Anu Chenji

“What will happen, Amma, if I let go of you just now? Will I swim?”, lisps my two-year old. She’s been clinging onto my neck for dear life in the dauntingly large expanse of the swimming pool at IIT, where we take a bunch of kids to teach them to swim. The pool is almost Olympic sized and must have seemed like an ocean to a small child. Several lessons have gone by and Arch has learnt to swim. K is still too small so basically she paddles with her feet while never letting go of my neck!

Before I can answer, she takes the plunge and lets go, sinking straight to the bottom which is all of three feet down and comes up gasping for breath and shivering with fright! But she’s nothing if not game and refuses to get out of the pool! “I want to swim like Akka!” She does, years later learn to swim pretty well, gritting her teeth to get across the length of the pool while trying to obey the coach’s instructions to keep her ‘head down, Kanch, head down!’, wondering why he’s yelling when her head is already down! Anyone who’s ever learnt to swim knows that feeling!

I remember my first foray into the pool when I was about fourteen years old. Wearing a costume borrowed from a cousin initially and then in a pair of pyjamas tied around the ankles till I could buy myself a costume! Every time you jumped into the pool, the pyjamas billowed out around you keeping you afloat and that’s how I learned to float!

This habit of jumping in both feet first seems to run in the family – starting with my very impulsive mother, just-as-bad me and now my daughter! Consequences are always there – of course! Sometimes disastrous, sometimes fantastic but always providing hilarity and many opportunities for saying “I told you so” to all the people in our lives who positively delight in saying it! Plus of course, even if you have to face some rather unpleasant music (why do they call it facing the music when it’s so unpleasant, I wonder??!) afterwards, secretly you’re gloating over the fun that has already been had and nobody can take it away from you! Fait accompli is a very good thing – is my considered-after-five-decades experience!

“See how I always have to bail you out of trouble” is something I’ve heard all my life – from various people…but I also think that if there weren’t people like us around, then whom would they be able to say it to? Then what is the purpose of their existence??! And where would they get their hijinks from???! All said and done, I think we windmill-tilters fulfill a very important function in this world – anyone wanna dispute that??! Imagine the world of literature without a Don Quixote? The English language wouldn’t even have been able to invent the word “quixotic”!! Phew!

Like many other inventions – made quite by impulse – like these….

SAVOURY CORN AND CAPSICUM MUFFINS

• 2 cups plain flour /maida
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• 1 green chili – minced
• 1 tsp mixed herbs
• 1 cup grated cheddar or any sharp-tasting cheese
• 1 cup plain yogurt
• ¼ cup butter (melted)
• ½ cup chopped red or green capsicum
• ½ cup corn kernels

One of the greatest pleasures of childhood was coming home to an empty house on Saturday afternoons – we had a half-holiday on Saturdays and the happiness of wearing what we called “civil dress” – basically anything but our ugly school uniforms of blue petticoats with white blouses and hard-as-a-cement-wall black leather shoes! On the way home, there were many dawdling stops at the carts piled with brilliant red ber – the small sweet-sour berries which make you suck your cheeks in with pleasure at their tartness, occasionally finding a worm in it! You were okay so long as it wasn’t a half-worm!

Then there’d be stops at the guava seller’s bandi (cart), the cart which sold green and red batanis (hard peas) of which I could demolish kilos at a sitting, the shop which sold oily potato chips and finally, loaded with all the favourite things, I’d slowly make my way home. To spend an afternoon reading to my heart’s content, no classes, no one telling me to do things – bliss!

One Saturday afternoon, while carefully picking out the ber, squishing each one to get the right degree of ripeness – you buy overripe ones, they tend to smell like brandy (according to my mom!), I left my tiffin carrier on the bandi and went home. The honest chappie hands it over in the school office. Unfortunately, everyone in the office had gone home except the Princy – a total horror of a nun – we shall call her Sister P – who, fuming with indignation over the ignominy of having been handed over a lowly tiffin dabba – identified the owner and gave me a royal shelling, going so far as to call my mother to the office to complain about my ‘unruly’ behaviour! Neither the parents nor I thought it was such a big ‘sin’ and to this day, I wonder what her grouse really was!!

Hyderabad was those days not so urbanised and the colonies were dotted with copses of henna and ber bushes. My grandfather’s house was in an area called Berban – literally forest of bers and many weekends were spent mucnhing on these, small star gooseberries and grapes – which grew in abundance in the gardens around…

Ber – Ziziphus mauretania to give it it’s correct name – Indian jujubes Wiki says – though I’ve never heard this before! Wiki, the mother of all knowledge also informs me that in Ethiopia, they are used to stupefy fish!! How??? They defintiely stupefied me with their sweet-sour deliciousness but fish???

