Author: anuchenji

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Of the colour of livers in our family…

banana chips
“Has that “thing” got him? Is it over? Is he dead? Is there blood? Is “IT” eating  him? Omg, omg… OMG! Yeeaaaa… aaaAAAAGGHHH!” and my cousin Sunita, who’s been hiding behind the sofa and has just popped her head out to stare in horror at the screen with one eye as she shrieks these questions, dives back underneath quicker than my brother Arvind can eat a laddoo and THAT is saying something.
I don’t exaggerate 😉 so I will refrain from saying things like speed of light etc. but I assure you sound wouldn’t have anything on it!
While I laugh at Sunita’s antics, secretly there is a part of me that is wanting to hunker down behind that sofa alongside her rather than do what we – a bunch of us school friends and Sunita who’s staying with us for the summer, are doing. What we are doing at another friend’s house is watching a horror movie called “The Evil Dead” and it IS seriously horrifying. Nightmares and “day” mares await – I can feel it in my bones!
I have always had a problem with horror movies, seeing precisely two of them and am not sure that one of them would even qualify as horror (I was assured by my college friends that “Poltergeist” was a funny movie – well, I guess watching someone cowering in their seat can be termed ‘funny’!)
Why did I agree to go then? One does many things in teenage one regrets later to appear “cool”! Since I wasn’t succeeding at that either, that was when I decided to put my foot down and say I wouldn’t watch any more of these – no matter how ‘uncool’ I appeared. And suddenly found what ‘cool’ really meant – talk about serendipity!
I have serious respect for those who can watch these – two of my aunts voluntarily paid money to buy tickets to watch “Rosemary’sBaby” voted the most horrifying horror film ever and lived to tell the tale!
But now for a flashback – (I am absolutely loving this writing business where I am producer, director, scriptwriter and lyricist all rolled into one!) – to when I was in class 10 and preparing for the “BIG PUBLIC EXAMS”.
The house we were living in then had only two bedrooms so my bed was at the end of a long, narrow dining room, right next to a window. Note this architectural feature – it plays an important part in my tale. Because some friend thought I was working too hard (wasn’t!), they gave me a book to read – the newly minted tale of horror called “The Omen”. I read it one afternoon while home alone, my eyes popping out right along with my heart, my liver (it was an interesting very-bright yellow liver!) and my spleen… till my parents came home.
After that, the only time I left my mom’s side was when she had to go to the loo! She slept next to me for ten days, on the window side of course  – because otherwise THAT THING would come and get me – what about HER, you ask? Well, I already mentioned the colour of my liver so what were you expecting???!
Sunita was just as bad – making her two tiny two-year old twin sisters sleep right next to her on each side so she’d be safe in the centre! No wonder our family coat of arms is a proper jaundiced yellow! Jus’ kidding, we don’t have a coat of arms – which of our lily-livered forebears would have the courage to bear arms, I wonder? – going by our personal inclination, that is!
And thus we honour them and all the other poltroons of this world with these yellow – coloured…
KERALA STYLE BANANA CHIPS
  • 4-5 large green plantains – the slim ones are the “chipping” variety. The fat ones are for steaming and making podimas
  • Turmeric powder – ½ tsp
  • Salt – 1 tsp dissolved in ¼ cup water
  • Pepper or chili powder to add heat
  • Asafoetida – 1 generous pinch
Peel the plantains and immerse them in cold water to which turmeric has been added – for half an hour
Heat coconut oil in a frying pan – use one that is large enough to hold the chips of one plantain and then has generous room for splattering.
Take one plantain out of the water, pat dry and drop a bit into the oil – to test for heat. If the piece rises up and froths immediately, the oil is ready. Slice the plantain directly into the hot oil – be VERY careful!
Fry, turning over constantly till yellow and crisp.
Now, very carefully sprinkle about a tbsp of the salt solution over the chips – they will splutter (I would be indignant too if someone tried to give me a salt bath!) mightily! Keep stirring and then remove with a slotted spoon onto paper.
Finish all and then add the asafoetida and mix well. Cool completely before lidding.
(Pic courtesy Internet)
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Of octopus eggs and other tentacle tales!

okonomiyaki

“You have to eat at least one Japanese meal before you leave Japan,” insist my hosts – good friends, Krishna and Lakshmi. We’ve been in Japan for almost three weeks and have basically been eating home food – pulihora, naans and curries and dals and sambars and the whole paraphernalia of Indian cooking… not so strange… except we are six thousand kilometers from India! Talk about Indians and how attached we are to our food!!

