The Traditional Fish Curry

While my 'other half' is more excited about trying her hands at multi-cultural continental cuisine, I stick to honing my skills on the home-grown ones. Not that I don't like 'her kind' of cuisine (I do! what will all that cheese, shrimp, ham and the like), but I enjoy cooking 'my kind' more, since it feels quite empowering being able to handle 'n' types of spices and 'm' kinds of oils patiently and coming up with something finger-lickin' good!

So, the weekend gone by I felt like having the good-ol' fish curry that my mom cooked back home when I was a kid. Now, I am not an avid blogger (as you might have guessed; this is my first post!..even though Sashimi keeps mentioning me here and there in her antics), so I forgot to take pictures while I was cooking. I'll try to be more considerate next time ;).

I'll keep it short (I personally find ramblings very boring unless there are images/pictures/visuals to support the content). The fish of interest is Rohu (no idea what's the common name though scientific taxonomy attributes it to "Labeo Rohita"..thanks there, Wiki!). People in northern and eastern part of my country are quite fond of it.

So, I took a fistful of mustard seeds and garlic bulbs (or pods? or buds?..what's it called, dammit?!) and centrifuged them in my grinder with a little water. I added some red chilli powder, pepper, turmeric and salt in the resulting paste. That takes care of phase one. Oh, I forgot to mention that I had cleaned up the sliced rohu and kept it in refrigerator earlier, so technically this mustard business is in phase two.

A little mustard paste is smeared on the fish slices and shallow-fried (umm..well, you can deep fry it and have it just like that..it tastes yum!! but that deserves a separate blog entry, so we will proceed). Meanwhile I had heated up some oil (ok, this needs mention: "oil" everywhere in this post means "mustard oil", any other will ruin the stuff!) in another pan with a li'l bit o' fenugreek. The mustard paste is deep-fried in it till it turns golden-brown, at which point I diced a tomato in it. Well then, the deal is almost over; you put the fried fish in the mixture, add a little water, salt it up a bit, leave for 5 mins and you are ready to rock! We usually relish it with freshly-cooked steamed rice. Feel free to experiment and add you own touch!

My Week Night Veggie Innovations

We are doing what we can to reduce our calorie intake. (I can't say for sure if it's working, but isn't it the thought that counts, or some such thing) With this noble thought in mind, on most week nights we have fairly simply done vegetables - home cooked, and plain chapatis. Now, the part about "simple" and "plain" gets pretty depressing at times. One night, not very long ago, Sushi rebelled. He wouldn't see another lauki until Armageddon cometh. The hapless lauki in the mean time was pining away in the refrigerator, slowly changing hue from a fresh youthful green to a pale, forlorn yellow. It was very nearly on the brink of going a murky brown, and time had come to take decisive action and reconcile the warring parties.

That's when some forgotten memory started to stir and it turned up "Kofta Curry". Kofta, as I remember, used to be a part of my childhood meals. Grandfather's faithful servant, the forgotten species that actually reside in separate quarters in your house and pretty much do everything that there is to be done around the place, had this item in his repertoire. Incidentally, the "faithfulness" of Shankar dada is a subject that's up for debates and it invariably is, at a lot of family gatherings. He's even suspected of having evil intentions pertaining to the life of my grandfather, which if nothing else, does show a stoutness of the heart.

Well, baba, that's my grandfather, strolled out of this world at his own pace and time and no one does doubt till this date, the culinary abilities of Shankar dada. Which is not to say that I got in touch with him for the recipe of Kofta curry! He was known for other nefarious activities too like being a rickshaw puller to make an extra buck and peddling contraband articles, so I'd rather not run that risk! Nope the kofta curry recipe came from good ole google of course.

The recipe? Oh yes, that. All you need to do is to get the bai to grate the murky brown lauki(if yours is still in the green of its youth, you may not really want to wait for the murky brownish-ness). To the grated lauki you add seasonings as per taste . I used asafoetida, cumin and coriander powder, salt, red chili and gram flour to make it all bindy and sticky.

