If appams come, can eshtu be far behind?

Vegetable Eshtu

Some weeks ago I posted my appams recipe Laced to Perfection. While I did feature the stew in the photos, I was so enamoured by the lacy appams that I forgot to click a better photo of the eshtu. By the time I realised it, I was too busy pouring and swirling more hot lace appams for the family, so the eshtu remained on the back burner- in its own juices - and eventually was polished off.

The following day I made some more eshtu and took some photos – but had this compulsive need to feature them with appams, but this time there was hardly any batter left. But what is eshtu without appam, so here it is, with the almost-exhausted -batter- extended-with–water- and -rice flour kind of appams in the background.

The truth is, appam and stew is a match made in heaven – or in God’s Own Country? 

Vegetable Eshtu

Ingredients

1 medium brown onion, finely sliced

1 large carrot, cubed

2 potatoes -  peeled (unpeeled if they have clean skins) and cubed

French beans, a handful, stringed and cut into inch-long pieces

½ cup frozen peas

1 tsp grated ginger

1 tsp minced garlic

2 green chilies, slit

A small sprig curry leaves

1 inch stick cinnamon stick

2 green cardamoms

2-3 cloves

5-6 whole black peppercorns

½ tsp cumin seeds

2 small bay leaves

1-2 dry red chillies

1 cup coconut milk

1 cup hot milk (optional)

1 tbsp almond meal (optional)

Salt to taste

Oil - 1 tbsp 

Method

Heat oil or ghee in a heavy bottomed vessel. Add cumin, cardamoms, cloves, pepper corns, red chillies and cinnamon and sauté for a few seconds. Add sliced onions, grated ginger, garlic and green chillies and half the curry leaves and continue to sauté till slightly browned. Add the cubed potatoes, carrots, French beans and peas. Mix until the vegetables get coated with the oil and spices. Add a cup of hot milk or boiling water and let it cook till almost done. Add more water as required. Add some salt.

Now add the coconut milk and let it simmer on low-medium flame for a few minutes. Adjust salt and add rest of the curry leaves. Simmer for a minute or two and remove from heat.

Serve with appams or idiyappams only.

But if you want to be heretic, you can serve it with dosas, chapatis, pooris or your everyday chawal. Makes a lovely party dish, too.

Pretend pickle

Fresh Mango Pickle (बाहुलीचं लोणचं )

There was this discussion on one of the foodie groups about the snob value of eating “out of season” waterlogged cauliflowers at astronomical prices. I jump into the fracas, as it is a topic (among thousands of others) I have a lot to say about. 

“There are various benefits to eating seasonal fruit and vegetables - they taste the best as they have been picked at the right time and not ahead of time to factor in transport times like out of season produce that has to travel for thousands of kilometres and languish in cold storage. Moreover, they aren't treated by thermal/chemical/chilling/pressure/processes to be preserved.

Seasonal fruit and vegetables have nutrients that support the body in the particular season. Oranges and mandarins that roll out in winter are full of Vitamin C to fortify the body against infections. Oil based seeds and greens like sarson (mustard greens) provide unction to the parched body.  One doesn't need to describe the benefits of cool cucumbers and watermelons in summer.

The cost benefits are also a given - it costs less to bring the seasonal produce to market, so the prices aren't hiked up.

And to top it all, eating in season brings the joy of embracing and welcoming the season.”

My rant sets me reminiscing, transporting me some four decades back into the summers of our content.

Come summer and Mother would plan her annual pickling pursuits. But the time had to be right and the mango had to be fit. She had to make a lot of preparations while waiting for that period after the first summer rains “valivacha paus”. The pickle would then have a better chance to survive, once the relentless heat dissipated a little, doused by the welcome rains.

Until then she had to spread out the red chilies, turmeric rhizomes to desiccate under the watchful glare of the sun. Their transformation into heaps of red and golden yellow powders was a matter of great interest. A veritable artillery of pounding and grinding implements - mortars and pestles, made of wood, stone or iron and of various sizes and shapes - was deployed for the task. Flanking them were sieves and winnows that would aid and abet them.

Packaged asafoetida wouldn’t do – as it would be mixed with flour to give it a free flow. So the best and purest nuggets of the resin would be sniffed out from the resident spice specialist. The resin would be sunned to ensure brittleness on its way to be pounded into a pure powder. Millions of mustard seeds would be rolled down a large steel plate, as Mother’s skilled hands would separate the chaff and other impurities from the seed. Golden methi seeds would be diligently picked and left to burnish and bathe in the sun.

