Taro the terrible escapes again

October 25, 2013November 2, 2013Aneela Mirchandani Roots and tubers, Sindhi food Tags: arbi chaat, arbi recipe, food, indian food, indian recipes, kachaalu chaat, kachaalu recipe, sindhi food, vegan, vegetarian 2 Comments

Taro chaat

…with some excellent results. I have before made note of taro root‘s scruffy appearance and its delectable nature. In this appetizer from my Sindhi childhood, taro shines with a few well-chosen accompaniments. This dish can go as a side with any Indian meal, or have it in the evening during a chaat and tea session.

Taro chaat

Ingredients:

2 or so medium-sized taro tubers
4 tablespoons tamarind chutney
1 tablespoon finely chopped onion
1 tablespoon minced cilantro leaves
Quarter teaspoon salt
Quarter teaspoon red chili powder
Half a teaspoon cumin seeds

Method

Rinse the taro and microwave it for about 5 minutes. Now it will be softened inside. When it cools, peel it to reveal the creamy white flesh. Cube it into quarter-inch wide cubes and save in a bowl.

Put in the cilantro and onion. And one is supposed to ‘layer the salt’ so go ahead, add enough salt for this amount of ingredients and stir. This will be about a quarter of a teaspoon but use your judgment.

Now put in the prepared tamarind chutney. Now. A slight digression about tamarind chutney is forthcoming.

You can make tamarind chutney the easy or hard way. The hard way uses the dried pods of tamarind, either peeled and made into a block, or the pods themselves. Either way this method requires a lot of soaking and squeezing with your fingers to get the pulp out. So I tend to use a shortcut method — tamarind paste is the one thing I do buy prepared from the store. I use tamarind paste, and this is a good recipe for tamarind chutney using the paste. If you want, you can add a couple dried dates, chopped fine.

Roast the cumin seeds in a hot, dry pan for a minute or two, till they turn a shade darker, and grind to a rough powder in a clean coffee grinder or a mortar and pestle.

Top the tamarind with the red chili powder, and the cumin powder, stir well, and you are done.

This makes enough for one person as a largish side, but is easily multiplied. Oh — and if you don’t possess tamarind or have a special hatred for it, you could substitute with a similar amount of lime juice.

Wondrous bread

October 7, 2013November 2, 2013Aneela Mirchandani Risen breads Tags: bread, food, Recipes, sandwich bread recipe, vegan, vegetarian, white bread recipe 5 Comments

Dear Reader, I am aware that not all visitors to my blog are foodies. Some of you want your daily bread and water and to not be bothered to put all manner of unfamiliar pastes and blocks in your mouth (“just try one bite!”) I have non-foodies in my family, and I get you. I really do.

And when it comes to bread, the non-foodie likes the square sliced white bread. I do too! Sliced white bread is a neutral substrate for any kind of sandwich. Cube it and turn it into croutons. Toast it and butter it. Batter-fry it. Dip it in soup. The shape is predictable, even, easy to cut into little squares or triangles. This kind of bread is a workhorse.

In India we grew up with white bread of this variety:

But as with many things, the primary innovation of making a square loaf, preslicing it and packaging it in waxed paper was American. It was a Wonder! And in case you need prodding to feel sufficiently celebratory, here, I will help:

It was a !

Sliced bread was invented in the 1920’s by a man named Otto Frederick Rohwedder. Not only did he come up with a bread slicer but also the idea of wrapping them in waxed paper to keep the slices fresh. After an initially doubtful populace, sliced bread began to fly off the shelves.

Pretty soon households were addicted to sliced white bread; that created its own problems. They became malnourished; the government had to insist that vitamins and minerals be added to the bread. Also, people began to forget what bread was supposed to taste like. Over the decades, the ‘bakeries’ where the bread was made turned into ‘factories’: the taste suffered, but nobody noticed. The product still flew off the shelves; ever more convenient, ever cheaper to make, sell, buy; it lasted longer and longer in our pantries. Until we ended up with this:

Wonder bread ingredients from http://theysmell.com

But never forget that the original soft white sandwich loaf really is wondrous. Easy to slice — not so crusty that the knife sends bread shards shooting into your eye. Not so soft that the knife mangles it with one gash. Easy to use for any kind of sandwich. And delicious.