You then shape the bindy and sticky mixture into spherical kofta shapes..which when fried right gives this -

Onion and tomatoes and ..er...I forget exactly what, but general spices make up a curry. In that you swim your koftas . Thus -

Phew! And thus your home economy is saved from the near loss of good lauki. (Lauki, for those who call it something else is "Bottle Gourd")

Swedish Meat Balls

..Or that's what they were intended to be at any rate. But they were a disaster on so many levels that it's only now that I can bring myself to write about it, precisely a month and a half later.

Let's start with the equipment.

My "meat ballers" are in fact not "meat ballers" at all. I don't even know what they are any more. They sit pretty in my kitchen, looking like a pair of quaint scissors, but they do nothing.
I could use them for ice cream scoop I suppose, but I don't want to jinx my ice cream. Why they aren't meat ballers? Because they don't ball nothing! And it ain’t my fault neither. I had learnt from my

Cajun Patties experience and put in plenty of bread crumbs in the ground meat and cream too, which altogether is a different story. But, the ballers wouldn't do their thing and no use blaming the bread crumbs or lack thereof, 'coz here's proof I could do it by hand just fine!

(I put them in the freezer just in case, to be absolutely sure)

This brings me to the next part of my disaster tale. The moment I put my perfect, rather,” perfect looking” meat balls into the wok they just came apart! Agreed they didn't turn to powder, but they lost all form! To this date I can't say why, but nasty shock that. Nothing I have seen in my 9 and 20 summers had prepared me for it.

Putting a brave face on it and moving on we tried to do what we could about the curry. Can't say, "moving on" really, we were just in a state of denial. So, then, cream forms an essential part of the curry in Sweden and also part of the ground meat for that matter. We were wondering if the Swedish like things over sweet, when we realised, the recipe said "sour cream". We had in fact put in whipping cream! Trying to fire fight the situation, I poured in some curd. Curd is after all sour. So, logically speaking it should have offset the effects of the whip in the cream.
Well -

Sushi put a stoic face on it. But I did catch him stealing bread slices from the fridge late in the night. I ate away valiantly, but had to accept defeat at the hands of leftovers at breakfast next morning.

And now, really, I have to go fortify myself with some strong black coffee and hope to put this behind me!

Popeye Chicken

So, here goes the story.

It was a week night. Monday at that. Beginning of the work week. We are pretty subdued on Mondays. By Wednesday, we start to perk up. By Thursday, we are rubbing our hands in anticipation. And Friday nights?! Those are the best of all. We celebrate, go out, cook, eat, squabble, argue, etc. In short, Friday nights are what we live for.

Anyway, like I was saying, it was still Monday night and subdued we were. In accordance with the mood , a mellow mushroom in spinach was on the menu. I had sorted through the spinach bundle and discarded those leaves that weren't quite up to standard - roughly 49%. I had then painstakingly washed each individual leaf that did come up to scratch - say 51%. About three quarters of an hour's worth of labour and the leaves were all squeaky clean. They were then put in a pressure cooker, to soften them under , u know, pressure.

That's when Sushi marched into the kitchen. He demanded to know what was under pressure.

Me: "Spinach"

Him: Hmm

He then peeks into the freezer and espies chicken.

Him: Out out out
Me: Me?

Alrite, I put the mushrooms back into the fridge and rush to get my camera. Sushi is meanwhile vigorously attacking chicken.

He then seasons it and puts it under pressure too. That's put both of our pressure cookers into the fray. Out comes the liquidizer. The spinach is very soon but a smooth paste.

A biggish blob of butter in the kadahi, and the chicken is all fried. In goes the spinach paste. A pinch of salt, a quick turn of the black pepper mill, woah.. did Friday night come sooner than usual?!

From the Frying Pan into the Fire!

