Author: anuchenji

“Ice pice,” rings out the cry and the kids all run to hide…

“Ice boys.” (Ice booooys!) I hear in a Madras school some years later and then, finally the penny drops!  That what was actually being played was a game of “I spy“! Indianised and apna desi version of course – usually an improvement on the original – just consider these “improvements”:

“Father promise” (low level commitment).

“Mother promise” (waay higher divine retribution if you break this one!), and above all…

“God promise” (we don’t even want to imagine all that can happen to you if you dare transgress a God promise!).

…all so much more promising than “crossing your heart and hoping to die”!

Sign in a “Meals-ready” restaurant : “Please don’t share two persons in one plate” – yes, our Indian thaalis are large and loaded but two backsides on one plate??? Plus, how will anyone purify the plate after that- even divine intervention won’t help matters here!

“Wanted red faced groom”… huh???? This one foxed even me, lover of Indish,  for a while… till I figured out (it helped that it was a matrimonial ad, not someone looking for a caretaker for his horses!) that the advertiser was translating from his native Telugu. Thus-ly: “Erraga, burraga” – meaning a “fair-complexioned, healthy “ groom – that Indian thing about pale skin apart, aren’t most grooms today red-faced with embarrassment at all the ceremonies?!

“Co -brother or co-sister” – in the complex world of Indian relationships and specific names for each reationship, this one is a real beauty and I am deeply upset with the OED for refusing to recognise it and include it in their list year after year…

“What a nose-cut that was!” Huh? Lakshmana and Surpanakha in the Ramayana? Naah… that was just li’l ol’ me cutting someone down to size! Literally translated from the Hindi – naak kaat diya uska!

“Why do you want to take so much tension, yaar?!” Deeply philosophical when you think about it –  we opt for tension, right? Why make this obviously wrong choice? So much better than “Don’t get tense!” Our Indish way forces you to reflect on your choices – want or no-want tension?! Kya baat hai!

“Arre yaar, why are you eating my brains?!” Last I saw, there wasn’t much to eat and I really wouldn’t want to deprive you of what you need to make a living with! But again, what a beauty! So graphically descriptive of someone getting into your mindspace. Just consider the “propah” alternative – “Stop getting on my nerves” – well, it could be the nerves on your feet, for all I know!

“When I passed out of college” – quite true for the supine state of most of us who graduated college in India!

And on that note, here is a very non- Indish dish!

 

AAVAPETTINA BENDAKAYA KOORA/bhindi/okra with mustard and fresh coconut

 

• Bhindi/okra – 300  gm. Cut into 1/2 cm lengths and dry under a fan for an hour or in an open tray overnight in the frig.
• Grated fresh coconut – 3 tbsp
• Red chilies – 2
• Mustard seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Green chili – 1
• Curry leaves – 2 sprigs
• Sambar onions/shallots – 4-5  – optional
• Cumin seeds/jeera – 1/2 tsp
• Asafoetida – 1 pinch
• Turmeric powder – 1/4 tsp
• Salt
• Chopped coriander  – 2 tbsp
• Oil – 1 tbsp

 

Grind the mustard into a paste with a tsp of water. Add  this paste to the coconut, shallots, jeera, chilies and curry leaves and pulse to a rough crumble.

Heat oil in a flat pan. Add turmeric and asafoetida and immediately drop in the bhindi pieces. Saute for 2-3 minutes. Cover and cook on a low flame for about 7-8 minutes more, stirring occasionally till almost done. Remove lid, add salt and saute for a further 3-4 minutes till the “sticky” stuff is dried up!

Sprinkle over the coconut crumble and mix well till it coats all the pieces. Switch off and garnish with coriander.

 

Serve with rice, rotis and if you have leftovers, eat as a diet snack (snakes being served here!) The kick of raw, ground mustard makes this dish totally “world-class” – another thing we Indians love!

“Three… ” easy jump…

“One… ” I’m good at this!…

“Six,” says the caller and I am defeated… or wait, am I?

A pair of strong arms picks me up easily and carries me up to six! I am not out – yay! The arms belong to the girl who taught me to think outside the box – my dear friend Suvarna – one of the kindest souls I have ever known in my life!

We, a bunch of third-graders – about seven years old, are playing a game called “Steps”. Basically, this involves one kid standing below a set of steps – six in all, counting bottom to top – and calling out a number. The idea is everyone else who is playing has to jump from whichever step they’ve reached  in the previous call to the step now being called (my current generation daughter would call it ‘mobility training’ or some such high-falutin name, we just called it Steps). If you tripped or touched down on the wrong step, you were “out” and became the caller in turn – for some reason, this was NOT a desirable outcome at seven… though it seems extremely desirable forty five years later!

Back to my game. Not being blessed with a great many inches, this was a challenge to all the not-so-tall girls. Suvarna, being blessed with many more inches than the average third-grader, would happily help out – picking me up and carrying me from “one” to “six”! Obviously, whoever had thought up the game had not bargained for kids being carried and so no rule was ever written expressly prohibiting it!

