Anu Chenji

I think i’m going to cheat a bit today! 109 days of honesty and cooking deserves one let off day, right? Plus i’ve just had a glorious head massage and am sleepy as hell!

Winter, such as we have of it, has come to Madras and when I walk on the beach in the mornings, I see people – young, old, men, women, even children – bundled up and with a variety of head gear to protect their ears! Or is it that we are afraid that the wind might just whistle in one ear and out the other – i wonder??! “Romba jill-aa irukku, illiyaa?” (it’s very cold, isn’t it?) starts almost every conversation you overhear. And all the ear-protected heads nod in vigorous agreement. This – in a city where the minimum temperature last night was 24C! But yes, rombave jillaa irukku! (It is very cold indeed!)

One of my greatest sources of amusement (secret of course) are the many things people use to protect their heads. There  are multicoloured scarves, shawls, monkey caps with “jill” noses peering out and an innovation from a couple of years ago, a truly hilarious contraption that covers both ears with furry rabbity things and meets at the back of the head with a metal thingy – these come in designer tortoiseshell, tiger stripes, leopard spots and other animal patterns – meant to make the wearer look uber “cool”! In its own way, the total disregard for fashion IS very ubercool and I end up gazing admiringly at the “veshti and kurta” clad thatha (grandfather) on the beach, striding along listening to the “Suprabhatam” (or as one friend prefers to dub it – “Super-bhatam”!) with his ears firmly secured against the cold in tiger stripe ear muffs! 

But wait, this is a food blog and even i am determined to cheat, the meme should be cheat about food, right?

The food life on the beach is interesting. There’s a guy pounding away at aloe vera in a large steel vessel and dishing out glasses of fresh aloe vera juice, the ubiquitous tender coconut water seller who’s there in all weathers and who, in winter, is patronised only by the younger ones and “North Indians” who don’t know that this is not “correct” winter food! Brrrr… 24 C is VERY JILL indeed! Loads of guys selling fresh vegetables and fruit; a laughter club creating – and causing – much unintended hilarity (okay, not strictly food but hey, laughter CAN work up an appetite you know!), and what is the subject of my discourse today – winter foods. Thegelu (also called gengulu) in Telugu, Panankazhangu in Tamil, tender palm shoots in English and i don’t know what they’re called in Hindi. 

Plucked only in the winter, the shoots have two outer woody layers that you roast on an open fire or sigri – ok, i do mine on the gasflame now! – and when the skin is very sooty, peeled off. Then you peel off the outer sooty layer and the inner fibrous layer and split it in two longitudinally to get at the white heart  – called the chandamama (moon!) which is again thrown away! The rest of the “thega” is broken into inch-long chunks and chewed thoroughly before the very fibrous part is spat out!

Seems like a lot of work but it actually isn’t and the the woody, fibrous pulp is worth the trouble. High in fibre, it’s winter’s super food – helps you move what otherwise might get jammed up in the cold weather! 

Also, because you need to do such a lot of chewing to get at the heart of the matter, you feel satiated much earlier than you would with say, a samosa – ergo it’s a super diet food – the thega, i mean, not the samosa!

When I first moved to Madras and was still struggling with Tamil, I had this insane pica for thegalu – was also expecting my first child at the time and tried my best to get hold of them. No one seemed to understand what I wanted, even when i drew pictures of it – with colours and all – till one of the vendors near the bus stop where i used to wait for the bus to go home from office and whom i’d asked for thegalu earlier – actually sourced it for me from some market! And told me what the Tamil name was for this was. She became in my eyes, an instant Miss Chennai -what a beautiful soul!

Go chew – on my cheat food for the day!

If you ever wondered how kids growing up in the same household, born of the same parents – could be soooo…different, I’ll hazard a theory on place in the family having a role to play in this.

Archana, my older daughter, was the scarediest kitten ever – terrified of dogs and cats and almost every four-legged animal. I think the only things she wasn’t scared of were ants! One Deepavali, a friend of mine got her a small toy pup – the kind which, when you wind it up, runs across the floor, turns a somersault and sits up and begs – and is all of six inches tall! Arch, just a toddler then, was so terrified that she climbed up on to the dining table and refused to come down till i gave it away – to the neighbour’s little boy! Ditto for a remote controlled police car – which whizzed all over the floor faster than she could run! My nephew Shriram was thrilled with the car. 

