Anu Chenji

“Allo… allo… hiss… crackle… splutter… one glass bellam… rice….milk… ” goes the line before getting completely cut off. I think i know the ingredients now and I have my mother’s genes – we shall make do, somehow! 

The call was to my aunt – Kalyani pinni – one of those super cooks in my family – and this was soon after I’d gotten married and shifted to Madras. My very first Sankranti (Pongal) in my new home and i wanted to impress my guests with my chakkara pongal (sweetened rice desert). Not having the slightest clue how to go about it was no deterrent to ambition (more of my mom’s genes)!! My aunt’s chakkara pongal was world famous in Madras 😉 and so the call was to her.

Unfortunately, this being the 1980s, it was not so easy to get  a telephone connection and our connection was still some months away on the waitlist. If I needed to make a call, I had to run down, cross the road to the medical shop opposite (honestly, those days i think there were more medical shops in India than telephone connections!) and yell at my loudest over an uncertain connection at a decibel level above the noise of the traffic. Getting a recipe over a line like this was quite an affair. The pharmacist was used to people coming in and making calls on business or matters of urgency and must have been quite a repository of other people’s lives, i guess, but this was probably the first time he’d listened in on a call for an “urgent” recipe! By the time I finished and turned around, I found I’d gathered quite an audience all eager to learn how to make chakkara pongal! They say we all touch people’s lives in many ways that we are unaware of – my aunt definitely taught a bunch of interested strangers of many creeds and colours how to make a super dessert!

Remember that I had an uncertain “recipe” at best and so i made do – the first one was just about passable but today it’s my chakkara pongal that is world famous in Valmikinagar!! (Modesty is not my middle name, you see!)

You don’t need an uncertain line for this one!

CHAKKARA PONGAL

• Rice – 1 cup – washed
• Jaggery – 1.5 – 2 cups (grated)
• Kalkand (rock sugar/misri) – 2 tbsp
• Milk – 1.5 cup
• Coconut milk – 1 cup
• Water – about 2 cups
• Green cardamom – 3 – peeled and powdered (the easiest way to do this is to pound it in a mortar and pestle with 1/2 tsp of sugar – you get a really fine powder)
• Edible camphor ( pacha karpooram) – 1 small pinch
• Saffron – a few strands – mix with one tbsp of warm milk and set aside
• Cashewnuts and almonds – slivered – 2 tbsp
• Raisins  – 2 tbsp
• Ghee – 1/2 cup (and don’t let any dieter talk you out of this!)

Fry the cashewnuts, almond slivers and raisins ina little ghee and set aside. In a heavy-bottomed vessel, cook the rice in a mixture of milk and water. When the rice is almost done, add the coconut milk, jaggery and kalkanda and continue to cook till rice is very soft and the whole thing is blended well. Add the ghee and cook for a further 3-4 minutes, stirring frequently. Add the camphor, cardamom and saffron milk and mix well. Switch off, let rest for a few minutes before decorating with nuts and raisins and serve. It’s even better the next day! Ask the guys around the telephone at the medical shop!

( pic courtesy internet)

For the longest time, I was convinced that Venkateswara Swamy ( Balaji/the Lord of the Seven hills/Perumal/Edukondalavaadu) and my father, coicidentally named Venkatesh were the same “person”. My dad had the same rounded chin, chubby cheeks and even features that Lord Venkateswara is represented with – in all his portraits – maybe these pics were based on N.T.Rama Rao’s portrayal of the god!

As children, there was an implicit acceptance of a “god” figure that in teenage years one questions so deeply! Faith was not a word that we knew particularly but was rather a part of life. In the same way that kids of my generation went wherever the parents took us – whether Tirupathi or grandparents’ house or any aunt/uncle/friend of theirs whose homes we visited  for holidays/transitory passing ‘throughs’ – in our childhood eyes, these were random things which just ‘happened’ and that we did not even think of questioning! The result, of course, was a rather blissful and blissfully ignorant existence till something came along to disturb it!

Life, in short was about ‘eat, sleep, do last minute mugging for exams’ while you wished earnestly that you were that cow placidly chewing cud in the maidan which didn’t have exams and report cards and parents’ signatures being needed on said report cards!

