Anu Chenji

Yesterday I wrote about lessons learnt in the fine art of delegating and earning by “managing” someone else rather than doing it yourself. Today’s story is about baby (literally!) steps in the field of commerce  and how they are related to the film industry!

When we were children, there weren’t too many movies made for children and since a trip to the theatre (movie theatre only) was meant  for the whole family, we got to see a load of stuff which today would be considered “unsuitable” – well, Indian cinema being highly censored, there wasn’t much to see anyway! Who can forget love scenes in which the hero and heroine ran around rose bushes and then when they got close up, the camera would pan out to a couple of roses dancing around each other!

Since sundry aunts and uncles who came to the city would always want to catch a movie, we got to see everything and many movies twice, thrice or even more! Potboilers, tearjerkers, mythologicals, romances, family dramas were all grist to our mill. I remember seeing a movie called “Dasara Bullodu” some five times – taken by a different relation each time! The draw of the silver screen was so strong that even the fifth time of a true potboiler was a treat – the idea of saying “no, i’ve already seen it” was unthinkable!! Plus if it was a rich relative, we each got a bag of popcorn to ourselves.

My mom, being something of an early Victorian in her outlook, would cover our eyes with her hands every time she thought there was an unsuitable scene playing on the screen. There were three of us and she had only two hands! The tacit understanding was that the third was expected to later “tell all”!

I can’t help but remember this when my children tell me not to watch something saying, “It’s too adult for you, Amma”! Huh? 

Oops, i was forgetting my story of base commerce! 

Class 1, I was six years old and fresh from seeing a movie over the weekend. Having watched carefully what happened, I figured that you gave some money to a window (from my vantage height, there wasn’t anything visible above the sill!) and out popped some tickets – printed on cheap blue and pink paper. Having just learnt to read, I could read that the name of the movie was printed on the ticket with a number (the price of the ticket) next to it. Wow, this was the world of adults!

Milk bottles those days (be patient, I’m going to tie up the whole story!) were delivered against coupons which had to be torn off from a little booklet – you retained the stubs. Aha, so basically when you wanted something, you had to get a coupon – Commerce 101!

And so, finding a book of discarded coupons, I knew I had stumbled on something valuable. Hyderabad’s local daily was a rag called the Deccan Chronicle, whose primary function those days was to advertise movies. And so, having figured out the innards of how adults worked, down sits one six-year old, with a copy of the newspaper, a book of old milk coupons and a pencil… and proceeds to write down the name of a different movie on each ticket. The next day, she sets up shop in school, selling each “cinema ticket” for five paisa! Pretty soon, her booklet of 21 coupons is sold out and a clean profit of a buck and five paisa is made! Ponzo had nothing on this scheme! Except Ponzo did NOT have a mother who marched said six-year old to school the next morning and made her return every paisa to the kids who had bought tickets! What she didn’t realise, of course, was that she killed the spirit of enterprise in me completely!!

Ah well, there’s always food as a comfort – my mom must have felt bad cause she made semiya payasam as a treat!

SEMIYA PAYASAM

• Milk – 3/4 litre
• Semiya or vermicelli – 1 cup
• Rock candy (preferred) or sugar – 3/4 cup
• Condensed milk (optional) – 2 tbsp
• 3 cardamoms – peeled and powdered with 1/2 tsp sugar (powdering it with sugar helps crush the cardamom pods easily)
• Saffron – 1 pinch
• Nutmeg – grated – 1/4 tsp
• Cashewnuts / slivered almonds – 2 tbsp
• Raisins – 2 tbsp
• Ghee – 2 tbsp

Heat the ghee in a pan and roast the cashewnuts and raisins in it. The nuts will turn golden yellow and the raisins puff up. Remove and set aside.

To the same pan, add the vermicelli and roast for about 5 minutes till golden.