The sesame oil had to be from the ghani or the press, fresh and fragrant. The salt was to be free of any pollutants that would compromise its powers to pickle.

While these preparations were underway and all the pounding and grinding and sifting and panning left the house fragrant with the promise of a year long supply of mouthwatering and lip-smacking condiments, the raw mangoes just wouldn’t stop coming.

They were of all types, shapes and sizes. From large totapuris and malgobas to small unnamed denizens.  Then there was the odd, occasional “shepya amba” with the inexplicable smell of fennel seeds or the tender coconut kernel like  “khobrya amba”.

Mother would try them out in various dishes, but mostly in these “temporary” pickles. The miniature mango bits, sometimes without the skin to allow instant marinating, and this pickle (more of a relish than a pickle) would be ready to eat instantly.

On this chilly mid-winter morning in Melbourne, I guiltily chop a raw mango interning in my fridge for several weeks. I judge it for its lack of firmness. $6 for a kilo of kairi is a preposterous price to pay for something that is best stolen from neighbours’ trees or lopped from the tree in the backyard. But it is the cost of coveting it out of season and in a land that is not its domicile.

The mango was best suited to be pickled into a बाहुलीचं लोणचं - in a rough translation it would be a toy or pretend pickle. This name must have come up on lazy afternoons when as we feasted on the dumbed down versions of fresh pickles. The name was even approved by Mother to enter the family dictionary.

For years I thought Mother was only humoring us kids hanging around her without the yoke of school and trying to keep us out of her hair as she went about her spice sorties.

I realised only today that she was actually auditioning the mangoes in her search for the perfect mango, just that shade of crispness and sourness the choicest best of the season.

Fresh mango pickle (bhauli cha loncha)

Ingredients

1 large raw mango (kairi)

2 tbsp kashmiri chilli powder

½ tsp turmeric powder

1 tbsp salt

2 -3 tbsp oil

½  tsp mustard seeds

1 tsp toasted and powdered methi (fenugreek)

1 tsp mustard powder

¼ tsp hing (asafetida)

1 tsp brown sugar

Method:

Heat oil and add mustard seeds to crackle and remove from heat. Cool the oil completely

Wash and dry the kairi. Then peel and chop it into small bits. Add all the powders, salt and sugar. Pour the cooled oil tadka. Mix and serve!

Store any remaining loncha in the fridge.

A book in the hand

Whole-wheat Banana Cake (Photos by Amruta Nargundkar)

Aai, Dada-my brother and I are lying on our own beds reading our books. In that large open family home of ours we aren’t disconnected by individual bedrooms. Some of the family’s countless cats are thrown in for the effect – well, I stand corrected, they choose to place themselves where they please – on the bed, in the crook of our arms, on the pillow...

We are each reading our own stuff (at times after a stiff battle for a much coveted freshly borrowed book) but keenly attuned to what the other is reading, whether it is James Hadley Chase, Spike Milligan or Pu. La. Deshpande. Suddenly one of us hoots out their mirth and the others tear themselves from their books to enquire with genuine interest. 

The one who hails our attention reads the amusing bits aloud, we all laugh and chuckle together and then quiet descends as we resume our own book journeys in companionable silence.

Sometime during the night, mother removes the slackened books from our chests and switches the lights off. Or if it is a daytime reading spree, someone tosses the idea of making tea and fixing a snack and we bandy it around each convincing the other how they are best suited to fix the readers a cuppa  - until Aai caves in to make some tea for all of us.

Can we have something to eat, too? We push our luck…. we want cake…

We were able to enjoy such fun times and have these fond memories only because Aai herself was a voracious reader. In fact, this love of reading is the inheritance from a maternal grandmother and her sisters- in- law (great – aunts of mine) - who were iconoclastic, trendsetting female bibliophiles from nearly a century ago.

These women were compulsive readers of historical and social novels by the likes of V.V. Hadap, Nath Madhav and Hari Narayan Apte, inculcating enlightened ideas of women’s education, widow remarriages, condemnation of child marriages and other social issues of their times. 

