Anu Chenji

The year is 1985. I’ve just decided to get married and am feeling quite on top of the world. 

My fiance is coming down for a couple of days from his workplace in Orissa and a couple of old friends decide to join us. Having always been a keen, if not quite quite a judicious cook  – generally having a tendency to bite off more than I could chew by choosing to cook dishes which took hours of slaving over a stove (must add a postscript here – the weather in Madras soon cured me of any desire to slave over any kind of stove), I decide to really go out on a limb this time – choosing to make a complicated dish called “tomato mahashas” – an interesting dish because it’s one of the few Jewish Indian dishes. 

I, of course, decide to make a complicated recipe (from that hoary lady of women’s mags – Eve’s Weekly) even more complicated! Quickly ran into trouble! My guests and my fiance had arrived… and I… I was covered in juice of tomato, flour, potato and bits of unidentifiable food objects! Guests sitting in the drawing room and me getting desperate because I’m not even half done! Guests smell something fishy (not literally!) and prowl around hungrily – the house being one of those ancient Hyderabadi homes where you can wander around for ever, some prowling is needed!

The kitchen is taken over and everyone is soon busy stuffing, rolling and kneading with varying degrees of ineptness – fiance who has rarely done more than make a cup of tea creating a total ruckus with his well-meant efforts!

The dish, though, turns out absolutely delicious. Highly recommended if:

a) you do not live in Madras or other equally hot places where you will melt into a puddle by the time you finish

b) you have all the time in the world and want to fill it up with cooking!

c) you are icebound and want to slave over the stove to defrost – self!

d) you want a story to tell for the rest of your life!

e) you are totally nuts!

My version below.

TOMATO MAHASHAS

• Firm, large-ish tomatoes – 6
• Potatoes – 1/2 kg
• Cooked pulao (leftovers will do) – 1.5 cups (see post on corn pulao – click here)
• Breadcrumbs – 2-3 tbsp ground with 2 tsp mint leaves or basil
• Gram flour/besan/senaga pindi/kadale maavu – 2 cups
• Salt
• Red chili powder – 1/2 tsp + 1/2 tsp
• Green chilies – Minced – 2
• Juice of 1 lemon
• Oil to deep fry

My first trip abroad. First plane ride. Flying from Mumbai to Geneva en route to Algeria to join my parents who are there for a few months on work. The agent who’s booked my tickets has forgotten to specify a vegetarian meal and Swissair had nothing to offer me beyond a bun! On a ten- hour flight, to make do with a bun when you’re fifteen years old is rather much and by the time I landed in Geneva in the middle of the night, I was ravenously hungry.

With an overnight wait at a hotel before catching the next flight, I found a restaurant still open and  went in. Unfortunately, this was Geneva and the waitress spoke only French, of which I had a smattering from school and German of which I had no clue at that time. But in the middle of the night, after a long and food-less flight, French was the last thing on my mind. I managed to get across enough to tell her I was hungry and she asked me if I wanted a sandwich. The word for sandwich being the same in English and any other lingo in the world, I had no problem with nodding an “oui”. Then she asked me something which sounded like “jam” so i nodded again – yes, a jam sandwich would be perfect! She quickly got me a plate of sandwiches and threw in a glass of hot milk for good measure. Gulped the milk down as I was hungry, very hungry…

 …and then bit into the sandwich. A couple of bites and it suddenly struck me that this thing I was eating was salty and that jam couldn’t be salty! So I opened the sandwich to find a pink slice of some meaty thingummy – what she’d asked me was did I want a ham sandwich (jambon) and I had heard it as jam! Quickly spitting it out, I ran to my room and gorged myself on chocolate which I’d picked up at the airport shop and went to bed almost as hungry as when I’d landed. A few hours of sleep, another flight, a long car ride home before I finally got food left me wondering whether I should just have eaten the ham sandwich – hunger is difficult at any age but particularly cruel on teenage tummies!

Now I am particularly careful when I ask for food – like today at a wedding when they were serving “mumble-mumble kababs” (I think as I grow older, people seem to mumble more!) and I had to ask him three times before I figured out that they were green plantain and basil kababs! 

GREEN PLANTAIN AND BASIL KABABS

• Green plantains (the fat short variety rather than the long sticky variety) – 2
• Basil leaves – shredded – 2 tbsp
• Green chili – 2-3
• Salt
• Lemon juice – 1 tsp
• Oil to brush
• Kabab sticks for spearing

Cut the green plantains in half widthwise and steam for 10-12 minutes. Remove peel and grate.