Wondrous Bread

This recipe is from King Arthur Flour: Classic White Sandwich Bread. You should click the link for instructions and background but I’m repeating the entire recipe here.

Dry Ingredients:

4 cups unbleached all purpose flour
1/3 cup dry milk powder (unsweetened)
2 1/4 teaspoon instant yeast

Wet Ingredients:

1 tablespoon honey
1 3/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons soft butter
1 1/2 cup water

Method:

Mix the dry ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer with a dough hook attachment. Mix the wet ingredients separately (no need to get it super combined). Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour the wet stuff in.

Stir with a dough hook until it sort of comes together in a shaggy mass. Cover with plastic wrap and leave it aside for about 10 minutes. Come back, run the mixer at this point for about 5 minutes until it comes together into a rough dough, like this:

At this point, I like to finish kneading by hand, until it becomes a smooth dough like this:

How do you know when you have kneaded enough? This is a trick I learnt from the book The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. Take a little marble-sized ball of dough. Spread it as thin as you can into a little sheet, gently. If you are able to tease the dough into a translucent sheet (light should be able to shine through) without breaking it, you are there. If it breaks off into chunks rather than become a translucent sheet, you are not there and need to knead further. This is called the windowpane test.

Windowpane test

OK. Oil the dough to keep it from drying out and put it in a large container to rise. I usually mark the level at which it is with a sticky tape. Leave it at room temperature until it doubles. This will take about 2 hours.

Now comes the shaping. The loaf needs to go into a 9″ by 5″ loaf pan. Form the dough into a rough rectangle, and start rolling it into a log from the long side, gently pressing the seam closed as you go. Take care to tuck in the ends as you roll. The shaped loaf should have its seam closed everywhere, almost like a zipped up sleeping bag.

Place it into a greased loaf pan and cover with a plastic wrap. In an hour or 90 minutes the loaf will have risen to an inch above the rim. Now it is ready to go into an oven.

Preheat the oven to 350 F. When it comes to temperature the loaf pan goes in (without the plastic wrap, please!) Bake the bread for 35 – 40 minutes. Around the middle of the cooking time, turn the pan 180 to allow it to cook evenly on all sides, and, tent it with aluminium foil to prevent it from browning too much.

When it is done, allow it to cool in the pan with some airflow under it, then take it out and slice it. There! sliced white bread.

The doofus

October 3, 2013November 2, 2013Aneela Mirchandani Sindhi food, Squashes and gourds Tags: food, indian food, indian recipes, sindhi food, vegan, vegetarian Leave a comment

Somebody stop me I feel a thesis coming on. It is about this vegetable:

Kaddoo

This is not the kind of vegetable that one expects paens to be written about. It is found anywhere that vegetables are sold in India; and being India, that could be a basket at a railway platform or a sheet laid out on the sidewalk:

vegetable market selling kaddoo and other things

A vendor sorts vegetables next to a railway track as a train passes by, in Dhaka on September 10, 2012. (Andrew Biraj/Reuters)

Sidewalk vegetable seller from suvisworld.wordpress.com

It is known to me and other Sindhis as ‘kaddoo’. It is so devoid of glamour that if you call someone a ‘kaddoo’ you may as well call them a doofus. But don’t underestimate it, because the kaddoo has mystique. For one thing, it is one of the oldest cultivated plants in the world. Humans have been eating it for ten thousand years. Recently some stands of wild kaddoo were discovered in Zimbabwe, which is probably where it originated. News of the cultivated kaddoo seems to have spread like wildfire, from Africa to Asia to the Americas; the kaddoo discovered America before Columbus.