Add milk and keep stirring. Cook till the vermicelli begins to get soft. Add sugar a little at a time and continue to stir. Add condensed milk. If using it, reduce the sugar a bit. The vermicelli should be completely cooked by now. Add the cardamom powder, saffron and nutmeg. Switch off and add the nuts and raisins. Let cool before serving. This payasam thickens up as it sits. 

 Pic courtesy: Internet

Once in a while, my parents, usually my mom, would get a bee in their bonnets (should that be two bees in their bonnets?) about “LESSONS” we needed to learn. No, these had nothing to do with school – about which they were pretty slack (thank goodness!) – more in the nature of  “LESSONS CHILDREN NEED TO LEARN”!  Under this heading came things like POCKET MONEY (already blogged about), BEING NEIGHBOURLY and then in one memorable fit – BEING INDEPENDENT.

Since we didn’t have a clue about what each of these would entail, all such experiments were looked forward to with enthusiasm – and they never turned out quite the way my parents envisaged! Lessons were learnt, maybe not exactly the ones that were intended! The lesson on pocket money, for instance, did nothing to teach me about balancing a budget – all it taught me was that spending ALL my money on sweets was guaranteed to give me a bad tummy!

One holiday season, my mom decided that we should all learn to become more independent (I suspect these fits were brought on every time she got a new issue of “Good Housekeeping” to which she subscribed and they had lots of articles those days – all politically incorrect today! – about keeping house, family matters and so on… ) and learn that MONEY DID NOT GROW ON TREES , that we had to WORK to earn money etc… And so, one day….

…on her way to work, she gave us the job of trimming the jasmine hedge which grew around our house. We had to pluck off dead leaves, branches and flowers and do some trimming stuff and so on. The hedge was looong… in my opinion at least a hundred feet (must have been about ten or twelve in all, i think). A luscious, juicy carrot was dangled in front of us – if the hedge was done by the time mom came back home from work, we got a WHOLE buck apiece. This was the early ’70s – when a buck went a very long way indeed. You could go to the cinema, eat chikki and popcorn and still have money for a stick icecream (ultimate luxury!) if you judiciously used legs instead of a bus to transport yourself.

…and so, work started with great enthusiasm; we ‘divvied’ up the hedge – so much to be done by each of us and enthusiastically pulled out branches, twigs, leaves, buds,shoots… everything! A half hour passed and the work began to pall. Break time was indicated, with lemonade… after which resuming work seemed tougher and tougher… a passing urchin was hailed… would he like to do some work and get paid? Would he, indeed? A couple of hours later, one happy urchin (he’d been promised a buck if he came back at the same time the next day) and three even happier children – looking forward to the prospect of sharing out TWO un-earned bucks between them after deducting “workman’s expenses”! Life was good. Lesson was learnt – it’s ALWAYS easier to get other people to do the work for you! And we hadn’t even read Tom Sawyer yet! Like I said, not quite the lesson parents intended, but lesson nonetheless…

There are foods like that too – you need to do very little work and it pays for iteself in taste – making people believe you’ve been slaving over a hot stove, poor thing… wiping occasional drop of sweat off forehead helps…

Here’s one of those – easy peasy dishes… zero fat, high in dietary fibre and Vits A,D, B6, B12, iron, calcium and magnesium – it’s quite a super food.

SWEET POTATO CURRY

• 1/2 kg sweet potatoes – , scrub and cut into 1 cm chunks. Do NOT peel – you will lose valuable nutrients.
• Green chili – 3-4 – minced
• Mustard seeds (optional)  1/2 tsp
• Jeera – cumin seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Turmeric – 1 large pinch
• Asafoetida – 1 large pinch
• Curry leaves – 2 sprigs
• Curry powder (roast 1 tbsp each of toor dal, chana dal and urad dal with a large pinch of coriander seeds, 3 red chilies and pich of asafoetida. Cool and powder)
• Coconut – grated – 2 tbsp
• Salt
• Oil – 1 tsp
• Juice of half a line

Heat the oil in a pan. Add mustard (if using) and jeera. When it splutters, add curry leaves, green chilies, turmeric and asafoetida.