Mix in the other ingredients and shape into kababs on sticks. Grill or shallow fry on a tava turning around till golden on all sides – about 6-7 minutes. Serve with mint chutney.

Every year as children, we used to make a pilgrimage with the parents (or rather the other way round, i guess!) to Mantralayam, on the banks of the river Tungabhadra, a place where one of the saints of South India attained Samadhi. 

As children, all trips were causes for excitement and so we didn’t mind it so much as we did in later teenage years when I was at college studying Philosophy and all these seemed very irrational things to do! Well, one moves beyond that too… 🙂

The journey used to be made by train and then by a jutka (horse-drawn carriage) in the earlier years and by a taxi in later years. The jutka was exciting except for the smell of horse manure which hung around the stables and which, to our city-bred noses, was weird and mildly offensive! Reaching Mantralayam, we made our way to one of a long row of old-fashioned guesthouses – with a bathroom and loo in the backyard. Wet bathrooms, then and now, have been a source of misery to me – so the “bath” – such as it was – was gotten over with as quickly as possible. 

Then the real excitement of Mantralayam… we made our way to the river to bathe. The Tunga was a shallow river most of the year and so we could easily get to almost halfway across by jumping across stones where we could and wading where we couldn’t… until one of the big brothers decided that it would be fun to make me really jump and told me there were crocdiles in the waters (there were NOT). Of the many pet fears in my life (there was a long list starting with cockroaches and working its way down to less dangerous animals like tigers and pythons and lions), crocs vied with cockroaches to top the list! End of jumping around in the river – I streaked out of there like my back was on fire – or worse – like a croc had caught hold of it!

The temple had a huge dining hall next to it which served and continues to serve several thousand people free meals every single day! The food there, as in most of Karnataka, is absolutely delicious and one way to forget that I’d nearly been “got” by one!

RAGHAVENDRA SWAMY MUTT KOOTU

TO ROAST – MASALA 

• 5 red chilies
• 1/2 tsp black peppercorns
• 1 tbsp urad dal 
• 1 tbsp chana dal
• 1.5 tbsp coriander seeds

TO NOT ROAST!

• 1/4 cup grated fresh coconut 
• 2 tsp tamarind  paste

VEGETABLES: cut these withut removing the skin. It helps the veggies hold their shape as they cook.

• 2 cups white pumpkin – cut into 1″ chunks OR
• 2 cups yellow pumpkin – cut into 1″ chunks OR
• 2 cups ridged gourd (beerakai) or the large round cucumber called dosakaya – cut into large chunks (optional) OR
• 2 cups mixed vegetables (any of the above)

FOR KOOTU:

• 1 cup toor dal – pressure cooked with 2 cups water and a pinch of turmeric
• 1/2 cup peanuts or mochakottai (fresh field beans)/anumulu or chikkudu ginjalu in Telugu
• Jaggery – 1 tsp

TEMPERING:

• 2 tsp – oil – preferably sesame or peanut
• Mustard seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Asafoetida – 1 large pinch
• Curry leaves – 4 sprigs

Roast the ingredients listed for roasting and grind together with the ingredients listed for NOT roasting to a smooth paste. Set aside.

Heat the oil in a large pan, add the peanuts and fry on a slow flame. When they start spluttering a bit, add the mustard seeds. When they splutter (no, we do not have an indignant dish on our hands – it’s just their character), add the curry leaves and asafoetida. Add the white pumpkin and cook for a few minutes. Then add the yellow pumpkin and ridge gourd, the masala paste and a couple of glasses of water and bring to the boil. Let cook till the vegetables are almost done. Add the jaggery and salt and the cooked toor dal and continue to cook for a few more minutes till well done. Adjust water to a sambar like consistency – though this dish tastes very different from a sambar!

Serve with hot rice, ghee, appadams and attain moksha from rebirths and crocodiles too!

Many years ago, my younger daughter – about ten years old, came up with the inevitable question that makes all parents squirm and hem and haw in turn: “Amma, where do babies come from?” With one older daughter, I was prepared for the birds and bees talk and so with pictures and all, gave it a shot. Many exclamations of horror followed!

In the days that followed, it turned out that I was the only mom in her class to have had “the talk” so far and so I was besieged with small slips of paper every evening – K would have been handed over a slip by one of her classmates with the injunction to “ask your mother”! Hilarious questions – some of them – for which I had to excuse myself, disappear into the bathroom for a good laugh, so as to avoid hurting daughter’s feelings!

