The Almost Cajun Patties

The patties were to be a "welcome back to home and hearth" for Sushi, but a series of events lead to us ordering pizza for the welcome back and the patties happened on the following day or the one after. Patties, to me have always meant meat stuffed in a flour casing and then baked, which is what I was googling for in the first place. Google seemed to think they were what I'd myself want to call "cutlet", but hey! who am I to contradict the wisdom of a zillion websites.

So, Cajun style patties it was to be and heart shaped, because you know, it was a welcome back for Sushi, and I rather like the dude and all that. DP even suggested that I draw an arrow through 2 hearts with ketchup. That, I forgot at the last minute, stressed as I was, which....hmm..maybe, just maybe, might have been a tad too demonstrative in any case.

So there I was in the kitchen all ready to go when I found that I had mis-pla-ced the.. p-p-prin-n-tout of the recipe!! There was the ground meat, the bread crumbs (I had definitely remembered those), eggs, and for some reason, milk, all staring at me in the face and no printout! A lesser mortal might have quailed at the prospect of a printout-less kitchen session, but not me. I decided to do what I had never before done - cook from memory.

See, I think I may have some intrinsic Cajun instinct, for I thought to add onions and capsicum to the frying pan. Celery, we don't see too commonly in these parts, which probably explains its omission from my frying pan. Then to spice up the mixture, in went g-g paste, Worcestershire sauce(I got it for the shepherd's pie and use it at every opportunity) and chilly sauce and parsley and pepper and salt. Cayenne pepper I didn't quite recall, but the same Cajun instinct led some red chilly powder into the pan.

I'll let you in on a secret - once upon a time I took some French lessons, like back in high school. My "education" has imparted the ability to mouth fluently anything remotely Francais, even as my mind is registering "gibberish gibberish blah blah blah". Well, we went honeymooning in Mauritius, Sushi and I, and I gleefully read out all the notices and signboards and adverts and whatnot at him. Suitably impressed, he'd ask me "Wassit mean?" and I'd muster all the smugness I could, give a French little smile and shrug "Je ne sais pas". I think he quickly saw through the ruse, he did.

Back in the kitchen, I was pretty sure milk came into it somehow, but to this date, can't say whether that was memory playing tricks or a genuine ingredient that I let fall by the side, metaphorically of course. One must never ever waste milk. Anyhow, next we put the eggs into the ground meat. It's supposed to help with the binding, essential for the shaping. In my case, it just made the meat more runny than it was to begin with, weird that! A tip at this point: never throw away bread crumbs. That genuinely helps with the binding, which is, I might have mentioned before, essential for the shaping - of the patties. Me, I had disdainfully thrown, yes, thrown , not even put away the bread crumbs on the lofty premise that the patties should taste like meat not bread.

The obvious thing to do if you happen to act like me is to somehow coerce the meat into some semblance of shape - hearts, ovals, whatever and then pop it into the freezer for a bit. It's like when you want ice, you put water in the little cube things and put it into the freezer - the same principle.

You then wait patiently for about half an hour or so, depending on the runniness of your meat shapes and transfer the tray (do not yet attempt to handle the individual patties) to the microwave. Once your creations start to look a little less fragile, you flip them over - a heart stopping moment, in my case, heart crumbling ..(see the pic) and then cook some more.

Guess what, at the end of it, you can hold the patties without them flowing through your fingers and the taste, that ain't too bad either!

Doings of this weekend past...I

It all started with the Meandering - no - the "Mandarin Shrimp". We had intended to get good ole noodles to eat along, but managed to get only spaghetti. That's Italian, strictly speaking, but what is one to do when you have landed in a quirky grocery place (naming no names - but it's listed on the stock exchange and them brothers they don't get along so good) which presumes to stock lasagna and spaghetti and herbs and whatnot, but no good ole noodles.

The long and short (nope not talking of positions now) of it is that we had a little less than half the packet left over, which I thought would make up a genuine Italian adventure. With that in mind I scoured a whole lot of websites (naming no names and giving no references) until I came across -
taa...daaa.... "Spaghetti Carbonara".

I was delighted at all the bacon and cheese, until conscience smote a bit and i did go looking for something low on the fats ..and turned up "lean meat balls and spaghetti". Now..hmmm..believe it or not we like Italian cuisine, but we don't like it with tomato in it....paradoxical as that may sound. So, the next logical thing to do was to google meat balls without tomatoes. Swedish meat balls anyone? It floats around in fresh cream, which sent me running right back to the Carbonara. (But the Swedish stuff will eventually find it's way in the Sashimi-Sushi kitchen rest be assured)

The Carbonara? nothing much.. :-) no really, nothing much at all. Boil the pasta in what i call my "pasta pot", you may boil it in whatever it is that you call your pasta pot. And then drain off the water when done. But ..wait...not all of it, save some, it will be needed later.

