Showing posts with label Indian food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Indian food. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Monday, June 16, 2008
Rainy Weather Delights
I love the rain, like most Indians do, except the poor souls living in Mumbai who wonder each day whether the floods will be back. Each time I wake up to a grey, cloudy sky, my heart starts dancing and I look forward in eager anticipation to curling up with lots of hot tea and a thrilling new book as well as some otherwise forbidden snacks. The rains just seem tailor-made for high-calorie, hot, spicy and fried snacks.
This Sunday opened on a beautifully rainy day - from early in the morning when we awoke, it was pouring and the sky was so leaden it didn't look like the rain would let up all day. My daughter and I sat out on our rooftop garden and enjoyed the spattering from the splashing rain and watched our plants preen themselves in the lush weather. Perfect weather for family favourite - Maida pakoras.
These pakoras are really simple to make and stay crisp for ages. Eaten fresh and crisp, they are unbeatable, served up with some cardamom tea.
Maida Pakoras
Ingredients:
1 cup plain flour
1/2 - 3/4 cups sour homemade yoghurt ( you can use store bought and non-sour but the taste is much better when the yoghurt is slightly sour)
I handful curry leaves
1 tsp cumin seeds, whole
Salt and red chilli powder to taste
1 cup vegetable oil for frying
Mix all the ingredients together into a flowy paste, adding the yoghurt slowly. Add more/ less yoghurt as needed, to get the consistency right - it should be like pancake batter. Heat the oil in a wok. Put in a drop of batter to see if the oil is hot enough - when it is, the drop of batter will float up quickly, turning brown.
Pour the batter into the oil, one tbsp at a time, and fry till goldern brown. take out of the oil, using a slotted spoon and resting the pakora against the side of the wok until oil stops running down from it.
Keep on absorbent tissue paper so the excess oil gets absorbed, while you fry up the rest of the batter. Serve hot with ketchup or green chutney, though if you ask me, this pakora tastes great by itself. Retire to window seat/ verandah, plate in hand and enjoy while soaking in the sight of the rain...
This Sunday opened on a beautifully rainy day - from early in the morning when we awoke, it was pouring and the sky was so leaden it didn't look like the rain would let up all day. My daughter and I sat out on our rooftop garden and enjoyed the spattering from the splashing rain and watched our plants preen themselves in the lush weather. Perfect weather for family favourite - Maida pakoras.
These pakoras are really simple to make and stay crisp for ages. Eaten fresh and crisp, they are unbeatable, served up with some cardamom tea.
Maida Pakoras
Ingredients:
1 cup plain flour
1/2 - 3/4 cups sour homemade yoghurt ( you can use store bought and non-sour but the taste is much better when the yoghurt is slightly sour)
I handful curry leaves
1 tsp cumin seeds, whole
Salt and red chilli powder to taste
1 cup vegetable oil for frying
Mix all the ingredients together into a flowy paste, adding the yoghurt slowly. Add more/ less yoghurt as needed, to get the consistency right - it should be like pancake batter. Heat the oil in a wok. Put in a drop of batter to see if the oil is hot enough - when it is, the drop of batter will float up quickly, turning brown.
Pour the batter into the oil, one tbsp at a time, and fry till goldern brown. take out of the oil, using a slotted spoon and resting the pakora against the side of the wok until oil stops running down from it.
Keep on absorbent tissue paper so the excess oil gets absorbed, while you fry up the rest of the batter. Serve hot with ketchup or green chutney, though if you ask me, this pakora tastes great by itself. Retire to window seat/ verandah, plate in hand and enjoy while soaking in the sight of the rain...
Monday, December 3, 2007
JFI December - Toovar Dal
Of all the dals in all the world...Yup, Toovar/ toor/ arhar dal is my favourite. Perhaps it's my South Indian genes - after all, saaru, huli, kootu and a host of other dishes in Karnataka cooking use this unassuming dal to make their point. Madhur Jaffrey refers to this dal as Pigeon peas, which is kind of cute, I think, and I believe it is also known as the Congo pea - how nice.
This humble dal is an excellent source of protein and has a mild taste which works very well with whatever combination of spices and vegetables one chooses to throw at it. Flexible, easy-going, wholesome and up for anything - if it were a person, I'd want to get to know it! So when I heard the December theme from JFI of Toovar Dal, it was like, 'Welcome home, my friend.'
