Anu Chenji

 “Anuradha, Anuradha… “ calls a voice gently…

…barely making a dent in my consciousness…

“Anuradha… ” more insistent and a hand shakes my shoulder…

I shake myself and open my eyes, looking around bemusedly like an owl. This doesn’t look like my bedroom… and what are all these people doing here anyway?

“I think it would be a good idea if you went back to your room and went to bed,” suggests the gentle voice again.

Nothing loth, I quickly gather up my belongings – my bag, pen, book etc. and trail blearily out of the door. Oops, I was forgetting something important. I go back in, excuse myself and bending down, pick up a rather large watermelon from where I had stashed it under my chair and bearing it aloft triumphantly, walk out of the… classroom!

In my defence, it is ten o’clock in the night and wa…ay past my bedtime! The setting is at my alma mater, the year is 1986. The prof in question – a marketing whiz kid – is here from the US, taking a course for us. He is young and he is sort of… anything but hidebound! He has decided that it it would be a good idea to take a class at ten in the night for some unfathomable reason. As for me, born to parents who start yawning any time past seven in the evening and toodle off to bed promptly at nine, ten seems positively decadent!

To add to all that, I have been out with another classmate doing a market survey and picked up a large watermelon on the way back, cradling it gingerly on my lap as I straddle the pillion seat! This is one of our “hallowed” traditions – any one who goes to the “city” has to pick up a watermelon. Post dinner, as we settle down to work on various projects, cutting and sharing the watermelon provides some much needed relief from the rigours of econometrics and project finance!

We get caught in a cold shower on the way back (anyone ever experienced the cold monsoon rains of Bangalore?!). We ride back slowly, making it safely past the few kilometres of paddy fields but with no time to go and change. Not to mention the watermelon. We can’t abandon it – people are depending on us! So, wet and shivering, we make our way to the classroom and stash the bounty under my chair.

The prof comes in, hands out a case study. It was all his fault, really. If it had been anything but a case study, involving careful reading of many pages of story and data, I would have been right there! The reading was all right, to begin with, at least. But at what point data and story and product and watermelon ran into each other, I have no idea! Well, there we are – back at the beginning again, with the prof – nice chap that he was, advising me to pack it in! I trail off to the hostel, change and have a nice nap before the rest of the class comes back, looking sleepy and absolutely ready for… a watermelon!

Today, of course, with greater access to ‘things’ than a hostel room, I would serve the watermelon in many diffferent ways!

 

Way 1 – VODKA -INFUSED WATERMELON

 

• 1 watermelon – 3 kg at least
• 1 funnel
• 2 – 3 glasses vodka – lay it on!
• 1 knife

 

Cut a hole in the watermelon the size of the funnel. The hole should extend into the melon at least 2″.

Carefully turning the knife around, remove the cylinder of watermelon that you have cut out.

Insert funnel into hole. Pour in enough vodka to almost fill the funnel.

As the funnel empties, fill again… and again… and again.

When you get a trifle impatient, pour yourself a drink!

Chill, cut and serve. Or if you are still in a hostel, slice in half, mush the watermelon about, distribute straws and sit around in a circle, sipping!

 

Way 2 : WATERMELON COCKTAIL

 

• 5 cups watermelon chunks – de-seeded and frozen
• Juice of 2 limes
• Sugar – 2 tsp (you may need more depending on the sourness of the lime)
• Tequila – 60 ml
• White rum – 60 ml
• Tabasco sauce – 1/2 tsp
• Ground white pepper – 1/4 tsp

 

TO SERVE

 

Mint and crushed ice

Blend everything together in a mixer. Pour over crushed mint and ice in glasses and serve immediately.

 

Warning: These are quite lethal so go easy!

End result is snores anyway!

Pics: Courtesy internet

Am seriously excited – having just acquired a new possession – a birthday gift from my mom – yep, in my fifties, I still get birthday gifts from my mom – one of the unalienable rights of daughterhood – as my daughters love to remind me – laying it on rather thick in case I forget their birthdays when they reach their fifties!

But I was forgetting (oops!) – my gift! A spanking new, shiny white, Singer sewing machine with just about every feature under the sun! In fact, I’m not too sure that it can’t be used in operation theatres to assist the surgeon “close up”! It is a thing of beauty and hopefully, like the last sewing machine I got as a gift – also from my parents – when I was about ten years old, will also be  a joy forever.