Kanch, on the other hand, was known as “K the fearless”! She wanted to do battle with the whole world – crocodiles (the story features in an earlier chronicle), rats, nasty, yappy Pomeranians, bigger, older kids who dared to scare her “Akka”, dark rooms and bathrooms (since she was too little to reach the switches, she just made do in the dark!) till her older sister told her that she’d better be scared of the dark because things could come at you in those places!

On another occasion, I opened a cupboard in the kitchen and found – a mouse staring out at me. I don’t know which of us was more scared but I had the advantage of being able to scream! Kanch comes running into the kitchen and scolds the mouse roundly – ” Lat (rat!), you bad girl…go scare your amma, don’t scare my amma”! Having satisfactorily dealt with the intruder, she puts her fingers back in her mouth and strides off – all two feet of her – reputation intact!

If, as Ayurveda says,you are what you eat, you need to eat a lot of iron to become a fearless soul. Gory tales from around the world talk of drinking the blood of your enemy’s heart, a tiger’s testicles, rhinoceros’s horn, lion’s hearts and so on…methinks there are foods out there that need a really brave heart to eat them – live octopus (no, not kidding – apparently the tentacles, if not removed, can bite you in the mouth as you’re chewing!), maggot cheese from Sardinia – and as a bonus- you get to bite on the maggots, Chinese twice boiled pee eggs ( what did you think they were boiled in to give them that yellow colour and the strong smell of ammnia??!), scorpions squirmng on a stick…!

Luckily, for most of us lily-livered souls, there are alternatives to all these – and still get to be a courageous soul.

Here’s one that I favour – drumstick leaves – one of the highest iron-containing foods on earth – and you don’t to go deep sea fishing to get these!

The easiest way to make it is a masiyal – a stir fry.

DRUMSTICK LEAF MASIYAL (MUNAGAAKU / MURUNGA ELAI MASIYAL)

• Drumstick leaves – 3 cups – washed and drained
• Curry powder (koora podi) -dry roast 1 tsp each of toor dal, chana dal and moong dal, 1 large pinch of coriander seeds, 2 or 3 red chilies and a large pinch of asafoetida) and powder – 1 tsp
• Turmeric – 1 pinch
• Salt
• Sesame oil – 1 tsp
• Mustard seeds – 1/4 tsp
• Urad dal – 1/2 tsp
• Asafoetida – 1 pinch
• Cooked toor dal (optional) – 1 tbsp
• Grated fresh coconut – 1 tbsp
• Red chili – 1

Heat a pan and add the oil. Add the mustard seeds. When they pop, add the urad dal, red chili, asafoetida and turmeric. Add the drumstick leaves and a couple of tsp of water. Cover and cook on a low flame for 5-6 minutes – the leaves will soften and shrink considerably. Add salt, podi, cooked dal and grated coconut. Serve as a side with sambar or majjigapulusu ( moar kozhambu) or plain dal.

The next easiest thing to Dutch courage, don’t you think? 

“What shall I pack for your lunch today?” 

No matter who asked me this question  – mostly my dad, on some occasions my mother or any aunt or uncle who was visiting us – the answer was always the same – “koorannam” – (dry curry plus rice)! To this day,I love dry food and will eat the wet stuff – sambar rice and so on – only because i HAVE to! This distaste must have come out of innumerable occasions – weddings and suchlike – where I (unsuccessfully most of the time!) had to chase rasam saadam all over banana leaves! Most of the time it ended up on my lap and my neck and so on. This distaste does NOT run to curd rice(yogurt and rice) – also wet but dearly loved! It does to buttermilk and rice (majjigannam / moru saadam) – again a painful process of finishing your meal by licking off bits of your arm and wherever else it had run to! As kids, of course, we had many jokes about how elderly relatives would eat rasam and rice – by slurping it all the way up to their armpits – GROSS!

When Kanch was about 5 years old, she came back from school one evening and as we were eating dinner, she asked me, “Amma, what are bamiyans?” Explained to her that the words was ‘banyan’ and it was a type of tree. She looked puzzled – “I don’t think so, amma, i think they’re a kind of people”. Huh? What? So I asked her to tell me a little more about them thinking they were some esoteric Brazilian rainforest tribe she must have heard about in school – or something.

“They eat funnily” she says. 

“How?”

