Author: anuchenji

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Of how to wage righteous wars!

patoli
So… I’m in the hospital with my mom who’s being discharged after a bout of pneumonia. Been on a diet of hospital food for three days so am quite fed up but looking forward to going home. All pepped up, I do my stretches in the hospital corridor, being stared at by every trolley pusher who passes by… but tra-la-laa, who cares??!!!
I eat my hospital regulation two idlis and bam… half an hour later… am groaning on a bed in the ER with a severe case of food poisoning! From idlis – I swear!
There’s no one else to help my mom, so in between bouts of running to the loo, I’m on the phone (for once, I bless the mobile phone’s inventor!) calling for reinforcements in the shape of family and friends to help – get my mom discharged, take her home, someone to stay with me in the ER, get me clothes and a million other instructions flying out of a hospital bed and the corridor leading to the loo! I’m hooked up to two drips – one on my wrist and the other on my ankle…
…and there we are, needing to “go” every few minutes and calling for the nurse to disconnect the drips this minute, clutching various pipe and tubes and running – like something out of Richard Gordon’s “Doctor” series.  A professional juggler would have had nothing on me that day, I swear!
Now, this ER loo also happens to be the one used by the staff – necessitating some seriously urgent banging on the door. Remember all those lectures in B-school on how to prioritise – the urgent, the important, the neither and so on – well, this was both very, very urgent and very, very important to me, at least!
In the middle of all this – the doc checking on me ( young, handsome chap btw), a fact which I note only incidentally, I promise 😉 – I am sure that it is the hospital food that has given me food poisoning since I’ve eaten nothing else! I threaten to sue them…
The dietician comes… then the catering head comes… then the general manager of the facilities makes a combative entrance, saying there’s nothing wrong with his hospital food. I am adamant. My aunt, herself a dietician and equally adamant, supports me, carrying on the fight every time I have to take a – ahem – needed break!
We are a formidable pair – they back off! Finally get discharged after they present me with a bill which is hurriedly withdrawn after some serious threats from my side!
And then I realize that this is exactly what the Mahabharata was all about – righteous indignation! Am feeling like all the Pandavas and Krishna rolled into one!
One word of caution though – you need some serious muscle building to fight a righteous war – here’s one for the building – the protein-rich…
MATODI/USILI/SANDIGE/PATOLI
  • 1 cup toor dal +1 tbsp chana dal – soaked for an hour and drained
  • 2 tbsp fried gram/putani/pottukadalai/putnala pappu (this makes the matodi light and fluffy)
  • 2 green chilies
  • 1 red chili
  • Peppercorns – 5-6
  • Jeera/cumin seeds – 1/4 tsp
  • Asafoetida – 1/8 tsp
  • Curry leaves – 3-4 sprigs
  • Salt
  • Grated coconut – 2 tbsp
  • Methi seeds/fenugreek – 1/4 tsp – roasted

Grind the dals along with everything else to a very crumbly, grainy texture. Set aside

OTHER INGREDIENTS

  • Beans or custer beans or methi (fenugreek) leaves or banana stem or banana flower – any of these – chopped very fine – 1/2 cup
  • Oil – preferably sesame oil – 3 tbsp
  • Mustard seeds – 1/2 tsp

Microwave the beans on high for 3 minutes and set aside.

Heat the oil in a large saucepan and add the mustard seeds. When they splutter, add the ground dal mixture.

Keep stirring for 3-4 minutes till it begins to dry up.

Add the beans and continue to stir till well mixed.

Cover and cook, stirring occasionally for a further 6-7 minutes.

Taste to see if the dal is cooked.

Serve with and majjigapulusu/mor kozhambu as a side along with rice and ghee.

Watch the Kauravas at the hospital shiver!