There are gazillions of ways of cooking Toovar Dal ( even though, in my early culinary career, I have been known to confuse this with chana daal. Oh the shame of it!), including a sweet and simple dal which we often have on our 'simple food' mood days - Just cook the dal, add a chopped onion and tomato and a little ginger, sauteed in a little oil with jeera seeds, fresh green chillies and a sprig of curry leaves. Add salt to taste and a spoon of sugar, and a topping of fresh, chopped coriander leaves - and a perfect little accompaniment for the roti or rice is ready in a jiffy. If you want an added variation, just squeeze the juice of half a lemon before serving.
But when I really want to make the toovar dal the centrepiece of the meal, then I have to reach for my formidable arsenal of cookbooks and leaf through them, trying to figure out which one suits my mood best. One terrific dish is the Gujarati Dal mentioned in Tarla Dalal's Gujarati cookbook, and I love the combinations of flavours and the textures this dish has - sweet, sour, chilli, soft, mushy and hard. Again, it goes equally well with rotis or rice, and as always, I have jiggled around with some of the ingredients to suit my palate better. I can almost hear Ms. Dalal's stern aunty voice in my head as I follow ( or not) the instructions. Her cookbooks are very instruction manual type, but her recipes are never fail ones, so while I may not curl up in my armchair reading them to myself, they do tend to get used a lot in the kitchen, which explains the liberal sploshes of turmeric and bits of green dhaniya decorating their pages.
I whipped this up on Sunday morning for our Sunday meals, and we had enough left to pack off with my husband for his office lunch on Monday. How efficient!
Gujarati Dal
Ingredients:
2 cups toovar dal, cooked in 4 cups of water and mashed until soft and mushy
1 cup chana dal, soaked and cooked in 2 cups water
1/2 kilo yam ( suran), skinned and cut into large pieces and boiled lightly with salt
1 tomato
8 pieces kokum, soaked in water
50 gms jaggery
1 tsp chilli powder
1 tsp jeera
4 small round dried red chillies
1 sprig curry leaves
4 green chillies, split
1 inch ginger, finely chopped
2 tsp asafoetida ( heeng)
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp turmeric
2 cinnamon sticks
1/2 cup raw peanuts
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Salt to taste
1 tbsp ghee
1 tbsp oil
Heat the oil and ghee in a deep saucepan.
When hot, add the mustard seeds. When they stop popping, add the jeera, green chillies, cinnamon sticks, ginger, turmeric, red chillies, curry leaves and asafoetida and stir to saute.
Add the tomato, stir and cook until soft.
Add the kokum, the lemon juice, turmeric and the jaggery and cook for a few minutes.
Then add the dals ( including the water they were cooked in - suit yourself as to how much water depending on if you like your daals thick or thin), yam, peanuts, salt and chilli powder and stir to mix.
Simmer for 10-15 minutes.
Serve hot with rice or rotis, with a cool cucumber salad, plain home made curds and a beans palya for the perfect meal.
My substitutions:
Don't like boiled yam, and had an embarassment of drumsticks ( sojne) at home, so used that instead
Don't like Chana dal much so omitted that.
Didn't have round red chillies so used the long ones.
I have to confess, I have followed this recipe to the T the first time I made it ( with the omission of the boiled yam), and it tasted equally good with my omissions and substitutions.
PS. As always, the photo sucks, even though I did take it in daylight, this time. Guess I just don't have a good trigger hand!
This humble dal is an excellent source of protein and has a mild taste which works very well with whatever combination of spices and vegetables one chooses to throw at it. Flexible, easy-going, wholesome and up for anything - if it were a person, I'd want to get to know it! So when I heard the December theme from JFI of Toovar Dal, it was like, 'Welcome home, my friend.'
There are gazillions of ways of cooking Toovar Dal ( even though, in my early culinary career, I have been known to confuse this with chana daal. Oh the shame of it!), including a sweet and simple dal which we often have on our 'simple food' mood days - Just cook the dal, add a chopped onion and tomato and a little ginger, sauteed in a little oil with jeera seeds, fresh green chillies and a sprig of curry leaves. Add salt to taste and a spoon of sugar, and a topping of fresh, chopped coriander leaves - and a perfect little accompaniment for the roti or rice is ready in a jiffy. If you want an added variation, just squeeze the juice of half a lemon before serving.