Bending the rules? Naah!

Out of the box? Yes! Am sure the batsmen who faced Douglas Jardine and his terrible bodyliners felt the same – before bodyline was banned!

For all I know, today’s third-graders have banned the entire practice of “carrying”! They might even have banned the hallowed custom of what was called aatalo aratipandu (literally, the banana in the game) used to refer to anyone who was smaller/weaker/not able to keep up with the rest of the team at any sport. The banana was always given many advantages – more chances before they were declared out, couldn’t be caught (even if they were, it didn’t count!) and so on. Superbly inclusive practice, allowing younger siblings to participate without getting hurt or scuttling the older kids’ team’s chances of winning – everyone had siblings and therefore, every team had bananas!

They were treated much like peanuts… not counted… unlike this dish where the peanuts count!

PEANUT PODI (inspired by Chef Chalapathi Rao’s dish at Simply South)

• Roasted peanuts – 2 cups
• Asafoetida – 1/8 tsp
• Red chili powder – 2 tbsp
• Cumin seeds – 1 tsp
• Tamarind – 1 small marble sized lump
• Dry coconut/copra – grated – 2 tbsp
• Garlic – 10 flakes (optional)
• Curry leaves – 1 handful
• Salt
• Sesame oil or peanut oil – 1 tsp

Heat oil in a saucepan. Fry asafoetida till crisp and set aside in a plate. Fry curry leaves till crisp. Add to the asafoetida.

Add the chili powder on top – the heat is enough to roast it.

Fry tamarind on a low flame. It will turn soft and then harden up a bit. Add to the rest of the ingedients.

Fry cumin and add to plate.

Fry garlic lightly if using. Remove and add to the plate.

Roast coconut till golden and add. Add salt and peanuts. Let it cool completely and grind to a very coarse powder.

Leave open for a couple of hours and bottle in a clean, dry bottle.

Serve with rice or idlis or dosas… or to flavour potato curry.

And make sure you make some tall friends when you play “Steps”!

Whew – neglected my blog for six days and now I’m feeling like a mom who’s left an infant to go back to work – on the first day back at work! I open the site and there is a sort of abandoned-house feel about it, musty and sad and… well, any more and I’m going to start sniffling! First things first – open up the windows, let in the air, let stories and recipes flow and the house will ring with laughter again – I hope!

At a shop with a friend today. The friend has a young daughter still at school and she stops to buy a rubber – no, don’t go all shocked and American on me (I can see the eyebrows flying up – a rubber for a school kid??!)- a “rubber” is what an eraser is called in India – that’s all! So, the obliging shopkeeper hunts around and comes up with a box of – rubbers!

Every one of them the same – an even greyish-white small rectangular shape, indistinguishable almost from those we used when kids. My mind flies back to forty-odd years ago. Buying rubbers, indeed buying any piece of stationery – was serious business! Indeed, first, it started with a teacher who rapped us across the knuckles if we spelt it “stationary” instead of “stationery”!  There is a whole bunch of traumatized kids out there (all in their fifties now), who will still check the word if they type it and if they have, god forbid, mis-spelt it, will take a quick, guilty look behind to see that Emilia teacher is not around!

After you learnt that important lesson, you were qualified to buy pencils and things on your own! For a long while, in our childhood, rubbers were the real thing – deep grey, made of ‘real’ natural rubber and left grey streaks all over your homework as you rubbed away at fractions in frustration! Then, sometime in the early seventies, these were replaced with synthetic rubber and… opened up a whole new world of glory – in terms of “scent” rubbers, “fancy” rubbers in animal shapes and things, rubbers with the alphabet printed on it – at least one letter of the alphabet with an “A” for “apple” kind of thing printed on them! Rivalries were born – who had the fanciest, whose dad (lucky bug!) had gone to Bombay or Delhi or some far off place (no, we didn’t know anyone whose dad or mom had gone abroad!) and brought back the very latest thing in rubber fashions!

The fancier, the more strongly scented your rubber was, the chances of your being queen for the day in school were higher – there was a definite pecking order. The bottom-most (you hung your head in shame if you used these!) were the round, thin, very hard ones which rubbed out the paper along with the pencil markings as often as not! Ranking almost as low were the little rubbers which were stuck on at the bottom of the pencil – these were serious cheapos!

With our Gandhian parents, these rubbers swam across our ken only when an occasional aunt or uncle dropped them our way! And grief ensued when one occasionally lost the prized possession! The grief was rubbed away only when one found it again… or maybe was fed this at dinner… the verra simple, verra nutritious, verra low fat, high fibre…

GREEN PLANTAIN PODIMAS/aratikaaya/vaazhaikai podimas

• Green plantains – preferably the fat variety – 2. Wash and cut into two pieces each. Do NOT peel
• Oil – 1 tsp
• Salt – 1/2 tsp
• Roast, cool and powder – 1 tbsp each of chana dal and urad dal, 2 red chilies, 4-5 peppercorns, 2 sprigs curry leaves, a pinch of asafoetida, 1/2 tsp coriander seeds (curry powder)
• Curry leaves – 1 sprig
• Jeera/cumin seeds – 1/4 tsp
• Mustard seeds – 1/4 tsp
• Urad dal – 1 tsp

Steam the bananas for 10-12 minutes in a cooker without the weight. Cool completely, peel (it comes off very easily in your fingers), and grate.