…Or that dog lounging on the street whose blissful existence precluded having to stand in a line, shiveringly awaiting your turn to get a smallpox shot (yep, back in the dark ages, we still had to take these!), the only consolation being that every other kid in the colony was also standing in the same line! Mothers were generally kind and there was always something extra special – a treat awaiting you at home for lunch. For some weird reason, my favourite for a long while was not a sweet but the very ordinary “majjiga pulusu” (moru kozhambu/kadhi/yogurt-based soup). Some of the best prasadams I have eaten in the many Venkateswara temples which dot the South of India have involved perugu – yogurt in some form or the other.

Presenting yet another dish of the gods:

MAJJIGA PULUSU

• Slightly sour yogurt – 2 cups – churned with one cup water
• 1.5 cups vegetables – ashgourd / chowchow (again!) / shallow fried chaamagadda (arvi/colocasia)/ lauki / shallow fried long pieces of bhindi (okra)
• Fresh coconut – grated – 3 tbsp
• Red chili – 2
• Green chili – 2
• Chana dal – soaked for half an hour – 1 tbsp
• Dhania powder – 1/2 tsp
• Roasted methi seeds – fenugreek – 1/2 tsp
• Jeera – cumin seeds – 3/4 tsp
• Asafoetida – 1 large pinch
• Turmeric – 1 large pinch
• Salt
• Jaggery – 1 tsp

To temper

• Coconut oil – 1 tsp
• Curry leaves – 2 sprigs
• Mustard seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Red chili – 1
• Jeera – cumin – 1/4 tsp

Add a little water to the vegetables in a deep pan and bring to a boil. Cook on a low flame along with the turmeric till half done. Grind into a smooth paste – red chili, green chili, chana dal, dhania, coconut, methi, jeera and asafoetida. Add the paste to the vegetables. Add the beaten yogurt and continue to cook on a low flame, adding salt and jaggery. Once the vegetables are done and the raw smell of the yogurt is gone, temper. Serve with plain hot ice, vadiyaalu (vadaams/ fries) and a plain vegetable curry on the side. Bet Lord Venkateswara will smile on you and let you be born the cow which doesn’t have exams in your next birth!

Rather busy week but with a patient in the house, have been thinking up invalid diets. Soups are definitely life’s saviours where invalids or weight watchers are concerned. 

When we were growing up, the only ‘soup’ we were familiar with was the tomato soup at a “hotel” . Restaurant was a fancy word which came into our vocabularies later in life. Till then any eatery – be it the humble idli-dosa joint called Maaruthi Vilas round the corner or the fancier Annapurna on Nampally Station Road where we had the tomato soup, they were all hotels – with a long “ho” and a very short “tel” – “ho-tle”- pronounced the Indian way! 

Back to our tomato soup – this was a bright orange-red concoction – of a hue designed to make any tomato blush 😉 filled with happily deep-fried croutons, this was our idea of “haute cuisine” as was “Hotle” Annapurna our idea of high living! As we grew older and the rites of passage of “going out with friends” were passed, Chinese joints entered our domain and “sweet corn” soup and the even more exotic “tom yum” soup made us feel truly cosmopolitan! 

Much, much later and many years of travel later, I got to the point where i now believe that Punjab was the best thing that happened to Chinese cuisine!! I think we Indians are definitely a bit chauvinistic when it comes to food and even if are eating a “molecular gastronomic experience” (phew!!), secretly there is a little voice (strongly resembling your grandmother’s!) telling you this is a great dish – all it needs is a pinch of jeera, a hint of asafoetida, a smidgin of garam masala or sambar powder, a spoonful of chili and a dollop of ghee! 

Over decades of “mindful cooking”, I learnt  (much to the chagrin of the grandmother’s voice!) that one area where we really cannot improve on another cuisine is the very humble soup. The rule of thumb with soups is – the simpler the better. The fewer the ingredients, the clearer the vegetable sings!

Here’s one of my own – with truly one of the humblest of vegetables but one of the sublimest of soups – presenting the

CHOWCHOW SOUP

(chayote/ bangalore vankaaya/ bangalore kathrikaya) soup

• Chowchow – 1 large – peeled and sliced
• Shallots or onions – chopped – 2 tbsp
• Butter – 1 tbsp
• Cashewnuts – 6-7
• Salt
• White pepper powder – 1/2 tsp
• Coriander  -chopped – 1 tbsp
• Milk – 1/2 a cup

Saute the onions along with the butter in a saucepan ona  very gentle flame till translucent, Add the chowchow, coriander and the cashewnuts and a cup of water and bring to the boil. Cover and simme for about 15 minutes till vegetables are super tender. Cool and blend to a very smooth puree. If the puree is not smooth enough, strain through a sieve. Add the salt, pepper and enough water to make a medium thick soup – spoonable but not droppable. To serve, pour 2 tbsp hot milk into a bowl and top with the soup. C’est tout!! Das ist alles! Ash-tey! Avulodaan! Ante! or in my favourite Hyderabadi patois – itna eech miyan!