But when I really want to make the toovar dal the centrepiece of the meal, then I have to reach for my formidable arsenal of cookbooks and leaf through them, trying to figure out which one suits my mood best. One terrific dish is the Gujarati Dal mentioned in Tarla Dalal's Gujarati cookbook, and I love the combinations of flavours and the textures this dish has - sweet, sour, chilli, soft, mushy and hard. Again, it goes equally well with rotis or rice, and as always, I have jiggled around with some of the ingredients to suit my palate better. I can almost hear Ms. Dalal's stern aunty voice in my head as I follow ( or not) the instructions. Her cookbooks are very instruction manual type, but her recipes are never fail ones, so while I may not curl up in my armchair reading them to myself, they do tend to get used a lot in the kitchen, which explains the liberal sploshes of turmeric and bits of green dhaniya decorating their pages.
I whipped this up on Sunday morning for our Sunday meals, and we had enough left to pack off with my husband for his office lunch on Monday. How efficient!
Gujarati DalIngredients:
2 cups toovar dal, cooked in 4 cups of water and mashed until soft and mushy
1 cup chana dal, soaked and cooked in 2 cups water
1/2 kilo yam ( suran), skinned and cut into large pieces and boiled lightly with salt
1 tomato
8 pieces kokum, soaked in water
50 gms jaggery
1 tsp chilli powder
1 tsp jeera
4 small round dried red chillies
1 sprig curry leaves
4 green chillies, split
1 inch ginger, finely chopped
2 tsp asafoetida ( heeng)
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp turmeric
2 cinnamon sticks
1/2 cup raw peanuts
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Salt to taste
1 tbsp ghee
1 tbsp oil
Heat the oil and ghee in a deep saucepan.
When hot, add the mustard seeds. When they stop popping, add the jeera, green chillies, cinnamon sticks, ginger, turmeric, red chillies, curry leaves and asafoetida and stir to saute.
Add the tomato, stir and cook until soft.
Add the kokum, the lemon juice, turmeric and the jaggery and cook for a few minutes.
Then add the dals ( including the water they were cooked in - suit yourself as to how much water depending on if you like your daals thick or thin), yam, peanuts, salt and chilli powder and stir to mix.
Simmer for 10-15 minutes.
Serve hot with rice or rotis, with a cool cucumber salad, plain home made curds and a beans palya for the perfect meal.
My substitutions:
Don't like boiled yam, and had an embarassment of drumsticks ( sojne) at home, so used that instead
Don't like Chana dal much so omitted that.
Didn't have round red chillies so used the long ones.
I have to confess, I have followed this recipe to the T the first time I made it ( with the omission of the boiled yam), and it tasted equally good with my omissions and substitutions.
PS. As always, the photo sucks, even though I did take it in daylight, this time. Guess I just don't have a good trigger hand!
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Breathing choked!
We had some foreign visitors to entertain at work, so I booked a table at Dum Pukht - the Maurya's first 'brandname' restaurant, and probably one of the first in India. Dum Pukht came up years ago - in the 80's, I think, and created one of India's first 'master chefs' out of Imtiaz Qureshi. The restaurant has been popular ever since, which is quite rare for a restaurant, especially in faddy Delhi. The Maurya is also home to another landmark restaurant in Bukhara - a frontier cuisine speciality restaurant, which has been on the list of top 10 restaurants in the world as well. Maurya is also anecdotally the best in terms of sheer hospitality and guest service. So clearly the Maurya knows what they are doing. Perhaps indulgence comes naturally to them, given their key business is in cigarettes:)
The cuisine at Dum Pukht is Lucknowi and Nawabi at its best. The food is delicately and complex-ly spiced but not spicy as in flambe-your-tonsils. Dum Pukht cuisine essentially is the art of slow-cooking food in a sealed clay-pot - the food is prepared, spiced and placed in the pot, which is then sealed off with dough, and then slow-cooked. The steam is not allowed to escape ( the words literally mean to choke off the steam), and the food cooks in its own juices and aromas. Legend has it that the origin of this style of cooking dates back to the 1700's and the days of the Nawabs of Lucknow. One benevolent nawab, at a time of famine, began the construction of the Bara Imambara in Lucknow to provide employment for the starving people, and asked for them to be provided with food. His chef came up with the concept of putting the rice, meat and veggies, along with spices, into a large clay-pot with live coals on top and the coalfire below. It was a simple and elegant way of serving hot food at any time and making it a one-dish meal. One day, as the pots were being unsealed, the Nawab who was passing by noticed the extraordinary aroma and asked to taste the dish. The chef who came up with this is supposedly Imtiaz Qureshi's ancestor, and so the secret passes down from generation to generation. These Nawabs are the same who apparently catalysed the invention of the Kakori kabab, so quite a foodie bunch!