The raft of what they read was impressive, ranging from Marathi peers of the English Romantic poets- Keshavsoot, Bal Kavi and their ilk to feminist writers Girija Bai Kelkar and Rama Bai Ranade. Biographies and works of Agarkar, Tilak and Savarkar and newspapers such as Kesari, the political literature around the new awakening during those times also made a deep impact on these women who hadn’t had much formal schooling.

Their interests were not just academic or artistic, for they acquired practical skills and absorbed knowledge in areas such as Ayurveda, public health, hygiene and midwifery through self-help books and shared their wisdom with other less fortunate women in their community.

Four of these women across two generations studied in Dhondo Keshav Karve’s  Hinganey Stree Shikshan Sanstha near Pune. Mai my grandmother had completed a few years of college at the Karves’ university.  She read the likes of Shakespeare, Marie Corelli, Dickens, Hardy to name only a few and would often tell her kids and later us grandkids, stories from her readings in the style of Lamb’s Shakespeare or at times gave us Bowdlerized renditions of these great works.

Periodicals like the Illustrated Weekly Of India, Women and Home and Reader’s Digest were delivered home, when my freedom fighter grandparents had patches of peacetime stability between dodging the Razakars under a shoot-at-sight order in the erstwhile Nizam State.

Aai is very proud of the fact that her social reformer father never bought his five daughters jewelry for their dowry – instead he would buy books, music records and plenty of goodies while returning home from his work related tours. Even to this day Mother’s face lights up when she recalls the shortbread and Shrewsbury cookies, the Huntely and Palmer biscuits in pretty tins and pound cakes that enhanced the siblings’ joy at their father’s homecoming.

A touching little childhood memory Mother ruefully laughs at is of writing a letter to her father who was in jail as a political prisoner, to bring home a lot of books and toys and cakes!

As I reminisce about what these mighty women two generations behind me read and relished, I am acutely aware that there was another and perhaps more enlightened generation of their mothers and mothers-in-law behind them supporting their literary efforts.

No mean feat this, in an era where little girls were punitively assigned grueling household tasks if their demanding mothers and mothers-in-law feared these kids would get corpulent when left at leisure. This was truer of child widows, whose destiny and dreams were shorn along with their locks and sealed in the constricted red or white wrap-around. 

Such strict matrons would add grit to rice and set the young girls to pick sack-loads of the grain to keep them out of mischief. When all else was done, some even had to draw heavy pots of water from deep wells, only to spill and waste the water along with their energy, time and any zest to improve their lot.

The progressive women in my family supported their daughters' literary interests, bravely facing disparagement from nosy neighbouring women folk criticising the young girls and their mothers for “lolling in bed with a book on their chests” and “drinking umpteen cups of tea with milk” – so inappropriate and unacceptable in those days.

Lucky us, I think – for not only did we get to loll in bed with books on our chests, but also got indulged in cups of tea with milk – and some wholewheat banana cake, from a recipe very close to Aai’s heart.

A gift I cherish, as does that likeminded lady with a child-like pure-hearted love for books exhorting the world (in a little-girl voice) to give children that gift of reading a book. 

Yes, Rohini Nilkeni, your words so resonate with me! 

This is my entry to the "The Idea Caravan" contest on Indiblogger.

Franklin Templeton Investments partnered the TEDxGateway Mumbai in December 2012.

Whole-wheat Banana Cake

Ingredients

2 cups fine whole-wheat flour (atta)

2 large or 3 medium sized ripe bananas, peeled and mashed

1tsp baking powder

¼ tsp ground nutmeg

½ tsp ground cinnamon

¾ tsp salt

¾ cup oil

1 ½ cups sugar/ 1cup sweetener

2 eggs

¾ cup buttermilk + 1 tsp baking soda

Method

Preheat the oven to 180 C. Grease and flour a 9”X5” loaf tin and set aside.

Sift the flour, baking powder, nutmeg, cinnamon and salt together in a bowl.

Combine the buttermilk and the baking soda.  Mix and set aside.

Beat together the sugar/sweetener and oil until light.  Add the eggs and beat until the mixture is light and fluffy.  Add in the mashed bananas and mix well.

Add half the flour mixture. Then add half the buttermilk mixture and stir well.  Then add the rest of the milk mixture and stir until the milk is fully incorporated into the batter.  Add the rest of the flour mixture and stir well.

Once the flour is mixed into the batter completely, pour it all into the prepared loaf tin.  Spread out evenly.

