Christmas Desserts

Did I ever tell you about how I came to work at a French creperie? Well, it all started when I graduated from High School in Singapore a year ahead of time. We knew we were moving back to India but the Indian Government had been up and down about Dad’s posting dates, so we didn’t know exactly when we’d be back. So I’d taken extra courses and graduated early and now I was underage for college in India so I had nothing to do. One day when mom and I were out at a mall, she spotted a sign asking for assistance at a French bakery so she egged me on to put in a one-line resume and our phone number. The next thing I knew, they called me for an interview and I was hired as the girl manning the crepe stand at the food court in the Metro mall on Orchard Road.

The crepe stand was a new venture by two young Frenchmen in their mid-twenties. I of course only remember the name of the one on whom I had a crush – Bruno. His partner used to be the manager of the stand I worked at. We had about 6 square feet of space at a small supermarket, and it consisted of a table with a crepe machine sitting on top and space below to store paper plates and so on. My job was not only to make the crepes but also to wander around the food court giving samples out to entice customers into buying them, because they were new to Singapore.

When I began working there, Bruno and his partner had exactly three fillings for the crepes – butter and sugar, butter and jam and jambon – ham. They asked me to try and come up with new fillings, so my friend from school, Ginger - who worked at the yogurt stand next door that summer - and I used to brainstorm to come up with new flavourings. Cinnamon was one flavor I remember Ginger coming up with. We came up with banana, and chocolate (Nutella), then banana-nutella, granola…Ginger and I used to have a lot of fun coming up with these during our lunch breaks.

I remember all kinds of funny things happened at that crepe stand. First, one day the batter finished and when I called my boss to tell him that, he just said, “Well, buy it from the supermarket”. I was flabbergasted and spent a good hour wandering around in search of the batter before it occurred to me that language may have gotten the better of us and called him to say it was the batter – crepe mix – that I was talking about and not the butter – le beurre. It got so confusing for him that I wrote out the old tongue-twister, Betty Botter bought some butter and gifted it to him. Another time, I noticed that every day by about midday, the batter, if it had been left over from the previous day, would start smelling bad and then the crepes would start coming out spoilt – they wouldn’t spread easily but drop out in little gobs and stick to the crepe machine surface. At first my boss thought I was doing something wrong, and then we both started getting puzzled about it. Then one day my boss figured it out – the supermarket manager used to turn off all the electricity at night, including for the refrigerator where the leftover batter was stored.

It was fun working at that stand, and I got to make a decent amount of money. The crepe machine was a doddle to operate – you filled the batter in a little rectangular pan that stood at one end and ran on wheels. You brushed some butter on the hot surface and then pulled the rectangular pan from one end of the hot plate to the other, applying pressure evenly to a pair of handles – kind of like pliers’ handles – that stuck out from the long sides of the rectangular pan, and that meant that a small crack opened up on the floor of the pan and poured out an even thickness of crepe batter along the hot plate. Brush a little more melted butter onto the crepe, dust caster sugar/ jam or jambon onto the crepe, roll it up using the spatula and serve up with your best French smile!

I even learned to make crepes flambé, which was spectacular, especially in the relatively bland environs of the food court – douse a butter and sugar crepe in rum and set it alight. The showmanship came in folding up the crepe even as flames were shooting out – you had to be really fast – and serving it up onto a plate. Every time a large crowd was in the food court, I’d flambé a crepe and then the next hour or so be flooded with orders.

We didn’t end up having crepes too often while we lived in France. I think we were so starved for spicy snacks and food, that sweet stuff just didn’t appeal to us at that point. And I’d never made crepes from scratch by myself. But the thought of making crepes suddenly occurred to me yesterday morning as I was debating what to make for Christmas lunch. I usually put on a spread that involves a fair degree of work, mostly because I have a tiny oven so any meal that involves baking more than one dish becomes a production and a masterclass in timing. And I like making what I think of as typically continental fare for Christmas – though vegetarian – baked vegetables, quiches, pies, potatoes dauphinoise – that sort of thing. But this year I’ve been so exhausted lately and last night we were out late for our anniversary dinner and then up early for Christmas present-opening with the kids so I was making a simple meal. Crepes seemed like the perfect way to end it – simple yet flamboyant and exotic.