Fry the bacon in a wee bit o' oil. You think that's too fatty? It gets better. We need to blot out the fat from the fried bacon on paper towels or umm..no not on your palette, that would be icky.

But ...you don't drain off all of the fat..u save some of it too to saute onions in. Conscience pricking yet? If not, then add the cooked pasta in it, "the saved from draining off all" pasta water and begin mixing like crazy. The pasta needs to have a uniform texture, you see.

In the mean time, what you should have ready on hand, is a mixture of eggs(beaten to death), grated cheese drowned in mercilessly and some pepper and salt to add spice to the afterlife. This mixture is to be poured over the cooking pasta.

If you thought the mixing earlier was crazy, now it goes totally wild. If you don't get wild enough, you end up with little clumps of cheesy omelet on your hands instead of the uniformly coated spaghetti. I did get something pretty uniform and with only a very few clumpy bits, but it was a close thing! Phew! Before getting the spaghetti off the stove, don't forget to throw in the bacon pieces and mix some more.

You're ready to eat at this point after shedding a few tears at the state of your pasta pot. The pasta was a bit aggressive I guess, no doubt on account of where it used to dwell! Look -



Did I mention that we had to buy further spaghetti 'cos the left over was not enough for our collective appetite? Also that we couldn't quite finish off the new packet? So, basically we're back where we started. And now, those Swedish meatballs are going to make an appearance..sooner than later.

Jharkhand Shrimps in Mandarin Curry

The idea originated in Ranchi. Mommie-in-law got hold of these huge, extremely well fed prawns (nope I didn't particularly inquire into what they were feeding on) and made them Chinese style. Naturally, when I found matching sized ones (in Bangalore) I couldn't help but try to replicate the Jharkand Shrimps.....in Mandarin curry, though technically mine spoke Kannada.

We had our whole evening and extended evening planned around the shrimps - Sushi and I. First, there was to be vodka/beer for him and her. Beer we stuck to the standard, but replaced Smirnoff with Fuel. I have gone about telling folks since then that Fuel is "much much smoother", but honestly, I just found the bottle really cool - shaped like a 3D trapezoid and with tape measure markings down the front. 'Course there was "chakna" to go with the drinks in the shape of mutton Kebabs..frozen and only needing a couple of minutes in the microwave.

At this point, the shrimps were to make their entry, we planned on cleaning and putting them to marinate "whilst" we polished off our appetizers and drinks. We had counted without the newly purchased game of Lexicon though, which we thought it might be a good idea to try out in this whole party for two scene.

See, Sushi and I can't play any game online or offline without sledging each other to the point of fisticuffs..and that is where the whole dinner schedule went awry. Picture this, we are a vodka and beer down each, he's questioning the existence of a word called "lug" and I'm challenging him to officially challenge it and suddenly our tummies give a tiny rumble each in unison.

That's when we decide the time was ripe to give the prawns their bath. A tip though, it aint enuf to simply scrub them well and wash 'em ..u must pull out the black nerve that runs down where their spine should have been. If not, you get this strange crunching sound under your teeth when devouring, which is quite unsettling.

Then comes the marination, simply slather them in lots of g-g paste and vinegar and salt and let them be for the next half an hour or so and return to your game of lexicon.

10 p.m.
We play on. I am ready to clinch it with "SNOB" and am holding my cards with barely suppressed glee. That's when he finishes it with "US". Aaaarrrghhhhh!

10:45 p.m.
It's past the time strictly needed for marination, but we have resolved our Lexicon differences. We are focused on the task at hand - to coat the shrimps in a layer of egg. For that, you need to knock their shells off taking care to not let the white and yellow run away. A good plan would be to have a little bowl in position before you set about de-shelling the eggs. The you swirl the whole thing around with a fork so the yellow is indistinguishable from the white. After that you let the shrimps swim in it for a bit before taking them out and frying them in a pan. The remaining egg may be poured over the frying prawns, doesn't hurt the dish but adds to the thickness of the curry...mandarin curry.