Growing up with a downstairs “aunty” who was an accomplished needlewoman and my grandmother, who also loved to stitch and a mom, who used to occasionally stitch frocks for me when she wasn’t stitching up people, not to mention many aunts who were pretty nifty with a needle themselves, it was almost inevitable that I fall in love with this art.

Having come home with my first machine – a treadle one – which I could just about see over when I sat down, my mom proceeded to fix up a teacher – one of her patients – who used to come home to teach me. The first thing she cut and taught me to stitch was a very Victorian pair of “pantalets” (see attached pic of   – A nice example of Queen Victoria’s silk drawers, sold for £9,375 on 1 Nov 2011, Paul Fraser Collectibles. These drawers were made sometime in the 1860s. They appear quite plain, and baggy for the size of the waist!) – hilarious bloomers which hung out like a diaper on a baby’s bottom, made of something like sandpaper called “gaada” cloth! Having satisfactorily disposed of them by “donating” them to the maid’s grandchild, I proceeded to dispense with my teacher and to learn stuff on my own – basically by cutting up stuff and figuring out how to put it back together!

Without too much idea of cutting, basting, sewing, I ruined many things before beginning to figure out stuff… and then stitched up everything I could lay my hands on! Skirts to lungis to curtains to baby clothes to quilts, my mother’s attitude of “Of course I can do it – it’s not rocket science and if it is, you just need to go to rocket science college” – was what guided my efforts – meeting with inevitable disasters like sewing the right side to the wrong side instead of two wrong sides together and then turning them right side out, clothes cut too small and then, in a spirit of over-correction, clothes meant for Gulliver – all having to be corrected “somehow”. Well, what couldn’t be corrected had to be endured – the spirit of the age was not about waste, after all! So, we wore clothes to grow into them – five years hence maybe!

The same attitude with which I approach new dishes! How difficult can anything be? Thankfully (from my family’s point of view that is) with a lot more success!

And so, here’s a dish for my daughters – not a rocket science level dish – just a hoary old favourite from Karnataka/Maharashtra…

 

VANGI BHAATH

 

FOR MASALA POWDER

 

• Dhaniya/coriander seeds 2 tsp
• Chana dal 2 tsp
• Urad dal 2 tsp
• Methi/fenugreek seeds 1-2 tsp
• Peppercorns 1/2 tsp
• Cinnamon 1″ stick
• Cloves 3
• Cumin seeds 1 tsp
• Biryani ke phool/patthar ke phool/kalpasi/dagad phool – 1/2 tsp (optional)
• Copra/desiccated coconut 1/4 cup(grated)
• Sesame seeds 2 tsp
• Asafoetida 1/4 spoon.

 

Red chili powder – 1/2 tsp – add to roasted ingredients at the end and powder all together.

 

RICE

 

• Basmati or sona masoori rice – 2 cups.
• Ghee – 1 tsp
• Turmeric – 1/4 tsp

 

Cook rice together with ghee and turmeric so that the grains are separate. Spread with a fork and cool.

 

FOR VEGETABLES

 

• Brinjals – 15 – sliced and soaked in water to prevent discoloration
• Capsicum/bell peppers – 1 – sliced.
• Tamarind paste – 1/2 tsp
• Turmeric – 1/4 tsp
• Gingelly oil – 1 tsp
• Ghee – 1 tsp
• Cashewnuts – 2 tbsp – broken
• Mustard seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Urad dal – 1/2 tsp
• Cumin seeds/jeera – 1/2 tsp
• Curry leaves – 3 sprigs
• Red chilies – 1 or 2
• Salt

 

Heat ghee and fry cashewnuts. Remove from oil and add to rice.

Add oil to the same pan and temper with mustard, red chilies, urad and cumin. Add curry leaves and saute till crisp.

Add sliced brinjal/eggplant, salt and turmeric. Mix well, cover and cook, stirring occasionally till almost done, adding capsicum halfway through the process – about 7 – 8 minutes.

Add masala powder and mix really well along with the rice.

Serve with appadams and raita or a salad and yogurt.

 

Stitch ’em up in admiration!

[Pics: Courtesy internet]

“It’s soooooooooooo… hot!” my usual wail every single day almost for the past thirty years in Madras – the city whose heat never, ever lets up! There come a few moments of a few days in December when you suddenly remember, “Hey, this is what it feels like to be alive” as a gust of slightly chill air briefly touches your cheek… the rest of the year you sort of exist in some kind of limbo – there must be a world out there where aliens wear things called sweaters and jackets!