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of Indian roads and continuing education

semiya bhaath
“Pssst… guss… guss… shhh… how can we ask… noo… yesss… ” in what they – they being three eight-year olds sitting in the back seat of a friend’s car being driven to school – think is sotto voce, whisper…
The driver in the front is the father of one of them, Uncle S. Knowing that one of the trio is bound to cave in sooner or later, he waits patiently, listening to a fourth kid in the front seat, my younger daughter, K, telling him about the dream she had last night. K’s dreams are usually measured in the number of kilometers it takes for her to tell us the tale – four kilometers or about fifteen minutes being about par for the course!! This dream is destined to be cut short though!
Soon, a squeaky voice from the back seat (one more of the squeaky brigade, Vinaya) pipes up. “Uncle S, what does this mean?” she asks. He glances in the rearview mirror and nearly ends up driving his car into the truck in front, swerving just in time. This, happens to be the very rude gesture known as “the finger”!
You have to hand it to him though – Uncle S keeps his aplomb! Explains that it is a rude gesture, not one to be emulated and asks innocently (seemingly!), “Where did you learn that?”
“Oh, Auntie Anu used it yesterday when a cyclist cut across the road in front of her,” explains the young ‘un.
“Ah, in that case, she probably doesn’t know it herself and we’ll have to explain it to her, won’t we?” he diverts their attention from the rudeness of the gesture, mentally resolving to strangle Auntie Anu’s neck!
I get a call later that evening. Thankfully, uncle S is a guy with a sense of humour and expresses undying gratitude to me for educating his daughter, not to mention my daughter and squeaky V in the ruder ways of the world! Thankfully, I say, because I know other parents who would have taken out a restraining order banning me from coming anywhere within two miles of their children!
My excuse is that I drive on Chennai roads and road rage is my birthright! He is not sold on the idea!
On another occasion, I have my one-year old strapped next to me as I drive and use a new Tamil curse word I’ve picked up from my brother-in-law while sitting pillion on his bike. He thinks I’m sleeping and I am, almost but the word has sunk into my unconsciousness and reassuringly pops up just when I need it most – as I curse the cyclist who cuts right across my nose – and I speed off!
He catches up with me at a red light, looks ready to get down and murder me, notices the baby and shakes his fist at me, telling me in graphic detail exactly how he’d have peeled my skin off if I didn’t have a baby next to me!
The signal turns green, I stick my tongue out at him (only mentally, I promise!) and drive off! Later that evening, at dinner, I ask my husband what the word means. He chokes on his keerai molagootal and asks me where I’ve picked it up. “Oh, from your brother,” I tell him blithely and ask again what it means. He refuses to enlighten me and I have to find out from another pal. There is a major “oops” moment as i realise just what I’ve called the cyclist! This is a family-type blog, so I can’t tell you either!
And in gratitude for Kanch saving my skin that day, we make today one of her favourites.
SEMIYA BHAATH
  • Roasted semiya – 500 gms
  • Cashew nuts – a handful – roast in 1 tsp ghee and set aside
  • Onions – 2 – chopped
  • Tomatoes – 2 large – chopped
  • Green chilies – 3 – slit
  • Ginger – 1″ piece – julienned
  • Garlic – 2 flakes – optional
  • Curry leaves – 2 tbsp
  • Peas – 1 cup
  • Carrots – 2 – chopped – optional
  • Turmeric – 1/4 tsp
  • Garam masala– 1/2 tsp
  • Salt
  • Sugar – 1/4 tsp
  • Hot water – about 2.5 cups
  • Chopped mint and coriander – 2 tbsp each.

TEMPERING

  • Oil – 2 tbsp
  • Ghee  – 1 tsp
  • Mustard seeds – 1/2 tsp
  • Chana dal – 1 tbsp
  • Urad dal – 1 tbsp
  • Asafoetida – 1/8 tsp

Heat the oil in a large pan – this thing tends to spill all over so use a large one. Add the tempering ingredients.

Add the curry leaves, ginger, garlic, green chilies and fry for a minute or two.

Add the onions and brown.

Add the turmeric, garam masala, carrots and tomatoes. Fry till tomatoes are softened.

