! On the other hand, what “Saveur” and “Bon appetit” and other West-based food magazines have lists of the most difficult recipes in the world and the most number of ingredients I’ve seen is twenty two – for a Devils’ Food Cake! Of course, the complexity with western cuisine lies in the processes – a classic cheese souffle may have fewer than ten ingredients but getting it right takes an accomplished cook! But remember, this whole narrative is about cooking with few, very few ingredients…

The one state in India which bucks this trend and makes delicious food with just a handful of ingredients is Kerala. As a child, on a school trip to Kerala – way back in the 70’s, we were served red rice at every restaurant we ate in and for palates unaccustomed to it – only extreme hunger pangs drove us to eat some! And so, for a long time, I never did care for Kerala food.

Till I grew up and married into a Palghat family. Even familiar dishes like the majjiga pulusu/moar kozhambu (or moar kootan in Malayalam) were made using far fewer ingredients and with just as good results! What also tickled me was that ingredients with a scant two or three ingredients had names with names with more syllables than ingredients! Take the “mezhukkuvaratti” for instance (six syllables). Complicated, you’d think? Nah! It is usually made with as few as three or four ingredients! (basically a stir fry with green plantains and/or yam/blackeyed beans, salt and oil). And tasty out of all proportion to its name or number of ingredients! 

BUT, to my mind the heights of Kerala cuisine is in the very humble, very everyday “olan” – a dish so simple even a seven-year old can make it and a dish so delicious that it lives in a class by itself! 

OLAN

• White pumpkin (ash gourd) – 2 cups
• Yellow pumpkin – 2 cups
• Blackeyed beans (karamani) – 1 tbsp – soak for a few hours and pressure cook with a little water.
• Green chilies – 2 – slit
• Coconut milk – 2 cups
• Salt
• Coconut oil – a few drops to garnish

Cut the pumpkin into thin pieces of 1″ square. In a large saucepan, place the white pumpkin pieces at the bottom. Pour a couple of tbsp of coconut milk over the top and cover and cook for just three minutes. Cover with the yellow pumpkin pieces. Add the green chilies and the rest of the coconut milk and cook till almost done. White pumpkin takes a few minutes longer than the yellow and if you cook them together, the yellow tends to get mashed up. Add the beans and salt and cook till tender but still spearate pieces. The garnishing for this is an exercise in simplicity – just drizzle a few drops of coconut oil over the top while it’s still hot! C’est tout! Or as they say in Palghat – “ambaradaan”!

And there’s my limited ingredient Masterchef dish!

Just sat down to enjoy a plate of sev puri at arguably the best chaat place south of the Vindhyas (not sure that it could be North too!) – Gangotri in Chennai and there was a commotion at the table next to mine. Now this table had two little kids – aged about four and two years. In 2014 – this is a recipe for disaster more often than not! Any parent who’s over 40 and who’s brought up a kid or two in the 80’s, 90’s or the early 21st century will agree with me on this! 

We’ve all faced bratty children (someone else’s!) at restaurants, theatres (i will never understand how parents bring children below the age of 7 or 8 at least to watch movies which are NOT meant for children) – and no, I’m not talking “A” rated movies – just the regular “U” ones – where kids are bored and scream their heads off as soon as their tub of popcorn is over – they seem to be everywhere! We all have favourite horror stories that we’ve encountered in all these places – my own reading is it’s the parents who are the true horrors! Our children, of course, never behaved LIKE THAT! All this leads me to suspect that parents have very short memories for their own childrens’ tantrums! Mea culpa too!

I do not remember the tantrums at all – there must have been some! But back to my today’s tale. One of these kids – the two- year old – had chucked the mother’s keys under the sofa seat they were on. This was a diner type arrangement with MANY sofa seats ranged against the wall with no gaps in between. Two of the staff had to shift an entire row of tables and their corresponding sofas and every diner in these rows had to shift their seats elsewhere till the keys wer found. Bad, you think? What happened next was so shocking that I couldn’t quite credit it – the lady – obviously the mother of the two (there was no other adult with them), took the keys from the waiter and walked off without a whisper of an apology to anyone there – waiters or other guests and not a word of thanks to the two waiters who had taken so much trouble to retrieve her keys! NOW do you agree with me about the parents over forty???

Trying to get over it by remembering happier incidents! 

Two tiny four-year olds – the best of friends – walk solemnly into a restaurant with the parents of one of them (Archana) and Vinaya with us! Solemn – as befits the outing – best company manners and all that – they sit down carefully. The waiter comes over and asks them what they’d like to order. Arch, who’s been to this particular restaurant earlier – knows the drill: “Could I have the ‘meluka, please?” Vinaya, deciding that whatever her friend likes she is sure to like, also adds “I’ll also eat the meluka”! The waiter looks puzzled till I explain – ‘meluka’ is “menu card” with a lisp! Vin, having decided this is a new and exotic dish, wants to eat the same! By the way, neither had learnt to read yet – but restaurant visits were, as I’ve mentioned – solemn affairs requiring proper protocol and company manners!!

The dish they finally ordered – after all this deliberation – was a pumpkin soup – a favourite even today.

VERY LOW FAT PUMPKIN SOUP

• Pumpkin (yellow) – peeled and cut into cubes – 2 cups
• Onion  – chopped – 2 tbsp
• Cashewnuts – 6-8
• Butter – 1 tsp (optional)
• Coriander – chopped – 1 tbsp
• Cinnamon powder – 1 pinch or 1 small sliver of cinnamon – 1/2 cm
• Pepper
• Salt
• Milk – 1/2 cup

Place the butter and onions together in a pan.  Cover and heat on a low flame till onions turn translucent. Add the pumpkin, cashewnuts, cinnamon sliver (if using) and coriander. Add a 1/4 cup of water and cook till tender. Cool and whizz in the mixer to get a very smooth puree. Strain if necessary. Put back in the pan, add the salt and pepper and enough water to make a thickish but still pourable consistency soup. Bring to the boil ( if you’re using cinnamon powder, add now) and switch off. Pour one or two tbsp of milk in each bowl and then pour the soup over the top. Garnish with coriander / parsley or basil and serve immediately  with a spicy bread. – focaccia goes very well. If you want to omit the butter altogether, just add all the ingredients together in the pan except the milk. Proceed in the same way.

And don’t eat the meluka!!!