Finely Chopped

Teaching your grandmother how to scramble eggs….Junior Masterchef Australia Season 1 now showing in India

2012-06-03T03:09:00.001+05:30

So Do you guys watch Junior Masterchef Australia?

They are showing its first season in India and many are hypnotised in its spell.

Including me.

I used to watch the second season of Masterchef Australia when they showed it here. Wasn’t as obsessed about it as a lot of others I knew were. A pure food show and a reality show on top of that is not the mix that drives me crazy. But I liked the general vibe of the show, the great food shots and techniques, the diversity of food… there was a lot to learn by watching it. On techniques and on the world of food. I would catch it if I was around a TV when they were showing Masterchef Australia but my life didn’t revolve around it. The third season of Masterchef Australia, which was the second season shown here, was a bit a tear jerker and that left me cold. as in the case of most people I knew, the Indian Masterchef or the one from USA didn’t work for me at all.

Pic Source: http://only1ivy.blogspot.in/2011/04/junior-masterchef-australia.html

Then came Junior Masterchef on Star World. I caught the 2nd or 3rd episode and was enthralled. The next time it came on TV, I was about to shut off the TV and head to the comp, but stopped as the little elves caught me in their spell again. Their cooking wizardry is humbling. I don’t think that even the grown ups in Masterchef Australia cooked so well. The confidence, technique and the plating of fairly complex dishes of the kids astounds one. And the air of positivity the show…the judges…as someone said more like ‘mentors’ than judges…so different from other reality shows or even their regular selves in the grown up Masterchef. So refreshingly alluring.

Unlike the other Masterchef series my interest in this one hasn’t waned. Whenever the show comes on TV I sit and watch stunned at the gifted and talented cooking that the child prodigies or chef-lings, as Gary calls them, exhibit.

Yes, off late the kids behave a if they have been choreographed by Saroj Khan, acting out each and every emotion but they are still light years away from the hamming of the Baby Guddus and Master Rajus of Hindi films of the 70s and that very teeth gnashingly precocious girl in Kuchh Kuchh Hota Hain. There’s is a certain innocence in the attempts of the junior master chefs to act as grown ups. A fine line separates them from what one calls ‘beshi paka’ in Bengali or ‘over smart’ in school patois from our growing up days.

Yes, there are some conspiracy theories about the kids being coached and that everything that we see on TV is not as it really happens. But then there are people who say that Santa Claus doesn’t exist either!

The stuff that the kids in Junior Masterchef Australia cook seems so ethereal and aristocratic that I just sit back watching them, humbled. Recently there was something that they cooked which I could have actually cooked too. A dish I have not made before.

The simple and humble scrambled egg.

I normally make the Indian version, egg bhurjee otherwise.

Scrambled eggs were part of the basic kitchen skills which the little elves were tested on in the episode last night.

I woke up this morning, reached out for my new iPhone and said ‘Siri, can you make me breakfast?’

“I cannot.’ Said Siri firmly and snuggled back under the sheets.

(Incidentally, given the amount of battery she consumes she is still very slim and as Arjun pointed out, very ‘hot’ too. Wonder if I should return it. The batter barely lasts for 4 hours and the phone gets very hot.)

I was wondering what to do for breakfast when I remembered the scrambled eggs from last nights’ episode. I called for breads and eggs and then breakfast was ready in a jiffy.

I used butter and didn’t toss out the yolks in deference to the little kids who inspired me…kids who, unlike us, are not condemned to a butter less egg whited cholesterol panicked world.

So here’s the recipe for scrambled which is based on what I saw the kids do on Junior Masterchef last night.

