Anu Chenji

Gloria, Victoria,

Gloria, Victoria, wieder, wieder witt bum hei SI SA… aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

We sing out out loudly and lustily in German as the music reaches a crescendo – except that the two voices in front with the mikes go wandering off in different directions seeking different heights! Herr Muller, our Direktor, looks down from his height of over six feet – first at one and then at the other, his mouth falling open – in equal parts with astonishment and horror – this is music? Happily for us, we were ignorant of the thoughts buzzing around in his head – “I’ve been told India is a land with a lot of music, people actually sing and dance on the streets at the slightest provocation, why even their romancing is by breaking out into song… what the heck are these two girls about??!! Herr Max Muller must have been a big, fat liar!”

We, that is my friend Shreesha and I, being the only two girls in the class and shorter than all the guys (it also helped that we were the apples of our teacher’s eyes!!), had been fondly placed by him in front of the stage to sing, along with the rest of our Mittelstufe class which was passing out, the German folk songs we had learnt during the semester. We were the shortest, so he put us at the front of the stage with a couple of mikes – rather like handing Dennis the Menace the keys to the fire station! We wreaked such havoc on stage with our loud and tuneless singing that I heard later they closed down the Institute!

BUT, Herr Rajan, our teacher, was such a good teacher that I can still sing (ahem, after a fashion but I swear I know ALL the words.  The tune is minor technical matter!!) many German songs!

My first exposure to desserts outside the home – payasams and kesaris and chakkara pongals came with a German dessert that is still a favourite across hotels in India – and deservedly so – the Black Forest Gateau!

During serious baking experimentation days (every cook goes through this phase!), pretzels – which for a long time i thought were American – appeared on my menu but very little else by way of German food. 

 Today I decided to make mini baked doughnuts but the holes got overfilled with batter and so I converted them into mini Bundt cakes with a ganache filling! Incredibly quick to make, these are really delicious for tea and surprisingly low in fat.

MINI BUNDT CAKES WITH CHOCOLATE GANACHE

• 1 cup maida – plain flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/3 cup sugar – granulated
• Cinnamon powder – 1/4 tsp
• Nutmeg powder – 1/4 tsp
• Butter – 1 tbsp – melted
• Buttermilk or yogurt  – 1/3 cup
• 1 egg – beaten

Mix all the dry ingredients together. Add the butter, buttermilk and egg and fold through to get a light batter. Using a piping bag, pipe the batter into a mini baking doughnut pan with 12 holes till almost the top (see pic for pan). This way, when you turn out the doughnuts, you get a hole only at the top into which the ganache can be filled. Bake at 160 C for about 18-20 minutes till springy to the touch. Cool and turn out onto a plate.

FOR GANACHE:

• Dark cooking chocolate – 50 gm
• Cream – 4. tbsp

Melt together in a double boiler till glossy and gooey. Fill each of the holes in the mini bundts.

You can sing as lustily and as tunelessly as you want while making them!

A very worried inside six year-old is being gotten ready for a trip to the airport – a very big deal in the 60’s. Worried and not able to ask anyone because I was painfully shy (i swear i was, really!) – for reassurance.

“How will you speak to your dad? Don’t you know he’d have forgotten Telugu (our mother tongue) completely and will speak only in English. He’s been away for so long” – our neighbour and much older boy, the oracle of our lives those days, Jitin, tells me as we prepare to leave for the airport. In an almost six year-old’s life, two years is a very long time. My dad, having spent two years in France on a study-cum-work programme, was arriving back home and for the past few weeks, we’d talked of little else – there was so much news to tell him, you see.

I had only a faint memory of what he looked like – and that mostly from photographs. Until Jitin threw a spanner in my works by telling me that Dad would have forgotten Telugu! I could speak English but was incredibly shy about doing so! And so, during that car trip to the airport, my stomach was churning over – in equal parts with excitement and anxiety – all nails got bitten off in the process! Until I couldn’t BEAR it any more and managed to ask my mom about it in as small a whisper as I could muster whether it was true! My mom, being a kind sort of person, held back her laughter and reassured me that no, Daddy would NOT have forgotten Telugu!  Feeling slightly better, though not completely believing her (it was Daddy who was the arbiter of all disputes between us kids about who would win if a crocodile and an elephant fought, which was a bigger river – the Amazon or the Yang-tze, which was larger – a whale shark or a blue whale and so on and my Mom’s word on this was not to be relied on completely!), we did reach the airport and on to the tarmac to receive him – you really could – in those days! Tremendously relieved to find that I could still communicate with my father who had NOT forgotten Telugu, I was struck with a debilitating attack of shyness and did not muster up the courage to talk to him till just before going to bed! Then of course, the floodstream did not stop for days!