They were surprisingly easy to put together from scratch, and very easy to make. Even better, they need really careful monitoring of the amount of butter used – my kind of recipe! Too much and they won’t come out right. I started out with butter and sugar ones, then for the kids I made two with Nutella. But I really wanted the flambé, reminiscent of Christmas pudding, so I cut up some oranges in half and made one crepe with sugar and orange halves, folded it up, smothered it in Benedictine and set it alight. That was a spectacle, alright, with flames shooting high up.

I don’t have great pictures, because you get the best effect with the lights turned down low, which means I’m groping in the dark for the matches and by the time I’ve found them half the liqueur has caramelized away and so on. But I’d highly recommend this super-easy dessert for a small gathering. It looks incredibly complicated and oomphy, tastes great and, like all my favourite recipes, you can ring in your own changes. For instance, tonight we had some batter left, so in remembrance of an amazing liqueur we’d bought at Freiburg once, I made crepes Flambé with orange peel and kahlua – truly delicious. I wouldn’t be surprised if crepes made with Nutella topped with Frangelico taste fabulous – an adult chocolate experience – or ones doused in Godiva…the possibilities are endless!

Ingredients

1 cup plain flour

1 egg

3/4 cup of milk

For flavouring:

Caster sugar

Orange peel/Cut oranges/Thinly sliced Apples/ Nutella/ cinnamon powder

Tablespoon of liqueur for flambeing - you can use any clear liqueur, from Kirsch to Frangelico, Kahlua...

Make a paste of the egg and flour and gradually add in the milk, whisking slowly to avoid forming lumps. Keep aside for half hour.

Use a nonstick pan for making the crepes. Take 2-3 paper towels and dab a bit of butter on them, and rub the paper on the frying pan. Be careful to use only the minimum butter needed to grease the pan.

The batter should be pouring consistency - use a few more teaspoonsful of milk to thin it out if needed - it should pour easily from a jug. Pour some batter into the frying pan and swirl the pan around to coat completely.

Pour off excess batter if any.

Sprinkle some caster sugar on the crepe.

Add oranges/ orange peel/ whatever. Fold over the two sides towards the middle.

Douse in the liqueur and, working quickly, set it alight and serve up.

With practice, you can serve it up while flames are still shooting up, which looks phenomenal. You should turn the lights down before you flambe so it looks even more spectacular!

Poached pears

I had read about this at premium restaurants but never tried it, so a couple of weeks ago, I finally decided to try it out. The dish certainly looks really pretty, no? And it's pretty simple if you ignore the long marination period (2 days). So while not a dessert to be thrown together for an impromptu evening, it's certainly one to be tried for a formal event.

Ingredients:

2 pears - firm but sweet

Red wine - enough to immerse the two pears in

1 stick cinnamon

3-4 cloves

1 tbsp sugar (depending on sweetness of pears)

1 tsp lime juice

Vanilla icecream to serve, as an option

Skin the pears, leaving the stems on and marinate in a tall jar with enough wine so the pears are immersed. Turn them over after a few hours if you are placing them sideways. After 24 hours, take out the pears carefully, and put the wine on to heat at a simmer. Add the cinnamon and the cloves, the sugar and let it simmer for about 15 minutes before turning off the heat. Add the pears back and let it marinate for a further day in the fridge.

Serve on a plate, or - my preferred option - in a wine glass. If you like, you can place a bed of vanilla icecream in the glass before resting the pear on it. Feel free to drink up the spiced wine as is or heated up - mulled wine at its best!

Festive Meals

My parents home, while incorporating many cosmopolitan elements in terms of décor, style or menus, has remained pretty traditional when it comes to festivals. And in my quest to preserve some traditions in a relatively non-traditional family, I like to make meals on festival days very traditional and South Indian.

South Indian Brahmins are vegetarian, so the food served on festival days and occasions like weddings is vegetarian. In fact, as strict Brahmins, many South Indians avoid even onions and garlic in their cooking, believing them to have Tamsik elements which are incompatible with the pure thirst for knowledge and detachment that is supposed to be the goal of Brahmins. Even vegetables which are considered 'foreign' or earthy, like potatoes, are avoided on festival days.