“See, they make a ball with their food and throw the ball into their mouth like this” – demonstrating with a “mudda” (lump of rice and dal she had in her hand) and of course, missing the target and splattering it all over her shirt! 

I am completely at sea by now. Then Arch, thinking very hard, comes up with, “Amma, I think she’s talking about Brahmins”!!

Much hilarity ensues, along with a lecture on sociology! 

My favourite dry “rices” are the pre-mixed ones – pulihora, podi rice, aavakai rice, even appadam and rice with ghee! Featuring today a very simple and yummy 

PUDINA RICE

•  Cooked rice – 3 cups
• Mint – pudhina leaves – washed – 1.5 cups
• Boiled peas or corn – half cup (optional)
• Onions sliced – 1/2 cup
• Green chilies – 2
• Red chili – 1
• Garlic – 2 pods
• Ginger – 1/2 ” piece
• Cinnamon – 2 ” piece
• Garam masala – 1/4 tsp (optional)
• Juice of one lemon
• Salt
• Sugar – 1/2 tsp

To temper 

• Mustard seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Chana dal – 1 tsp
• Urad dal – 1 tsp
• Jeera – cumin seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Curry leaves – 1 sprig
• Oil or ghee – 1 tbsp
• Asafoetida – hing – 1 large pinch

Heat the oil in a large pan. Add the mustard. When it pops, add the chana dal and fry for a few seconds. Add urad dal and jeera and fry for a few seconds more. Add curry leaves and asafoetida.

Grind mint, chilies, garlic, ginger, cinnamon to a smooth paste and add garam masala.

Add onions and fry till brown. Add mint paste and fry till it is quite thick and pasty – about 8-10 minutes. Add salt and lemon juice. sugar and rice and mix well till the grains of rice are well coated. Rest for ten minutes before serving with papad, a pickle and yogurt.

And by the way, I’ve solved the rasam and rice conundrum which has been eluding physicists and such others for decades – I now eat it ONLY out of a bowl!

My grandmother’s house in Ulsoor, Bangalore was not very large. I remember a large central room with a kitchen and a couple of rooms leading off it. There was a little strip of corridor at the back with a dark, old fashioned toilet – I was always terrified of going here and a bathroom with a built in “anda” fired by wood – to heat bathwater for the dozen plus people who lived here. My grandmom bore ten children in this house, brought them up, performed weddings and naming ceremonies and death rituals and the mundane business of feeding at least a dozen mouths at every meal. Relatives were always welcomed – to share whatever they had. 

What fascinated me most about the house was the enormous (to a very small me, that’s how it seemed though when I went back there a couple of years ago, the room seemed much smaller!) central ‘hall’ with a red oxide floor where they lived, ate, slept and to my wonder – where there were at least five or six kids studying at any point in time. During WWII, when paper was in short supply, the room was divided off into squares with a piece of chalk and each kid got his / her own ‘homework’ corner! “Rough work” in Math was done on the floor with chalk and then neatly copied into the precious notebook! At about six or seven, this seemed such a romantic thing to do and I remember pestering my mom to be allowed to get a red floor for our stone-paved house in Hyderabad so I could do the same too!

Baths for a dozen people in one single bathroom? My super efficient grandmother made do! That bathwater – super hot in cold Banglaore, smelling of woodsmoke as you were pummeled with oil and your skin scrubbed off (well, almost!) has given me a distaste for cold baths that has lasted a lifetime! Even in midsummer Madras, I need my hot water!

Like most households of that era, there was no breakfast but rather a large brunch. For people who needed to leave early, “saddannam” (pazhedu / left over rice soaked overnight and mashed to a thin pulp with buttermilk) and a lemon pickle to go with it served as breakfast. For us kids who were there on holiday, this was sheer torture! We were used to having a substantial breakfast early in the morning before setting off to school and to have to wait till ten or eleven for our first meal of the day created unbearable hunger pangs! Suddenly, we became extremely fond of morning walks – with our kindhearted mom – the walk lasted all of a couple of furlongs – to the nearest Udupi joint where we sustained ourselves with masala vadas and dosas – for a couple of hours till brunch was served! The quantities that we could put away at lunch meant that no one was the wiser about the sneakily eaten breakfast!

