Anu Chenji

I’m at the Open Day at my children’s school. The kids have been at it since the morning – each of them manning their project and explaining to a steady stream of parents, grandparents and visitors the Pythagoras theorem or how to do something with potatoes and electricity or reading out a poem they’ve written. It is hot (when in Madras is it not??!) and the kids are sort of wilting in the heat. Also they want to go to other classrooms and see what their friends are doing!

Unfortunately having had a meeting I couldn’t skip in the morning, I’ve reached school only in the afternoon and end up feeling guilty at having to ask obviously tired children to explain their experiments to me! Scuttle through classrooms furtively, with a sheepish grin to compensate for stopping at various tables on the way!

So I stop at this one table which has an interesting set of tubes and pipes and wires rigged up to produce… something! It looks intriguing and I query, much to the despair of the ten year old manning the counter. So what does this do?

“It makes something, something… by doing something, something…” he rattles off at top speed. I look puzzled. He looks desperate… looks around… no teacher in sight… “pssst, auntie“, he whispers. “I know you want to know but I really want to go to see my friend in the other classroom… so could I pleeez go? I’ll tell you about this thing later if you want” he offers generously.

I scuttle quietly out of school!

On another occasion, I call up a friend at home. The call is picked up by her two-and-a-half year old grandson, who tells me his paati (grandmom) is not at home.

“So who is this?” I ask.

“This is me”, he says – wondering what kind of nutcase wouldn’t know the answer to such an obvious question!

“What’s your name?” I ask him.

“V…”, he says.

“And what are you doing, V…?” (snoopy adults – he must be thinking!)

“I’m working”!

“On what?”

“On repairing my cycle!!”

“Ah… and who else is at home with you?” I ask.

“S… akka”.(their cook).

And to forestall any further questions, this sub-three-year old tells me, very patiently, as he might explain to a rather dimwitted adult, “I know you want to chat, but I’m really rather busy right now. So could I please go?”!! Phew!

Further mental scuttling away happens on my side! Lesson is learnt!

Comfort is sought… in food, of course!

In this simple but delicious…

TOMATO DAL

• 1 1/2 cups toor dal and a generous pinch of turmeric, pressure cooked till soft.
• Peanuts – optional – 2 tbsp – cook along with the dal
• 3 large tomatoes – chunked.
• Garlic – 3-4 large flakes – about a tbsp of paste
• Red chili powder – 1/2 to 1 tsp – depending on how hot you want it
• Jaggery – 1 tbsp
• Tamarind paste – 1/2 tsp
• Salt
• Garam masala powder – 1/4 tsp
• Kasooti methi – 1 tbsp

TO TEMPER:

• Ghee – (no oil!) – 1 tsp
• Mustard seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Jeera/cumin seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Curry leaves – 2 sprigs

Grind the tomatoes and garlic together to a knobbly puree. Set aside.

Heat the ghee in a pan and add the tempering ingredients.

When they splutter, add the tomato puree, jaggery, red chili powder and cook till the raw smell is gone – about 7-8 minutes.

Add the dal and the rest of the ingredients along with 1.5 cups of water.

Bring to the boil and cook for a further 3-4 minutes.

All it needs is hot rice – or in this weather, cold rice is welcome!

And accept philosophically that kids will always get the better of you!

Mistresses of jugaad – that’s what most Indian housewives  of my mother’s generation are! No one in the world could possibly have polished this very fine art of making do as the Indian woman has done!

In my mom’s case, she started her culinary career rather late in life – having refused to get married and finally being persuaded into it at the (for her generation!) ripe old age of twenty seven, my mom had very little idea of  the mysterious processes that went on in the kitchen to produce food! My dad was waaay ahead of her at this stage and between the two of them, they managed to not starve!

With two demanding professions however, a cook was called for and after a few hit and miss efforts, one arrived – all the way from Udipi! Now, Udipi, as everyone knows, is the undisputed capital of vegetarian cuisine – the guys there have polished this whole affair of vegetarianism to a fine art of sheer perfection! But. as everyone also knows, there is an exception to test every rule… and he arrived in the form of Narayana, our beloved cook from Udipi – who couldn’t cook even to save his life!

Between the two of them, my mom and he managed to satisfy their palates. My dad resigned himself to a life of undercooked/overcooked/slightly burnt and can be swallowed with a lot of water/very burnt and has to be chucked out-meals till they learnt how to cook – with an occasional injection of help from my grandmom who taught both mistress and cook how to cook! We… what did we know??!

Over the years though, my mom became quite accomplished at a few dishes though her approach to cooking has always smacked of something like Don Quixote tilting at windmills – we can beat this if we keep at it! And if we can’t, well, we’ve invented a new dish!! Ta-da!

