Weekend Cooking

Since our cook/ housekeeper is away, I'm having to cook on a more regular basis, though my parents have been stars, supplying food unasked for weeks on end. Sunday morning we had an idli beakfast, idlis and coconut chutney by mom while I dished up my froend Monika's mother in law's peanut chutney recipe. I'm one of those people who finds peanuts totally addictive, especially in savoury form, so I have pretty much cleaned out what was left of the chutney, pairing is variously with butter-toasted pao at dinner last night, with crackers for a snack and then cold out of the fridge with hot idlis again this morning.Would highly recommend you make it a pantry staple!

Here's the recipe link: Kickass peanut chutney

For those too lazy to follow yet another link, here it is:

Ingredients:

1. 1 cup roasted peanuts ( I used packaged, pre-roasted and salted peanuts out of laziness)
2. 3-4 dry roasted dried red chillies
3. 2-3 cloves garlic
4. 1 small onion, chopped
5. 1 lime sized ball of tamarind, soaked in 1/2 cup warm water
6. 1/2 cup water

2 sprigs curry leaves
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
1/2 tsp hing
1 tbsp oil ( peanut oil for choice)

In a little oil, cook the garlic till its dark brown but not burnt. Remove from the oil and fry the onion in the same oil till soft.
Grind together the first six ingredients to the required consistency - you decide if you like chutney runnier or thicker. Add salt to taste.
Heat the remaining oil in a tadka kadhai. Add the mustard seeds. When they pop, add the cumin, hing and lastly, washed curry leaves. Take off the heat and pour over the chutney. Bliss out!

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Then, for a late Sunday lunch as I just lost track of time, we had rajma by mom, with baked stuffed capsicum. The Capsicum could be a great meal by themselves, especially for anyone trying to go low-carb. I made the capsicum stuffings two ways. One was with a cabbage and potato stuffing from Monika's food blog. Another kind was a basic paneer bhurji, which actually worked out very well.

I love yellow and red capsicum but am not a big fan of the green ones, so this style of cooking actually made them delicious and the kids ate them up without a murmur. definitely going to repeat this...

Ingredients:
10 medium sized capsicums, cut into half each

Stuffing 1
1/2 small cabbage, cut into fine ribbons and soaked in water
2 potatoes, boiled and mashed
1 onion, julienned
2-3 cloves garlic, crushed
1/2 inch ginger, crushed
2-3 green chillies, chopped fine
1 tsp cumin powder
1 tsp coriander powder
salt to taste
1/2 tbsp oil

Heat the oil. Add the garlic and ginger and cook over medium heat for 1-2 minutes. Add the spice powders and onion. Cook till the onion is translucent. Add the drained cabbage - the water clinging to the leaves will be enough to cook it, and stir to mix. Once the cabbage is cooked through, add the mashed potatoes and salt and mix well.

Stuffing 2
200 gms paneer, grated or crumbled
3 small tomatoes, chopped fine
1 medium onion, chopped fine
2-3 green chillies, chopped fine
Handful coriander leaves, cut into fine shreds
1 tsp cumin seeds
1/2 tbsp oil
Salt to taste
1/2 tsp turmeric if you like

Heat the oil in a pan. Add the cumin seeds and toast for a minute. Add the chillies and onion and cook till translucent. Add the tomatoes and cook until soft. Add the paneer and salt and cook for a couple more minutes. Turn off the heat, add the coriander leaves. If adding turmeric, add into the hot oil before putting in the cumin seeds.

For the Capsicum:
Prepare the capsicum by slicing each capsicum into half and clearing out the seeds. Pre-heat the oven at 180 degrees C. Rub the oven roasting pan with a thin slick of oil ( about half tbsp).
Fill half the capsicum halves with Stuffing 1 and the other half with Stuffing 2. Bake for 25 minutes and let rest for 5.

Enjoy with rice and a bean dish, and dahi, with rotis or just by themselves with a salad on the side!