Add the sweet potato pieces and a couple of tbsp of water. Cover and cook till tender but not falling apart – 5-6 minutes. Add salt, curry powder and coconut and switch off. Squeeze lime juice over before eating.

Wanna earn a buck by trimming the hedge? 😉

The funeral service is going on. The minister asks for the eulogy to be given as Paddy lies in his coffin. Paddy hasn’t made many friends in his drunken journey from cradle to grave… there is a thundering silence… hemming and hawing and surreptitious glances at watches are taken as people become more and more uncomfortable. The minister looks pointedly at the pew where Paddy’s bingeing pals are seated. Finally one of them can’t take it any more and stands. Hat twisting in hand, Sean mumbles, “Paddy sure was good at marbles when he was a boy” and sits down to a collective sigh of relief – SOMEONE has said SOMETHING good about Paddy!

This story is to let you know that in case one of you has to give a eulogy for me, I was pretty good at marbles as a kid too! There is a fashion in children’s games – so one season,you can’t play anything but carrom, from the morning glass of milk to long past bedtime if you had early-to-bed parents like mine! Then again, three months later, during the next set of holidays, you’ll probably wonder what all that was about as you settle in to gilli-danda or golis (marbles) or kite-flying. The passing of seasons was noted by the games that were played collectively and the fruit that grew in that season – months and years were not particularly important…

January, of course, was the season for kites. For weeks, life was dominated by patangs, guddis, “fighters”, charaks (spools), saada (regular thread) and maanja (glass powder reinforced cotton thread for kite-fighting – for some reason, tubelight glass was supposed to be the best for this – no wonder streetlights in India in this season never burn – some enterprising maanja maker pinches them under cover of darkness!) Kites were flown either in maidans – of which Hyderabad had plenty those days – or on rooftops – also plenty because there were only houses, no apartment blocks had come to the city then! 

There was no staircase to the terrace in the house on which we lived and we either had to borrow a ladder (heavy, wooden ones)  from someone or clamber up the grill and reach over the parapet, catch hold of a pipe and pull oneself up – quite an athletic feat! Not being tall enough nor having long enough arms for this, I would try and try to clamber but keep sliding down, much to my frustration, till one day, when i was about ten… I actually managed to throw one leg over the parapet. Seconds later, I was UP there! Queen of all I surveyed, Tenzing Norgay’s and Edmund Hilary’s peer – the colony, in fact! Getting up there ranked on par with those very few REAL thrills that life offers – learning how to cycle, learning to swim and learning to fly a kite…

Being the Sankranthi season, sweets were also being made at home and in my innocence, I thought that that day’s kesari halwa was made to celebrate my equal-to-Everest climb! Halwa has always been “special” in my eyes – for this!

HALWA/RAVA KESARI

• Semolina – 1/2 cup
• Sugar – 3/4 to 1 cup – depepnding on the sweetness of your tooth!
• Ghee – 1/3 cup
• Milk – 1/2 cup
• Water – 1 cup (a little more or less) OR 1 cup carrot juice – boiled (to make you feel virtuous about your vegetables!)
• Cashewnuts / slivered almonds / raisins – 2 tbsp each
• Saffron – 1 few strands
• Cardamoms – 3 – powdered with a tsp of sugar
• Kesar or orange colour – 1 pinch (optional)
• Edible camphor (pachakarpooram) – a tiny sliver – like a pinky nail trimming!
• 1 pinch salt ( a pinch of salt in any sweet dish is a good idea – it also fools the tastebuds into thinking it’s sweeter so you need less sugar!)

Heat one tbsp ghee in a pan. Add the cashewnuts and toast for a minute. Add the almonds and raisins and continue to toast till golden. Remove and set aside.