I always enjoy eating at Dum Pukht, only it costs an arm, a leg and other body parts, so I usually have to wait for official occasions. The food was wonderful, and mild at the same time. We ordered the hara kebabs, with spinach and cashews, for starters, followed up with Dum kakori, Murgh Qorma, Arhar Daal and Baingan-Mirchi ka Salan, with rotis. The restaurant served complimentary butter rotis which were the epitome of sinfulness, so soft and yielding were they. The Vegetable Biryani was good too, though not particularly outstanding.
As a vegetarian, I only had the daal and baingan but that was enough. the daal was wonderfully spiced, with just the right aromatic mix of jeera and garlic. I wonder how they do it - we make this at home all the time, and I don't remember it as being specially flavourful on most occasions. The Baingan-mirchi was made of small purple eggplant and large mirchis, which luckily were mild. The flavours went extremely well together, and now I want to learn how to cook that dish.
But more than the food itself, I was impressed by the exquisite service. I dropped my fork, and before I could say anything a replacement had arrived. The waiters took care to point out the more spicy dishes to our french guests so they were forewarned. At every point in the evening, we only had to look up to find an attentive waiter at the elbow, yet they were never obtrusive.
A meal for four, with a glass of wine each ( Grover's La Reserve, chosen by our French visitors!) came to about Rs. 7000, not counting taxes. Expensive but a wonderful experience, and definitely worth a re-visit...
The cuisine at Dum Pukht is Lucknowi and Nawabi at its best. The food is delicately and complex-ly spiced but not spicy as in flambe-your-tonsils. Dum Pukht cuisine essentially is the art of slow-cooking food in a sealed clay-pot - the food is prepared, spiced and placed in the pot, which is then sealed off with dough, and then slow-cooked. The steam is not allowed to escape ( the words literally mean to choke off the steam), and the food cooks in its own juices and aromas. Legend has it that the origin of this style of cooking dates back to the 1700's and the days of the Nawabs of Lucknow. One benevolent nawab, at a time of famine, began the construction of the Bara Imambara in Lucknow to provide employment for the starving people, and asked for them to be provided with food. His chef came up with the concept of putting the rice, meat and veggies, along with spices, into a large clay-pot with live coals on top and the coalfire below. It was a simple and elegant way of serving hot food at any time and making it a one-dish meal. One day, as the pots were being unsealed, the Nawab who was passing by noticed the extraordinary aroma and asked to taste the dish. The chef who came up with this is supposedly Imtiaz Qureshi's ancestor, and so the secret passes down from generation to generation. These Nawabs are the same who apparently catalysed the invention of the Kakori kabab, so quite a foodie bunch!
I always enjoy eating at Dum Pukht, only it costs an arm, a leg and other body parts, so I usually have to wait for official occasions. The food was wonderful, and mild at the same time. We ordered the hara kebabs, with spinach and cashews, for starters, followed up with Dum kakori, Murgh Qorma, Arhar Daal and Baingan-Mirchi ka Salan, with rotis. The restaurant served complimentary butter rotis which were the epitome of sinfulness, so soft and yielding were they. The Vegetable Biryani was good too, though not particularly outstanding.
As a vegetarian, I only had the daal and baingan but that was enough. the daal was wonderfully spiced, with just the right aromatic mix of jeera and garlic. I wonder how they do it - we make this at home all the time, and I don't remember it as being specially flavourful on most occasions. The Baingan-mirchi was made of small purple eggplant and large mirchis, which luckily were mild. The flavours went extremely well together, and now I want to learn how to cook that dish.
But more than the food itself, I was impressed by the exquisite service. I dropped my fork, and before I could say anything a replacement had arrived. The waiters took care to point out the more spicy dishes to our french guests so they were forewarned. At every point in the evening, we only had to look up to find an attentive waiter at the elbow, yet they were never obtrusive.
A meal for four, with a glass of wine each ( Grover's La Reserve, chosen by our French visitors!) came to about Rs. 7000, not counting taxes. Expensive but a wonderful experience, and definitely worth a re-visit...