We are a bunch of classmates who are holidaying together with families at the home of two of us (two classmates married to each other – i.e!) in Japan. There are twenty four of us altogether and therefore meals are highly orchestrated with teams of two or three taking over the cooking of each meal – hailing from all parts of India and living all over the globe. The meals are varied and interesting and loads of fun to cook as teams!

There are about a dozen vegetarians in the group – eating out is not so easy because Japanese cuisine (well, this was over ten years ago) does not offer much for veggies, not to mention the fact that our group varied in age from seventy to one and a half years of age!

So it’s basically been home food. Then one day, we decide to try out a Japanese meal and our host comes up with the idea of an okonomiyaki meal. For all the Japanese I knew – extending to two words – konnichiwa for hello and sayonara for goodbye (the latter I picked up from an old Hindi film song shot in Japan!), it could just as well have been octopus eggs I was eating (if octopi lay eggs, that is)!

And so off we go to this teppanyaki restaurant. We find a table. We sit down. I sigh and lean my elbows on the table – only to jump up again like a scalded cat – exactly what I was then! Never having been to one of these before, I hadn’t realised that what I thought was a steel table top was actually a huge hotplate!

Pushing my chair away, I warily keep a distance from the table. The guy sitting next to me has already placed his order and the waiter brings over his stuff. It is long. It has little round things. Wondering what new kind of vegetable this is that has swum into my ken, I discover it is literally a swimmer – an octopus, to be precise! Or rather, one tentacle of said octopus! And it is fresh – very fresh – still moving – I have an epiphanous moment – the tentacle is waving to me for help! I brush epiphany aside and await my dish with some inner quaking. My friends assure me that it is indeed vegetarian. But it’s going to be cooked right here, where probably many an octopus has been cooked earlier, I want to say… but better sense prevails… when in Japan etc… 

And our waiter, a pretty and extraordinarily polite young girl (this politeness is rather an epidemic amongst the Japanese, i must say!) comes over and starts to assemble our okonomiyaki at the table. There’s lots of cabbage, there’s mayonnaise, there’s egg, there’s soya sauce and loads of other things – I cannot believe that such seemingly disparate flavours are going into one dish! And finally we end up with what looks like a huge, fat cabbage-y pizza or oothappam! I taste a little. Interesting – is the thought. A little more – also interesting. But I cannot eat so much! My daughter K thankfully is by my side and finishes off hers and mine!

Came back home and decided this was a dish worth making again  – but in miniature!

So here goes my version of okos…

VEGETARIAN MINI – OKONOMIYAKI

For 4 mini okos, you will need:

  • Maida/plain flour – 1/3 cup
  • Water of veggie stock – 2 ounces –  60 ml
  • Salt
  • Baking powder – 1/2 tsp

Mix these into a batter and set aside.

FOR VEGGIE FILLING

  • Cabbage – shredded – do NOT chop into tiny pieces – the oko will break apart easily if you do – 1.5 cups
  • Capsicum – julienned – 1/4 cup
  • Green chili – 1 minced (I am Indian after all!) or 1/2 tsp of wasabi paste for bite.
  • 1 egg
  • Grated cheese – cheddar is fine. Use a smoky cheese if you want added flavour – 2-3 tbsp.
  • Oil – 2 tsp

Mix the flour and everything else, except the oil together. Do not overmix.

In a heated pan, pour a few drops of oil and dividing batter into four, make 4 small “pizzas” in the pan. Pour a few drops of oil around each.

After 3-4 minutes, it should have set on one side. Flip over and continue to cook for a further 3 minutes till completely set.

