Month: April 2015

…so this friend of ours – a very busy advertising honcho, running a very busy ad firm, with a very busy schedule… you get the idea? Very busy guy… comes out of his flat on one very busy morning, hands and shoulders aweigh with lunchbag, camera bag, briefcase… his mind buzzing with… what else, very busy thoughts of the meeting ahead… with a very busy client… He gets into the lift and then as the lift makes its way down, notices a not-quite-so-busy guy, also in the lift, giving him weird looks…

Ignores him at first, then the looks get weirder, driving all the serious business of being busy out of our pal’s head – quite a task! “So what is this guy staring at? Smut on my nose?” and stares into the polished steel surface of the lift wall. No smut visible. Tentatively looks down to see if he’s got my daughter’s disease (blogged earlier – please see http://anuchenji.com/blog/yet-more-foot-mouth-tales) of missing shirt, etc. All in order. The busily creative mind is now seriously puzzled! Ennada idu? What on earth is this guy’s problem? Maybe I’m in the lift with a psychopath? Omg! All other busy thoughts are gone as he squeezes himself carefully into a corner… watching the other guy out of the corner of his eye for any sudden movements, in which he can quickly fling his lunchbox at him!

Then he wipes his glasses – on his shirt sleeve, of course. Were you seriously expecting a glasses wiper? And stares again intensely at the lift wall. Chin? Check. Nose? Check. Eyes? Check. Ears? Both in place. Specs? Sitting correctly on said ears. The gaze travels upwards. OOOOOooooh! Towel tied around head after washing LONG hair? Check! Definite OOPS moment!

Doing his best to give the impression that this was exactly the look that he had intended to convey all along and buster, you’d better watch out – thorthu (Kerala’s justly famous thin towels!) are going to be the next fashion statement, man, he nonchalantly gives his head a shake and pulls off the towel with a flourish. Thirty years in advertising have not been for nothing, right?

Sadly, the effect is slightly, just slightly – ruined by the towel getting stuck in the hair at the back of the neck (problems of waist-long, curly locks!) and eliciting an ouch from self! Also by the spray which splatters the other poor guy – whose turn it is now to shrink into the corner!  Thankfully, the lift has reached the ground floor by now and our man manages to swagger off confidently – like I said, advertising is not for nothing!

Carrying off stuff is basically the name of the game – these things happen because you planned it so! According to my husband, this is the only lesson they teach you at B-school! My response is that engineers, poor chaps, don’t have the panache to carry things off! Of course, he’s an engineer!

The queen of coverups, of coure, was my own heroine – Julia Child. She drops a turkey that she’s slaved over for hours just before serving it – at the dinner table where a bunch of guests are waiting – for Thanksgiving dinner and… picks it up and announces, “Oh thank goodness. I’ll just bring my spare turkey in!” before whisking it off to the kitchen, doing some cosmetic stuff to it and bringing it back gaily to the table! Vive la Meryl Streep!

Though there are some disasters that it’s difficult to cover up, no matter how much panache you can summon up! Like this once, when K wanted to make a fancy tomato shorba for dinner for the parents to welcome us home after a holiday and the mixie exploded! We were scraping tomato puree off the ceiling for weeks!

Here’s how to make and eat your shorba without having to lick it off the ceiling!

MINTY TAMATAR KA SHORBA (TOMATO SOUP – INDIAN STYLE)

• Very ripe tomateos – 8 large – chunk.
• Garlic – 3-4 flakes
• Bay leaf – 1
• Mint leaves – 1 tbsp + 1 tbsp to garnish
• Coriander- chopped – 2 tbsp + 1 tbsp for garnish
• Sugar – 1 tsp
• Cloves – 2
• Cinnamon – 1″ stick
• Dried coriander seeds – 1 tsp
• Red chili pwd – 1/2 tsp
• Salt
• Ghee – 1 tsp
• Jeera/cumin seeds – 1/2 tsp

Cook the tomatoes with the garlic, dried coriander seeds, 2 tbsp coriander, bay leaf , cinnamon, cloves and chili powder.

Once tomatoes are softened, let cool. Puree in the mixer to a smooth puree.

Strain out the puree. Shorba is best served silky smooth so pips and skin need to be removed.

In another pan, bring back to the boil, adding sugar and salt. You may need to increase the sugar if the tomatoes are very sour.

Heat the ghee in a small saucepan, add the cumin seeds and let them splutter. Pour over the shorba. Serve in bowls, garnish with coriander and mint leaves.

And if there’s any mess, clean it up with the thorathu that you were using to dry your hair!

P.S: This is very thin soup – just like all those excuses we made above!

“An-dradha. Will you be my best friend for tomorrow?” says one of my many school friends. I am quite happy to agree to anyone who asks me to be their best friend – after all, one can always be many people’s bf or bfftw (best-friend-for-the-week!), right?