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Indian food
This is a rambling post because I'm trying to knit several different ideas together, and it seems to have turned into a patchwork quilt rather than a woven spread. I was just reading a food blog I stumbled upon ( anything but work, right?) - A mad tea Party - and came across a post about the western standards and knowledge on food and how we should not apply it blindly to ourselves. One of the conclusions I have come to in recent times is that plain old home cooked Indian food can beat any other cuisine hands down in terms of both taste and health.
Our diet has a large quantity of vegetables - green and colourful, raw and cooked - at every meal. The dals are cooked with a minimal quantity of oil. We use whole wheat and therefore higher fiber flour for our bread than the maida that westerners use. All the spices that go into our food are recently being investigated by the West as health-enhancers, be it turmeric or cloves. Our recipes, particularly the traditional ones, have an innate balance between the ingredients for taste and health - rare is the potato bhaaji or chana daal dish that does not have ginger, for instance. Cultured yoghurt is a staple of every meal too.
I found out recently that different vegetables will taste different to people because of their genetic make-up. It would be only natural to assume that food also acts differently on people because of their DNA, so while I think basic common sense should apply to food choices ( i.e. if you eat fried food all the time you're gonna fall sick/ become obese, whether it's indian fried food or not!), we are broadly ok following our traditional food habits.
I also came across some research about cultural attitudes and how they are shaped by our Stone Age past - cultures which were based on hunting and gathering have very different attitudes to cultures which were based on farming - the former tend to be more individualistic and independent while the latter tend to be more socially oriented and interdependent. If our cultural attitudes are still shaped by something which happened so far in the past, isn't it likely that our reactions to food are also shaped by our past? That would explain why the west, particularly the Northern part of the West, would have health problems with a carb-rich diet whereas the east and the Southern part of the West (Italy?) - would lean towards more vegetables and carbs.
I'm off to have my healthy indian lunch now - sprouted moong salad.
Ingredients:
half cup sprouted green moong
1 cucumber, chopped
1 onion, chopped
1 tomato if you like, chopped
Juice of 1/2 - 1 lime
salt to taste
Black pepper powder or chaat masala
Just mix everything up and let chill for an hour. If you're a garlic fan and not in office ( as I am unfortunately), you can add a bit of crushed garlic too. Enjoy on a hot summer's day along with a glass of majjige ( double-toned home made dahi blended with coriander leaves, salt and a green chilli, and water if you like it thin, and garnished with kari patta and mustard seeds tadka ).
Our diet has a large quantity of vegetables - green and colourful, raw and cooked - at every meal. The dals are cooked with a minimal quantity of oil. We use whole wheat and therefore higher fiber flour for our bread than the maida that westerners use. All the spices that go into our food are recently being investigated by the West as health-enhancers, be it turmeric or cloves. Our recipes, particularly the traditional ones, have an innate balance between the ingredients for taste and health - rare is the potato bhaaji or chana daal dish that does not have ginger, for instance. Cultured yoghurt is a staple of every meal too.
I found out recently that different vegetables will taste different to people because of their genetic make-up. It would be only natural to assume that food also acts differently on people because of their DNA, so while I think basic common sense should apply to food choices ( i.e. if you eat fried food all the time you're gonna fall sick/ become obese, whether it's indian fried food or not!), we are broadly ok following our traditional food habits.
I also came across some research about cultural attitudes and how they are shaped by our Stone Age past - cultures which were based on hunting and gathering have very different attitudes to cultures which were based on farming - the former tend to be more individualistic and independent while the latter tend to be more socially oriented and interdependent. If our cultural attitudes are still shaped by something which happened so far in the past, isn't it likely that our reactions to food are also shaped by our past? That would explain why the west, particularly the Northern part of the West, would have health problems with a carb-rich diet whereas the east and the Southern part of the West (Italy?) - would lean towards more vegetables and carbs.
I'm off to have my healthy indian lunch now - sprouted moong salad.
Ingredients:
half cup sprouted green moong
1 cucumber, chopped
1 onion, chopped
1 tomato if you like, chopped
Juice of 1/2 - 1 lime
salt to taste
Black pepper powder or chaat masala
Just mix everything up and let chill for an hour. If you're a garlic fan and not in office ( as I am unfortunately), you can add a bit of crushed garlic too. Enjoy on a hot summer's day along with a glass of majjige ( double-toned home made dahi blended with coriander leaves, salt and a green chilli, and water if you like it thin, and garnished with kari patta and mustard seeds tadka ).
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