Lightly beat 2 eggs with a pinch of salt & 3 tablespoons of milk. In the show the judges said that if you beat the eggs too much they become fit omelettes. So just give it a few gentle swirls with a fork. Some of the contestants used cream too
Heat a tablespoon of butter on a flat non-stick pan. Some of the contestants used olive oil
Once the butter melts pour in the egg mix and let is spread all over the flat pan
On a low heat shake the pan a bit….the egg will begin to form
Gently break the egg mix a bit with a fork and, as the egg begins to harden, switch off the flame and spoon out the egg on to a plate
Season with some crushed black pepper on top

If I go by what they showed in the episode then the judges would have preferred the eggs to be runnier than what I had made…but the texture was definitely creamy, buttery and very very indulgent.

Thanks kids.

IceRocket Tags: junior masterchef australia 1,scrambled eggs,breakfasts

The legend of Lucknow’s Tunday Kebabi

2012-06-02T01:38:00.001+05:30

I have recently begun blogging on the Times of India site. My blog there is called The Chopping Board. This is my first post which appeared there a couple of days back. This reproduction on Finely Chopped has some very minor proofing changes and lots of photos of course. Apart from the high of featuring on the Times of India site, the biggest thrill for me was the fact that the post published just after mine was one of my favourite features writers in India, aapri Bachi Karkaria!

This is a long read but then these kebabs were a century in the making too.

The first thing people will tell you on hearing that you are going to Lucknow is ‘go to Tunday for kebabs’.

Just as they would say go to Paradise biryani if you say Hyderabad, Nizam’s rolls if you say Kolkata or Bade Miya if you say Mumbai or Kareems if you say Delhi.

Chances are that quite a few of these places would disappoint you if you actually went there. Nizam’s today after many labour trouble closures no longer seems to pack the same punch. I found Bade Miya to be hugely over-rated when I moved in to Mumbai in the late ‘90s. I believe things haven’t changed since. I’ve just once packed food from the Kareems at Nizamuddin and am yet to see its charms. And a recent biryani expedition to Hyderabad made it clear to me that Paradise is for tourists but not a place where locals eat.

So would Tunday, supposedly the origin of the famous gulauti kebabs, be a damp squib too?

The fact is that there were a few who told me that Tunday has had its time and is no longer the gold standard at Lucknow.

While others said ‘go to Tunday’!

For whatever it is worth, Tunday featured right on top of the list veteran journalist Kanchan Gupta sourced for me from his local Lucknow contacts when he heard that I was going to Lucknow.

My verdict on Tunday?

Well I had 2 meals at two Tundays. One at their original outlet at Lucknow’s Chowk and the other at their second one at Aminabad. The first one run by the grand man, the Late Tunday Kebabi’s son, while the second managed by his grandson. On both occasions I stuck to the basic burre (buffalo) kebabs. Once with parathas and once with shirmals.

To cut a long story short, both experiences were phenomenal....the perfect balance of meat and spices...poetry on a plate.

Mystical Chowk and the century old Tunday Kebabi

I first went to the Tunday at Chowk which, the folks at my hotel told me, was the original or first one.

I landed at Chowk on the first evening at Lucknow. There was a certain mystical feel to the place at night...as if one was at a grand wedding feast where the ceremonies were over, the lights dimmed, friends still lingering on catching up with each other before calling it a night.

There was a certain sense of calm to the roundabout at Chowk which was surrounded by some grand yet old buildings.

I began ticking off from my list the moment I entered Chowk with chaats at Dixit’s. Then I walked around soaking in the atmosphere. Nepalis making vegetarian Hakka noodles at a local restaurant...a sweet shop which was packed...a man on the street scooping out kulfis for the throng surrounding him...a cycle rickshaw guy smoking a quiet cigarette, framed in the yellow light, before he set off looking for customers again.

I walked around Chowk feeling the magic of the place in my bones. And then I begun to get to know the merry men of Chowk...Guptaji who smiled as I photographed the namkeen in his cart. He proudly made me taste them all. Lekh who told me about the hidden delights of Chowk and said I should come back in winter when the dawats happen. The ebullient young white bearded venerable Tripathiji who asked me to have tea at his tea cart...a wizened man so full of life and good cheer. And many more on the streets who welcomed with open hearts and outstretched arms.

