Anu Chenji

“Baaba maama is coming to dinner today and I’m making paayasam (milk based pudding).  Stand here and keep stirring it every couple of minutes or so”. And having given me clear instructions – in her opinion – my ever-busy mother runs off to the clinic – housed in our garage. I stand and I stir. But no one told me to not do anything else. So, in one of the two minutes breaks – must have been the frst one , why waste time?? – i ran off to get the latest book I was reading. After that, I followed my mother’s instructions to the ‘t’ – stirring every two minutes. What she HAD omitted to tell me was that there was an end point to the whole process – that the paayasam would actually get done at some point! So, i continued to stir and i continued to read. My subconscious (if i had known back then that it existed!) – was aware that weird smells were emanating from the neighbour’s house and I also felt sorry for them not having a “sweedish” (sweet dish pronounced at the speed at which Hyderabadis normally bring out their words!) made in my uncle’s honour – to look forward to.

Considering that the houses of those days had large gardens and high compound walls, whatever the neighbour was cooking must have been REALLY weird for me to smell – so I reasoned!

A couple of hours later, my mother comes running in – paayasam check! That’s when it dawned on that it was not just the neighbours but us who wouldn’t have any dessert – and that the weird smell was arising from the pot which I had been so assiduously stirring! I tried telling my mom that since the milk-based dish was now a rather dark brown, maybe we could pass it off as “chakkara pongal”        ( another rice dessert sweetened with jaggery and therefore brown in colour!).  But no marks were given for creativity (the bane of those days!) and the dish including the pot, were thrown out! My uncle – Baaba maama – kind hearted soul that he was  -told me years later when I grew up  – that the whole episode had given him more enjoyment than any bowl of regular paayasam would have done!

Let me redeem myself with a really simple and really delicious paayasam – one of the oldest puddings known to civilisation – the recipe remains almost unchanged from Vedic times! In Telugu, this is called “parama-annam” meaning celestial food.

ANNAM PAAYASAM (RICE KHEER)

• Milk – 1.5 litres
• Rice – washed – 2 tbsp
• Sugar – 12 tsp
• Saffron  – a few strands

Heat the milk in a heavy-bottomed vessel – a pressure cooker or an ‘uruli’ are great. Wash the rice adn add it to the milk. Cook on a low flame, stirring frequently till the rice is tender – about 20 minutes. Add the sugar and continue to cook till the rice is really soft. Add the saffron strands and switch off. Cover and cool before serving. 

 “Of course i ate my vegetables; didn’t i eat so many paavakai vathals (dried karela wafers) at lunch today?? And no, i don’t want any more veggies!!” protests my never-say-die 6-year old nephew who’s spending the summer with us. 

“What rubbish!! Wafers don’t count! No nutritive value whatsoever. Eat the greens or else…” is my unspecified threat!

I not only have the job of making him eat what i consider nutritious stuff but also have to manage the perceptions of my younger daughter who’s watching this whole exchange with great interest – i can SEE the wheels turning in her head – if Adarsh can get away with this, maybe i can try stuff too!! Unfortunately for them and fortunately for me, i was born decades before them and had tried many of the same tricks in the book – and figured out that parenting is also about staying one step ahead in the bargaining game! Both nevvy and daughter finally give up in sheer disgust – it’s difficult to get ahead of Amma! Which takes me back a few years earlier to when Kanch (my younger one) was about 3 years old. Suspicious of her playing “quietly” behind me on the bed for over ten minutes, without turning around, i told her to “stop doing whatever she was doing”. Stunned silence and then, “how did you know?” pipes the squeaky voice… “coz Amma has eyes at the back of her head”, I answer lazily. For the next 6 months, Kanch scrabbled around in my hair and scalp trying to find the “eyes at the back of Amma’s head”!!

Back to the vegetables… the everyday struggle with vegetables has had mothers doing very creative things with food but the struggle with karela (bittergourd / kaakarakai/paavakai) is something that ends only as the kids approach adulthood and actually develop a taste for it – and sometimes- it never happens! 