One of my favourite foods at home – from the magical hands of my appamma  (my aunt Shanta makes it just like “mom made it” now and also makes it for me every time I visit her in Bangalore – she’ll never see the last of me! ) – was the very South Indian salad called “koshumbri”. Made specially for the Rama Navami festival, it was also made occasionally on request! Every time  they serve a ‘green salad’ in a restaurant – basically a few pieces of cucmber, carrot, tomato and onion with a whole green chili on top – I can practically ‘see’ my grandmom turning up her nose at the chef’s idea of cuisine!

So, if you don’t want my grandmom (and yours too, i bet) turning up her nose in disdain, do make this!

KOSHUMBRI

• Moong dal (green gram/ pesara pappu/ paitham paruppu) – 1 cup – soaked ofr a hour and drained
• Cucumber – chopped fine  – 2 cups
• Carrot (optional) – grated – 1/2 cup
• Raw mango – grated – 1/2 cup (if not available, squeeze lemon over the salad at the end)
• Coconut – grated – 1/2 cup
• Chopped coriander – 2 tbsp
• Minced green chilies – 2 or 3
• Salt

To temper:

• Sesame oil – 1 tbsp
• Mustard seeds – 1 tsp
• Asafoetida – 1 generous pinch
• Curry leaves – chopped – 2 sprigs ( i prefer to microwave whole curry leaves for a minute on high till they are crisp and crush them by hand over whatever dish i’m making. This way, they don’t get pushed to the side of the plate or spat out!)

 Mix all the salad ingredients together and temper. Squeeze the juice of 2 small or one large lemon over the salad at this stage if no raw mango is available. 

Aside: Wiki tells me that ‘kachumbari’ is a Swahili word originating from ‘kosambri’ or ‘kachumber’ in Sanskrit and also meaning a chopped salad – how cool is that??!

“SK…RUNCH” she goes and her teeth gleam white in the darkened cinema hall as she bites into an apple plucked straight off a tree! And I fall in love all over again – no, not with her or the dude next to her or with any hero chasing a girl around a tree but for the product that dances its way across the screen after that first scrunch. 

The jingle is still fresh in my memory:

Vajradanti, vajradanti

Vicco Vajradanti.

Toothpowder, toothpaste.

Ayurvedic jadi-bootiyon se bana

sampoorna swadeshi

Toothpowder, toothpaste.

Viccoooo. Vajradanti!

That was 1984 and I still use the product and can sing (after a fashion!) the jingle. A couple of years ago, when we were holidaying in the Himalayas, we stayed in an apple orchard and the very first thing i did was to pluck an apple off a tree and bite into it – singing said song!! Thank goodness my children were not around to witness the corniness – would never have lived it down! But a kind friend (thank you, Dipika!) filmed the whole sequence and played it back to squeals of amused disdain from my children! 

Growing up in the South of India with not an apple tree in sight but eating them from the market (they might as well have come from a cow for all i knew), seeing them actually growing on trees was something of a wonder for me – the first time I did was when I was about ten years old, on a school trip to Kashmir (more about this in another anecdote). Apples and walnuts are forever asociated with Kashmir in my mind and are two of the many yummy things to come out of that state. 

A dish made with both has to be a marriage made in heaven, right? 

Here goes a recipe for 

APPLE AND WALNUT MUFFINS – makes 12

• 1 apple – any crunchy variety (i have an version to the woolly ones) – peel and cut into 1/2 cm cubes and drizzle 1 tsp lemon or orange juice over. Set aside.
• 1 and 3/4 cups flour – maida – sifted with 1.25 tsp baking powder and
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon powder
• Sugar – 3/4 cup
• Butter – 50 gm melted to a deep golden brown along with 50 gm sunflower oil – set aside
• Toasted walnuts – 1/2 cup
• Vanilla essence – 1 tsp
• 1 egg
• 1.5 cup yogurt – whipped

 Mix the dry ingredients together – flour, baking powder, cinnamon and sugar in a large bowl.

In another bowl, mix togther the egg melted butter, yogurt, vanilla essence. 

Preheat oven to 160C (325 F). Prepare 12-muffin tray with paper / silicone cups.

Working quickly, pour the wet ingredient mix into the dry along with the apples. Fold togther till just holding. Drop into prepeared muffin cups. Dot with walnuts and bake at 160C for about 30 minutes till a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Rest for 20 minutes. 

Bite in, singing “Vajradanti, vajradanti…..”

You’ll be a convert for life – to both the toothpaste and the muffins 🙂