FOR DRIZZLING

  • Mayonnaise
  • Ketchup
  • Soya sauce
  • Sweet chili sauce
  • Green stuff – spring onions, coriander

Drizzle and sprinkle over lavishly while still in the pan.

Flip out and serve.

Watch out for that tentacle reaching out to you from the next teppan!

(pic courtesy internet)

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Further lessons in music and vows of silence!

chocolate custard cake
“Saaaami… ninneee koriiiii… ” And beautifully the melody comes out of my music teacher’s violin.
Saami… squeak… moan… ninee… groan… koreee… oww…!” goes my violin right behind the teacher’s, valiantly attempting to follow but stumbling over the obstacles posed by the various “gamakams” (quavery notes!) along the way…
“Try again,” says my teacher, one of the most renowned violinists in India. So what is she doing with me as a student, you’re wondering, right? Well, she also happens to be related to me and can’t say no to my mom and to cut a long story short, there we are – she attempting hard to teach and me attempting even harder to learn!
And so I try again… and again… but I don’t get it!
“Set aside the violin for a minute and sing it,” she commands.
“Whaaa? Are you sure? I can’t sing – I mean like at all”! I protest.
She waves aside all protests – anyone can sing – she proclaims! (By the way, is this a common belief amongst all music teachers, I wonder, having gone to three who professed exactly the same beliefs??)
“Okay, her funeral,” I sigh to myself, not knowing how close I am to bringing her to the actual thing!
And start off… ”Saaami… ninneee… koreeee… yunnaanuraaaaa,” the last note wanders off into the wide blue yonder searching for a nesting place… after all, all the notes leading up to this have gone, to use an Aussie term, “on a walkabout” and now want to come home to roost! Alas for the last note, like parallel lines, destined to meet only at infinity, never in the real plane, it’s still wandering somewhere out there, maybe right alongside the Mars Orbitor mission, waiting to come home!
My guru has her eyes closed – she seems to be listening intently… the note limps to a halt… I wait… she must say something… the silence is deafening… is she alright?… I am about to get up stealthily to check if she’s still breathing when she opens her eyes… and I realize that she is all right… just about!
“Let’s try the violin itself,” she says and my heart sinks. “Maybe another song?” she suggests. “Practise  this one at home and we’ll try it again.” I am nothing loth and jump to it with alacrity!
In all fairness to self, I think that this ragam – Sreeragam – is a rather tough one to crack!
I go back home, practise – really, really hard, much to my cousins’ disgruntlement (I am staying with them). They protest vociferously. I am not responsible for their gruntlement though – and I need to get this right! Two days later, I am back in class and sail though the raga!
My teacher, though, hasn’t recovered yet from the previous class – she gestures to me but does not speak a word – she is on mouna vratam (a vow of silence!).
That was the violin but I promise you that this is a real symphony! This is…
ULTRA CHOCOLATE-Y CHOCO-CUSTARD CAKE (adapted from a recipe for Brooklyn blackout cake)
FOR CAKE:
  • 100 butter(I used table butter)
  • 80 ml sunflower oil
  • 300g sugar
  • 3 eggs
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1.5 tsp baking powder
  • 280g plain flour
  • 50 gm cocoa
  • 200ml milk
  • 1 tbsp coffee mixed in a  tsp of milk

Cream butter and sugar together.

Beat in the eggs one by one.

Fold in sieved flour + maida + cocoa mixture into the batter till incorporated, adding milk as you mix. Add vanilla essence and coffee and mix.

Bake at 190C for about 40-45 minutes till done.

Cool and slit along the waist. (this cake will necessitate you slitting all your pants at the waist too!)

If you have any bumpy bitsin the cake, slice off and whizz to a crumble in the mixer.

FOR CHOCO -CUSTARD CREAM FILLING:

  • 500 ml milk
  • 4 tbsp custard powder (I used vanilla)
  • 1/2 cup cocoa
  • 75 gm dark chocolate – broken into bits
  • Cream – 50 ml
  • Sugar – 1 cup
  • Butter (again i used table butter)

Mix the custard powder into about one-third of the milk and set aside.

Mix the cocoa powder and sugar into the milk and heat.