I come back from my evening walk today bathed in sweat – not from a particularly brisk walk (more like a snail trying to shrink bashfully inside its shell), but from the weather! Straight from the sweaty bath to a real bath and then flop down on the couch. “I don’t think I can write today – my brains are actually  frizzled,” I grumble!

My helpful “only younger daughter” as she refers to herself when she wants to wheedle something out of the parents, tells me to write about inspiration.

“What?” I mumble, feeling totally uninspired…

“Write about how we inspired you as kids,” she instructs… whatever else I have given her or not, there is no dearth of confidence there!

“How?” I query further.

“By… ummm… watching me run?” she responds. “Surely you must have been inspired by my running!!”

Phew! Definitely my daughter and my mother’s granddaughter – that thing about finding everything that we do so interesting that we have no doubt whatsoever that other people find it equally so!

The consequences to this of course, are that occasionally one is answered by gentle snores in the middle of one’s most exciting story!

Which leads me to the inspiration for this whole blog thingy… all the stories… mostly inspired by my children and their childhood (as she does not fail to point out in her effort to give me examples of how they inspired me!) Her case ends with a grouse . “How come we haven’t featured in a story for ever so long? You haven’t written about either of us in ages!” 

And so dedicating this entire blog to my two inspirations (yes, Kanch, your running did inspire me – even when you were seven! So does your confidence! And to my only older daughter whose sense of fair play is so finely honed that we parents dare not slack off!)… also remembering that this was started to teach them both easy cooking and yesterday’s recipe – the “beautiful apple and cinnamon bread thing” was a bit of a stretch… we go back to simpler stuff!

Here’s an easy salad – inspired by the most unlikely of things – the Madras summer!

 

CORN, BEAN AND AVOCADO SALAD

 

• Boiled sweet corn – 1 cup
• Fresh red soya beans – cooked till tender – 1 cup
• Avocado – chopped – 1
• Mango ginger (if available) or really tender ginger – julienned – 1 tbsp

 

DRESSING

 

• Juice of 1/2 lime
• Juice of 1/2 sweet lime (mosambi / sathukudi) or orange
• Green chili – minced – 1
• Sweet chili sauce – 1 tbsp
• Honey – 1 tbsp
• Fresh mint – chopped – 1 tbsp
• Fresh basil – chopped – 1 tsp
• Fresh coriander – 1 tbsp

 

Mix the dressing ingredients, except the herbs, together and refrigerate for an hour.

Mix all the salad veggies together and refrigerate.

Whisk dressing well and pour over the veggies. Rest for ten minutes and sprinkle the herbs on top.

 

A cold soup and this salad – before you collapse from the heat!

Pic coming tomorrow, guys! It’s too hot to make even this!

“Thirty eight only? No, no, make that forty two at least! I’ll look like so old fashioned if it’s only thirty eight!”

So you come home a week later with the coveted “forty two” to be greeted by  an old fashioned aunt who cackles looking at your ankles, “Haha, you don’t need to buy any brooms for the rest of the year,” to your mom!

What did you think we were talking about? Asking for “pass marks” from a teacher so you wouldn’t have to face irate dad to get your report signed? Specifying length of haircut to the hairdresser? In millimetres if you were a boy those days!! Inches if you were a girl!

One of the great “cultural” indicators of the rollicking 70’s – the bellbottoms – and their width thereof! Readymades were not available easily those days so if you wanted something like a pair of bellbottoms, you had no choice but to go to the tailor – who also happened to be your family tailor – who stitched everything from your mother’s sari blouses to your dad’s officegoing shirts to the baby’s clothes and your school uniforms! Specialist he was not!

You went to him with your treasured blue denim length – bought at great personal sacrifice – having had to run the gamut of grandparental disapproval, neighbourly advice (unwanted of course!) on how your parents were spoiling their children by allowing them to wear these clothes of the decadent seventies (and how these would lead on to the highway of drugs and drink and everything else undesirable!) and of course, having to wait for a festival to come up – buying clothes at any other time was quite decadent! Sometimes this neighbourly interference was a blessing in disguise – with the neighbour managing to set the parents’ backs up so, out of sheer cussedness if nothing else, they would allow you to get your heart’s desire!