About a year later, they knew a lot more – or so they thought! I bumped into K’s Physics teacher at a dinner and he told me he’d never forget her – not for her prowess in Physics but for other reasons!

K, in class one day, was, as usual sitting in the last bench and not paying attention – playing noughts and crosses with her neighbour while a few words of Physics occasionally made it past her eardrums.

The teacher calls her up: “K…, do you have any idea what we are talking about?”

She has a vague idea that whatever class had been about had something to do with gases and laws and says so.  

“So tell me about Gay-Lussac’s law” says the teacher. ( The law has to do with volumes of gases after a chemical reaction).

“Yeah, you know!” she says.

“Yes, I do but what do you know?” he asks.

“Well, you know, he… (swinging her arms about) he… swung both ways!”

Well, do I need to tell you why my hair turned grey before I managed to get her to pass her tenth standard Physics exam?!

All that talk of gas – let’s make something which is supposed to be as gassy as it is delicious – the uniquely Hyderabadi dessert…

KHUBANI/QUBANI KA MEETHA

• Dried apricots (the Indian variety, not the golden variety which is too sour) – 2 cups
• Fresh cream to serve
• Powdered sugar – 2 tbsp

Soak the apricots in 2 cups water for about 5-6 hours or overnight. Remove the seeds with your fingers. Pressure cook the apricots for 2 whistles (or stew for about 25 minutes) and simmer for 5 minutes before switching off. 

Mash with a ladle or a potato masher till you get a very knobbly puree with lumps of apricot. Let cool and ladle into bowls. Whip the cream with the icing sugar and spoon over.

Do not discard the seeds. The seeds can be cracked open with a stone pestle to get at the almond-y nut inside. These can be crushed slightly and served over the qubani for a different texture – i personally like mine smooth.

Even the shell of the seeds can be washed again, dried and powdered in the mixer and added to sandalwood powder to give a fantastic face scrub.

(Pic courtesy: Internet)

Today I’m going to blog about something that you can’t make at home without investing in a large piece of machinery – a  sugarcane crusher! Sorry, guys, am ducking! Just couldn’t let a food blog bypass something so essential to gustatory happiness and soulful comfort as… sugarcane juice, could I?

Call it ganne ka ras, cheruku rasam – any name in any language – it’s (literally) as sweet!

Innumerable glasses of this nectar of the gods resulting in innumerable and almost surefire stomach upsets never deterred us from the next glass.

A bunch of us from school used to go to this place called Bal Bhavan in Hyderabad – a sort of children’s club where there were lessons in everything from singing to dance to skating and stamp collecting – the brainchild of some bureaucrat with true foresight!

This club was set in the middle of several acres of gardens open to the public and maintained meticulously by a team of gardeners as zealous as they were skilled. We – a bunch of four of us – were playing near a lotus pond and one of us had the bright idea of plucking lotuses to take home. No sooner thought than done – we plucked a few and started walking to the gate. Angry shouting behind us which we ignored for a while thinking someone else was being shouted at. Then as we turned a corner, we saw an irate gardener bearing down on us with a large broomstick in one hand. No thought was needed for action to take place- we took to our heels… luckily ten year old feet are way faster than fifty year old feet! We ran all the way out of the gardens to the bus stop before stopping to catch a breath… lotuses intact and triumphant! (The thought did occur later that the gardener was the wrong gender for a broomstick – surely wizards had some other mode of transport and the right of traveling by broomstick was reserved for witches?!)

Celebration at deliverance from a fate we could not imagine was indicated – and so, deciding to walk the four or so kilometres home, we splurged our bus fare to raise our glasses in good cheer – glasses of sugarcane juice, of course!

The secret of sugarcane juice, as with most other dishes – is in what you add to it. Watching the guy who owns the crusher (lucky bug!) lovingly feed the cane into the crusher along with a couple of lemon halves and a piece of ginger, waiting to see the cane being folded and fed back in a  couple of times more to extract the last possible ounce of juice – thank goodness microbial infection was not something that we were aware of! My mom, the ever-careful doc, did not want to deprive us of this treat but insisted on taking precautions… so the guy would be called home, made to wash and scrub his machine out with water provided from our garden tap, the crushed juice poured into a jug from home, not into his dubiously washed glasses – before we were allowed to drink it. The “clean” juice never tasted as good!

Plus the “correct” glass (see pics) was needed to ensure the experience… and the taste!

Here’s to sugar cane… hic!

And if you’re feeling cheated of a recipe, buy a sugarcane crusher, send the cane in with lemons and ginger and repeat till no more juice comes out! And don’t wash anything!