Festive meals include one sweet item, a dal-based gravy dish like huli or saaru, kosambri – a salad made of julienned cucumber or finely grated carrot, or sometimes soaked chana dal or moong dal and dressed with lime juice, green chilli, chopped coriander and fresh grated coconut and seasoned with a mustard seed-curry leaves and heeng garnish, a dry vegetable, typically beans or ladies finger and rice. In my mother's home, a flavoured rice of some kind is de rigueur – lemon rice, tamarind rice or a rice spiked with a special pulao powder and mixed with a special selection of carefully chosen vegetables – tinda by itself, or green peppers with peas, fenugreek leaves by themselves or peas when the fresh peas really kick in. Even the order in which things are served on the plate and eaten has a special significance.

We start by serving a spoonful of the sweet – kheer, sajjige or whatever else in the bottom right. The kosambri at the top left. On the right of the kosambri comes the dry vegetable. Below the sweet comes a spoon of fresh homemade tuppa or ghee. A mound of plain rice is served in the center of the plate. The saaru or huli is served next to the rice. The spiced rice is usually served to the left of the plain rice.

The meal starts with the head of the house making a ceremonial ring of water drops around his plate, and then everyone begins their meal. The first morsel to be eaten has to be the sweet. Once that is finished, everyone is free to move on to whatever they want to eat, but a repeat helping of the sweet is necessary after the saaru-anna has been eaten. And we end the meal with curd-rice.

This year, for Deepawali, as mom was in the US with my sister, we all ate at our place, dad included. The sweets included payasa made with poppy seeds, sajjige – a halwa made with cream of wheat, and dad brought one of his favourite kannadiga desserts – kesari bhaat, or saffron-rice. I made saaru which my kids love, and lemon rice which is easy for everyone to eat, and for the cook to make.

Poppy seeds payasa is something that I never cared for as a child. It's only as an adult that I have developed a taste for it, and now I find the complex flavours delicious. It's also an easy one to make and healthy as it uses jaggery instead of sugar. And after the scramble of getting up early to do an oil ceremony for everyone, bathing and then rushing through the cooking in time to participate in the puje, I find its promise of sound sleep extremely beneficial J.

Poppy seeds Payasa

1 tbsp poppy seeds

1 tbsp rice

½ grated coconut

4-5 tbsp of jaggery, or to taste
1 tsp powdered cardamom
400 ml water

Soak the poppy seeds and rice in a little water for half hour. Blend with the coconut in a mixie until finely blended. Add to the water and set on to boil. Add the jaggery when it starts boiling, and let it simmer for 5-7 minutes after that. Top with the cardamom powder.

You can garnish with roasted cashews or slivers of coconut before serving. Tastes good, hot or cold!

Baked Vegetables

Back in the '80s in India, whenever people had parties, it was time for them to display culinary chops by way of serving unusual dishes from other cuisines. Those were the years characterized by menus which would have rajma chawal and paneer side by side with a Chinese Chop Suey, a dessert of agar-agar-laced China Grass or the ubiquitous baked vegetables, amongst the few households that owned such an esoteric piece of equipment as the oven. The baked vegetables would typically be a mix of potatoes, carrots, cauliflower and peas in white sauce topped with Amul processed cheese. I personally never liked the dish as I found it limp and the mix unappetizing.

Today's menus take in a much larger territory and typically try and serve everything from one type of cuisine, unless it's a buffet or a multi-cuisine banquet. So it's far more done to find a meal of Chinese, Thai or regional Indian cuisines at dinner parties, and baked vegetables, if served are in a context of similar dishes. In fact it's quite rare to find baked vegetables on any menu because they are passe. But done well, they can be delicious and interesting.

At the vegetable market over the weekend I found onion flowers and leeks which were reasonably priced, as well as Brussels sprouts which I love served baked with cheese. So last night when we had guests over for dinner, I thought it might be fun to try a combination of all three vegetables in a baked dish. The mixture turned out really well, though if I made it again I'd increase the quantity of Brussels sprouts, as otherwise they can tend to get lost in the mix. The sweet, meltingly soft roast onions are a wonderful contrast to the slight bitterness and chewiness of Brussels sprouts. This is definitely something to try again.

