Anu Chenji

Kanch comes back home from work super-excited. “Guess what A (her boss) lent me today?”

With Kanch, my experience has been that the ‘guess what’ question could have answers ranging from a virus to a ragi biscuit to an elephant – all equal sources of excitement! So I don’t dare hazard a guess – yesterday’s source of excitement could just as easily be today’s “oh, that’s so lame” – rather difficult to keep up with, to say the least!

So the rest of us have developed a coping strategy – “WHAT, WHAT, WHAT, what??” in equally excited tones is the way to get a coherent answer and to share the latest rage! She thrusts out a book and I read the title “Enter the Kettlebell”… any of you who knows without reading this post what a kettlebell is merits a 3-course meal at home – you can pick what you want from my blog and I’ll make it for you, I promise! And if you’re working in the fitness industry, sorry that automatically disqualifies you! 

Back to the book – like it was a serious glossy book by a guy to improve strength and sub-titled (i am NOT making this up, i swear!!) “Strength Secret of the Soviet Supermen”. Like, wow!! and WOW!! Giving me ideas for books like “Come, Rediscover the Joys of the Tava” or “Enter the Wok”!! Why not?? Soliciting feedback from my viewers here, please…

Back to the kettlebell contest. Kettlebells – as I learnt a few months ago – are a sort of advanced free weights used to build strength. Get that? Well, I didn’t either – till saw the thingummies – and so, am including a pic up there in the images section for you to figger! Ok, Kanch is peeking over my shoulder as I write this and falling over herself with giggles so let me get the ‘correct’ dope from her! I quote “It’s a type of weight – an alternative to barbells or dumbells  with which you can do ballistic movements”. Duh? Superman kinda stuff, i’m guessing??

With an athlete and a swimmer to nurture and an aunt who’s a nutritionist, the quest has been to make meals as nutritionally balanced as possible. Tough task when all the yummy things seems to be bad for you!! But with a daughter who just doesn’t snack – no samosas, no chips, no masala peanuts and get this – NO VADAS (makes me suspect that she has no Nemali genes at all)!! – i still have to provide up to six square meals a day for her!! While slow food has been the order of our lives all these decades, I do need shortcuts once in a while. Here’s something I came across – healthy, quick and nutritious – meeting all of Kanchu’s requirements!

THE SCOTTISH SKIRLIE

The quantities are basically andaaza – meaning make ’em up as you go along but am giving some idea here.

• Onions – chopped – 1/2 cup
• Oats – 1.5 cups
• Paneer or cottage cheese or any crumbly cheese – feta would also do – 3/4 cup – grated
• Spinach – 1 cup – chopped
• Eggs – 2 or 3
• Salt
• Pepper
• Water – 2 tbsp
• Cooking oil or butter – 1 or 2 tbsp

Heat the oil or butter in a saucepan and fry the onions till translucent. Toss in the oats and toast till golden and aromatic.  Add one or two tbsp of water to soften the oats.Now add spinach and stir till it wilts. Salt it, pepper it, spoon it into bowls and top with a LOT of crumbled cheese. If you eat eggs, fry one or two for each bowl and serve on top. If not, add a few halved cherry tomatoes along with the spinach. See pic.

Serve it with a thin shorba or soup for a light but filling dinner. 

(Pics courtesy internet)

One of the very first dishes that my mother learnt to cook after moving to Hyderabad in the 50s was “chole”. Till then, the quintessentially Telugu growing up in Madras and Madanapalle and Guntur diet was a daily sambar and whatever ‘koora’ (dry vegetable / poriyal) happened to be made along with it. Boring – we thought! 