Then during the short ‘interval’ in the morning (the morning school break), two more girls come up with the same request. I don’t have a suspicious nature so I nod happily. By the time lunch break is over, I’ve received no less that eight requests! Now even with my unable-to-smell-a-two-week-old-dead-rat-at-two-feet nature, something smells – rat-ty!

The thing with self-deluding natures is, you see, that you think that everyone loves you! It is not a bad thing to figure out – as I did in my late thirties (did I claim in an earlier story that I was quick on the uptake? – I was lying!) – that sometimes what they love is in your cupboard!

What was in my cupboard then was our annual class trip to a local “place of interest”. Nine times out of ten, this was the Coca-Cola factory in Hyderabad! A classmate had an uncle who was a big bug at the factory and obviously the good sisters at our convent school took the easiest way out! So what if we’d seen the factory four times already – the kids enjoyed it! Plus – and this was a VERY BIG plus indeed – they got free Coke!

We were warned about being on our best behaviour – say thank you nicely, DO NOT ask for a second bottle, do not wander out of the line and so on… we were a generally polite bunch of kids so these warnings were really redundant. But then adults have to have some occupation, no?

But none of this explains why I was suddenly so popular during the week leading up to this trip…

…..you see, I’ve always had a problem with fizzy drinks – I sip them slowly through a straw – as one is expected to – but there is an unexpected fallout – in about two or three seconds. Warm Coke or Fanta or Bovonto or whatever it is I’ve imbibed, flows gently out of my nostrils! I can only tell you that it is a most unsettling experience – if you’ve never experienced it yourself! This happens even if the Coke is cold – it’s like there’s a little processing plant plant in there which is spitting out effluent (as you can see, I haven’t been married to a process engineering guy for thirty years for nothing!)

…and so, since everyone knew that I wouldn’t drink my bottle of Coke, it automatically meant that my best friend for the day would get my bottle also – and be heroine for having wangled two bottles!

Now, if only my school had taken us to a samosa or vada or masala vada factory, I’m sure I’d have been on everyone’s hate list for trying to pinch their samosa/vada/masala vada!

Or these…

KUNUKULU (LITTLE DEEP FRIED ADAI VADAS)

• Toor dal – 3/4 cup
• Chana dal – 1/2 cup
• Urad dal – 1/4 cup
• Rice- 1/2 cup
• Putani/putnala pappu/pottukadalai /fried gram – 1/4 cup
• Chopped coriander – 3 tbsp
• Chopped onions – 1 cup
• Asafoetida – 1/4 tsp
• Salt
• Red chiles – 5
• Green chilies – 2
• Peppercorns – 5-6
• Curry leaves – 2 sprigs – chopped finely
• Oil for deep frying

Soak all the dals and rice except the putani for about an hour. Drain and grind to a very knobbly, rough, thick batter adding everything else. At the end mix in the onions, curry leaves and coriander.

Heat the oil, break off bits of the batter and deep fry till golden brown. Don’t shape them into smooth balls – the rougher the edges the crisper the kunukus!

For a healthier version, add shredded cabbage to the mixture.

I swear everyone will be your bff if you serve them these!

“Put on your pants before you come out of your room!” I yell at my 7-year old daughter who has a habit of wandering out forgetting various articles of clothing! It is a source of constant tension to check to see if she’s properly attired before we leave for school and office in the morning. Now, everyone knows how that works – the pre-eight o’clock period of the morning – you barely have time to check if you’re still breathing before you have to hustle self and everyone else out of the door!

Then you cross the halfway mark, just negotiated horrendous Madras traffic and that horrible stretch of road still under construction (they do know how to choose their time, don’t they??!) before a small voice piped up from the backseat, Amma… I think I forgot my pants/shirt/pencil with an exam on today/lunchbox/that assignment which is overdue by a week and the teacher has given her an ultimatum – today!… any of a number of things!

K, being K, would have been perfectly happy to go to school with any or all of these missing, except the all-important lunch box! That was something for which she would want to turn back for! The rest of it I considered important and would turn back for – just a matter of differing priorities!

Back to our missing pants tale. There is a shocked silence for a minute at the other end of the line. “But… but… how did you know I wasn’t wearing any?” whispers a friend’s voice! I had dialled a friend just before K came out of her room half-dressed and without realising that the line had been picked up at the other end, yelled out the pants-on-fire bit! Shocked friend, embarrassed self, both with a funny bone equal loads of laughter and a tale that I haven’t lived down even twenty years after!

There is something about our one-track minds which is rather unmindful of anything in the environment except the thing we are focusing on at the moment – which invariably leads us into trouble!

I’d have yelled out an instruction, “Be sure to flush after you’re done” at a cinema or a restaurant or something without realising that the kid being given said instruction was behind a closed toilet door but there was a large-as-life co-theatre-goer/diner standing right in front of me till I got a funny look and the other lady scuttled off as fast as her legs would carry her, to get away from this keeper-of-public-morality!