Ingredients:

1 pound onion flowers, cut into inch-long sticks

1 pound Brussels sprouts (I used about 100 gms yesterday and found it less than I wanted), cut into half cm rounds

500 gms leeks, cut into 1 cm thick rounds

1 tsp vegetable oil

200 gms light cream

½ cup milk

1 cup grated parmesan cheese

Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 150 degrees C. Mix the milk, cheese, cream, salt and pepper well. Roast the onion flowers in 1 tsp vegetable oil until wilted and soft but still vibrant green. Layer an oven-proof dish with the onion flowers, followed with the Brussels sprouts and then the leeks. Pour over a quarter of the cream-cheese mixture. Continue layering until all the vegetables are used up and end with a top layer of the cheese-milk-cream mixture.

Bake for 50 minutes – 1 hour, checking from time to time, until the top layer is lightly browned. Serve hot

Nature’s feast

It seems to me as we grow older, that there are two ways we can evolve. One way is to eschew everything about the natural state, and run screaming in the direction of Botox, facelifts and steroids, hoping to stave off the process of ageing itself. The other way is to go in the direction of vintage wine, ageing gracefully and allowing the bounty of nature given by God to mature and ripen and offer its deepest and most complex flavours. Of course, making sure that one is not corked!

In the same way, as I grow older, I seem to appreciate the beauty and bounty of nature more and more. Be it the contrast between the dark green, old-looking and rough-edged leaves of the Har-shingar tree juxtaposed with the fragility of its star-shaped white flowers laden with perfume, standing proudly on their bold-coloured orange stems or the abundance of fruit and vegetables that grace our markets in every season. On Saturday, I visited my favourite vegetable mandi in Munirka, near the Malai Mandir and was almost transfixed by the sheer variety of vegetables and fruit available. As usual, I was greedy and bought more than I think we can eat within a week, as the market is a little out of my way. But the luxury of being able to choose so many fresh, naturally ripened vegetables and fruit is one that I never cease to appreciate.

There were all kinds of exotic and mundane things available – from the kannadiga favourite seeme badnekaayi or Chayote, to onion flowers, looking like frailer versions of asparagus, to tender young asparagus itself. Leeks, white onions, sambar onions, spring onions and red ones. Sweet potatoes, new potatoes and ordinary ones. Five kinds of eggplant or brinjal, from the big, round one used for bhurtas to long purple Japanese ones, tiny green ones prized by the Thais, small purple ones perfect for Bagaare Baingan to slim, delicate looking white ones. Fresh greens, from Bibb and iceberg to lollo rosso, a big bunch of spinach, a bunch of methi or fenugreek greens, rocket, dill, coriander and some red leaves that I don't know the name of. All kinds of squashes and root vegetables, from sweet potatoes to yams to taro…The fruit stalls too were full, for once, with fruit ranging from Indian green pears to yellow Bartletts which I promptly bought for the purpose of poaching in red wine, pomegranates from Afghanistan, large and bursting with juice, red-cheeked apples and star-shaped disco papayas, oranges and custard apples, Maltas or navel oranges and persimmons, and of course, the humble yet much-loved banana…

I came home laden with bags full of farm-fresh produce and I can only hope that we manage to eat everything we bought before it goes bad. But the experience of buying and being able to select from such abundance, and more, cooking the produce in such a way as to bring its flavours alive without killing it in an overdose of oil or spices, and then enjoying every mouthful…Ahhhh, there is nothing that produces a greater sense of well-being.

For the past few days, I have been indulging in a guilty pleasure once the kids are on their way to the park. I shut the door behind them, revel in the momentary blessed silence, then head for the kitchen to rootle out a Malta and a sharp knife. I quarter the fruit and settle into my favourite armchair. Then I greedily stuff a piece of the fruit into my mouth, sucking the sharp, sweet-sour juices and enjoying every last drop as it dribbles into my throat and think, "Gar Firdaus bar rue zameen ast, hameen ast, wa hameen ast", Babar to the contrary!

First Birthday Food

My youngest, Bojjandi, turned one yesterday. It was bitter-sweet - on the one hand I was happy I had managed to keep him alive given two siblings under six with a habit of strewing tiny toys around the house and not knowing their own strength. on the other hand, my littlest baby was also getting ready to move into toddler-hood, baby no more. I almost thought it was time for baby # 4 but the prospect of divorce and/ or working until the age of 95 made me decide 3 was enough to be going on with.