High in Vit C and a million medicinal uses, the seed is also a source of biofuel… i’m almost ashamed to be a human being and the recipient of so much bounty from one single little berry!

The best way to have these is to just wash and eat them but if you do want to make something exotic, here’s a really exotic chutney!

BER CHUTNEY

• Semi-ripe ber (regipandu/ elandapazham) – 1 cup
• Jaggery – if the ber is very sour – 1 or 2 tbsp.
• Red chilies – 5
• Green chilies – 2
• Jeera – 1 tsp
• Urad dal – 1 tsp
• Mustard seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Oil – 2 tbsp
• Chana dal – 1 tsp
• Asafoetida – 1 pinch
• Salt

Wash the fruit well. Squish each between your fingers till the seed pops out. Discard the seeds. Set pulp aside. Eat some – just for fun 🙂

Dry roast the red chilies, green chilies, chana dal, urad dal, asafoetida and cumin. When cool, powder.

Heat 1 tbsp oil and fry the ber for 8 – 9 minutes till done. Cool and grind along with the powdered masala and salt.  Add jaggery if using. Temper with mustard seeds in hot oil. Pour over.

And next time the Princy catches you, offer her some ber – she might let you off with just a warning instead of a few juicy ones (those, not bers!)

“Venkatesh, you order. I’ll wait and see what you get and then I’ll order,” says my dad’s closest friend – the gentleman we knew as Shankaraiah maama (uncle).

So my dad picks up the menu – incomprehensible foreign language and jabs his finger somewhere at the middle of the menu. Both friends sit back and wait to see what his luck is going to be, jabbering away excitedly.

For both of them, it’s their first trip abroad. The year is 1969 and they’ve been chosen from a bunch of engineers at the electricity board that they work for to go to France on a two-year training programme. The first three months of the programme is to be spent learning French and the rest of it on technical stuff as they continue to learn French. My dad is a natural polyglot – his dad spoke fourteen languages – and he picks up French easily and naturally – remaining a fluent speaker all his life.

This, however, is their first day in Paris, first day out of the India and in fact, their first day out of the south of India! There is no French anywhere in their background.

For two very strict vegetarians, two years in Europe is a daunting prospect and so, my dad, on the flight out, decides that whatever his strict Madhwa upbringing might have been, he’s going to eat whatever he needs to, to stay alive in a Europe which has not yet heard of vegetarianism! Shankaraiah maama, on the other hand, is much more squeamish and decides that he will stay vegetarian, come what may… therefore the guinea pig at the restaurant on their first day is my dad.

Some twenty minutes later, the waiter rolls up with his order… beefsteak… done rare, very rare… in fact, any rarer and a vet would have soon set the cow on its feet! With streaks of fat and blood still showing… Shankaraiah maama takes one look at it and scrambles out of the restaurant, pale with shock!

My dad blanches but having told himself he would survive this country, he digs in his fork and manages to cut and masticate a mouthful… and somehow to finish most of his meal.

On the way back to the ‘pension’ where they are staying, dad passes a market, manages to buy some rice and a couple of vegetables using sign language and goes back home to cook a meal for his friend, who is still prostrate with shock! The meal even includes a lemon pickle! For a Telugu, far from home in not just a geographical sense, the pickle soon revives his spirits…

For the rest of their two years, Dad manages to eat whatever is available and his friend whatever vegetarian fare he can forage!

Travel anywhere is India for a vegetarian is not a problem, even in areas like the North East, where the diet is primarily meat-based because the concept of vegetarianism as Indians know it, with all its taboos is understood. Outside India, people are quite likely to offer to just remove the pieces of chicken or whatever fish, fowl or flesh are mixed up in the dish and serve it to you plain!

Just like how there are variations of some dishes all over India – like a dal in in zillion avatars or a kadhi (buttermilk-based gravy) which almost every state and indeed, every community in India makes a variation of!

Just now, travelling in the Himalayas, we came across this very simple and very delicious kadhi, guaranteed to set even motion-sick tummies like mine right! Right outside the temple complex of Jageshwar, in a tiny little joint called “Om Restaurant” – a barely 100 foot square little place perched at the edge of the road, with two tiny tables capable of accommodating ten people altogether if you almost sit on each other’s laps (!),  a hospitable soul called Puran Chandra Bhat presides over some dozen large pots and pans and churns out the most amazing rotis, dals, subzis, rice and kadhi! (see pics)

KUMAONI KADHI

• ·      Buttermilk – 200 ml
• ·      Besan/chickpea flour/senaga pindi/kadalemaavu – 100 gm
• ·      Turmeric – ½ tsp
• ·      Cumin seeds – jeera – ½ tsp
• ·      Caraway seeds/ajwain/omam – ½ tsp
• ·      Green chilies – slit – 2
• ·      Red chili powder – ½ tsp
• ·      Oil – mustard or vegetable – 2 tsp
• ·      Salt

Churn the butter milk, salt , turmeric and besan together till smooth. Heat on a low flame stirring constantly till it reaches boiling point. Do not increase heat at any stage as the gravy will curdle and become grainy.