This Ugadi, for instance, I call my mom to wish her. Ask if she’s made Ugadi pachadi – the sweet-sour-bitter-astringent combination of jaggery, raw mangoes and neem flowers that is supposed to signify all that the year ahead is going to bring us . She said “Yes, but I couldn’t get the neem flowers because you know, the flowers were too high and I can’t climb a tree. The boys (her grandchildren) came home late and I can’t expect them to climb a tree at eleven o’clock, can I?” she asks perfectly reasonably, as per her lights! Did I mention that my mom is eighty three?!

“So then, what did you do?” I ask.

“Oh, I just decided that this year, we needn’t deal with any bitter stuff so I made the Ugadi pachadi without any neem flowers (key ingredient btw!) and it was yummy!” she responds blithely!

Jugaad? She’d rewrite Indian history if she could!

All that Ugadi talk reminds me of this delicious pachadi which I had in my aunt’s house (thanks, Manju aunty!) – so simple, made of such a humble vegetable and so utterly delicious!

 SORRAKAI PERUGU PACHADI/BOTTLE GOURD OR OPA THAYIR PACHADI/YOGURT CHUTNEY

• Bottle gourd (see pic) – peeled and grated – 2 cups – boil without a lid so that the water evaporates, along with a pinch of turmeric and a pinch of sugar till done – about 5- 6 minutes. Cool.
• Thick yogurt – 2 cups – whisked

Mix together and add salt.

MASALA

• Green chilies – 2
• Ginger – 1 cm piece
• Fresh coriander – 2 tbsp
• Coconut (optional) – 2 tbsp
• Jeera/cumin seeds – 1/2 tsp

Grind together to a smooth paste and mix with the other stuff.

Temper with mustard seeds, urad dal, one red chili and curry leaves.

Serve as a side with any mixed rice – like tamarind or tomato.

Want jugaad? Don’t have bottle gourd? Make do with ribbed gourd. Don’t have that too? Or any vegetable at all? Do without! Have leftover pacchadi? Dunk some vadas in it for a healthier dahi vada!

And that was the most memorable school day of them all… at LFHS… where my brothers went to school…

My brother had put himself down for plenty of competitions – from painting (at which he excelled) to singing (despite our genes!) and a fancy dress competition! No one could ever accuse us Chenji kids of being chicken hearted – we were as immune to the “slings and arrows of fortune” as we were to the hoots of derision which greeted us whenever we tried to sing!

And so, the afternoon programme at the boys’ school starts with the fancy dress competition. Remember with a very busy mother who had a more-than-fulltime profession, we kids were very often left to our own devices. So to get Arvind ready for the fancy dress comp was… let’s put it this way… a full-on sibling effort! We had to figure out first what he would go as – we were just then full of one of the Tarzan tales so a Zulu warrior was the unanimous choice.

Now came the all-important question – what did they look like? With no computers invented yet (or none at least that we had heard of!), much less Om Google-aaya namaha, we had only the vaguest of ideas. The dark skin was easy – Cherry Blossom shoe polish to the rescue! We had a feeling that maybe Zulu warriors wore a grass skirt (obviously mixed up with Hawaii!). How to make our very short grass into a skirt was definitely beyond us. My skirts wouldn’t fit either.

So we thought and thought… we thought very hard… and the eureka moment (which has never let us down so far!)  happened. I had just started taking tailoring lessons. I’d had just one lesson but nothing loth! You can’t make a grass skirt out of just nothing, can you?

So we dug around (thank goodness for working moms who can’t ask you unanswerable questions!) and found a sari of Mummy’s that we thought would do. It was a pink (strawberry ice cream pink, as a matter of fact) nylon sari. Nylon, in the form of a weird product called “644 Nylon” had just come into the market and someone had given my mom one. We didn’t think much of it and decided our mom would be better off without it!

We strung a nada (pyjama string) between two door handles, carefully laid the sari over it, halving it’s breadth, just as carefully made pleats and with my newfound tailoring skill, I ran large stitiches through it from end to end – voila – Zulu skirt!

All it needed now was for Arvind to blacken himself, tie “pink nylon grass skirt” around waist, smear chand (red bindi paste) on his lips (Zulu warrior in drag??!) and set off to school. The boys had to go earlier than the rest of the family so the full glory of the Zulu hit my parents right there – on stage! I don’t remember whether he won a prize or not, but he should have – for sheer effort and effrontery!

But that was not the end of the story… the singing competition followed on the heels of the fancy dress comp. With no time to change, we had a ten-year old Zulu belting away Yaadon ki baaraat lustily and tunelessly!

I think my dad needed a stiff one that evening!

Arvind, I am sure, would have revelled in this unusual pink dish.