Check out its pretty flower:

Kaddoo flower

Like other plants from the Cucurbitacae family (squashes, melons and gourds), it is a vine and climbs by means of tendrils. Kaddoo flesh is pale, watery and very mild. Some would say boring. It cooks down to become squishy and somewhat gelatinous. The skin is thin and pale green, but one does have to peel it before cooking. The seeds of the young fruit are quite edible.

Calabash

So where is the mystique? I knew that kaddoo is also known as lauki, bottle gourd, opo or dhoodhi, but I didn’t know that it also goes by the romantic name of Calabash. In India we mostly eat this as a young vegetable, when its peel and seeds are rather soft. But apparently when it ages, the peel hardens, the flesh dries up, leaving a sort of bottle behind; In this form, it is called a calabash. It has been used by old cultures as a vessel, or even as a musical instrument. Apparently the fact that the size of these gourds roughly matches the size of the human head gives it its resonant qualities.

Sitar parts

Musical instruments, hmm…what kind? Some tribal folksy thing no doubt, that street performers play and bystanders throw change at? Sure…but also, think Ravi Shankar and the sitar. The calabash is used for the shell of the deeply buzzy and resonant sitar…the main resonating chamber of which is called…wait for it…the kaddoo.

QED.

Kaddoo koftas in gravy.

kaddoo koftas

Ingredients:

One large kaddoo, peeled, quartered and seeded
Quarter cup besan
Half a teaspoon coriander powder
Some sprinkles red chili powder
One teaspoon aamchur
Salt to taste
4 – 5 tablespoons oil
One recipe of browned onion tomato gravy

Method

Grate the kaddoo quarters. Salt it with about a teaspoon of salt and mix it with your fingers. Leave the grated kaddoo aside for about half an hour; during this time the salt will draw out most of the moisture.

Now you can do the rather tedious task of squeezing out the water from fistfuls of kaddoo my means of your hands. Save the water, it has some kaddoo-ness and we will use it later.

Meanwhile start off the process of making the browned onion tomato gravy. When it calls for water (at the end) use the kaddoo water, would you please? Lets not waste it.

The volume of the grated kaddoo will have much reduced, and it will be dry. Put in the besan and the dry spices. You do not need more salt. Mix it with your oiled fingers; it should now be amenable to form patties. Form about 6 patties and leave them side by side on a plate.

Panfrying them is next. Heat a non-stick pan with oil about an eighth of an inch deep. When nice and hot, put in the patties with liberal gaps around, and sort of flatten them. Let them cook for 5 – 7 minutes or until they brown at the bottom; flip them, some more oil perhaps, and cook for another 5 minutes.

The patties are ready, all that is needed is to slip them into a nicely simmering pot of the browned onion gravy.

And you are done. This dish goes very well with rotis/chapatis.

Browned onion-tomato gravy — let’s get this over with

October 1, 2013November 2, 2013Aneela Mirchandani Basic methods, Sindhi food, Vegetables Tags: food, indian food, indian recipes, vegan, vegetarian 2 Comments

Browned onion tomato gravy

Sindhi food has a ton of recipes that start with first making a browned onion-tomato gravy, then putting in whatever edible goodies you find in the fridge that day.

Browned onion gravy can make anything taste good. Those left over hard-boiled eggs from a week ago? Throw them in. The unidentifiable pulpy vegetable with the brown spots? Cut out the brown spots, throw it in, heat it through, and gloat. Lentils, beans of all descriptions, chicken, dumplings that are fried, dumplings that are boiled, in they go. Call them meatballs or call them koftas, throw them in. You could make a giant batch of the gravy, freeze it in meal-sized portions, thaw and add stuff to it — there you go, your main meal for dinner.

In fact this gravy is such a magician that it is a bit of a cop-out for an aspiring master chef, and makes me reluctant to use it too often. Think about it — if you are a doctor, how respected would you be if your advice for every ailment is — ‘take two aspirin and call me in the morning’? It might work but it is too easy. But this is still an indispensable skill to have in your Indian cooking repertoire, so let us take our two aspirin and learn to do this right.