The news was a mixed bag of everything important to the lives of us small fry – a veritable smorgasbord of happenings for many months and news about the neighbour’s dog was mixed up with what was happening at school, the eagerness to recite the shlokas we’d learnt while he was away, how we’d watched a hen being slaughtered in the neighbour’s yard (by having it’s neck wrung off and then watching it run around for a full ten minutes before it dropped dead – so now I know EXACTLY what they you mean when you talk about running around like a chicken with its head cut off!) and so on… much like our dish of the day – batata poha – a mixture of everything good!

BATATA POHA (ATUKULU/AVAL UPMA) 

• Poha (beaten rice flakes) – 4 cups – wash and soak for 7-8 minutes before draining. Set aside.
• Potatoes – cut into thin fingers – 2 large
• Boiled green peas – 1/2 cup
• Onion – 1 chopped
• Ginger – 1″ piece – grated
• Green chilies – 4 or 5 – sliced
• Coconut – grated – 3 tbsp
• Peanuts – 1/2 cup – roasted
• Turmeric – 1/4 tsp
• Mustard seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Chana dal – 1 tbsp
• Urad dal – 1 tsp
• Asafoetida – 1 generous pinch
• Curry leaves – 2 sprigs
• Coriander and/or mint – 2 tbsp – chopped
• Lemon -1 large
• Garam masala – 1/4 tsp
• Sev – to serve – 1 cup (optional)
• Salt
• Sugar – 1 tsp
• Oil – 1 tbsp

Heat oil in a large saucepan (you need plenty of room to manouevre on this one!) and add the mustard. When it splutters add chana dal and stir for a few seconds. Add the urad dal and let both fry till a golden brown – about a minute. Add the onions and green chilies and fry till golden. Add the ginger and turmeric. Add potaotes and a couple of tbsp of water. Cover and cook till potaotes are tender. Add the soaked poha, salt, sugar, coconut, green peas and garam masala. Stir all together and cover and cook for a couple of minutes more.Add peanuts and squeeze the juice over and stir.

To serve, place the poha on a plate, sprinkle herbs and sev and serve immediately before the sev loses it’s crispness. What makes this dish such a favourite is the contrast of flavours and textures. Makes a superb breakfast with a cup of yogurt and pickle.

And poha in Telugu (atukulu) is just as sweet 🙂

* Stir fried wikipedia with pimientos ……. 168 Y

* Stir fried wikipedia ………………………….. 168 Y (i’m guessing its wiki which is the expensive ingredient here!)

* The meat miss the bean curds………………….. Y (huh? what did it catch then??)

* The meat fries the mushroom ………………… Y (am sure you can give the chef a few days off, right?)

* The temple explodes the chicken cube……….. Y (wow…. and you want us to eat here? I dare not even pray!)

* Wheat joss stick cow willow…………………… Y (ahh… errr… ummm… hmm… still thinking about this one!)

* Fried rape with dried mushroom………………. Y (hmm… imported from Delhi?)

* The city flavour explodes a belly……………….. Y ( well, they’re honest!)

* Fry to infuse bowel………………………………… Y (err… no, i’d rather not… just now!)

and most tellingly of all…

* Fry Mao ……………………………………………… Y (if anyone ever doubted where China stands today!)

List of items on a menu in China!

Travel in China is always an education and sometimes a veritable quadratic equation – go figure exactly what “stir fried wikipedia” is!! A couple of years ago, my husband spent a good deal of time traveling in the interior of China. Even in the major cities of the East, it’s very, very tough to get by because of the language. In cities two thousand miles in the interior, life was, to put it mildly, a tough one! Being a vegetarian was tough enough but trying to get across the concept of vegetarianism was well nigh impossible. A vegetarian friend of his had smartly come prepared with all the words for “no meat, no fish, no shark, no eels, no octopus” and so on and carefully went through the list with a waiter in a restaurant thinking that he’d cracked it. The chef and the waiter put their heads together and went through the list and came back with the one thing they figured he could eat, the one item that our pal had forgotten to include in his list – chicken!