At this point, you should have a lot of garlic, ginger, green chili chopped and ready to be thrown into any empty utensil that happens to be standing around. Okay..lemme slow down a bit. I am now talking of making the curry. For that you grab a utensil - pot/pan/ whatever..remember, time's getting on? Well, then you put the pot/pan/whatever on fire (on the stove), pour in a wee bit o' oil (butter might be nice too if you are in a reckless mood), then throw in the afore-mentioned garlic-ginger-chili. When it starts to grow golden (it does by the time you have located the sauces), you pour in some soya sauce, and ketchup and..I donno...Worcestershire ..more the merrier, that's the point. Then it might be necessary to dilute with some water, pinch of sugar, some salt, the pot/pan/whatever starts bubbling a bit and you are done ..well almost. This is where you put in the fried shrimps into the curry...and yeah, now you are done.

My curry looks a bit translucent, where mommie-in-law's had been on the opaque side and pinkish in colour. I suspect that might have been because she used g-g paste instead of the chopped g-g + chili. And the pink might have been some play with the ketchup.
Anyway, if you check the time stamp on the pic below, you'd know why we don't have a detailed analysis of the discrepancies.


Yep! we are missing soup bowls.

Mutton – No Pressure.

I am suspecting this one was “invented” by dad in one of his not too willing to be involved moments. Maybe a game was on or maybe he was propounding solutions to the Kashmir problem, bottom line is he wasn’t at a place where he wanted to be in front of the flames on a constant basis.

The other thing about dad is that he doesn’t believe mutton should be cooked in a pressure cooker. We have been brought up to believe that mutton cooked in a pressure cooker is as bad as potatoes. Now, don’t get me wrong - I LIKE potatoes, but who’d want their mutton masquerading as potatoes? Over time and marriage I have seen that all mutton in pressure cooker isn’t necessarily potato, but the beliefs of your formative years have a habit of staying put. And by now I have sufficiently elucidated the title so let’s jump into the making of Mutton – No Pressure.

Well, you begin by chopping mounds of onions. Or you request Sushi to chop ‘em for you if you get all tearful killing zem. Thus -


Then you prep a kadhai by heating it a bit over the stove. In oven terms, this would be called "pre-heating". After the kadhai is pre-heated enough, we add a bit, make that a fair bit of mustard oil and let it get all hot and bothered too. Finally, you dump in the chopped onions and mutton , put the lid on it and there ends your involvement for the next hour and quarter.Before I forget, the flame doesn't need to burn too bright, keep it on "low".

During this time you are free to propound solutions to the Kashmir problem, bug Sushi over his lamentable tendency to hog the computer for playing games and hogging it yourself to complete this blog. This may also be a good time to discover that you are out of g-g paste, a very vital ingredient, without which mutton isn't just potato, it's french beans! One of us, I won't say which, left the comfort of the home and hearth to correct the omissions of the morning shopping expedition.

G-G paste? That's "ginger- garlic" paste. It is also known as "g(squared) paste" or "paste 2G" in different parts of the world.

Being the responsible adult that I am, I went to check on the concoction in the kadhai midway through my self-imposed exile from the kitchen...and....wooooahhhh....wasn't what I had expected!


See that, all that water in there? I believe that's cause of the onions and maybe the mutton too. After all 3/4th of the body IS water! And the reason it's yellow is nothing very gross..naah that's just the mustard oil mixing with water. As my shocked senses returned to normal, I realized that "cooking in its own juices" is the technical term used to describe this phenomenon. I covered it again and did another "Eureka" - for the principle isn't very different from pressure cooker. The meat was cooking in steam, just, probably not as drastically fast to potato it.

As the hour approaches, or rather, as the hour and quarter approaches, one needs to get the masala ready. In an altogether different kadhai or sauce pan, take some more mustard oil, to which you add some red chili, the hard won g-g paste, jeera powder, and just about anything that catches your fancy. I'd recommend some black pepper and salt and curd to get a sour tang. Anything goes, but tomatoes, which unless you are Punjabi or Italian is absolutely inexcusable. And that, is another of my daddy's sayings. And I, abide by it. Well, then you cook the masala.

A good indication of the cook-ed-ness of masala is when it starts to separate from the oil that held it. That is when you drop everything (figuratively speaking only) and mix it in with the mutton. By this time, the mutton should have soaked up it's juices and the onion should have become indistinguishable from the mutton. So, as you can see, a lot of careful co-ordination and syncing is required. Timing - would make or break this recipe.

If everything goes well, you have on the one hand, mutton which is tender and dry. On the other hand, you have masala that is separated from the oil it was brewed in. And when the twain did meet - here's what you get.