Clutching your treasure in a Nalli bag (yellow square bag with red print on it – every self-repecting household had one at least – used to carry everything from drumsticks to food parcels to cloth to the tailors!), you went singing all the way to the tailor, who would proceed to take your measurements and offer helpful advice – “Twenty eight inches is what everyone is wearing, sir!”

“Oh yeah? Did my mom bribe you on the way to the market? Twenty eight indeed! Make that forty two at least!” you order  in a lordly fashion.

You might think you’ve won the battle but you could not rely on the tailor  – what if the parent countermanded your instructions?! And so, you checked on him every other day to see that he cut the width of the “bottoms” correctly so you could definitely swish your way into class on Saturday, our “civil dress” day – the one day of the week on which  the rule about uniforms was relaxed! Definitely cock of the walk!

The decade was all about biting off more than you could chew – the “bell bottoms” and “elephant bottoms” (even more courageous versions of the above!), why  do we always have to have boring home-cooked food? Why can’t we have Punjabi food? Or even, horror of horrors, Chinese food! We read Harold Robbins in protest (against a terrified parental tirade and warning lecture not to become a good-for-nothing like Danny Fisher!)

Right now, in my fifties, I am tempted into the same – biting off more than I can chew business – in the kitchen occasionally!

Inspired by a baking group on facebook, I create this apple and cinnamon very fancy bread, making a crucial mistake in the shaping without realising it – turning it inside out basically!

But it is a totally divine bread – so here goes:

 

BEAUTIFUL APPLE CINNAMON BREAD

(Courtesy: daringbakerduluth.blogspot.in)

 

Making the Frangipane

 

1/2 cup butter, softened

1/2 cup sugar

1 egg

1 tablespoon vanilla, liqueur, or flavored liquid of choice

2 tablespoons flour

 

Cream together butter and sugar in a medium bowl until light and soft. Gradually mix in the egg and the egg yolk one at a time. Stir in the tablespoon of liquid. Stir 2 tablespoons of flour into the ground nuts, then mix into the batter. Set aside.

 

Making the Bread
For the dough

 

• 1/4 cup water
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1/4 cup butter
• 1 medium egg at room temperature
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 sachet active dry yeast
• 3 cups flour ( I used 1 of whole wheat one two of plain)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

 

Between the layers

 

1/4 cup butter, softened

4 tablespoons cinnamon mixed with 1/2 cup sugar

 

Additional

 

3 apples, peeled and sliced

1 teaspoon sugar

3 tablespoons melted butter

 

In a small saucepan, melt the butter and add water and milk. Bring the mixture to a warm room temperature. In a bowl, whisk together the water, milk, butter, egg, sugar and yeast. Set aside to foam for about 5 minutes.

In another bowl whisk together the flour and salt. Stir the liquid ingredients with the dry ingredients and knead on a floured surface for about five minutes until you get a smooth dough.

Place the dough in a bowl you have brushed with some oil and cover it with a wet cloth and leave it in a warm place to double in size (about 2 hours).

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Remove one large egg sized piece of dough from the mound and set aside. Divide the remaining dough into four equal parts. Roll each of the four parts into a circle about 9 inches in diameter.

Spread the first round with a quarter of the butter then sprinkle with about one-third of the cinnamon and sugar. Place the second layer of dough on the first layer, repeat the spreading and sprinkling and then do the same with the third layer. Top with the fourth layer, this time only spreading it with butter. Trim the edges to create a perfect round shape (easiest if using a round plate 8 inches across as a guide). Save your trimmings.

Using a sharp knife, make cuts that divide the dough into 8 triangles, leaving a half inch of dough intact at the edge.

Make slits that go 2/3 of the way in the middle of each triangle. The cuts should not reach the base of the triangle nor the tip as you can see in the picture.  Pull the tip of each triangle through the slits as seen above.  Score the surface of the dough on any plain doughy areas to create greater detail.

Preheat your oven to 400°F.

Roll out the egg sized round of dough to fit into the center. Spread frangipane over the center round (you won’t need to use it all). Press the apple slices gently into the frangipane, overlapping slightly in a spiral pattern. Use your trimmings from when you rounded out your dough to created a little spiral flower centerpiece.

Brush the dough with milk. Sprinkle the apple section with a teaspoon of sugar.