Browned Onion-tomato gravy

Start with reading this recipe — how to caramelize onions. That is going to be our first step. This recipe makes enough for a base for the main meal for 2 – 4 people.

Ingredients:

One medium-large onion, chopped fine, or sliced thin.
One large or two small tomatoes, roughly chopped.
3 – 4 large cloves garlic, minced
Half inch piece of ginger, minced
1 – 4 serrano chilies to your heat tolerance, sliced
Half a teaspoon whole cumin seeds
Half a teaspoon coriander powder
Quarter teaspoon turmeric
Half a teaspoon salt
2 – 3 tablespoons oil

Method:

Heat oil in a wide thick-bottomed pan. When it shimmers put in the cumin seed; when that sizzles, the onion and caramelize it.

At this point add the ginger, garlic, chili, and let them cook on medium heat for a couple minutes. Now put in the tomato. Sprinkle some salt over. The thing about the tomato is that is has to liquefy, then mostly dry up. First, the combination of the heat and the salt will make it release its liquid. Then, cook some more on that wide-open pan of yours, and the liquid will evaporate. The remains of the tomato will combine with the caramelized onion to create a rough paste.

Browned onion tomato gravy

At this point the dry powders can go in. Give them a stir, and then put in some water; the amount depends on what you are trying to use the gravy for, anywhere from half a cup to a cup.

Bring the water to a boil, and let it simmer for about 5 – 7 minutes.

The gravy is basically done. But you can take it into multiple directions from here:

run it through a blender to get a smoother sauce
add some cream or milk to make it creamy
or add a cashew puree to make it creamy that way
add garam masala, extra chili in the form of red chili powder, cumin powder, or other spice mixture of your choice
or use it as is.

Soap chutney

September 24, 2013November 2, 2013Aneela Mirchandani Chutneys Tags: cilantro chutney, coriander chutney, food, hara dhaniya chutney, indian food, indian recipes, vegan, vegetarian 4 Comments

Green chutney

Only after I first came to these foreign lands as an adult did I realize that there existed people who hated cilantro. I could not conceive of this. In India this deeply cut leaf of the coriander plant tops each meal and many spice pastes are centered around it. It is so commonplace that you would have to stop eating to avoid it. It is commonplace as water. Perhaps not that much. It is as common as…ah, say, soap?

Soap.

Yes, soap. People who intensely dislike cilantro all agree that it reminds them of soap. This is incredible to me. I’m a reasonably clean person, people, and I have had many close encounters with soap. Daily, you might even say. I have eaten cilantro by the fistful. At no time have I had the urge to rub the leaves onto my hands, nor to bite into the bar in the shower.

Soap? What to make of this?

Just to be complete, let us first consider the possibility that there is a secret society of cilantro haters who have secret meetings where they collude on what smell they will all agree cilantro reminds them of. That is a definite possibility, but I’m missing what the motive might be here.

The other possibility is that yes, indeed, cilantro has a secret life where it dabbles in cosmetics. Because the few people who don’t mention soap, say that cilantro reminds them of lotion.

There is a scientific basis for this. There are fragments of fat molecules called aldehydes; the ones found in soap are same or similar to the ones found in cilantro. As this New York Times article by Harold McGee explains, people from cultures that are used to cilantro have learnt from an early age to tamp down the soapiness of cilantro in favor of the herbal and pungent smells.

Which brings us to cilantro chutney. I for one, adore the smell of cilantro so much that the question for me is: how much cilantro flavor can I pack into each cubic inch? The simplest way to do this is by making a paste.

Green Chutney

Green chutney was a staple in my household. There was always a steel tin of this condiment in the fridge. In earlier days our cook used a grinding stone, something like this:

Stone grinder

Then the Industrial Age dawned in our household and then we used a blender, the picture of which I do not need to show you.

