Anu Chenji

My guest blogger for today – my younger daughter Kanchana!

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So in a recent blog post, my mother mentioned that BOTH her kids love eggs as much as she does. Uhh, not cool Amma.

Firstly, as Arch so emphatically stated in her ‘guest blog post’, my mother didn’t let either of us develop food preferences when we were growing up. Secondly, when either of us did – accidentally – manage to develop a preference either way, it apparently got ignored completely!

One such preference that I secretly, sneakily, stealthily manage to develop was my dislike for eggs. (Note to Amma: next time you blog about either Arch or me, please verify your data about what foods we like).

I’ve never been a big fan of eggs. Eggs in whichever form – whether scrambled, omeletted, boiled, buried in cheese, whatever. Having been a vegetarian athlete, I was never allowed to go without eggs, as protein sources are hard to come by. While throughout my years at school I found a way to twist, break, find a loophole in pretty much every role enforced by our teachers, I was the complete opposite when it came to training. So when my coach told me to eat X number of eggs a day, everyday, I shut up and did it.

Naturally, I kept trying out different ways to disguise the eggs I had to eat. One recipe that I recently stumbled upon is Egg Akoori. I first tasted this rather fantastic Parsi dish at Bombay’s famous Leopold’s Café and tried to recreate it at home. 

Here’s what you’ll need: (recipe makes 4 eggs)

AKOORI

1 pod garlic

1 green chili

½ large onion sliced

1 tomato chopped up

1 large pinch of : turmeric, jeera, dhaniya, chaat masala, chili powder

Heat butter in a pan. Add in ingredients in the order above. Cook them up, then add in the eggs and scramble up.

Garnish with coriander. I like eating this with hot rice.

Basically, scrambled eggs-Indian style!

(Picture courtesy: Internet) 

“But, pleeeez, can I have a headman’s hut?” asks my daughter. No, it’s not a resort and we are not looking at cute cottages…

What we are looking at is a plateful of small, hut shaped dosas! Kanch has just waited for me to make a whole village of little dosas shaped like huts before weaving a story around them about a headman and his wife and his honchos and his kids before she begins to nibble at the huts. My exhortations to please eat before the dosas are stone cold make no dent in her consciousness – the story of the headman, his family’s little huts, their cannibalistic tendencies, the firepot in the centre (a mound of chutney that she builds up into a volcano) is just too fascinating! And just as the hapless explorer (her Akka – big sister) is about to be put into the pot on the fire, along comes our heroine (K, of course!!) – rushing out of the littlest hut where she’s been hiding – to vanquish the would-be assassins!

And so on to a LARGE hut shaped dosa again – the headman’s hut before she begins to eat!

Alphabet dosas spelling out their whole names were also much loved but the conical, “hut-shaped” dosas were and still are favourites! A teacher friend of mine told me about a child in her class who, when given an assignment to draw his house, drew a tall, rectangular structure with little squares of windows in them! She said this was the first time that she’d seen anyone drawing anything other than a “hut” – the wigwam shaped structure that we all grew up drawing as the simplest shape of a house! So my friend draws the hut and asks the kid whether he recognises it. He stares at it for a while before guessing, “upside-down funnel?” He’d never in his life – and this in India – seen a house like a cone! Am sure that Kanch would have asnwered that it was a dosa!

So here’s to the hut dosa!

DOSA:

• Urad dal – 1 cup
• Parboiled rice – 2.5 cups
• Raw rice – 1/2 cup
• Methi – fenugreek – seeds – 1 tsp
• Salt
• Sesame oil – 1/2 teaspoon for each dosa
• Ghee – a couple of teaspoons

Soak the raw rice and parboiled rice together with the methi seeds. Soak the urad dal separately. Both overnight or for four hours.Drain and grind separately into a smooth but very slightly gritty batter adding water to make it a thick pouring consistency. Mix both batters together in a large vessel and let ferment for at least 6 hours in a warm place. Overnight is good. The batter will almost double. Whip well adding the salt. Or just buy the batter!