Switch off.

Heat the oil in a separate small saucepan and add the cumin and ajwain. Add the green chilies and fry for a few seconds. Add the red chili powder and immediately pour over the gravy. Serve with plain rice and a vegetable on the side.

Here’s a dish worthy of Shankaraiah maama’s determined vegetarianism and my dad’s equally determined ‘adjustibility’!

Many years ago, over a decade ago, in fact, we were on a holiday on Japan. To South Asians, being used to hear of India being spoken of as ‘exotic’ by every non-Asian we ever met, as we inwardly wondered what the heck that meant, Japan was truly an exotic country! The idea that one man’s every idli-sambar is another man’s exotic truly comes home only when we remove ourselves from our familiar confines and venture abroad.

To most Indians, accustomed to think of anyone with a non-brown skin a ‘foreigner’, to be the foreigner with the brown skin is a decidedly strange experience! Ever hear the one about the Indian software engineer in San Jose who is stopped by an American looking for directions to a Mr. Everyday Joe’s house? He scratches his head, looks at the address on the piece of paper being proffered and then offers, “No, Sir, I’m sorry . There are no foreigner’s around here!”

On a day trip to the temple town of Nara in Japan (Nara is rather like the Thanjavur of Japan dotted with ancient and beautiful Buddhist shrines), the friends with whom we were staying, the incredibly hospitable Krishna and Lakshmi, organized a really lovely outing starting with being dressed in kimonos and then visiting some of the temples. There were fourteen of us women and girls so the choosing of kimonos and sashes and being dressed in them – an art in itself – took almost two hours! We then put on those cute sandals with socks built into them that Japanese women wear with kimonos (finding shoes for the larger sizes quite a challenge) and then stepped out – a flock of pinks, oranges, greys and blues – for a kilometer –long walk to the main temple. Within minutes, we had collected a bunch of excited Japanese who trailed behind us, chattering, the little ones pointing and some of them trying to make conversation in English with us.

Traipsing along, feeling very pleased with ourselves – who doesn’t like getting dressed up?!! – one old man came up to me and in pretty passable Americanised English – learnt from watching gangsta movies (!) – paid us many compliments. Kept bemoaning the fact that Japanese women had almost completely given up wearing kimonos (well, if I had to spend forty-five minutes every morning on the exercise, I don’t think I’d last beyond a day!) and excited about all of us ‘foreign’ women who were so adventurous!

We finished with several temples and with feet killing us – well, for the sake of appearing completely Japanese, we had, several of us, squeezed our sizes six and eight feet into tiny Japanese slippers – the Japanese themselves don’t appear to grow feet beyond a size five – gigantic by their standards! Much appreciation for Gulliver in Lilliput developed in our hearts, not to mention in our aching toes! 

Back at the kimono house, we were served tea and little sweetened rice paste rolls with sesame seeds by the two ladies who had dressed us. The serving and eating is quite a ceremony in itself, incredibly graceful as the Japanese are. As we kept trying to match bow for polite bow, not quite sure where to stop and having been warned about appearing bad-mannered, I sneaked a look at the rice paper rolls longingly! If someone hadn’t giggled and then the whole room erupted in laughter – I swear we’d still be bowing away, like the ostriches in perpetual motion  – we really did look like the toy we used to buy in exhibitions where two ostriches face each other and keep bowing to each other because of the liquid that balances the two of them continuously shifting sides! 

The rice rolls had gone cold but were still pretty ‘exotic’!

Reminded me rather of the kozhukottais that we make back home when we want a light dinner. 

RICE KOZHUKOTTAIS

1.              Raw rice rava/semolina – 2 cups. If this is not available, wash two cups of rice and spread out to dry on a dry cloth for 15-20 minutes. Pulse in the mixer to a not-too-fine rava / semolina consistency. This is raw rice rava.

2.              Water – 5 cups

3.              Salt

4.              Sesame or coconut oil – 1 tbsp

5.              Mustard seeds – 1 tsp

6.              Chana dal – 2 tbsp

7.              Urad dal– 1 tbsp

8.              Asafoetida – 1 large pinch

9.              Curry leaves – shredded – 2 tbsp

10.            Red chilies – 2 – broken into bits

11.            Chilies dried in buttermilk  (majjiga mirapakaayalu / moru mizhaga) – 3 – fried and  crumbled. (optional)

12.            Grated coconut – fresh – ½ cup 

Coconut chutney or mor kozhambu/majjiga pulusu – to serve with it (featured earlier in this blog) 

Heat the oil in a thick bottomed, deep vessel – a pressure cooker is great. Add the mustard seeds. When they pop, add the chana dal and urad dal and let them turn golden. Add the curry leaves, red chilies, asafoetida and immediately pour in the water. Add the buttermilk-chili bits and salt. When the water comes to the boil, pour in the rice rava in a gentle stream stirring continuously. Add the coconut too. Within 3-4 minutes, the rice will swell up and form a ball around the ladle. Continue to stir for a few more minutes. Switch off and let cool a bit. With wet hands, shape the mass into balls – about the size of a lemon. Lay them out on a tray or an idli stand and steam them for 10- 12 minutes. 