Bake in the pre-heated oven for about 40 - 45 minutes. If your oven has uneven heat areas, turn the pan once half way through. Test with a skewer or if the cake springs back to touch, then it is done.

Cool for about 10 -15 minutes before slicing.

You can have the cake and eat it too!

Piece de Resistance

Phodnichey Pohe (फोडणीचे पोहे)

The bus has left Belgaum on time and is slowly warming up to the overnight journey to Hyderabad. As it motors away into the distant sunset, it picks up good rhythmic speed, lulling me into a slumber. When I wake up, we are at a tea-stop and my new husband (don’t worry, this is a story from 29 years ago) has stepped out of the bus, surely in search of something to eat, I jump to a backed-by-experience-conclusion, a tad impatiently.

How many times can I tell him about the importance of staying away from unhygienic street food – how can I convince him about the dreadful consequences of waterborne microbes, flies, bacteria, amoeba, impurities, rancid oil…

He grins at me charmingly, cutting my lambast mid-sentence and proffers a newspaper cone containing some steaming kanda pohe.

No way! I turn up my nose.

But the nose has a will of its own and won’t get turned up. Instead, it seeks that most delicious aroma wafting from the newspaper cone.

The eyes follow suit, taking in the perfect bright yellow phodnichey pohe or beaten rice,each moist but firm grain separate, beautifully garnished with fresh chopped onion, sev and coriander, a little wedge of lemon pertly perched on the side.

The mouth waters in mutiny, the stomach growls seditiously, reminding me that the hurried lunch I had had was long gusted from the gut.

I am ambushed into surrender as I reach out and scoop in a mouthful. My resistance all but gone with the first bite, I reach out once more, and more…

Shall I get some more, the husband asks and I nod enthusiastically – inadvertently ...conveniently ignoring the hint of teasing in his voice. These pohe are undoubtedly the most delicious ones I have ever eaten.

I crane my neck out of the bus to make sure he’s gone back to the poha and bhajji stall and settle back into my seat satisfied that he has picked up two cones. I smile at myself, thinking here is a tale for posterity – imagine Me! Yes ME! Eating pohe from the dilapidated and dirty stall in a hole in the middle of nowhere - called Yergatti…and then again, asking for more…

I am lurched out of my reverie as the bus starts. The husband’s not back yet. I look around me and am suddenly worried, where could he be! The conductor should have at least given a warning. But he was just around the corner – hey wait!

Worry turns into panic, but only momentarily so – I spot him making his way to his seat beside me, balancing his way forward while holding on to the newspaper cones.

“Ah, good! He hasn’t spilled the pohe! …

29 years later, I still get teased, baited, tempted, coaxed out of dogmatic or pragmatic resistance to any new idea – with a gentle reminder of the pohe of Yergatti.

Phodnichey Pohe (फोडणीचे पोहे)

Ingredients

2 cups medium thick pohe

1 large onion, chopped

1 large potato, boiled, peeled and cubed

½ cup raw peanuts

2 finely chopped green chillies (or more)

10-12 curry leaves

1 tbsp lemon juice (or to taste)

1 tsp sugar

1 teaspoon mustard seeds

½ teaspoon turmeric powder

A pinch of hing

4 tbsps oil

Salt to taste

2 tbsps grated coconut (optional)

2 tbsps chopped coriander

Method

Sieve the pohe in a colander to get rid of pohe dust and chaff and pick the paddy bits, if any. Wash the pohe in cold water and drain in the same colander and keep aside for about 8-10 minutes. Fluff the soaked pohe a little.

Heat the oil in heavy bottomed kadhai. Add mustard seeds and let them crackle. Add the peanuts and fry for a minute or two, then add the hing, chillies, curry leaves and sauté for few seconds. Add the chopped onions and sauté till translucent and then add the cubed boiled potatoes cook for a few minutes.

At this stage add the turmeric – if you don’t cook the turmeric too much, it will give a nice light yellow tinge to the pohe. Now quickly add the soaked pohe, salt and sugar to taste and mix well. Cover with a lid and cook for a further 5 minutes till you see white steam escaping from the lid.

You will have to test the grain of poha to see if it is cooked. If the pohe are dry, sprinkle some water or milk and cover and cook further for a few minutes. Remove from heat. Add the lemon juice and mix.

Serve hot garnished with chopped coriander leaves and grated coconut.