Bake for 10 minutes, then lower the temperature to 350°F and bake until the under side is golden brown and the top is as brown as you want it. Turn off the oven and let it rest in there for up to 30 minutes so your frangipane sets up and the apples cook. You may also choose, as I did, to cover the bread areas with foil and broil the apples section briefly so it browns. (I will also note that I baked my bread on a preheated pizza stone, because it’s the only pan I had large enough for this bread.  This may have helped brown the bottom of my bread, which happened beautifully).

Take your bread out of the oven and and brush with melted butter while still hot.

 

Enjoy!

There was to be a fete at school to raise money for something. I forget what but everyone, including the nuns at our convent, seemed to want more than they have! This is not so common then as it appears now – it was the late seventies and schools were more innocent then.

There was an “Annual Day” where I… really do not remember what happened! There was a Sports Day, at which considering my “prowess” at any sport which did not involve sitting down (!), I was an insignificant entity, marching along with a bunch of other kids in yellow culottes and white shirts and later, during high school, thankfully joining the school band to play the flute – which did NOT need tuning and which I was therefore perfectly capable of playing! Also it involved blowing a lot of hot air – which I loved!

We also used to get taken to the Fateh Maidan stadium for public celebrations of our Independence Day and Republic Day. Bunches of us school kids did tribal dances, jigging away quite happily to drumbeats, individual performances not mattering too much in the general melee. That it was most of the time hot was of little moment to us – ice lollies were available for as little as five paise and I remember eating some twenty of them one particularly hot August day. Lots of kids fainted in the heat but I don’t think anyone bothered too much – it was par for the course!

And so schools jogged along, managing with whatever funds they could muster (convents, I am sure, must have received some form of funding from somewhere else!), charging very little by way of fees and paying teachers accordingly a pittance – hats off to those teachers who did a remarkable job out of love for their work and the kids they taught! 

This idea of a “fete” – a new word in our vocabulary – was therefore very exciting. With an extremely pushy and determined principal heading the school, very ambitious plans were drawn and parents, whose existence had hithertofore jogged along peacefully with school being viewed primarily as a place which provided relief  from the kids – suddenly found themselves being willy nilly forced into “organising” stalls, kids, set targets for selling tickets (at a hundred bucks a pop, it was a LOT of money to pay for entrance to a school fete!) and generally jogged out of their peaceful existence!

One of these involved a “sale-of-work” stall from the needlework department. Oh yes, those days we still had needlework as part of the school curriculum! The nun in charge, our “needlework sister”, distributed pieces of cloth for us to embroider and sell – as tablecloths. There was a choice of a virulent parrot green (which fell to my lot!), a garish red and a few other equally shock-inducing colours. Confident of my skills with the needle, I draw an ambitious design… and sit on it… there was, after all, plenty of time left till the fete… till suddenly, the fete was three days away! No way I could finish it in time. Palpitations ensue.

My kind and generous mom comes to the rescue and takes me to an “embroidery shop”, where for the sum of twenty five rupees (LOTS, i assure you!), the tailor gives me back an elaborate machine-embroidered design of red, blue, pink and yellow on a parrot green background! Relief is my principal emotion as I hand in the piece and watch it being labeled as the “handiwork” of our students! 

The cloth is sold at the fete for the princely sum of twenty two rupees – not covering its cost! One of those bricks in the school building was definitely funded at great personal cost! 

Unlike this easy dish made with leftovers which wouldn’t cost twenty five rupees today!

 

LEFTOVER RICE ROTI

 

• Cooked rice – 1 cup
• Soya flour – 1 tbsp (can substitute rice flour or whole wheat flour or jowar flour)
• Green chilies – 2
• Ajwain/carom seeds/omam – 1 pinch
• Coconut – grated – 1 tbsp (optional)
• Chopped onion – 1/4 cup
• Peppercorns – 1/4 tsp
• A few dropsof lemon juice or 1 tbsp yogurt
• Sugar or honey – 1/2 tsp
• Salt
• Curry leaves – 1 sprig
• Mint or coriander – 1 tbsp – chopped  (or methi/fenugreek leaves)
• Sesame seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Oil – a few drops
• Butter to serve

 

Pulse everything except the sesame seeds, oil and butter in the mixer for a few seconds till just blended. Remove and mix well with your fingers to a thick dough. Pat into a roti about 2 mm thick, sprinkle sesame on both sides and roast both sides till golden brown and crisp. Each side will take about 4-5 minutes. The roti may break apart as you turn it – that’s okay.

Serve hot with plain butter.

 

You can even sell it at your next school fete!