One of those strange kids who’ve always liked this bitter vegetable – I’ve learnt many ways of cooking it. One of my favourites is a Kerala curry I learnt from a friend – Rosemary – simple and so delicious that i make a large batch and snack on it through the day! 

BITTER GOURD FRY

1. Bitter gourds – long ones – 4 – slice into thin rounds without removing the seeds. Microwave for 3-4 minutes on high.
2. Onions – 3 – sliced into rings
3. Salt
4. Oil – 2 tbsp
5. Turmeric – 1/4 tsp
6. Chili powder  1/2 tsp
7. Asafoetida – 1 large pinch

 Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Add the onions and fry for 3-4 minutes along with the asafoetida and turmeric. Add the gourd and cook uncovered, turning over occasionally till the onions and the vegetables are done – this will take upwards of half an hour. Add the salt and chili powder and continue to roast till crisp. Switch off and leave uncovered till cool. 

AND you don’t need eyes at the back of your head to figure out it’s nutritious!

Living in Madras for the past 25-odd years, I’ve sort of grown used to the dosa-idli-heat, Tamil is the oldest lingo chauvinism, Rajni vs Kamal debates, the DMK -ADMK-PMK political scrambles, sundal-on-the-beach stuff… just noticed too that my list up there both begins and ends with “food items”! The stuff that makes most places bearable! Sometimes though, nostalgia does overtake the here-and-now dosa-chutney combo and makes me want to go back to my mirchi-ka-salan, khatti dal combos of Hyderabadi friends-ke-tiffin-dabbe!

Maybe it’s the Nawabi influence but even the poorest households in Hyderabad have men and women with fantastic “kairaasi” – the ability to turn humble ingredients into dishes fit for a – Nawab! In fact, the best baghara baingan (eggplant gravy) i’ve ever tasted has come from the household of an office boy in my brother’s studio!

I have written some stories of this baghara baingan in one of my earlier posts but as always – there are more!

At my wedding reception at a hotel, my most-hospitable-but-not-the-best-of-organiser parents had sent out hundreds of invitations without really keep track of them. The result – the crush at the wedding reception was over 3000!! The hotel , having been informed that there would be about 1800 guests to dinner, threw up their hands by the time they crossed the 2000 mark! More guests were streaming in and food was fast running out! My brother decided to jump in to the rescue – organising a bunch of his friends and family and herding them into the kitchen to make – baghara baingan – a dish that requires long and careful preparation! Reasoning that a bunch of hungry Madrasis ( husband’s people!) would probably not know a baingan from an anda (eggplant-egg – back to our egg saga of the last few days – AGAIN!!), they proceeded to boil up – yes, boil up – some eggplants and throw them into a rudimentary gravy and serve it up as baghara baingan!  Result : the numbers of Hyderabadi guests at the table declined drastically but the hapless Madrasis soldiered on! Must have wondered why so much was made of this Hyderabadi dish!

Today was about nostalgia for another favourite – closely related to the baingan – presenting

MIRCHI  aur TAMAATAR KA SALAN

• Large green chilies – washed, dried and slit leaving both ends intact – 10
• Tomatoes -2 + 1 – chunked
• Onions – sliced – 2 large
• Garlic – 10-12 flakes – peeled
• Ginger – optional – 1 tsp minced
• Peanuts – 3 tbsp
• Sesame seeds – 2 tbsp
• Dry coconut – copra – 2 tbsp
• Poppy seeds (khuskhus) – 1 tbsp
• Dhania – coriander – seeds – 2 tbsp
• Jeera – cumin – seeds – 1 tsp
• Red chili powder – 1.5 tsp
• Turmeric pwd – 1/2 tsp
• Oil – 3 – 4 tbsp
• Lavang – cloves – 2 – optional
• Tamarind paste – 2 tbsp
• Mustard seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Curry leaves – 2 sprigs

Dry roast the dhania, jeera, peanuts, sesame, poppy and coconut separately. Grind togther with the cloves to a fine powder. Set aside. Heat one tsp of oil and fry the onions, garlic and ginger till golden brown. Grind this along with one tomato to a very smooth paste. 