Roast the semolina in the same pan for about 5-6 minutes till you get a nutty fragrance. Set aside.

In a larger pan, heat the water and milk mixture, reserving a little. When it starts boiling,add salt, lower the heat and add the semolina a little at a time, stirring continuously. This is very important otherwise you get yucky lumps! Cover and cook for 3-4 minutes till the water and milk are completely absorbed. Add the rest of the liquid if needed.

Open, add the sugar and the colouring, saffron, cardamom and camphor and mix thoroughly. Decorate with the nuts and raisins.

Go fly a kite!!

(Pic courtesy internet)

Come every Sankranti and I’d be one happy little girl in a paavadai-chokka, twirling  round and round till the skirt puffed out around us and we sat down with a most satisfying “bussss” , clapping hands with my friends as we chanted…

Chamma chakka, chaaradesi mogga,

Atlupoyanga, aaraginchanga

Mutyaala chamma chakka mugguleyyanga

Ratnaala chamma chakka, ranguleyanga

Pagadaala chamma chakka pandireyanga

Ammaayi pelli… .something something… i forget the rest!

But here’s a link to the song – the tune is not quite right, it seems to me – I always sang it to a  different tune, but this will do 😉 

This was one time of the year that I did not mind being woken up early, even in Hyderabad’s chilly winters – for the pleasure of drawing muggulu (kolam/ rangoli/ rangavalli/ designs drawn in the front yard with rice powder to decorate a house) – an art form that i absolutely loved! We had an old Iyer maami who lived with us and cooked for us and I spent many somnolent summer afternoons learning how to do this from her….Poor soul, we used to tease her by calling out “maami, maami” and then when she came, pretend that we had actually called Tommy, the dog! Children can be pretty awful sometimes, I swear! 

Anyway, these winter mornings, I’d be woken up early, given a glass of milky coffee – a treat! – and then would sit down outside to draw ENORMOUS muggus which covered our front garden. If, in a fit of virtue, my mother decided that I was still too little for coffee and insisted I have the usual Ovaltine (loathsome stuff!), I could quite happily dispose of it among the rose bushes with no one being any the wiser! That’s when I understood the concept of win-win games though when I was small, it was called “quietly pour the Ovaltine away without anyone seeing it” game!

Much as I loved the muggus themselves, they came with an unwanted “side effect”! Once the rangoli or muggu is drawn, small lumps of cowdung are shaped into little conical thingies, placed on the design and decorated with turmeric and kumkum and flowers. These thingies are called gobbemmalu. Cowdung?! No way I was going to touch it! So this part of the work had to be done by someone else, usually our maid. Cowdung patties were used as fuel so most people were used to doing this. It was only us kids who went ‘euugghhh!’ at the thought of picking up what came out of a cow’s nether parts!

Festival food was always a delight and pongal, chakkara pongal (both recipes appear earlier in these chronicles), mukkala pulusu were longed-for treats. Today’s dish is another festival dish – coconut rice – with a difference.

COCONUT RICE/KOBBARI ANNAM/THENGA SAADAM

• Cooked rice – 2 cups
• Grated fresh coconut – 2/3 cup
• Boiled fresh peas – 1/2 cup
• Green chilies – slit – 2
• Salt
• Pepper – 1 large pinch

TEMPERING

• Sesame oil – 1 tbsp
• Ghee – 1 tsp to fry cashewnuts
• Cashewnuts – 10-12 -halved
• Garam masala – 1 pinch (optional)
• Mustard seeds – 1/4 tsp
• Chana dal – 1 tbsp
• Urad dal – 1 tsp
• Jeera (cumin seeds) – 1/2 tsp
• Asafoetida – 1 large pinch
• Curry leaves – 2 tbsp – crisp up in the microwave for 2 minutes.
• Chopped coriander – 1 tbsp

Heat the ghee, add cashewnuts and roast on a low flame till golden. Add garam masala, if using and mix. Take out of the saucepan – otherwise the cashewnuts will contine to roast and burn. 