Take out and serve with coconut chutney or majjiga pulusu/mor kozhambu.

And if you do happen to wear a kimono, don’t try the small shoe stunt – just wear keds and be unfashionable! Like these kozhukottais – not very beautiful but very definitely soul food!

For the past few years, I have been drawn irresistably to the Himalayas… grand, beautiful, splendid… many more eloquent voices  than mine have described this patch of divinity on earth – this punya kshetram – with far greater felicity than I possess… to me, it is the one place on earth where one glimpses, however faintly, the possibility that the veil of maya can actually be lifted… a place set on earth to remind us to look upwards where we can go rather than downwards… where our feet get stuck in the morass of the many pettinesses that we choose to live with…

Is it any wonder then that the hillspeople are amongst the gentlest on earth… when they live with this every single day?! Waking up to beauty, living, breathing it every minute, closing their eyes upon it every night… sigh… are you wondering whether you’ve stumbled on to the wrong blog? This is a food and funny story blog, right?

Thank you for having allowed me to wax lyrical over one of my favourite places on earth and now let’s move on the serious stuff… the funny stuff, I mean!

Today, we set out from Binsar (beauty!!) where we’re staying to visit the ancient temple of Jageshwar – a cluster of lovely cairn-like temples built some 1200 years ago… chiefly will be remembered today for having to hop around from one foot to the other as we walked around clad in socks – so cold that the ground was covered with ice in some parts – ice that’s been lying around for over two months now and is refusing to melt… brrrr…

On the way back, the driver – a helpful soul called Girish who promised to bring us some sarson ka saag from his home because restaurants here do not serve it 🙂 – suggested that we stop off at an another temple called Golu Devata ka mandir. Now this Golu Devata is a prehistoric hill god who has been worshipped here for millennia and is now identified as one of the forms of Shiva – in the form of the Dispenser of Justice. Because he is the dispenser etc., people come from all over the hills here to pray and ask for justice to be granted in court cases, land disputes and so on. The custom is you buy a bell from one of the many little shops outside, say your prayer to Golu Devata and then tie the bell to one of the many lines provided for it – there are millions of bells hanging here!

Noticing some stamp paper documents tied up here along with thousands of letters, I idly started reading some of the letters. One was from a young chap seeking the answer to the eternal riddle… it went like this: “Dear God, everything is great with me – thank you (good mannered lad evidently!). Only one request – please provide me with a problem-free girlfriend!!” So I closed my eyes and answered him thusly, “And when you do find one, please provide the answer to Socrates and Confucius too!”

 There was a letter from another young kid, again thanking god for many things (this is a well bred race!) and asking only to please, please, please be granted an iPhone!

Simple souls, simple prayers, simple, wholesome and absolutely delicious food! That’s what these foothills of the Himalayas are all about!

Here is a recipe for an awesome spinach dish made by the chef at the resort we’re staying in – Mahindra’s – a magician called Dharamvir Singh – the very Kumaoni…

PALAK KA KAPA

• Finely chopped spinach – 2 bundles
• Whole wheat flour / Atta – 1.5 tbsp
• Mustard oil  – 1 tbsp
• Whole coriander seeds/dhania – 1/2 tsp
• Cumin seeds/Jeera – 1/2 tsp
• Jeera powder – 1 pinch
• Red chilies – 1 or 2
• Green chili – minced – 1
• Asafoetida – 1 pinch
• Garlic – 1 flake – minced – optional
• Turmeric – 1 pinch
• Ghee or butter – 1 tsp

Heat the mustard oil in an iron pan, if you have oil. Add the dhania, red chili, garlic and palak/spinach. Toss and cook for about 3 minutes till palak wilts.

In another pan, heat the ghee or butter. Add the atta and let it froth up. Fry till golden yellow. Add the green chili, jeera powder, turmeric, asafoetida and salt. Add water and let it come to a boil. Add the palak and continue to cook till thick and done but palak is not overcooked.

The spices used in this dish are all very light and the palak kind of sings it’s own aria with very minor notes from the spice!

Serve with hot rice or tandoori roti and ghee. Go straight from the hills to heaven – you’re not too far off!