Add the semiya and salt. Add the water a little at a time, stirring frequently.

After 4- 5 minutes, add the peas, cover and cook on a low flame for 4-5 minutes. Check to see done-ness. Add a little more water if needed. Sprinkle sugar over. Pour the ghee on top. Cover and cook for a couple of minutes more.

Switch off and add chopped mint and coriander. Sprinkle cashewnuts over top.

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A lesson on how to wash clothes!

hoppel-poppel

“Anu atha, this Madras is soooo hot… I’m itching all over,” my nephew Shriram tells me, soon after moving to Madras and joining his college hostel.

“Let me take a look,” I’m wondering if it’s prickly heat. Nothing much except a mild rash though.

Give him something for it and then we continue our conversation about life in the hostel. How’s the food, is my inevitable first question!

Then questions about who cleans the room (the students!), who washes clothes – is there a laundromat? Expecting that this being one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the country, of course there’d be  a veritable bank of washing machines!

Yeah, there’s  a washing machine but it hasn’t been working for two years! He doesn’t seem to be particularly perturbed, so I ask him how he’s washing his clothes. Considering that he’s a basketballer and that Madras is the sweatpot of the world, there must be loads!

Oh, I wash them by hand, he says breezily. Nosy parker that I am, I ask for details (I’m secretly impressed that he even knows how to wash clothes!)

“Oh, there’s nothing to it, Anu atha, he says, I don’t know why we even need a machine or people make such a fuss about it.” I am by now seriously in awe!

“You just put them in water, add some washing powder, shake them about a bit, then hang them out to dry. That’s all,” he says!

“What about rinsing them out?” I ask.

“What’s that?” he asks!

“You know, you need to get the soap out, right, so you rinse it in plain water?”

“Do you have to do that, Anu atha?”

“Well, duh!”

“Oh… oooh... ooh... so that’s what my clothes are so stiff after they dry?”

“Yes, and that’s also why you’ve got itchy skin!”

And so begins a lesson in washing clothes – for kids who’ve been brought up on machines, this seems like quite an esoteric skill to acquire!

I have an epiphany on perspective. For those of us standing on the other side (the pre-side) of the Great Washing Machine Divide, we look at the machine in wonder. For those on this side, the handwashing days are positively exotic!

And, oh, by the way, he says, the food in the hostel is great!

A few weeks later, the food is okay… and then a month later… I’m coming home now...

Hostel food is a legend in itself and how the generations before Maggi survived in hostels is one of the great mysteries of life.

Researching hostel foods, I stumbled on this brilliant dish – called, would you credit it? – hoppel-poppel! Serious  – it was invented in Germany and was originally called Bauernfruhstuck (there’s an umlaut over both the u’s but I don’t know how to put them in here!)

Presenting the… ultimate hostel comfort food…

HOPPEL-POPPEL

  • Two medium potatoes – scrubbed and sliced into thick slices. Don’t bother to peel because I’m sure you won’t have a peeler in a hostel! And the peel is good for you, anyway! 
  • One onion – chopped / sliced – what you will.
  • One large tomato – sliced
  • Capsicum – 1
  • Any herbs – coriander/mint/basil
  • Eggs – 4
  • Oil / butter – 2 tbsp
  • Salt and pepper
  • Jeera/cumin seeds – optional extra! – 1/2 tsp
  • anything else youu feel might do well in this dish – mushrooms, cheese

Heat the oil/butter in a large saucepan. Add the jeera.

Arrange the potato slices on it. If you’re using a capsicum, arrange that first! 

Sprinkle the onion slices over. Cook on a gentle heat turning over occassionally.

Add the tomatoes, salt, pepper  and mix. Pour the eggs over the top and stir to mix well with everything else. As soon as the eggs begin to firm up a bit, sprinkle the herbs on top and take off the heat.

Enjoy your hoppel poppel straight from the pan – why add to the number of dishes to wash up?!