This chutney is great as a spread on bread, or as a side to all kinds of Indian snacks.

Ingredients:

1 bunch of cilantro, rinsed and roughly chopped, including soft stems
Anywhere from 1 to 8 serrano chilies, depending on your heat tolerence
Half a teaspoon salt or to taste
For sourness, 2 teaspoons of lime juice or 1 teaspoon tamarind paste (optional)
Half a bunch fresh mint, leaves only (optional)
1 – 2 cloves garlic (optional)
Half an inch piece of ginger, peeled and sliced (optional)
A cubic inch of onion (optional)
Half a teaspoon sugar (optional)

Method:

As you might have noticed there are a number of optional ingredients. Just the first three will give you a serviceable green chutney, but the addition of the others will enhance the flavor in their own unique ways. I particularly recommend adding onion, because onion has this unique characteristic (like salt) to bring out the flavor of the other ingredients, while not overstating its own. A good team player, is our onion.

Put everything into a blender with only the water that clings to the leaves from rinsing, and hit go. Maybe add a tablespoon more water but limit this. You might need to stop, stir, and go a few times, but eventually the blades will catch; and you will have your green chutney.

Interestingly encrusted salmon

September 20, 2013November 2, 2013Aneela Mirchandani Californian food, Fish Tags: fish, food, indian food, indian recipes 1 Comment

Salmon crusted with cracked black pepper is IN. Open a fancy restaurant, add that dish to your menu, and watch your cash register spin. But what is a few cracked peppers? I pooh-pooh it. Wait, I must catch a breath from laughing. I give you — salmon encrusted with the most interesting crust in the world.

Black pepper does make an appearance. Coriander seeds do as well. And also — that paragon of savoriness — urad dal (Vigna mungo), the platinum-blond lentils that turn red when roasted. Throw in some lemon juice and you have a meal. The fame of this recipe has spread far and wide throughout my home since I came up with it.

The most interestingly encrusted salmon in the world

Ingredients for the spice powder:

Half a tablespoon whole black pepper
One tablespoon whole coriander seeds
One tablespoon skinned and split urad dal

Ingredients for the meal:

3/4 lb salmon steak or fillet
salt to taste
One tablespoon olive oil
Juice of half a lemon or to taste

Method:

To make the spice powder we need to first roast the seeds. Heat a small thick-bottomed pan on medium heat. Put in the black pepper and coriander seed in one batch. Stir occasionally. In a couple minutes a few will start to pop (stand back). Empty the seeds into a small bowl.

Next, in the same pan, in goes the lentil. Stir once in a while to ensure even roasting. These will take longer but in a few minutes will redden. Take them off the heat into the same bowl.

Wait a few minutes for the spices to cool, then grind them up in a clean coffee grinder. The salmon crusting spices are ready. You can save the excess in a clean spice jar, nicely labeled and dated. You will thank yourself later.

Next let’s prepare the fish. For us, dinner for two consists of a three-quarter-pound fillet or steak of salmon, but feel free to use as much fish as you need. Start the oven at 425 F to preheat.

Place the fish in an oven-safe tray. Make a few deep cuts with a sharp knife. Sprinkle salt to taste. Now spread olive oil over the fish, then lemon juice, taking care to drive some of the salty, oily, lemony mixture into the deep cuts you just made (now you don’t need to wonder why you made them).

Next comes the spice powder. I use it liberally to coat the fist. Perhaps a tablespoon and a half for a piece this size? The point is really to cover the flesh.

Goes into the oven next. I give it 20 minutes in a 425 F oven, and it comes out medium-well. Your mileage may vary.

This goes very well with patty-pan squash mashed (squashed?) but the recipe for that will come later.