Now comes the part that calls for the serious skills! Heat a nonstick pan (preferable). Pour 2-3 drops of oil on top and sprinkle a few drops of water on top – the dosa master (my husband) throws the water with a flourish so it can splatter the wall behind – but it does sizzle amazingly! On high heat, pour one ladleful of batter in the centre of the pan and spread it with the bottom of the ladle into a thin pancake. Immediately lower the flame and pour a few drops of oil around the edge of the dosa and a couple of drops of ghee in the centre. Cook uncovered for about a minute till it turns golden brown on the underside – peek to see. Flip over and turn up the flame. The dosa cooks in a few seconds on the second side. Flip off the pan and serve with chutney/ chutney podi/ sambar/ cannibal’s blood!!

If you want a “hut” dosa, as soon as you pour the batter and spread it, cut a radius in the batter with the edge of your ladle. Cook as normal. Don’t flip over. Pick up the cut edge and roll on the pan into a cone. Let the cone sit open edge down for 3 or 4 seconds to get  completely done. Carefully slide on to a plate. Build your village!

Happy hunting!

“Guess what happened at school today?” asks Arch bursting with news as she comes back home.

“What?”

“Deepshika actually wanted one of my burgers at lunch!” – comes back a shocked, horrified response.

“So, did you give her one?” I ask – innocently. After all, I had packed four large and four small burgers – to be shared out with her friends at lunchtime!

“How, Amma? They were BURGERS!” as though I had asked her to gift away the family heirlooms! Come to think of it, Arch would probably have gifted these away quite happily – if it came to a choice between the heirlooms and a burger!

“Well, i packed enough for you to share around, didn’t I?”

“But then, I’d have gone hungry!” she protests..

“Well, if you were still hungry, you could have asked her to share some of her lunch with you” – i proffer.

“”But, but….”, she says, spluttering with indignation at a mother who doesn’t GET it, – “she brought thayir saadam”!!! (Thayir saadam being curd rice – something which at age ten, they thought very infra dig!) And in comparison with a burger, well, it didn’t begin to figure! Only a mother could have thought it was a fair exchange – said her expression!

Some of the best burgers I’ve eaten were at a tiny hole-in-the-wall shop off Abid Road in Hyderabad when I was at college. There was a Punjabi guy with a blackboard sign outside his shop which said “Vijay Vargal” along with the menu. Thinking he’d named the shop after himself, I addressed him as VIjay-ji (he was well over fifty by the looks of him) and he looked quite blank. I pointed to the sign and asked him “Isn’t that your name?” “Duh… Why would i name myself after a dish?” he responds. My turn to look blank… then i got it… Vijay Vargal was the Indianised Vegetable Burger!!

Ah well, I can’t hope to compete with a Vijay Vargal but here’s the second best veggie burger!

VEGGIE BURGER

• Burger buns – 1 for a normal person. 4 big + 4 small for hungry, growing ten-year olds!

For the patty:

• Boiled mixed vegetables – potatoes/carrots/peas/one piece beetroot if you want red patties/tender beans – 3 cups
• Minced green chilies – 2 – 3
• Chopped mint leaves – 2 tbsp
• Chopped coriander or parsley – 1 tbsp
• Red chili powder – 1/2 tsp
• Chat masala – 1/2 tsp
• Lemon juice – 1 tsp
• Cornflour – 1 tbsp
• Salt
• Oil to shallow fry
• Breadcrumbs to coat ( I usually freeze the end slices of bread and blitz them in the mixer with a few basil leaves – you get an interesting basil-flavoured crumb)
• Mash all the vegetables except the peas. Gently mix in the peas and everything else. Work the cornflour in gently. Shape into large patties. Roll in the crumb. Fry on a shallow tava with a few drops of oil. Set aside. You should have about 4 large patties (1/2 ” thick)

For slaw:

• Mayonnaise – 1 cup
• Fresh ground mustard – 1.5 tsp (this is not difficult at all – grind the mustard in a stone mortar with a few drops of water – you’ll never use store-bought mustard again!
• Shredded cabbage/lettuce/carrot/onion/apple mixture – 2 cups
• Minced chili – 1
• Chopped mint or coriander or basil – 1 tbsp

Mix together. Set the slaw aside.

Ketchup and lettuce leaves – 1 or 8 🙂

Sliced tomato / cucumber -1 large each

Cheese slice – if you want it

 To assemble:

Tawa fry the burger buns after slicing in half horizontally, with a little butter. On the bottom half, smear ketchup. Place a lettuce leaf and pile on the slaw. Place the patty on top. Add sliced cucumbers/cheese slice/tomatoes. Cover with the top half of the bun. Pack them in a ten-year old’s lunch box!!

( pic courtesy internet)