Do remember to rinse out your pan though, after you’ve used soap!

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Of purple passions and faddy eaters!

palak paneer

“Please can we have purple pulao?” squeaks my littler one – who is – you guessed it – on a purple streak right then!

For about six months, we’ve been wearing purple, drinking purple (grape juice is good but she’s willing to try even purple cabbage juice), drawing everything possible in purple, covering our books purple and even choosing restaurants based on whether the signboards outside are purple! There are two conspirators in this – K and her best friend Tara – so we’re even seeing double in purple!

It puzzles us mothers a bit – when we were that small, I doubt we knew a colour called purple – if we ever thought about it, it was a shade of violet! And belonged on the then-reviled-now-much-loved vegetable called a brinjal! So we humoured them, me going so far as to buy purple food colouring to make purple milk!

But and everyone has a breaking point  – mine came with the request for purple pulao. NO WAY!

But, amma… it’s so beautiful... am sure you will love it too – says the artful wheedler! Sorry but I’m thirty years ahead of you in this game!

Mahomet knows when she’s beaten though and trails off, to find the next best thing to wheedle her mom out of!

We go through many phases like this – all capitalised in my memory thanks to the intensity with which K always pursued her passion of the day – the FLUORESCENT GREEN phase (you try finding a food that colour in India – back in the early ’90s!), the DOG phase (if you can’t have a another baby, at least have a dog! Or even a monkey!), the RAHUL DRAVID phase (he’ll take one look at me and beg me to marry him! Nothing loth on confidence, the kid!), the AMMAMMA phase ( for which she created an anthem – it went something like this…

Ammamma, 

I love you.

Please don’t

go to Australia

tum-de-dum

tum-tum-tum,

tum-tum-tum-tum

tum-de-dum!

Thankfully, for the past few years, we’ve been on a reasonable diet – it’s a green one this time – she did try a few months ago to convince me we might all be better off on a gluten-free diet but I put my foot firmly down – eggs and bread are the most convenient breakfast and I refuse to eat idlis every day of my life, much as I love them! Luckily, she wasn’t quite sure of this one and decided that maybe, mother knows best, after, all!

So here we are, with this very green, very delish Rajasthani version of  an old favourite…

PALAK PANEER

  • Paneer – 250 gm – cut into 1 cm cubes and soaked in warm, salted water for ten minutes. Drain and rinse.
  • Spinach / palak – 2 large “cuts” – about 5 cups – clean, chop roughly.
  • Ginger – 1″ piece
  • Garlic – 1 flake
  • Green chili – 1
  • Onion – 1 small – sliced
  • Tomato – 1 medium – chopped
  • Cumin seeds/  jeera – 1 tsp
  • Saunf/aniseed – 1/4 tsp
  • Bay leaf – 1
  • Cinnamon – 1/2 ” piece
  • Cloves – 2
  • Turmeric – 1/4 tsp
  • Red chili powder – 1/2 tsp
  • Salt
  • Ghee – 1 tsp
  • Butter – 1 tsp
  • Milk – 1/2 cup

Heat the ghee in a pan. Add all the whole spices and fry for a few seconds.

Add the onion, garlic and ginger and ginger and saute for a few minutes till the onions turn golden brown. Add the powders and the tomato.

Add the spinach and quarter cup of water.

Cover and cook for a few minutes till spinach is wilted.

Cool and puree.

Return to stove and bring to the boil.

Add salt and paneer pieces and cook for 3-4 minutes more. Add butter and switch off.

Add hot milk slowly in a strem, stiriing continuously.

Serve with puris, roti or rice.

And stay on the green kick – it’s easier for all concerned!

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Of Amitabh and Jeetu and Rajesh and all the heartthrobs!

masala vada

masala vada masala vada

Remember those little printed booklets of song lyrics that used to be sold outside cinema theatres in the ’70s and ’80s?