Hubby too had his share of troubles. He tries to explain carrots to a waiter and finally decided to draw one (with a colour pen) to make him understand. The waiter comes back – half an hour later – having successfully tracked down an orange-coloured umbrella!

He finally decided to click pictures of everything he needed on the phone camera – next time you want a carrot or peanuts or maybe just a loo, just show the pic!

Finally, he tracked down one item which was completely vegetarian and incredibly – rather tasty – incredible for a South Indian who can survive only on idli, dosa and thayir saadam (curd rice)! It was so good that he met the chef and managed, with the help of an interpreter to figure out how to make it. So now we have it as a regualr feature – I have no clue what it’s called in China but in our home, it goes under the moniker “Chinese breakfast”!

CHINESE BREAKFAST

• Atta (wholewheat flour)- 4 cups
• Capsicum – very finely chopped – 1 cup
• Beans – ditto – 1 cup
• Carrots-  ditto – 1 cup
• Spring onions – ditto – 1/2 cup 
• Green chilies – minced – 4
• Coriander – very finely chopped – 3 tbsp
• Red chili powder – 1/2 tsp
• Salt

Mix the flour with water and salt to a medium thick batter. Add all the other ingredients and whip well. Heat a saucepan and pour a few drops of oil on it. When it’s hot, sprinkle a few drops of water – the sizzling will ensure that the oil spreads all over the pan. Pour two ladlefuls of batter and spread out to a pancake about 2 mm thick. Pour a few drops of oil all around. Lower the heat and cover. Cook for about ten minutes till the bottom surface is golden brown and crisp. Turn over and cook uncovered for a further  7-8 minutes till brown bubbles appear on the bottom and it’s quite crisp. The centre stays quite tender.

Serve with pudina chutney or peanut chutney or if you have Gujju genes, with ketchup!

Better to make it in two or three pans on the stovetop – each of these takes 17-20 minutes to cook and you can get very hungry waiting!

You could always fry mao along with it!

Chennai at it’s best – in December and January. The mild chill in the air which brings out all manner of “winter clothing” among our “let’s avoid the cold, rumba jill-a irukku” (Tamil for “it’s very cold”) population! The strains of music from every sabha hosting the music festival, the sound of selangai (gajjelu/anklets) from Bharatanatyam performances, the rustle of silk saris as singers seat themselves on their stages and the swish of the silks as the audience takes its place, the myriad lights glittering off hundreds of diamond nosepins and above all, the simply wonderful smells of pongals, vadas, chutneys, sambars, rava dosas emanating from the temporary canteens in every sabha. I am sure that half the audience comes to these performances primarily for the food and secondarily only for the music or dance! I do know people who sneak in for the food only, tap their feet to a taal or two and then buzz off to the next sabha canteen to sample some more! These are the Chennai season aficionados – except the season we’re talking about is the pongal-vada season!

Much as I love this season here, my heart harks back to crisp winter mornings in Hyderabad where I grew up, the small bonfires by the roadside around which groups of people would be huddled warming their hands, how the air was always clearer and crisper somehow, of roasted corncobs by the roadside – twenty cobs to the rupee (!), of loose skinned “Nagpur” oranges with a sweetness to rival sugarcane juice… ooohh and that ganne ka ras (sugarcane juice) – worth every tummy upset I’ve ever suffered in consequence of too many glasses, and… hari boot! Those huge bunches of ferny greenery sold by the bundle where you had to look for the little pods and pop them open to get the sweetest of fresh garbanzo beans (fresh chickpeas). Sweet and mildly astringent at the same time, those pods had an incredible taste! 

About a year ago, we were in Bombay in the winter and wandering into a Gujarati provision store, were offered a handful of small, tender green beans – slightly smoky in flavour but they took me right back to ‘hari boot’ days! There was a large bowl of these at the counter and he offered them to all his customers till I demolished the bowl!

Then I found out that these seeds were called “ponk” and fell in love all over again – ponk, PONK, ponk!! How could you not love it?? Wiki tells me that these are green, immature sorghum grains and they are roasted under charcoal before the seeds are beaten out of them – no, I am NOT giving you a recipe for this here – get them from the neighbourhood Mr Patel then!

This recipe for hari boot will work provided:

• you manage to shell enough beans without the compulsive need to eat them as you shell them
• you don’t give into to this irresistable urge to eat them all raw!