Peanuts galore

I just tried out this Gujarati chutney made from peanuts and it tastes fabulous, so had to share :) It tastes great with toast, bagels, chips, rotis, chillas - just about anything, really.
Ingredients:
3 tbsp peanuts
2 cups full of coriander leaves
3-4 green chillies
1 inch piece of fresh ginger
Juice of 1 lemon
Salt
1/2 tsp sugar
Lightly dry-roast the peanuts without any oil until they are pale brown. Puree them along with the coriander leaves, ginger and chillies and a little water until it turns into a smooth paste. Flavour with the sugar and add salt and lime juice to taste.

Spice it Up!

It's difficult to remember that chillies are not an inherent part of Indian cuisine and that in fact they came to us via the colonists, through South America. They seem so integral a part of our cuisine that it's hard to think of a savoury dish that doesn't use them. When we were in France, we used to find it very hard to find fresh green chillies ( really?), and chilli powder doesn't work for everything. So one day I decided to pick up these interesting looking chillies from the neighbourhood LeaderPrice - they looked like tiny little lanterns, with a pointy tip.

I was making Baingan bharta for dinner, so along with the eggplant, I roasted one of these - no point roasting too many before we know how spicy it is, I thought. We sat down to a rare meal of roti ( heated pita bread), masoor ki daal and bharta. One bite of the bharta and my husband and I were taking turns to stand under the kitchen tap and wash the volcano off our tongues!It turned out to have been a habanero - the spiciest chilli on the planet. Suffice it to say I handled it with kid gloves thereafter - using upto but not more than a 2 millimeter square!

I'm a moderate chilli-eater at the best of times, and don't really enjoy dishes which are too spicy. But a family friend from Pune used to send us a bottle of her Ranjaka - that's chilli chutney or an indian version of sambol - every year, and I was hooked onto it. It's been a while since she has sent us any, contact with Pune not being all that frequent. So a couple of weeks ago, when I spotted plump, juicy red fresh chillies at the mandi, I had to buy some to try this out for myself.

It's a rather simple recipe, and the result is as fiery as it looks. But it does go rather well with rotis, idlis, dosas...even buttered toast. Last week I added a spoonful to Stone Soup which completely changed the character of the soup - yummy.

Ingredients:
250 gms fresh red chillies, with the stems cut off
2 tsp roasted fenugreek seeds
5 tbsp lime juice
Salt to taste

Just put everything into the blender and blitz to a fine pulp.

If you want the chutney to be fiery but not blow-your-head-off, try slitting the chillies and removing the seeds, as well as soaking them in cold water for half hour.
I unfortunately didn't and so have a large quantity of searingly hot chutney ( unfortunate because my husband and son won't even touch it) - which still tastes darn good. I actually roasted the chutney in hot oil for about half an hour, after I tasted the first output, which seems to have marginally mellowed the heat a bit. Not as explosive as the habanero bharta but about a 7 on the chilli richter scale!

Hey I bet this'd taste even better with garlic added to it - gotta try that next time.

Down Home Breakfasts

There are many things I love about Karnataka food - the spices, the freshness, the fact that most of the food is not heavy - but what I enjoy most of all is the breakfasts. Give me a good Karnataka breakfast and the rest of the day goes incredibly well. The uppittu, the sajjige, avalakki, the set dose...but what really tantalizes my palate and imagination is akki roti. I don't know why but since childhood, this has been a particular favourite of mine.

We used to typically get this for breakfast when visiting family in Mysore. Somehow mom rarely made this in Delhi when we were kids. Later on, after I started working and mornings were less frantic, she used to make this every once in a while, especially when dad had got fresh green beans from Bangalore, and I always loved it. It got into my repertoire when I got married, particularly because rice flour was easily available at the grocery store in Fontainebleau.

Akki rotti is best had crisp, with a yummy coconut chutney or Ranjaka as an accompaniment. We've carted these handy eats with us on a very long driving holiday to Switzerland, and they came in very handy on stretches where we found no veg food.