” One more plate coming up…”

A few minutes later… “and anooother… “

And so on it goes one lazy Sunday afternoon we’d spent with a bunch of friends playing rummy… At about four, I’d altruistically (i have the excuse of being very young!!) offered to make samosas for all of us – there were five of us – husband, me, my brother-in-law and a couple of bachelor friends of his. Since we were among the few married couples in the group, these card sessions were usually at our place. 

Growing up with two brothers with rather LARGE appetites, i was quite used to churning out the very large quantities of food they seemed to need to sustain them ( i remember one marathon poori making session where we made close to two hundred pooris for just three of four of them – one brother and couple of friends – the sight of a poori made me sick for weeks afterward!)

And so started the samosa session – kilograms of potatoes and peas, seemingly a granary of flour and many dozens of samosas later, i threw in the towel!! No more – if you’re still hungry, eat thayir saadam (curd rice or if we were in pre-Revolution France, the equivalent would have been – fill your tummy with bread!) – was the threat! While the rest looked suitably abashed (not one samosa left for me, btw and if i hadn’t been smart enough to take a sneak preview, i would have been the one eating thayir saadam – only!), the biggest eater of them all, Chandru – looks disappointed – “but I ate only forty”!!

With all of us becoming diet conscious in our later years, samosas appeared less and less frequently at teatime – the decreasing frequency  being attended by increasing guilt pangs! One of these occasions was when my daughter decided that she’d had about as much as she could stand of a corporate career – after spending four months with a consulting firm!!! – and decided to quit to pursue her love of running and fitness. Last day of work – and she wanted something really special for the rest of the poor sods (in her opinion!) who had to continue. Decided to rustle up “kajjikayis” (karanjis), the D-shaped stuffed sweets that we could die for and quickly start kneading dough. As I start mixing the stuffing, find that the copra (dry coconut) has gone “off” and I need to do something in a real hurry with half an hour to go. Whirling like a dervish, microwave potatoes and peas, make the masala, roll out the pooris, stuff and fry the samosas – and collapse after packing a couple of dozen samosas for her co-workers.

The rest of the day is spent basking in the complimentary sms-es that keep flowing in but I am convinced now that samosas in particular, need something like adrenalin flowing in to start the job! 

Here’ s what you do once the adrenalin flows in:

 SAMOSAS

• Maida – plain flour – 1 cup (makes about 15)
• 1 tbsp melted butter
• Potatoes – 4 large – boil and peel
• Green peas – 2 tbsp – boil or microwave on high for 3 minutes with a tsp of water.
• Carrots – 2 – peel and microwave for 3 minutes
• Onions – 1 large – sliced fine
• Green chilies – minced – 2
• Ginger – minced – 1/2 tsp
• Red chili powder – 1/2 tsp
• Jeera – cumin seed powder – 1/2 tsp
• Chaat masala or kala namak (pink Himalayan salt) – 1 large pinch
• Asafoetida powder – 1 large pinch
• Salt
• Turmeric – 1 large pinch
• Juice of half a large lemon
• Chopped coriander/mint – 1 heaped tbsp
• Oil to deep fry

Mash the potatoes and carrots together. Heat 1 tbsp of oil in a pan and fry the onions, chili and ginger. Mix in the powders and salt. Switch off, add lemon juice and coriander / mint. Let cool.

For the covering

Mix the maida with 1/4 tsp salt. Pour in the melted ghee and mix till the mixture is breadcrumb-y. Add water a little at a time and knead to a medium soft dough. Divide into marble sized balls and roll out into thin, very thin pooris. Place a little filling – about 1 tsp in one quadrant of the circle and roll the poori in half and then half again – till it forms a sort of puffed up triangle. 

Deep fry on a low flame till crisp and golden and serve with tamarind sauce / mint chutney/ ketchup – or plain!