HARI BOOT SNACK

• Shelled beans – 2 cups – steam for no more than two minutes – they cook really quickly like fresh green peas
• Chopped onions – 2 tbsp (optional – i prefer mine without!)
• Cumin powder – 1/4 tsp
• Chaat masala – 1 pinch
• Salt
• Juice of half a lemon
• Oil – 1 tsp

Heat the oil in a pan and add everything else except the lemon juice. Stir fry for about a minute and switch off. Squeeze lime over and eat quickly!

If the shells on the pods are very tender, don’t bother to remove them. Just heat the oil and add everything else. Cover and cook for ten minutes on a low fire stirring occasionally./Remove lid and roast for a few more minutes till the skin is crisp – the insides will still be tender. Eat with skin and all!

It’ll help you become a food aficionado, if not a particularly musical one!

An elephant orphanage? Wow, what a wonderful country to think of something so compassionate – is my first thought. Where else but beautiful, beautiful Taprobane? Running for your atlas? Or offering prasadam to google – unless you’re a trivia buff? Taprobane is what the Greeks knew the island of Sri Lanka as and according to Western legend, the inhabitants had one giant foot with which they protected themselves from the sun!! Huh??

I’ve fallen in love with Sri Lanka from the word ‘go’ – as we land in Colombo – with it’s cute little ‘toy’ airport (this was over a decade ago!). Friendly people with gentle, singsong voices, the beauty of the land itself – what more could one ask for??

An elephant orphanage – that’s what!

So off we set to Pinnewala by road. Never seen so many baby elephants together in one place… come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve seen so many babies of any one species, including the human – in one place! Watch the elephants being fed milk out of beer bottles. One particular li’l fella catches my eye – a naughty chap who wants more than his share of eight bottles (wonder whether he thought those bottles actually had beer in them?!) and chases his keeper round and round the gallery to much merriment from the audience.

Feeding over, we wander about looking at the few adult pachyderms feeding peacefully while the babies walk sedately back with full tummies. I am standing quietly by the side of the path (yes, i can be quiet, you know!), arms folded, watching a cute threesome – obviously pals – of baby elephants walk towards us on the path. The little rogue fella comes towards us with a twinkle in his eye – i swear! – and I smile thinking he’s probably found something to investigate – maybe sugarcane or a monkey or something. The next thing i know, I’m lying flat on the path – having been thoroughly butted right in the tummy!  I am sure to this day that he meant to do it! Grateful for two things – one that I hadn’t eaten lunch yet so it was only me on the path and nothing else! and two, that it was only a baby elephant – a small matter of a hundred and fifty kilograms or so!

Traveling in interior Lanka was a challenge for a vegetarian bunch. What saved us was the podis and pickles we carried. Rice and stringhoppers were easy to find everywhere. And so a diet of “kalanda saadams” (mixed rice varieties) along with the local chutney ‘pol sambol’ was what kept us alive till we got back to Colombo!

One of those rather unusual rice varieties – the usual suspects would be tamarind rice, lemon rice, tomato rice and so on – is the curry leaves rice. Ayurveda lists these properties of curry leaves: anti-diabetic,anti-oxidant, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, anti-carcinogenic AND it protects the liver from damage! And that’s just the leaves!  The roots are used for treating body aches and the bark to treat snake bite! Not to mention the high iron content – remember all the admonitions to “MINGU” (swallow!) the leaves so your hair would stay black and you’d score high on the maths exam!! Phew, with all that, why do we bother to eat anything else, I wonder 😉

 CURRY LEAF RICE (KAREPAK ANNAM / KARUVEPILLAI SAADAM)

• Cooked rice – 2 cups (Basmati or any other variety)
• Curry leaves- 1/2 cup – wash and drain
• Urad dal – 1 tsp
• Chana dal – 1 tsp
• Pepper – 3/4 tsp
• Cumin  seeds – jeera- 1 tsp
• Red chili – 1 or 2
• Oil – 1 tsp
• Ghee  – 1tsp
• Cashewnuts – 10-12 – broken in half
• Salt

Heat the oil in a small pan and fry the urad dal, chana dal, pepper and jeera. Add the curry leaves and fry till crisp. Or microwave the curry leaves for 2 minutes – they crisp up beautifully and retain the greenness. Let cool and powder. Mix in salt.

In a non-stick pan, heat the ghee. Add cashewnuts and fry on a low flame till golden yellow. Add the powder and the rice and mix well. Fry a few more leaves or microwave them and sprinkle on top. Serve with a roast potato or green plantain curry and chips.

You might try feeding it to that baby elephant too!