Add the custard powder milk into this and stir continuously till you get a thick custard.

Drop in the chocolate and continue to mix. Switch off, add butter and incorporate (lots of elbow grease required!)

Lastly fold in the cream.

Let cool, stirring frequently.

TO ASSEMBLE:

Sandwich the two halves with generous slatherings of custard cream.

Pour over the top. Any of the crumb left?

Stick it all over so it looks sort of sandy.

With this in your mouth, mouna vratham (vow of silence) is the only way out!

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Of chembus and village weddings…

pindi miriyam
Imagine this… three pairs of feet running as fast as we can, clutching a “chembu” ( a water container – rather like a large bulb at the bottom with a narrower top) full of water, trying not to spill the water… we’re in a lemon and spoon race?
Naah, nothing so easy… we’re in a race to reach the… no, wait, I’m running ahead of myself!
This was the early ’70s and we’ve been carted along by the parents to the wedding of somebody – third cousin’s fourth grandson or something like that – like most kids those days, we not only didn’t have much of a choice, the possibility of a choice would probably have stumped us completely!
So there we were – in this little village somewhere in Cuddapah, at the wedding of someone we’d never see before (come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve seen them since!)But never mind, they are family!
The wedding is in a truly beautiful old temple (sub-ten year old philistines that we were, the grey stone carvings still made an impression on my mind) and we are staying in a sort of choultry attached to it. Speaking of choultries, there is an actual place in Tamilnadu called McDonalds Choultry (no kidding, check it out in Salem district, which over the years has become Magadanchavadi – I love these name evolutions. Think of a Hamilton Bridge in Chennai becoming corrupted (or evolving, as I prefer to call it!) to Ambattan Bridge ( the word “ambattan” in Tamil means “barber”!)
Ok, diversion over, we are back to our choultry at the wedding. All is fine, except that the village of P has not yet evolved to the stage of having indoor toilets… or, as we discover to our horror, no toilets at all! I don’t eat for a couple of days – basing my actions on the simple logic of input-output. I manage – till hunger almost kills me on the third day! Plus it’s wedding food after all. Give in to temptation on the third day and eat everything – including ladoos and whatnot – with inevitable consequences!
Three pairs of feet, three chembus clutched in hands and the lemon and spoon race has nothing on our anxiety to get to the great outdoors pit which serves as the toilet!
The older ladies are in a quandary. Till we find out that in one house in the village, one soul – who happens to be the junior engineer in the electricity board, has built a toilet in his house! He is suddenly very pleased to be entertaining twenty five members of his boss’s (my dad’s) family. Except that of the twenty five, there are only twenty four present in his drawing room at any one point, with the twenty fifth disappearing quietly amidst sotto voce hisses of “Don’t take too long” and “My turn next”!
All that deep Andhra/Rayalaseema stuff reminds me of this curry my ammamma (grandmother) used to make –
CHOWCHOW OR POTLAKAYA PAALA PINDI MIRIYAM
(ok, that sounds like quite a mouthful but it’s basically a spiced gourd stewed in milk)
  • Chowchow/Chayote peeled and cut into 1 cm cubes. Remove the inner white seed. – 3  OR
  • Snake gourd (potlakaya) OR
  • Bottle gourd (sorrakaaya/aanapakaaya)
  • Turmeric 1/4 tsp
  • Milk 1/2 cup
  • Salt
  • Sugar – a generous pinch

MASALA POWDER (the pindi miriyam – literally pepper powder!)

  • Urad dal 2 tbsp
  • Peppercorns 7-8
  • Raw rice 2 tsp
  • Coconut grated (fresh) 3 tbsp – (optional but yum!)
  • Red chillies 2 or 3
TEMPERING INGREDIENTS
  • Any vegetable oil 2 tsp
  • Mustard seeds 1 tsp
  • Jeera/cumin seeds 1/2 tsp,
  • Red chillies 1-2
  • Curry leaves – 2 sprigs
Microwave the vegetable on high for 4 minutes.
Meanwhile dry roast and grind the ingredients for the pindi miriyam, adding a little water if necessary.
Heat the oil in a saucepan. Add mustard, jeera and red chillies in that order. When they splutter, add curry leaves.
Add the boiled vegetable and sprinkle the turmeric. Mix well and add the ground masala, salt and sugar.
Let the mixture cook for a couple of minutes and add milk to adjust the consistency.
Bring to a boil and simmer for 3 minutes.
Serve with rice and a plain pappu (dal)
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Of doctors, pregnancies, little books and anxious husbands!