Add the oil, Heat and add mustard seeds and chana dal. When the seeds splutter, add the urad dal and let dals both roast to a golden yellow – about 30 seconds. Add the jeera, asafoetida, green chillies and boiled peas. Stir well. Add the salt  and coconut. Crush the crisped up curry leaves over. Add chopped coriander leaves and rice. Switch off and mix everything together well. Serve with vadas, appadam, a salad and a vegetable on the side.

I promise to sing you chamma, chakka to the right tune one day!

“Shhh, Kanch, your mother is singing such a lovely song. Don’t talk”, says Tara, Kanchu’s friend from infancy, trying to shush the kid who will NOT be shushed! Both are about two years old and Tara is spending the day at our home. Having lunched, it’s nap time and I’m singing a hoary Telugu lullaby “Aayi, aayi aayi, aapadalu kaayi… zzzz… ” – a song that is completed to the accompaniment of snores from the singer – it has invariably put me to sleep before the baby! 

Tara DOES manage to shush me however – my singing has been called many names, many four-letter names even, which I, being a magnanimous sort of creature – have forgiven the name callers for! But no one, NO ONE, has ever called it lovely!! I still cherish the moment 😉 Today, when I sing, it is generally to the accompaniment of groans from an unappreciative family!

Was a little worried about what I’d give them for lunch – Tara is a picky eater and prefers meat-based dishes. We are an eggetarian household and remembering the Dennis cartoon strip about saying grace. But there’s only vegetables today. What do I have to thank God for? I was wondering whether she’d eat anything at all! Anyway I could always whip up an omelette – was my thought.

I needn’t have worried – the kid not only ate but actually asked for seconds – of spinach! My lunch that day was a very simple dal, spinach mashiyal (is exactly what it sounds like – mashed up, cooked spinach with tempering), roast potato and rice. 

I still don’t get why kids in comic strips are supposed to say yuck to spinach and that there’s a whole comic character created for the specific purpose of getting American kids to eat the green stuff – POPEYE! American consumption of spinach went up by a third after Popeye appeared!! wow! like WOW!

All they needed to do was to make spinach like THIS.

KEERAI MASHIYAL

• Spinach (palak) or amaranth(thotakoora/molakeerai) – 2 bundles – washed well and chopped any which way!
• Coconut oil (preferred) or any cooking oil – 1 tsp
• Red chili – 1 or 2 – cut into pieces – easiest way to do this is with the kitchen scissors
• Mustard seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Asafoetida – 1 large pinch
• Urad dal – 1/2 tsp
• Jeera (cumin) seeds – 1/4 tsp
• Turmeric – 1 pinch
• Grated fresh coconut and / or 2 tbsp cooked toor dal.
• Salt

Cook the spinach on high in a microwave for 3 minutes until wilted. Pulse it for 2-3 seconds in a mixer or use a bar blender to mash it a little. Set aside.

Heat the oil in a large pan and add the mustard seeds. When they pop, add the urad dal, red chilies and cumin. When the dal turns golden yellow, add the asafoetida and turmeric.Add the spinach and salt and cook for three minutes or so till the spinach has reduced completely and there isn’t too much water left. Do NOT, at any stage, discard the water – you will lose valuable nutrients. Add the coconut and / or cooked dal. Mix well and switch off.

Serve as a side with rice and sambar and a roast vegetable. Or with rotis.

Psst… and if you really don’t like spinach, it’s not all it’s hyped up to be – the idea of spinach as an iron-rich food was due to a mistake – with the scientist who transcribed his notes misplacing a decimal point  – thus making 3.5 mg of iron per 100 gm of spinach to 35 mg of iron – no wonder Popeye’s muscles popped up! It IS a very good source of other nutrients though – Vits  A, K, B6, B2, E and C and lots of minerals. 

Shall I sing you a lullaby? 😉