For his first birthday party, the food had to be something that he could eat. Moreover, I had had pest control done just two days before and the kitchen was lying strewn all over the dining room, so it had to be an easy menu. Finally I decided simplicity was going to be key and fixed the menu: Idlis with huli and coconut chutney, rice flavoured with vegetables and menthedittu, and carrot cake.

The Carrot Cake was a new one on me but I had been wanting to make one for quite a while, and when I saw the recipe in one of my favourite recipe books, I found it was healthy too - wholewheat flour, carrots, orange juice and vegetable oil. It turned out really well, though it was flatter than I expected, as I had baked it in a wide cake pan. I frosted it simply with cream cheese flavoured with honey and orange juice - something which didn't tax my cake-decorating skills of which, to say they are meagre would be high praise. And proof of the deliciousness of the said cake was Bojji gobbling it up and wailing loudly for seconds :)

Carrot Cake recipe

Ingredients:

2 cups wholemeal self-raising flour, or with 2.5 tsps of baking powder added

3-4 carrots, grated and squeezed dry

1 cup vegetable oil

1 cup caster sugar

1 tsp nutmeg powder

1 tsp cinnamon powder

3 eggs

1 cup walnuts, powdered (optional)

Zest of 1 orange and its juice

Beat together the orange zest, OJ, sugar and eggs until light and frothy. Add the vegetable oil, flour and spices and mix well. Add in the carrots and walnuts and mix together. Pour the cake batter into a greased and lined 8" baking pan and bake at 180 degrees for 1 hour - decide n baking time and temperature based on your oven's idiosyncrasies. Mine required baking at 160 for 35 minutes and the crust was close to burnt.

For the frosting, beat together 225 gms cream cheese with 2-3 tbsp honey and 1 tbsp OJ. You can also use this to sandwich the cake together and then top with Royal or Marzipan icing. Decorate as wished...

Back again

Have been off blogging for a long while thanks to not having a laptop...Now I've finally got one so here I come. Lots and lots of posts have been revolving in my head for ages...

One of the first things a resourceful and experimentative cook needs to learn is the fine art of 'jugaad'. Jugaad is an Indian term signifying street smarts - the art of using what resources you have at your disposal and accomplishing what you need to accomplish, without waiting for the perfect solution to present itself.

Recently A's birthday came up and I had had no time to preplan what I was going to do that day. A is not a chocolate cake fan, unless it's a special recipe, like my Chocolate Chestnut bombe, or the Chocolate fondant cake, so I racked my brains to come up with something he would like that would be interesting to make too. I had also been pondering my stash of frozen raspberries for a while, wanting to find something evocative to do with them.

As it turned out, I found a wonderful recipe for Almond Cake in Nigella Lawson's How to be a domestic goddess. It uses a cup of almonds, blitzed into powder, with eggs and sugar. It's typically made in a bundt pan, so the shape itself looks festive.

Simple: Beat together 4 egg yolks with 1 cup caster sugar. Add vanilla and the powdered almonds. Beat the whites until stiff and fold in. Bake in a nonstick bundt pan for one hour at 160 degrees centigrade (keep an eye on the cake while it's baking as each oven is a little different).

Well, at least that's what I thought. So I beat the yolks and whipped the whites and folded away and set it to bake. About 50 minutes later the cake was done, so I set it out to cool. Only to find that once cool, the cake simply would not emerge from the pan in one piece. Of course, I hadn't happened to have had a nonstick bundt pan so I had used an ordinary round pan copiously lined with wax paper, but given the moist and sticky nature of this cake, that didn't work. I might add, I had substituted powdered ordinary sugar as I was out of caster sugar - I am not one of nature's planners...

So here I was with great hunks of a sticky cake - not festive looking! Now what to do? The the thought of the raspberries jumped into my head and I decided to make a jugaad version of English trifle, with cream and raspberry sauce.

I took out my Spanish red and gold glass bowl and tossed a few hunks of almond cake into the bottom. Then I topped it with lightly sweetened beaten light cream and topped it with raspberry sauce, made by whipping defrosted raspberries with a little sugar, as the rasps were a little sour. I carried on layering until all the cake, cream and rasps were used up and chilled it until the rasp sauce was well set.

It turned out to be a fabulous concoction, with the sour-sweet raspberry sauce cooled by the whipped cream providing a lovely contrast to the sweet and moist cake. What do you think?