BEETROOT AND FETA RISOTTO

• Arborio rice – 1.5 cups
• Beetroot – 1 – grated with a few small pieces reserved.
• White wine – 1 cup
• Onion – chopped – 1/2 cup
• Milk – 1 cup
• Green chili – minced – 1 (ok, I’m Indian!)
• Garlic – 1 flake – minced
• White pepper  – powder – 1/4 tsp
• Rosemary – 2 fresh sprigs or 1/2 tsp dried
• Feta or soft paneer / cottage cheese – crumbled – 1 cup
• Vegetarian stock or water – 2 or more cups as needed.
• Salt
• Olive oil – 1 tbsp
• Butter – 1tbsp

Fry the green chili, onions and garlic in the oil plus butter mixture till the onions turn golden yellow.

Add the arborio rice and stir well till the oil coats the rice.

Add the grated beetroot plus the pieces and wine and cook till the wine is absorbed. Add salt.

Add water/ stock and milk a little at a time, stirring continuously till the rice is no longer chalky but rather – chewy. Add the pepper and mix well. Crumble feta/ paneer over, reserving a little for garnish.  Cover and let it rest for a few minutes. .

Serve garnished with feta and rosemary. One beetroot will make this deep pink. If you’re keen on strawberry  pink, use half!

I’ve written earlier about my mother’s attempts to send me to what were called “vocal music” classes – all abortive. But these efforts of my mom’s were not all in vain – they instilled in me the overwhelming desire to learn music somehow! After listening for years to MS, Kishore, Balamurali and the like, I was fired with zeal – fed by the hopes of false prophets – in the form of various music teachers – who insisted that everyone could learn music! All I learnt over the years was that these people sometimes LIE!

Somewhere thereabouts of my fourteenth year of life, someone – must have been one more of the false prophet ilk – suggested to my mom that if Anu can’t sing – (understatement of the century ), why don’t you teach her an instrument?! Perfect, decided my mother, having rosy visions of me accompanying Pandit Ravi Shankar (even to talk of the two of us in the same breath is sacrilege – so I’m saying this very sotto voce!) maybe!

So we cast around and decided (visions of Vivaldi maybe?) that the violin it would be. Found a teacher close by and thus began a four year odyssey – to Armageddon! The teacher insisted I could play. I could – if someone else tuned the violin for me – I was near finger-perfect!

Distinguishing a “sa” from a “pa” was however a whole different matter altogether. The teacher would play and I’d stare at her intently, hoping her face would give away the note she was playing. She’d repeat the note again… and again… and again… I’d close my eyes in concentration and will myself to hear it, open my eyes and tentatively venture a “pa” or a “ma”, barely breathing out the syllable so that I could quickly turn it into something else depending on her facial expression – extreme pain to extreme shock was the range – sometimes it came out as a “sss… mmm… pa?”

It  was the teacher’s turn to close her eyes, to pray to the Buddha to give her both patience and compassion, I’m sure!! I may not have learnt much music but she became an evolved human being, thanks to me! I also became pretty good at reading people’s faces!

There were many repercussions… my room, where I practised diligently every evening, shared a wall with my mom’s clinic. High up on this wall was an architectural feature of those days – a little window… thanks to which my “music” practice sessions wafted in clearly and cruelly to the ears of the patients and their attendants! My mom shut down the private practice soon after that – it dawned on me decades later that maybe i contributed to it… in some small part??! The patients were too polite to say anything, but must have prayed fervently that there wasn’t a long waiting line at Doctor-gaaru’s clinic! My brothers, on the other hand – were loud and vocal – “Why can’t you stop those lessons??! I’m going to fail my exams, thanks to her!!!”

There are a many more stops on this musical journey of mine – but I’ll keep those stories for later!

Right now, all I’m going to say is that if the parents had had the sense to invest in sending me for culinary lessons rather than music lessons, who knows, I might have become the Adriano Zumbo of desserts!!! Like this quick and easy, yummy but healthy…

MANGO AND OATS KULFI

• Full cream milk -preferable – 4 cups
• Instant oats – powdered in the mixie to a smooth powder – 5 tbsp
• Sugar – 6-7 tsp or substitute – I use 3 -4 sachets of Splenda
• MTR instant badam milk mix – 4 tbsp
• Saffron strands – a pinch
• Slivers of badam/pista (optional) – 1 tbsp
• Mango puree – 1 cup

Mix everything together (except saffron and mango) and heat for a few minutes till the oats are cooked. 4-5 minutes at the most. Or microwave on high for 3 minutes, stirring once in between.

Add the saffron strands, mix well and cool, stirring constantly – otherwise milk gets that yucky skin (meegada/edu) on top. Add the mango puree and incorporate.

Pour into kulfi moulds and set overnight in the freezer. You can use silicone muffin cups too. Or and this is the cheat’s way – just freeze it in the bowls in which you intend to serve it!

And voila, your quick, low cal (well, at least as far as desserts go!)  dessert for the summer!