Hyderabad brought many new experiences to my parents. My dad had grown up in Bangalore, but being a “boy” (hmmm…of his generation!!!) had managed to eat his share of “exotic” foods outside the home. Mom, joining the medical services in Hyderabad and my dad being in the electricity board, suddenly found themselves at sea in a world which spoke shuddh “Dakhni” (the Hyderabadi patois which is a mixture largely of Urdu and Hindi with a smattering of Persian thrown in to leaven the dough!). My parents having neither Hindi nor Urdu and most definitely not Persian, though they were linguists otherwise, thought they had suddenly landed in a foreign country. My mom, being a doctor who could fluently converse in Telugu, Tamil, a reasonable amount of Kannada and Malayalam, found she had to converse with her patients in sign language, pointing to various organs for problems! 

Two days of this was enough. Before they had even found any domestic help, off they went, fired by the nation-building fervour of the post-Independence decade – to sign up for an Urdu teacher – a venerable maulvi with a long beard whose family became dear friends and whose daughter successfully fought her extended family to resist an early marriage and went on to become a doctor – inspired by mom! As though that was not enough, they also signed up for lessons from the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha (the DBHPS).

Life was very full – with doctoring and housekeeping and learning TWO languages simultaneously. Every evening when the maulvi was due at home, my mother would have a long list of words for him to translate – her lessons were never of the “Pat sat on the mat” (Radiant Reader class one!) or ” The pen of my aunt is on the table” (high school French text which almost inevitably was translated by generations of French hopefuls to be “The table is on – or maybe inside – my aunt with the pen above her (floating??)”!! Rather her sentences were all about “Do you have a pain?”, “Do you have a pain in your stomach/liver/chest?”, “Are you vomiting?” or whatever! Even today my mother’s Hindi/Urdu – which she rattles off fluently, if not quite correctly – to the shopkeeper giving him a list of provisions to deliver – sounds like  a medical examination! 

The Hindi scene was also rather funny. Those days, the DBHPS, in an attempt to encourage the learning of the language, allowed adult students to “pass” the basic exam if they could copy out the question paper – since that meant they’d learnt the akshar (script)! 

In between all of those, she also managed to pick up stuff like baghara baingan, chole and pulao and many other things which were considered “exotic”! 

We all of us loved her chole but I, of course, had to experiment and try different types of it till I found the ONE way of making this which I thought was the best! So here goes my own family’s favourite:

AMRITSARI CHANNA

• 250 grams white chickpeas (channa) 
• 2 Tea Bags 
• ½ “ ginger – crushed 
• 2-3 cardamoms – big ones 
• Salt to taste 
• Raisins – 1 tsp 
• To dry roast and powder: 
• ( 1 bayleaf 
• 4 cloves 
• 1.5 “ cinnammon 
• ½ tsp black pepper 
• 1 tsp. cumin 
• 1 tsp whole dry coriander seeds 
• ½ star anise 
• 3 red chillies ) 
• ½ tsp dry ginger powder 
• 2 tsp amchur (dry mango powder) or 2 tsp tamarind paste 
• 1 tsp jaggery or sugar 
• Grated nutmeg – 1 pinch 
• Asafoetida – just a sprinkle 
• ½ tsp turmeric 

To garnish: 

• 2 Green Chillies – sliced 
• 2-3 Tomatoes – cut into 8 long pieces each 
• 1” ginger – julienned 
• 2-3 tsp fresh coriander – finely chopped 
• 2 Table spoon Ghee 

Dry roast all the ingredients in brackets – from the bay leaf to red chilies. This must be done on low heat and for about 2-3 mins till you get their aroma. Take off the heat and transfer to a grinder. Let it cool and then powder – not too smooth. Set aside. 

Soak channa in cold water overnight. Rinse and add fresh water – abt 2 cups. Slow cook or pressure cook with the tea bags, cardamom and crushed ginger. Channa should be soft but still separate. 

Discard the teabags. 

In a large saucepan, heat the ghee. Add raisins. When they swell and shrink again, add bayleaf and one sliced onion (optional). Add channa and our fresh masala powder, salt to taste, amchur or tamarind paste, ginger powder, nutmeg ,turmeric, asafoetida and jaggery. 

Simmer this for about 20 mins on a very low flame. 