You may add a bit o' water and let - simmer if you like curry. Personally, I prefer things dry to bring out the pungent flavour of the mustard oil. Happy eating - No pressure!

Maah Shepherd's Pie

The story of "Shepherd's Pie" goes like this - I chanced upon a place called "Polka Dots", which is a restaurant, and no, you are not dim, it really isn't all that obvious from the name. Polka dots happens to be one of the first "around the world cuisine" places in my part of the world, and that still doesn't explain why it's named that, but I'll let that pass, for now. Well, I was sitting there, browsing the menu and saw "Shepherd's pie" which conjured up a pretty compelling mental image. I was thinking of a shepherd, minding his flock amidst rolling hills with perhaps a soft mist around. He'd probably be pulling at his pipe as he sits by a small fire, in which presumably, he'd baked the pie. Compelling enough to try out an unknown dish? I certainly thought so! 'Course I didn't know then that the contents of the pie were essentially ground lamb meat and that gives a very sinister tone to the dish! Imagine Little Bo Peep , has lost her sheep, and she's really really hungry now.

Getting back to the pie, the lamb at polka dots, in his life, could not have had very hygienic habits. Apparently though, he had made enough of an impression all those years ago to barge in on one of my google moments. Google Gods turned up quite an intriguing recipe, where they even replaced "ground lamb" with "ground chicken", so I didn't feel like I had to go looking for an animal that was well groomed..and erm...with metrosexual leanings...in his life that is.

A bit of a challenge that these "around the world" recipes pose is that the ingredients may not be so easily found. Worse still, you may never have heard of them before. Dried thyme leaves? I didn't have any! What I did have is lot of little Oregano packets that we collect(wholly legitimately) from Pizza Hut, so that was one item off the list.

"Catsup"? I certainly hadn't heard of it before and was pretty certain it wasn't lurking around in the fridge waiting to catch me unawares. Invoking google Gods yet again, I did gain some insight into the mystery.
Location: White House, Washington DC
Time: Breakfast
Barrack Obama : "Michelle, would you pass the catsup please? I could use some on this here omelet"

Location:Hogwarts Castle
Time:Breakfast
Harry Potter: Accio Ketchup!!

Oh Ketchup?! Any self respecting refrigerator has that! Sushi though insisted that potatoes(potatoes do get into it) and ketchup sounded awful! At the same time, he wanted to stay true to the recipe as well...and we were at our wit's ends!

Devoid of the catsup, and barring the oregano, -stand-in for dried thyme leaves, and the Worcestershire sauce, which my fridge in all honesty can't claim to have either, we seemed to be heading for a somewhat flavourless pie. Here's where the Sashimi ingenuity kicks in, but I'll talk about that a little later.

We jumped right into the preparation - boiled potatoes, peeled them, mashed them, added bit o' milk, butter, salt, and mashed them some more until they got all light and fluffy.

Next we had to tackle our veggies, mainly mushrooms, onions and peas. The recipe did mention carrots too, but we aint all that "rabbity". By "tackling", I mean you need to get the veggies into a pan with a bit of oil and ..."saute" it around a bit. We also did add some chopped garlic, mainly because by this time we had abandoned all idea of being strictly truthful....to the recipe that is!

"Chicken broth and flour mixture" is what needs to be done next. Chicken broth, we made by the simple expedient of boiling some of the ground chicken in water and adding salt and pepper and oregano and letting the whole thing simmer a bit. (Traditionally, I believe, the broth is made by doing unto the bones what we did to the ground) The water then, becomes the broth and you can still use the left over ground chicken too. The flour needs to be mixed into the broth to create a mixture that's tending towards a paste but not quite getting there. This is what gives the pie that moist juicy taste.

The important part now, is to get the chicken into the pan and see that it gets cooked, really done, not rare, not medium. You can then merrily pour and mix (the broth), then sprinkle and mix (oregano - one never gets enough of a good thing, pepper, salt) and finally add the veggies and garlic.
Remember, I was worried a little earlier about the flavourless-ness of the whole effort sans catsup and Worcestershire sauce.? So, I decided on garlic, a bit of soya sauce and a lil bit of chilly sauce to infuse some life into this, a bit hampered by lack of right ingredients at the right time, dish. The dish, when dished, had a momo- like taste going for it which was all nice considering we really ...truly madly deeply love momos. Notice that I said "momos" twice in the last sentence, also bolded and italicised it?....Well it's a literary technique called foreshadowing. I use it quite a lot and so does J K Rowling!