Heat the rest of the oil and fry the chilies for a minute. Set aside. In the same oil, fry the ground onion paste till golden brown. Add the ground masala powder, turmeric and chili powders and fry for a few minutes more. Add the tamarind paste and 1.5 cups of water and stir well. Bring up to the boil and simmer for ten minutes till the raw smells of tamarind and tomato disappear. Add the fried chilies and cook for 7-8 minutes more. Add the two chunked tomatoes, cover and simmer, adding more water if needed for a medium thick gravy – for 3-4 minutes. Serve with hot rice and nothing else 🙂 – even the Madrasis will drool!

[vc_row][vc_column first=”true” odd=”true” width=”2/3″][vc_column_text font=”normal”]A small child trails disconsolately clutching a piece of paper in her hand, taking about an hour to cover a distance of some 200 metres to a music teacher’s house. Halfway through, she rebelliously opens the note which her mother has given her to be given to the music teacher – who also happens to be her aunt… the note seems to weigh her down even further… the mother (mine) has asked the aunt, who happens to be a brilliant singer, to start her daughter (me) on Carnatic music lessons. Growing up with two brothers, i thought that stuff like music and dance were “sissy” things done only by girls! Me – i wanted to be a boy – to the extent that i did NOT like wearing the frocks which were considered “suitable” for girls back in the 60s and only wanted to wear my brother’s shorts and shirts – T-shirts had not yet been invented! 

Therefore, to be made to go to paata class (music lessons) was nothing short of insulting! Also, i must have had some inkling, even way back then, that singing and me were likely to be very ucomfortable bedfellows! Later, i grew to love music but music never ceased to hold my initial reluctance against me and persisted in making my “sa” come out like something between a “ree” and a “ga”! 

The longest of journeys has to end, i guess and i finally reached my aunt’s house. The very kind lady asked me to sit down and sing something – anything – i knew. Sensing a chance to sabotage my mom’s plans to teach me music, i said didn’t know any songs. “They must have taught you something at school”, she says. I shake my head – no song! “A nursery rhyme?” Doing my best moron interpretation, i look blank. “At least the national anthem?” she asks. I hadn’t seen this one coming! Not being able to figure out how to wriggle out of this, i slowly stood up and – belted out the worst rendition of the “Jana Gana Mana” my aunt and her equally musical husband had ever heard! They sat patiently through it and i sat again while she tried teaching me the basic seven notes. Class ended, she gave me a note to be given to mom. As soon as I was out of sight of her house, I sneakily opened the note which suggested gently, very gently, that perhaps, just perhaps, it would be a good idea to teach me a musical instrument rather than singing! Joy lending wings to the selfsame dragging feet , i flew home faster than even my sprinter daughter could have! 

 I read later that eating anything round before an exam ensured a “ZERO” result – must have been the eating of so many eggs that ensured a zero in music! Being in an eggy mood – here’s yet another egg curry – a Moroccan one that’s one of our favourites and is known in our family as “ammamma’s egg curry” (referring to my mom)!

AMMAMMA’S EGG CURRY (SHAKSHUKA)

• Eggs – 6
• Onions – sliced very fine – 1
• Tomatoes – 5 – chopped
• Green chilies – minced – 2
• Jeera powder (cumin) – 1/2 tsp
• Dhania (coriander) powder – 1/2 tsp
• Garlic – minced – 4 pods
• Ginger – miinced – 1/2 tsp
• Red chili powder – 1/2 tsp
• Chopped parsley – 1 tbsp
• Chopped mint – to garnish
• Turmeric – 1 pinch
• Sugar – 1/2 tsp
• Pepper – 1/2 tsp
• Salt
• Oil – 2 tbsp

Heat oil in a large saucepan and add the green chilies and sugar. Add the onions and garlic and stirfry till golden brown. Add the coriander, cumin and red chili powder and ginger. Stir for a couple of minutes more. Add the tomatoes, pepper and salt.  Bring to a boil and then simmer for 5-7 minutes more. Carefully crack the eggs into the gravy and cover. Cook for 5 minutes if you like them a bit gooey or for 7-8 minutes if you like the yolks set.

Sprinkle parsley and mint all over. Serve with soft white pav bread or rice or rotis.

photo courtesy : internet

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