The Tahoe gratin

September 16, 2013November 11, 2013Aneela Mirchandani Cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, chuoy, Roots and tubers, Western food Tags: bechamel sauce recipe, food, Recipes, Vegetable au gratin, vegetable casserole, vegetarian 6 Comments

Tahoe Gratin

We spent labor day in a rented cabin in the Tahoe region. We had a state of the art kitchen at our disposal, a warm cozy evening for dining in, a few vegetables in the fridge, but no spices whatsoever. What’s an Indian cook to do?

Gratin!

I love gratins — the creamy cheesy crusty casseroles. I was first introduced to gratins in an strange fashion — a pure vegetarian Gujarati restaurant in Bombay had a ‘Vegetable Au Gratin’ on the menu and it was delicious. Restaurants in India have this strange quirk where the advertised cuisine hardly matters — a South Indian dosa restaurant will have an entire Indian Chinese menu, and throw in a club sandwich as well. They don’t seem to believe in specialization of cuisine.

Sort of like the proprietor here at The Odd Pantry you say? Hmm.

At any rate, this is a pure vegetarian gratin, and it is built in layers of potato, cauliflower and corn…all vegetables with distinct flavors that nevertheless that have a certain savoriness that unites them.

The Tahoe gratin

Ingredients:

1 large red potato or 2 medium
Half a head of cauliflower
Half a pound bag of frozen corn kernels
One and half cup milk
1 – 2 tablespoons butter
1 – 2 tablespoons whole wheat flour (same amount as butter)
salt to taste
A 2″ by 2″ by 2″ block of good sharp cheddar cheese

Method:

In this dish I precook all the vegetables to minimize and equalize the gratin baking time. The other principle I follow is to salt each layer on its own.

First, the potatoes. Slice the potato as thin as you can get them (eighth of an inch). Put them in a pyrex container, add salt enough for the potatoes, and submerge them in half a cup milk. Microwave for 2 – 3 minutes and then set aside.

Next the cauliflower. Slice the florets into quarter inch thick slices, put them in a bowl, add some salt, and once again, microwave for 2 – 3 minutes and set aside.

Next the corn. Same routine — put in a bowl, add salt enough for the corn, and microwave. With the frozen corn all we are trying to do is thaw them.

Vegetables are ready. Let’s make the bechamel sauce. Heat the butter in a small pot. When it melts, add the flour and stir, stir, stir on gentle heat. It will foam and bubble and perhaps turn a shade darker. Now put in the milk. Stir with your wooden spoon for dear life as you slowly pour the milk in. You may need to resort to a whisk, the idea is we are trying to not have any lumps. Keep the heat gentle. You can also pour in any extra milk from the potato cooking bowl. Once all the milk has gone in, and the mixture is smooth, you can up the heat and bring to a boil. Add salt enough for this sauce.

Once it comes to a boil, turn it off after a minute. We are ready to compose the layers. In a flat baking dish, first layer in the potato slices, trying to keep even thickness. Next put on the cauliflower florets in a layer. Next the corn. Now pour the bechamel sauce all over the vegetables, pushing and prying with a spatula to get it everywhere.

Cut the cheese up into tiny cubes. Cover the top of the casserole with cheese. Cover with foil and bake for 45 minutes at 425 F. In the last 10 minutes, take the foil off to get it to brown. If you want more of a brown crust, stick it under the broiler for 5 extra minutes.

Here are some other ideas for other vegetables to add to the mix: peas, leeks, roasted zucchini.

Yogurt Rice — an iterative approach

September 13, 2013November 2, 2013Aneela Mirchandani Rice, South Indian food Tags: food, indian food, indian recipes, vegetarian 3 Comments

Yogurt rice

A precept that is big in the software engineering world (my other life) is that development should happen in phases, but each phase should be releasable as a full-fledged product.

This precept was very much on my mind as I made yogurt rice for dinner the other evening. I’ll tell you why.