corn patty
“Doctor, my wife is not eating anything.”
“That’s not a problem”
“Doctor, she’s not keeping down anything she’s eating.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Doctor, she throws up even water.” (Ultimate irresponsibility!)
“It doesn’t matter, Venkatesh!”
Doc’s turn now: “What’s that little book you keep reading out of?”
“Oh, doc, I made a note of all the questions I needed to ask you.”
“Give it to me. Let me have a look,” and he has no choice but to hand it over.
The guy with all the questions is my husband, soon to be a father for the first time. Being one of those hardcore engineering types, he’s made a note of all the things his wife is recalcitrant about – like not eating and drinking and throwing up everything she eats or drinks!
The doc is also my aunt and a seasoned gynaecologist with decades of experience in dealing with anxious fathers-to-be. But even she hasn’t met a more antsy yet-to-be-dad! She takes the little book he hands over as though he’s signing off his inheritance and promptly tears it into little pieces and throws it into the dustbin.
My spirits, which have been rather low so far (throwing up your innards every half hour or so is not conducive to happiness, compounded by a hoveringly anxious husband!) begin to look up!
She then lectures him on being overly anxious and so on forth! He is unusually silent as we leave the clinic – it lasts for all of an hour! But now, I’ve learnt the dialogues and can parrot the doc’s words without a pause!
The phase passes, now I can’t get enough food, eating a huge meal every few hours and eating almost everything in sight! Baby is born and hubby’s latent anxiety resurfaces – with every sniffle she makes, if she doesn’t finish her second bottle of milk, if she so much as sleeps an extra half hour…
….now we’ve got a new doctor to hassle – the paediatrician! And she is an altogether gentler woman – till the sixth visit or so. Then it’s her turn to ask for the little book and… you know how it goes!
Over the decades, we have hidden and deliberately lost a few of those little books (I think engineers are born clutching on to these!) and managed to reduce their numbers but not eliminate them altogether from our lives! They keep resurfacing in mutant forms – talk about survival of the species – Darwin needn’t have travelled halfway around the world to stumble on Galapagos and its turtles. He could have taken a little detour to Madras!
The one thing I have managed to keep down consistently through pregnancies is roasted corn on the cob – Marina beach style – with just sea salt and red chili powder smeared on with a lemon half for garnish. And so every evening after work, the same anxious hubby has patiently taken me to the beach, eaten two of these to keep me company and gone home to a frugal meal of curd rice which he has to make himself as I can’t stand cooking smells!
Here’s a corn patty to celebrate…
CRISP CORN PATTIES (OR PATTICE IN MY NATIVE HYDERABADI!)
  •  3 cups frozen corn kernels – microwave on high for 4-5 minutes.
  • 2 tbsp spring onion greens -chopped
  • 1  medium onion, chopped
  • Capsicum – 1/2 cup  – chopped
  • 1 egg, lightly beaten – optional
  • 1/3 cup maida – plain flour
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • Salt and pepper
  • Green chili – minced – 2
  • Mint – chopped – 2 tbsp
  • Chaat masala or Himalayan salt – 1/2 tsp – optional

Mix the maida, milk, salt and a little pepper together. Whisk and set aside.

In 2 tsp oil, saute the green chilies, onion and capsicum till wilted. Cool.

Mix in everything else and the egg if using.

If you are NOT using an egg, grind about half a cup of the corn and mix back into the mixture to bind.

Drop 2-3 tbsp of the mixture on a heated griddle and pour a few drops of oil around. Turn over and fry till crisp on both sides.

Serve with ketchup or a Thai style sauce.

And a craving for corn does not mean you are pregnant – I know lots of men who have these cravings!