To serve: Plate this and sprinkle with the ginger – fried till crisp and pieces of tomato on top. Sprinkle with fresh coriander. 

Serve with roti or bread or puris. By itself as a snack too. The slow-cooked way is overnight in a crockpot. 

And, oh, aapka kaleja theek tho hai na? (hope your liver is doing okay?) 😉

(pic courtesy internet as I forgot to shoot mine!!)

It’s Christmas Eve, 2002 and we are deep inside Sri Lanka – at a beautiful resort – the Sigiriya Village. I have already fallen in love with Sri Lanka – a land of gentleness – whether it is the landscape or the people or the very musically gentleness of the language itself! Where else in the world could man have built an orphanage for baby elephants??!

Having just climbed 1200 steep rock cut steps to the top to see the famous and stunningly beautiful rock paintings – and then back again, we were ravenously hungry and since the resort was dressed up to the gills – full of tourists from Germany and Austria ready to make merry at Christmas, we went into the restaurant – a huge football field-sized affair with a buffet dinner laid out all around. Tables groaning with food and stomachs growling in anticipation, we pick up our plates and start walking around… and round and round… looking for vegetarian food – any vegetarian food! I do one round and find some plain steamed basmati rice – yay! Where there is rice, there must be some food for us herbivores, right? After all, if the people of this country could build an entire orphanage for the largest herbivore on land, they must surely have provided for the two-legged variety too??! Right?? Wrong!

Feeling sure that I must have missed something, I go hopefully back to the salad bar – over a hundred salads and I examine each one carefully as the rice grows stone cold (or as we say in not-so-polite Telugu – pilli ucchha madiri – meaning as cold as cat’s piss! Another interesting line of thought – who then was the first man ( i don’t think any woman would have been so foolish!) to think of what temperature this could be and then stick his finger – let’s give him some credit  and say it was a pinkie finger! underneath the cat as it tried to find a private place to mind its business!). Back to the salad bar – not a hope – everything has some form of seafood – whether powder or flakes or a fish sauce – to dress it with. Finally, i disconsolately pick up a few carrot sticks and head back to our table to compare notes with family and our friends with whom we are traveling. No one’s had  any luck 🙁

Husband has a brainwave and flags the waiter over. Man bends over us very solicitously.

“Merry Christmas” says my husband.

“Thank you, sir and the same to you too!” he beams back. They smile at each other for a few seconds as the waiter begins to grow nervous. “Anything I can do for you, sir?”

“Oh, no, just wanted to see a happy face. You see, it’s Christmas and this is all we could find to eat” says husband, looking completely woebegone (he’s very good at it!), holding up his plate to display some rice and three sticks of carrot he had arranged artistically on the rice in the hope of making it look more appetising! 

It works! The waiter looks shocked, rushes off, returns with the manager – all apologies – and an offer of several vegetarian dishes – we have to keep telling them that it must not contain anything that moves! Twenty minutes later, arrangements are made for these people from India who couldn’t find anything to eat from the hundreds of dishes they had!

Despite the fact that vegetarian food is a problem to find in the interior of Sri Lanka ( i carried pickles and podis!), i learnt from a wayside restaurant how to make one of the simplest and most delicious of chutneys – sambols – called pol sambol. 

POL SAMBOL

• 1 coconut – grated
• 4-5 red chilies or 1 tbsp red chili pwd 
• Shallots – spring onions – sambar onions – 1/2 cup
• Juice of one lemon
• Salt 

Pulse everything together in the mixer without any water. You should get a moist but grainy, powdery consistency. Eat it with anything – rice, appams, idiyappams. It makes a fantastic replacement for a dry curry  – if you don’t have time to cut and cook veggies. Just serve it with plain boiled dal and rice and an appadam – microwaved if you are on a diet.

And go bravely to Sri Lanka – even if you are a veggie!