Let's not digress though, not when the final and crucial step, that of scooping the chicken-veg-broth-sauces mixture into a ceramic bowl and arranging the mashed potatoes on top is still to be taken. Once that is done, you pop the dish into the oven (in our case, our trusty microwave, duly preheated) and let it bake till the potatoes start going brown.

The picture above shows the end result of our efforts and the one below is a more professional rendition of the Shepherd's pie. Lacking in presentation a bit again, but let's see , we probably "pattern" the potatoes a bit more and yeah "brown" them more too.

The Chocolate Cake That Wasn't ...

I made this one for Christmas last year, i.e just over a monce ago. It wasn't strictly described as a Christmas cake on the website I used for reference, but it was supposed to turn out all moist and chocolatey if done right. That seemed to be good enough for Sushi and me!

Well, we thought we did everything right - had this ready reference hard copy of the recipe, we measured out all the ingredients in the exact quantities mentioned. We even had a calculator handy, so we could divide the numbers mentioned in there, to scale down the size of the cake. Things seemed to be pretty encouraging up until that point, we got ready what looked like the perfect cake mix. Picture below -

As our confidence levels grew, we deviated a bit from the written (in hard copy) instructions, but not too much - we changed the shape and size of the baking utensil. We went with the above glass bowl, what was mentioned I believe was something more rectangular and ceramic. But that ought not to have made such a difference ? Right?

Anyway, the other glitch was that we don't have an oven at this point of time, so we used our trusty microwave. It has served us well.... We did pre-heat it and everything though. To cut a long story short, the cake refused to bake right. Convection, microwave, microwave + grill, just grill, pre-programmed cake setting, nothing made an impression. The cake acquired a hard exterior, broke up like it thought it was supposed to be doing an impression of an erupting volcano. Here's what I mean -

It sat in the microwave for all of an hour, but then I tried the "Knife Test" on it (Stick knife in cake, If Knife = wet, cake not baked, else if knife = dry, cake baked end if). This here knife that you see on the side, comes out clean on the sides, but is all sloshed in chocolate when stuck in the core.

Any ideas?? Anyone?

First Came the Methi Paratha

I got this recipe from the bai back home, had to coax it out of her. Took time and patience and a lot of re-verification and corroboration of facts from different sources, but the end product was a good approximation of the original - even if I say so myself. Me being of the less reticent types, am ready to share the secrets of the Methi Paratha with those whom perfection(paratha-wise) may have eluded so far.

1. First, you need to get yourself a bunch of methi, a small bunch serves 2 (Sushi and Sashimi sized 2). Then you'd need to separate the leaves from the stems, until there are about 3 fistfuls of methi leaves all eagerly waiting to be chopped. For chopped, they must be if at all you want to avoid the sensation of chewing on a bunch of grass( which we did) and it is only the flavour thereof that you are after(which we were). First, they must be washed though (without detergent will do) and then chopped length wise, then width wise, length wise again, until you get something that looks like this -
Pretty neat huh?
2. Moving on, what you'd want next is the dough and this requires some very sophisticated and complex mixing (uh...no, not quite, not mixing as in cocktails). A little bit of regular atta, some besan (depending on the yellowness desired), haldi( depending on the degree of further yellowness preferred), lal-mirch powder, if you like things hot, and ajwain (I add ajwain to everything I make - my kitchen traditions). some g-g paste(ginger garlic), curd and then finally water. Water's to be added with a lot of deliberation 'cause this is the make or break point of the entire dough which is so essential to the success of your parathas. Too much water and it becomes runny, too little and it doesn't knead. Providing you have put in all the ingredients and in the right quantities, you are ready to knead. There are no restrictions as to how the kneading should proceed as long as the end result looks like -
Oops, I mean like this - (the one above is a picture of kneading in progress).


3. Okay, we are getting somewhere now! Next, we break the dough above into bite sized, make that cookie sized little spheres, vis-a-vis ,
I'm not gonna say what the dry atta in the corner is for. Na, that'll be my own little trade secret. What happens next is fairly simple - you roll out the little spheres into flat circles or the closest approximation to a circle that you can get , depending on your skills in that area. Put the dough-circle things on the tawa, swab in a good deal of (refined) oil (Sushi's suggestion) and blot the excess out with kitchen towels (my own brilliant idea) as you turn your parathas round and round on the tawa on their way to bakedom.

Voila!