Now yogurt rice (otherwise known as curd rice; mossaru anna in Kannada, daddojanam in Telugu, bagala bath in Tamil) is a South Indian recipe that I hadn’t even heard of till adulthood. But had I ever eaten yogurt rice? Of course! Every single day of my tender young life I had yogurt rice for lunch. Yogurt rice with cauliflower, yogurt rice with ketchup (don’t ask), yogurt rice with papad, yogurt rice with sookha aalu, yogurt rice with pickles. If you pierced my veins you would probably have had thick and pulpy yogurt rice squirt out.

Sorry about that image. Here’s the point I’m trying to make. Short of the fancy ‘yogurt rice’ recipe with every bell and whistle, simply mixing yogurt with rice achieves a serviceable product. While being quite ricey and quite yogurty and cooling, it is its own thing with a very distinctive fragrance. That is your first iterative product — simply mix yogurt with rice. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Iteration 1: Mix it up

Cook about a cup of long-grained rice with some salt. Let it cool a bit, break lumps with your fingers, then mix in about a cup of plain yogurt nicely. You are done with your first product. This is a great accompaniment to any spicy vegetable dish or pickle. Or heck, dot it with ketchup, scoop up a dot in each bite, but don’t tell people this idea came from me.

Iteration 2: Salad it up

Now for the second iteration we throw in some crunchy salady ingredients to brighten the flavors. Imagine luscious smooth cooling yogurt rice with the occasional crunchy freshness, perhaps a couple in each bite. Chop up 2-3 scallions, greens and all; and perhaps a quarter of a deseeded cucumber into tiny cubes, and mix it into the yogurt rice.

Iteration 3: Spice it up

Yogurt rice is soothing and cooling. Perhaps too cooling and too soothing? We need to add some sweet, sweet pain. This calls for heat from two sources: green chilies, and ginger. Thinly slice one serrano chili, or a few smaller bird’s eye chilies, or one jalapeno. Also slice half an inch piece of ginger into strips. Mix those into the rice. Still in keeping with the salad theme, we do not cook these last ingredients but keep them fresh.

Iteration 4: Season it up

Now lets add a tadka. For the non-Indians, ‘tadka’, ‘vaghaar’ or ‘baghaar’ is a very standard method of finishing up many, many recipes: heat a bit of oil or ghee, throw in some whole or ground spices and / or aromatics, let them cook, and throw that seasoned fat into the dish and mix it in. So let us tadka the yogurt rice. Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a little pan; when it shimmers, put in the following: a few sprinkles of asafetida; when it foams, put in a teaspoon of deskinned udid dal; when they start to turn reddish, put in a teaspoon of mustard seeds; when they pop, put in about 6 curry leaves. When they shrivel, it is time to turn off the heat and mix it into the rice.

Iteration 5: Fancy it up

What is expensive, nutritious and will allow you to charge 50 cents more for this dish? Cashews! In the same pan as the seasonings, put in a drop more oil, and put in a quarter cup whole cashews to roast. Once they darken in various places, turn off the heat, and mix it into the rice.

Iteration 6: Sweet touch it up

Now for the kicker — the last step that I didn’t even know about when I made this dish, but was told to me by my friend Rashmi after: put in about a quarter cup of pomegranate kernels and mix it in to distribute evenly throughout the rice. Can’t wait to try the 6th iteration of this dish the next time I make it!

Creamy tomato korma with 2 jewels

September 11, 2013November 2, 2013Aneela Mirchandani Vegetables Tags: food, indian food, indian recipes, vegetarian Leave a comment

Tomato korma

My favorite Indian restaurant dish has always been the navratan korma. Creamy and subtly flavored, it is traditionally made with nine separate ‘floaters’ that make up the nine jewels (nav=nine, ratan=jewel). The problems with replicating this dish at home are many and various:

I can never bring myself to put in the sheer amount of butter and cream needed in this recipe
my grinds are never as smooth and as fine as in restaurants
the nut kormas that I have made are, shall we say, lacking in flavor
I never have nine things, all together, in the fridge at the same time, to use in the korma
It goes well with naan but I don’t have a tandoor, so I need a recipe that will go well with rice or roti

Did you think this was going to be just a litany of my troubles? No, Dear Reader, I have found a good substitute! Here it is. A poor man’s korma with two jewels instead of nine, and a creamy tomato base instead of whatever they use. Feel free to up the jewel count when you make this at home. Feel free to take any other ‘Julia Child’ steps, such as peeling and seeding the tomato for a smoother sauce. I certainly didn’t but I’m rustic that way.