Printed on the cheapest of paper – cheaper even than the Deccan Chronicle’s  paper quality (and that, let me tell you, is saying something about just how cheap it was!!) and sold for something like 25 p – chaaranne (four annas) as it was those days, these little booklets gave us tremendous joy.

You’ve just come out of the theatre, heart filled to overflowing with the antics of Jeetendra prancing like a monkey in his trademark white shoes, white suit outfit to the refrain of Piya tu ab tho aaja or thrilled to an Amitabh Bachhan saying in that t0-die-for baritone, Mere paas maa hai or swooned over Rajesh Khanna’s unmatchable romanticism as he croons Raina beeti jaaye and you melted into a puddle of sentimentality on the seat… (it could of course be that the thrifty theatre owner had switched off the airconditioning during the most intense moments on the screen when the audience is so engrossed that they don’t notice that the temperature has climbed -unexplainably!)

As you walk out, head in the clouds, heart somewhere in Kashmir with our hero and heroine, the heat and dust and stench don’t make any kind of impression on you! But you do notice the rows of vendors squatting by the roadside, hoping that one of these starstruck teenagers will buy a chaaranne ka song pamphlet from you!

And some always do, of course. And go around for the next few weeks (that’s how much time it will take them to gather together the price of the next movie ticket – if I remember right, the balcony ticket – the highest denomination – was 4 or 5 rupees! Cheaper tickets could be had, of course , for something like less than a rupee!) gazing soulfully into the distance mentally singing Kuch  tho log kahenge to a dreamy Sharmila Tagore as the reality of a dad or a mom yelling at them (those clearly gender-delineated days, it was the dad’s job to yell, mostly!)  to get back to their books – otherwise they would end up selling those booklets on the pavements for a living while their luckier classmates would become doctors or engineers, or even fly off to America!

More about these little booklets – the paper so cheap it left marks of ink on your fingers when you handled them, they taught a generation to sing and romance and swoon and sigh and dream… who cared about the paper quality?! And of course, the pleasure of listening to these songs tuned in to Binaca Geet Mala on the radio waiting to hear the radio jockey (I’m pretty sure that is not what they were called those days!) Ameen Sayani – a cult figure in himself – he rubbed shoulders (for all we knew!) with the likes of Kishore Kumar and R.D.Burman!

I remember an aunt and uncle, so crazy about movies that they saw every single pic that came to town – the “good” ones because they were good, the “bad” ones because we have to figure out why people are saying it’s bad, no? But of course you do!

Now this same aunt and uncle had four children – theatre tickets plus popcorn for six people would have put a serious strain on the family budget so what do they do? Stop seeing so many movies? Whaaat?? No way! So, we buy tickets and we take our own snacks to the theatre (allowed those days!). To prevent bickering in the theatres with whispers of “You got more than me” and “Pass that bonda” my wise aunt took to packing six little newspaper packets of snacks – everyone was happy!

Here’s the cause of the happiness (other than the movie of course!)… another variety of…

MASALA VADA

  • Chana dal – 1 cup – soaked for two hours and drained
  • Green chilies – 2
  • Chopped onion – 1 large
  • Red chili – 1
  • Jeera/cumin seeds – 1/2 tsp
  • Ginger – 1/2 ” piece
  • Garlic – 1 or 2 flakes
  • Curry leaves – chopped – 2 sprigs
  • Fresh coriander – chopped – 1 tbsp
  • Chopped mint – 1 tbsp
  • Cloves – 2
  • Cinnamon stick – 1/2 “piece
  • Pepper corns – broken- 1/4 tsp
  • Saunf (aniseed) – 1/2 tsp
  • Salt
  • Oil to deep fry

Grind the dal to a very grainy texture along with the garlic, ginger, onions, dry spices and salt. 

Add the crushed pepper and all the herbs. 

Shape into small, uneven vadas (uneven edges leave more room for frying and therefore more crisp surfaces!) and deep fry till golden brown. This vada is so tasty it needs nothing as an accompaniment! 

Just like the songs in Amar Prem… 🙂