Our impromptu soiree over I headed to Tunday down a long deserted alley. Stopping to ask for directions at shops that were open.

“Walk on” urged the voices in the dark night... “bas thora hi aage hain”.

The build up to my first Tunday experience was as cinematic as it gets. There was a cold breeze around me and my driver called me on the phone “hurry up sir...there could be an aandhi (dust storm)”. I walked on trying to shield my eyes from the dust. Shrugging off the eeriness of the empty streets.

And then suddenly there it was after a ten minute walk in the clouds. Tunday Kebabi.

The first sign was not a board or shop display. Just a throng of people. Ahead of them was a huge flat girdle and on that a gentleman rhythmically tossing in kebab doughs. Splat they went in only to come out a bit later as a grown up kebab.

Thin discs of meat. Unevenly formed. Very quick to make. Dozen to a minute.

No wonder Vir Sanghvi had called Tunday’s gualutis ‘the poor man’s kakori kebabs’ in his book Rude Food.

Behind the kebab guy was a cavernous hall. The restaurant. A hole in the wall if there ever was one. Albeit a big one. This was not a place for the faint hearted. Dusty, neon lit, tables spread haphazardly. Men eating with serious intent. There weren’t any women around if I remember right.

The place was quite haphazard and reminded me of Candies on a busy Sunday afternoon. I looked around and feebly asked a couple of folks who seemed like waiters...no uniforms here...on what to do. They walked on harrowed without answering me.

I stood helplessly while folks seeing me camera asked me to photograph them. They love that apparently at Lucknow. A group of four young men asked me to photograph them thrice in fact at Tunday’s.

Then I spotted an empty table where two gentlemen sat and I joined them. I took the chair opposite them and sat down.

They seemed to be ‘regulars’ and called for the waiter confidently. I took the opportunity, jumped in and placed my order for a plate of kebabs and parathas with them.

Then we got talking. Turned out they were of Nepali descent but born in Lucknow. One of them explained that they were ‘regular’ to the extent that they came to Tunday’s once a fortnight when they felt like kebabs. “You can’t eat this every day. Your body will give in. But we love the kebabs here. My wife has a government job. I don’t work. Once in a while she gives me money and we come here for kebabs.”

“We get special kebabs and parathas. Different from what others get”.

“Are these ‘beef’?”

“Beef as in?”

“Gaai ka”

'”Nehin. Bhaains. Buffalo”

The bigger built of the two did all the talking while his friend kept smiling. He had decided to take me under their wings.

“Wait I will tell them to get special kebabs and parathas for you too. The ones we get”.

I smiled happily and then we chatted while our order got ready.

The bigger of the two gentlemen, Ashok, looked at me fixedly and said, “What do you do”

“I am a market researcher”

“Is there any future in that?”

Stumped I looked at him for a while...

Bang came the next question “Is there any job satisfaction in what you do?

Brilliant! Here was Obi Wan himself in the middle of a desolate chop shop at Lucknow. But then this was a mystical night. Not your usual 9 to 5 night. The restaurant at the end of the universe.

Thankfully the kebabs came and our catechism ended. It was time for me to take a figurative sip out of the Holy Grail.

I broke a piece of the paratha...thin...muslin-like...made in the manner or rumali rotis on an upturned wok. Swiped some of the pate-like kebab with the ‘ulta tawe ka parathas’ and popped the combination into my mouth.

I broke into a smile.

The sheer delicacy of the soft minced meat formed into thin kebabs...slightly burnt edges ...the ‘special touch’ that Ashok promised...the spices with the residual heat of chillies...tantalising yet not overwhelming. The beauty of freshly ground meat. All wrapped in the thin crisp paratha.

Just the sort of simplicity in taste that I am willing to travel the world for.

I was in a happy place.