Creamy tomato korma with 2 jewels

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons ginger-garlic-chili paste
2 cups tomato puree, made by simply halving about 5 tomatoes and giving them a spin in the blender
1 bay leaf
2 black cardamoms
4 green cardamoms
1 small stick cinnamon
4 cloves
2 tablespoons ghee
1 tablespoon dry fenugreek (methi) leaves or half a bunch fresh
A pinch of nutmeg, grated
Salt to taste
quarter cup heavy cream or milk
Jewel #1: half a pound of paneer, cubed into small cubes
Jewel #2: Big handful frozen peas
(other possibilities: chopped pineapple; cashews; green beans, in inch-long pieces; carrots, cubed; cauliflower florets; slivered almonds; bell peppers)

Method:

Heat the ghee in a thick-bottomed pot on medium heat. When fully melted, throw in the whole spices — the cloves, cardamoms, cinnamon, bay leaf. They need to cook for a minute, then in goes the ginger garlic paste. Let it sizzle and look ‘cooked’ which is one step before looking ‘browned’. At this point put in the tomato puree and an additional cup of water.

Bring this mixture to a boil and let it roil away gently for about 10 minutes. It will reduce some and its lusciousness will be greatly enhanced. At this point add the salt, fenugreek leaves, and grate some nutmeg in. Let it cook to meld another five to seven minutes. All this cooking can be done at medium heat.

Now the jewels go in. There is no need to thaw the peas before adding them in. The peas can go in first, then the cubed paneer. If you have other ‘jewels’ that need to be cooked to fully enjoy them, I suggest you precook them by blanching or microwaving, with some salt, before popping them into the sauce to finish off.

In any case my jewels did not need much cooking. Once the peas thaw they are quite done, and the paneer just needs heating through. This happened in another few minutes.

What is a korma without cream? So just before serving, lower the heat, add the quarter cup of cream and gently stir in, adjust for salt, and serve with some nice long-grained rice.

(This recipe is one of the 1000 found in this book.)

Rustic ginger-garlic paste with optional green chili

September 11, 2013November 2, 2013Aneela Mirchandani Basic methods, Spice pastes Tags: food, indian food, indian recipes, vegan, vegetarian 9 Comments

I have a bone to pick with most ginger garlic pastes — one normally uses a blender to make them, so one needs a simply giant amount of ginger and garlic to make the blades go, and, one has to use water to make it slushy.

But who wants slushy ginger-garlic paste while cooking? And, who wants a simply giant amount of paste situated in the fridge, week after week, slowly oxidizing, and stinking up the air each time you open the fridge?

I often resort to the blender method, but I do believe this method is way superior — here we use the mortar and pestle. Aside from looking decorative, you make only as much as you need, and seriously, it doesn’t take that long.

No precise ingredients in this one. Use as much as you think you will need.

Step 1: Peel, destem and chop ginger, garlic, and chili. No need to go super fine.

Step 2: Place all ingredients in the bowl of a mortar (or is it pestle? I can never remember).

Step 3: Sprinkle with a bit of salt and wait a few minutes. Salt has three functions here. If you use kosher or sea salt, it will add a bit of roughage, all the better to grind with. Second, salt draws out moisture, and once again, this helps the grinding. Third, salt actually starts to cook certain foods. You can notice this specially with garlic — raw garlic has a sharp and aggressive taste; but if you salt it for a few minutes, it mellows out considerably, just like it does with cooking.

Step 4: Pound away with the pestle (or the mortar, I can’t remember which is which). It will not be a super smooth paste, but that’s where the rustic charm comes in.