Ingredients:
2 cups rice flour
Handful freshly grated coconut
Handful chopped coriander leaves
2-3 green chillies if liked
2 tsp jeera (cumin) seeds
1 red onion, chopped finely
Salt to taste

Mix the ingredients together with a little water to make the dough. Be conservative while adding the water, because this flour soaks it up pretty fast so it's all too easy to end up with a sticky, slushy mess ( and I speak from experience!)

Keep a wide bowl full of water handy on the side.

Take a fistful of dough and form it into a ball. Put the ball of dough in the middle of the frying pan, and using your fingers, press the dough out towards the corners of the pan.

Try and get the roti as thin as possible so it turns out crisp. Warning - your fingers will start to hurt a little bit, but all in a good cause! (The rice flour is too brittle to lend itself to rolling, hence the need to press them out). Occasionally dip your fingers in the bowl of water to keep the dough from sticking to them.

Once the dough has spread out, make 3 holes with the tip of your finger in the middle of the roti. Put the pan onto a hot stove and cover it with a lid that seals it off tightly. Cook under cover for about 2-3 minutes, and then remove the cover. The roti should be looking steam-cooked by now.

Dribble a few drops of the oil into each of the three holes, and taking a bit more oil in a teaspoon, run the teaspoon around the outer edges of the roti. Cook on a medium-high flame, turning over occasionally, until the back is nicely browned, and there are a few brown patches on the front.

Serve hot with traditional Karnataka coconut chutney. You can add fresh, lightly steamed green beans to the dough for an even more traditional touch.

Now the chutney too is a work of art, in my opinion. I hate the typical coconut chutney served at restaurants, particularly outside the south. They basically consust of ground up coconut and a bit of salt.

Homemade chutney - now that's the real thing, with taste and zing. It's so delicious I could eat a bowlful by itself, and it's the icing on the rather bland cake of idli or dosa. Neither idli nor dosa have the same savour when served without this accompaniment.

Ingredients:
1 fresh coconut, grated
1 lime-sized tamarind bit soaked in hot water
1 inch ginger, peeled and chopped
3-4 green chillies
Handful coriander leaves, chopped roughly
Handful Roast chana, peeled ( bhuna hua chana)
Salt to taste

Squeeze the tamarind into the hot water so all the tart juice runs out. Strain the tamarind juice into your blender. Add the rest of the ingredients, and half cup water. Grind finely, adding a little more water as and when needed. Top with the Garnish, and serve with idli, dosa, akki roti, uppittu, plain chapatti and whatever else takes your fancy!

Garnish:
1 tbsp oil
1 tsp black mustard seeds
1 tsp urad dal( white)
1 red dried chilly
Handful curry leaves, washed and dried
Pinch heeng ( asafoetida)

We had akki roti with this wonderful chutney made by dad for breakfast on Saturday. The weather was lovely - warm but with a cool breeze, so we ate out on our balcony, which has mediterranean-style stucco white walls and orange flooring. The balcony looks out into a jacaranda tree, and beyond that a lawn with frangipani trees, so it was the perfect place to enjoy a lazy breakfast. We wound up with traditional filter-kaapi supplied by dad again ( we don't go for coffee much at our place) while watching the two kiddos run around and play - Gar firdaus bar rue zameen ast, hameen ast, wa hameen ast, to paraphrase Babur!

Aromatic Dhania

I love the smell of coriander. To me there's nothing that spells freshness quite as much as the scent of this herb. I view it as such a thing of beauty that I hate throwing away even one leaf. I love garnishing dals or vegetables with dhania, dhania chutney with samosas or on a sandwich, in a raita. I even have a great recipe for dhania soup with garlic (another vegetable I love), a portuguese recipe, I believe, which is incredibly sensual with the two intermingled aromas and a dash of good quality olive oil. To me, a perfect lunch in the summer is cucumber salad with lemon juice as dressing, garnished with dhania, and salt and pepper to taste. Easy on the eye, on the nose and on the palate.