Lungi securely tied up, a prisitine white banian with sleeves (in the days before t-shirts were invented!), talapaaga (turban) in the form of a rolled up towel tied around his head and giving many instructions to his underlings (us three children – bring this, bring that and the other!), my father would sit down to the arduous process of making shrikhand! To help himself along, he would commence the intense physical process by singing – loudly and completely off-key – from his repertoire of three songs – “Nandaamaya, guruda nandamaya” being first choice!

A conversation about gender roles with my fiercely feminist daughters this morning also led to a discussion on where we’d got our feminist genes from. While my mom fought for her right to a career outside of the home (unusual in her generation), my own definitions of gender were definitely shaped by my dad as well. While she did the cooking when there was no cook, it was my dad who took over the vegetable cutting (a big job in a family which was known for its large appetites!), tiffin dabba packing, ironing school uniforms – till we grew old enough to do it ourselves, the daily puja paath, the tying up of my hair in a pony tail when my mom was late – our school regulation two plaits with blue ribbons was beyond him so I used to take a note to school to be excused (aside: convent schools those days were terrorist organisations – going by the sheer number of rules and the punishments for infarctions and the number of notes we had to carry to be excused from stuff!). It was another matter that that pony tail tied by my dad was always so tight that i used to come back with a headache – at the ripe old age of seven!

I go back even further and realise that it was my grandmother – my dad’s mom – appamma – who laid the foundations for an equitable division of labour between her five daughters and five sons, teaching all of them to handle household tasks so the burden would not fall only on a few. Continuing that tradition, there were some things that ONLY my dad would do – one of these being the making of shrikhand. Those being the days when milk was not easily available, shrikhand appeared on the table only on special occasions – when dad was in the mood! Yogurt needed to made with a large quantity of milk, then strained, then whipped – and for the quantities that we could put away  – at least 3 litres of milk was needed. Even after the mixer made an appearance in the house – sometime in the ’70s, my dad would continue to do the beating of the yogurt by hand – insisting that this was the only way to get REALLY good shrikhand. Very much my father’s daughter, I still cannot get myself to make shrikhand with a mixer!

Some years ago,when Arch,  my older daughter was studying in Delhi and feeling very homesick, I wanted to send shrikhand to her with my husband who was planning a trip. Puzzling my head over how to make it last (it doesn’t freeze well), I managed to get hold of a blood bag (the kind of bag that is used to transport blood and plasma during wartime!) – unused, of course – and put a dabba of chilled shrikhand in it to send off. It puzzled the security guys at the airport no end but we managed to get cold shrikhand across to her to ward off homesickness blues!

Here it is.

SHRIKHAND

• 2 litres thick, fresh yogurt
• Sugar – 16- 17 tsp (sorry am not good with cup measures!
• Saffron strands – 1/2 tsp
• 1 or 2 tbsps milk

Tie the yogurt up in a thin muslin cloth – an old dupatta is great . Place the bundle in a large strainer or sieve over a large bowl so that the whey can collect underneath in the large bowl. Put the whoel thingummy in the frig for a few hours or overnight. This way, the whey gets strained out and the curd doesn’t go sour.

The whey can also be used to knead chappathi dough later.

Empty the thickened yogurt into a basin. Add the sugar, milk and the saffron and keep beating with a ladle- breaking up any lumps against the sides of the basin. Takes about 20 – 30 minutes of whipping to get the silkiest of shrikhands. Shrikhand tend to thicken up so incorporating milk helps to keep it the correct consistency.

Serve with pooris or if you’re on a diet, with rotis. Then keep sneaking spoons through the day!

 p.s. while i have mentioned pooris in the passing, letting them play second fiddle to the shrikhand, i have to admit that on one memorable occasion – just over a month ago, i realised while i watched pooris almost float up to the ceiling – they were that light – at the home of a friend’s mother in Mumbai, that pooris could do an item number on their own and didn’t really need an accompaniment! Thank you to Dipika for letting me meet her mom (Vibha Divetia) with the magic fingers and to Gujjus in general for mastering this art – no one can make pooris like them!!