Except it won't. Because I got this ---->

The balancing act, with a wooden spoon and another wooden spoon to fish out frying objects from the wok, that used to be my frying experience exists no more.
Bring on the pakodas, fish and pooris.. I can now deep fry right there with the pros and dish it out in one swift scoop !
(The kadahi has made its appearance plenty of times on this blog. It's the chanota that I'm introducing this time around)

Friday Nite - Dinner and Movie

The much awaited weekend rolled around ..last night, which means we're already half way through it (sigh!) Sushi is in the kitchen dealing with chicken (as in cooking it) and I'm here blogging. Normally I don't desert my spouse, when he's in charge at the cooking range. Nope, I offer advise(solicited/unsolicited), take pictures and generally make myself useful. But I have this phobia about chicken with their bones on, de-boned I devour with gusto, but chicken or any other birdy beings with bones in them give me the shivers, which is why I'm here in blog land right now.

About the Friday night though...It's been a dry spell at the multiplex this year cos of quarrelsome bollywood, and I think the multiplex guys. And no, I don't know whose fault it was, point is that a bollywood flick, good or otherwise has become something of a novelty. So, when "New york" hit the screens, we thought to go have a look. Now, there are 2 theatres we usually go to. Theatre A has restaurant B really close by and Theatre B has restaurant A really close by too. So depending on which theatre we get tickets to or which restaurant we want to eat at determines our plans for the evening.

This time around, Friday 9:30 p.m saw us at restaurant A which serves cuisines from pretty much everywhere. The good thing is that if you tell them that you have a 10:30 show to catch, they serve you with brisk efficiency and don't even take it personally if you say you don't want starters or desert. Well, so long as you order drinks anyway. In what is going to be a separate story altogether, I'm someday going to write about the "Long Island" iced tea that we mixed at home, quite a tricky thing to do as we live miles and oceans away from Long Island. But anyway, I wanted to try out the real thing, so when I saw it on the menu, I ordered it in all it's 5 spirits splendour. Sushi stuck to beer. He's developing quite a crush on beer, he is.

Well, as I was in this whole mood of "let's see what the professional version tastes like", I ordered some Carbonara off the Italian section. Sushi was mulling over his selection and I was busily offering advise. He wanted something with a bit of a zing and I was trying to sell the "Jerked creole chicken" to him, in the process letting him know all about the origins of creole cuisine and what it comprises of. I don't know why he had this glazed over look in his eyes, but he remained unconvinced and mulling still, until the maitre d' came over.

Sushi: I want something with a zing.

Maitre d': Then I'd recommend the Jerked Creole chicken.

Me: Ha!

Sushi: glazed over expression.

(Turns out I was had mixed up Cajun and Creole, so even as he put in a mild protest about how he thought Creole should have something to do with Africa, I held on firmly to my Louisiana story. You decide: here .)

Well the carbonara arrived and it was fusilli not spaghetti, so that was a surprise. It had bacon in it so that was okay. Now, I had only chosen to coat the spaghetti in cheese and eggs(like the recipe said), but here the fusilli was floating in the creamiest sauce that's still making me drool. I definitely think it had olive oil and eggs and cheese in it. Milk - maybe, maybe not. And I definitely hope it was not one of those complicated emulsion things that you do when creating mayonnaise, because we have not been able to create mayonnaise so far and we definitely intend to try and replicate that sauce in our kitchen.

Sushi, he was a bit bemused at the quantities on his plate - chicken breasts(all nice and zingy) but only about a teaspoonful of rice on the side and mashed potatoes, daintily decorated, but just so little.

Shortly, afterwards things started getting a bit fuzzy because there were only 15 minutes to go for the show and I was trying to gulp down the remaining more than half a glassful of long island asap. Hmmm...one must never drink tea in its long island avatar fast. It will cause you to not grasp the happenings in the movie altogether, because, you know, the whole fuzzy effect. And you might get the feeling that the fussili is doing a strange dance inside you. Also, nachos are an excellent cure for hunger (remember too little rice and potatoes) and budding feelings of wanting to return home midway through the movie (remember the fussili dance).

Bet you didn't know that! Moral of the story: when restaurant A serves Long Island iced tea, theatre B must always server nachos!

Shepherd's pie V8.0

Remember Shepherd's pie ?
It's gone several version upgrades since then and looks like this now -

Thank you, Thank you :-)

The golden brown crusty potato layer, that was a V4.0 discovery. We finally found a use for the rack that comes with the microwave. The closer you take your "grillees" to the grill, the faster they grill! Eureka!