Oh well, one lives but one doesn’t always learn!

One then consoles oneself and the embarrassed kid and maybe even the co-diner with food items! Like this…

 BANANA CHOCOLATE MUFFINS

•  3 very ripe bananas – mash well
• 100 ml vegetable oil (sunflower or any odourless oil)
• 3 tbsp yogurt
• 2 large eggs
• 100 grams demerara sugar
• 200 grams plain flour/maida OR a mixture of half and half whole wheat flour and maida
• 4 tbsp cocoa powder (sifted)
• 1 tsp baking powder

To the mashed bananas, add oil, eggs, yogurt and sugar. Mix well.

Mix all the dry ingredients together and working really fast, mix the wet and dry ingredients together.

Spoon into muffin cases (about 15) and bakle in a preheated oven at 200C for 15-30 minutes till done. These muffins are dark brown and simply delicious!

You really will enjoy taking your foot out of your mouth for one of these! 😉

So… the other day, I was at my regular supermarket checking out stuff. Most of the sales and counter staff know me by sight as I shop there every week almost. She checks in some item and then pulls out a Kitkat bar from a basket, shows it to me and says, “Ma’am, this is free with… (some other product that I’ve forgotten now – I am an advertiser’s nightmare – never remembering what comes free with what. I might remember the free thing but I cannot, for the life of me, ever remember what it came free with – thereby defeating the whole point of the ad campaign!!) And if certain advertising industry pals of mine are reading this, you can pay me for a free tutorial on brand recall, advertsing effectiveness and so on… 😉

Back to my story… so I say thank you very nicely (having been brought up with proper manners and so on). Then I notice that she is looking rather bloated and has a load of bangles on each arm. She’s also looking rather hungry – it is lunchtime almost… and so… i put two and two together (like any good MBA would) and come up with… forty four (also like any good MBA would). Remembering my own very long ago pregnancies, the seemantam bangles and the almost insatiable hunger I used to feel while doing my sales calls, waiting for lunchtime, then snack time, then tea time… was inspired…

So I hold out the Kitkat to her, tell her my whole family is off chocolate (lie!), so why don’t you have it instead? She protests a bit, then accepts it shyly. Billing is done. My bags are loaded. And by way of goodbye, I ask her casually, “So when are you due?” (You can skip this bit if you’re Indian – you’ll understand! But for everyone else, that is an Indian’s unobtrusive way of asking, when is your baby due?) She looks puzzled. “What, ma’am?”

No one ever accused me of being slow on the uptake. “Oh”, I wave airily. “You know. When is your summer break due?”

Then before she latches on to just how lame a save that was, give her my bestest and most brilliant smile and walk off  – pretending to be jauntily unconcerned! I don’t fool her for  a minute!

Come back home and relate this edifying tale to my family. Hubby, of course, sighs the defeated sigh of a long suffering husband with a wife who, according to him, takes one foot out of her mouth – only to put the other foot in! “But she did look pregnant,” I protest weakly…. my daughter very kindly points out to me that since this is the fourth time I’ve done this (in her memory and god alone knows how many times before that!), maybe I should contain my friendliness to sales girls. Even weaker protest from me… (daughters have that effect on one, you know!)… “she looked hungry… soooo… ” and then decide that it is better to beat a dignified (as dignified as I can muster under the circumstances, that is!) retreat… then I’ll live to fight another day! To ruminate on favourite pregnancy foods…

One of which was this…

TOMATO PULAO

• Basmati rice – 1 cup – wash well and soak in 2 cups water for half an hour at least. Cook till almost but not quite done.

FOR MASALA PASTE

• Ripe tomatoes – 4 large – chunked
• Ginger – 1/2 “piece
• Dhaniya powder – 1/2 tsp
• Jeera powder – 1/2 tsp
• Red chili powder – 1/2 tsp
• Garam masala – 1/2 tsp
• Turmeric powder – 1/4 tsp

Grind tomatoes and all the powders togther to a knobbly puree. Set aside.

FOR TEMPERING

• Oil – 1 tbsp
• Ghee – 1 tbsp
• Cardamom – crushed – 1
• Cinnamon – 1 ” stick
• Cloves – 2
• Bay leaf – 1
• Sugar – 1  scant tsp
• Onion 1 large – sliced fine
• Green chilis – sliced
• Salt
• Pepper – 1/2 tsp

OTHER INGREDIENTS

Boiled peas – 1 cup

Heat the ghee and oil. Add sugar. Let it caramelise. Add the whole spices and the onions and fry till onions are golden brown. Add the tomato paste and cook for about ten minutes till reduced to a thick paste. Add the rice, boiled peas, salt and pepper and mix gently together. Cover and cook for five minutes more till rice is tender.

I serve this with nothing except a cucumber salad and plain yogurt and if you’re felling in the mood for some calories – potato chips!

And when you put this is your mouth, you’ll have to take both your feet out!