Heat the oil in a pan, add the mustard seeds. When they splutter, add urad dal and jeera. Let the urad dal turn golden brown and crunchy.

Add curry leaves and saute.

Add the grated, cooked plantain, salt and curry powder and mix with a light hand. Switch off immediately.

Serve as a side with rice and sambar or rasam for a really light dinner.

Rub away your tummy troubles!

…bak, bak, bak bak, chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter… goes a four-year old little girl, non-stop from sun-up to bedtime.

“Why do you talk so much?” asks the mother, normally a very patient woman.

“I don’t know, Mummy. Whenever I open my mouth, crores of words come tumbling out… on their own! (Noru therusthe koo ani koti maatalosthaayi!). I can’t stop them,” say I.

All the chatter happens at home and also with friends at school. If a stranger enters the equation, even if he or she is a relation or someone close to the family, the stream dries up… abruptly and completely! I am very shy with strangers and cannot even say hello to people.

Once, when I was about six or seven, a friend of my dad’s comes home to dinner and spends all of three hours trying to get me to say –  something. I don’t. I can’t actually! I only nod or shake my head – and in Hyderabad, it’s very difficult to make out one from the other – depending on what he’s asking me.

The visitor leaves and I am in for the royal-est scolding of my life – from my dad – who is very upset with my rudeness. I am not rude, I want to protest, but I can’t talk to strangers! My brain freezes, as does my tongue.

The bak-bak carries on in class the next day as it does every other day. The teacher, fed up with my constantly disturbing the girl next to me, makes me shift my seat. In the course of the next forty minutes, before the bell goes for the next lesson, my seat is shifted three more times altogether! Finally I am sent to stand outside the class in the corridor, where I cannot distract anybody. I strike up a conversation with the ayah, the lady who sweeps the corridors. Happy to take a break, she chats with me about her problems (I am seven years old!) till the bell reminds her that she hasn’t finished her work yet  and off she goes, raising the dust with a flourish, in case the good sisters of the convent should catch her at it!

It took me years of concentrated willpower and practice but I finally did work off my chronic and painful shyness. Unfortunately, today, the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that I am often in trouble for my over-friendliness and what’s worse, no one ever believes that I was a really shy kid! Haha, goes the world! You? 

Once, in a car park at the park where we work out, I bumped into someone whom I was sure I had met before. He didn’t seem to show any recognition of me at all (sigh, sadly for my ego). So, the ex-shy kid goes up to the man and asks, “We’ve met before, haven’t we?” He denies it vigorously. My long-suffering husband, standing at a safe, but hearing distance, asks me later, “You are aware, aren’t you, that you’ve just used the oldest pick-up line in history??!” Oops! Major OOPS!

So, to celebrate shy kids everywhere in the world and help them to “mix” (this was supposed to be desirable, I still haven’t figured out why!) better with their less interesting compatriots, here’s a…

MIXED VEGETABLE KOZHAMBU

• 2 cups of mixed veggies – 2″ long drumstick pieces, sliced eggplants, cubed pumpkin, ashgourd, okra, radish, yam – whatever you have
• Tomato – 1 medium – chopped
• Sambar onions/shallots – a handful – peeled

FOR MASALA: Roast and grind to a fine paste adding a little water

• Coriander/dhania seeds – 2 tbsp
• Fenugreek seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Black pepper – 1/4 tsp
• Cumin seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Grated fresh coconut (not to be roasted) – 4 tbsp

FOR TEMPERING:

• Mustard seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Urad dal – 1 tsp
• Asafoetida – 1/8 tsp
• Curry leaves – 2 sprigs

OTHER:

• Turmeric powder – 1/2 tsp
• Red chili powder – 1/2 tsp
• Tamarind paste – 1.5 tsp
• Salt
• Sesame oil – 1 tbsp

Heat the oil in a pan. Add the mustard seeds. When they start crackling, add urad dal and let it brown a bit.

Add the curry leaves and asafoetida.

Add onions and saute till golden.

Add tomatoes and let soften.

Add other vegetables, turmeric and half the salt. Add 1 cup water and cook till almost done.

Add tamarind paste, rest of the salt, the ground masala and enough water for a medium thick gravy.

Simmer for 8-10 minutes to let the flavours infuse. Add 1 tsp jaggery for added taste.

Switch off and serve with hot rice.

Doesn’t matter if you are positively tongue-tied… people will sing your praises!