As were my dinner mates when they saw the expression of bliss on my face. They were apparently so happy to see my enjoyment that they refused to let me pay. My dinner was on them.

A story which got repeated a few more times in the big hearted city of Lucknow. I had to struggle, often unsuccessfully, to get people to take money from me. It was as if all the honest and humble eateries of Lucknow, and the people there, had decided to adopt me.

After dinner my new friends introduced me to the elderly gentleman at the counter, Haji Raheez Ahmed. His father was known as Tunday Kebabi and had set this restaurant about a century years back.

Kebabs and parathas...they had hit on a winning formula and stuck to that. Simple business principles which made so much sense. That’s how legends are made.

I said goodbye to my new friends and traced my way back through the long alley...in the dark...the promised dust storm adding to the sense of adventure as I tried to shield my eyes again from the dust and headed back to the car.

Surely this was one of the one thousand and one Arabian Nights.

Tunday at the meat markets of Aminabad

My Tunday tales didn’t end that night at Chowk.

A couple of days later I landed at Aminabad at Lucknow as I went out in search of lunch.

I was told that I HAD to go to Aminabad if I was looking for the meaty delights of Lucknow. There was of course the big daddy of them all. Tunday Kebabi. Some even thought this to be the original outlet. More people knew of this one than the Chowk one. Many small kebab and nihari shops beyond Tunday were promised to me. My list spoke of a few places like Wahid’s biryani too.

Turned out that you can’t miss Tunday Kebabi when you enter Aminabad.

Unlike the original one which is hidden away in the depths of time at Chowk the ‘newer’ one stands bang in the middle of Aminabad and dominates the lane. In front is a big girdle with kebabs being made on it by the minute. A man in a corner making parathas with a fan cooling him. The saffron coloured shirmals, local parathas, being made at another corner. And a huge biryani pot from which a man was doling out technicoloured biryanis for customers.

I walked in to the restaurant. This was different from the Aladdin’s cave like one at Chowk. Still very basic in ambiance. But this one was air-conditioned, divided into sections. The overall look grey and yet lively if that is possible. The ‘decor’ consisted of pictures of film stars. SRK in his 90s haircut and jacket with sleeves rolled up. Anil Kapok, in his pre Oscar and MI3 days, in a bathrobe of the sort that heroines of the 80s would wear. Some more modern faces from Bollywood. The Tunday hall of fame.

Wahid’s next door. The older biryani restaurant next door had just one picture amongst faux prints of Sydney for some reason, that of Yousuf Saab AKA Dilip Kumar.

I spoke to the gentleman at the counter at Tunday’s at Aminabad. Mr Muhammed Usman. The grandson of Tunday Kebabi, the name the Late Haji Murad Ali was better known as.

Mr Usman confirmed that the hundred year old shop at Chowk, which has father managed, is the original Tunday outlet. The shop at Aminabad is about thirty years old. Most of the other ‘Tunday’ restaurants were owned by folks who had used the Tunday name apparently but had nothing to do with the family. Usman just shrugged when he said this. Copyright infringement didn’t seem to keep him up at night.

I placed my order. I stuck to the basics as I had already downed a biryani at Wahid’s.

My order was a plate of burre (buffalo) gulautis, which is what the grand old man Tunday had started his empire with, and a shirmal.

For the first time I had a table to myself at Lucknow. I didn’t know what to do with the solitude of an empty table. Luckily the food came soon. I tore a bit of the shirmal and scooped up a bit of the pate like kebab and popped it in to my mouth.

I took my first bite and then smiled once again as I had the first night at Tunday’s. The smile broadened as the warmth and finesse of the delicately spiced kebab and the hot, soft and crisp at the edges, shirmal embraced me.

With each bite I marvelled at the sheer artistry of what I was eating. And this, mind you, after I was already full. Yet I took each bite with increasing anticipation and subsequent ecstasy.

The hot bites of the burre ke gulauti and shirmal that I had at Tunday that afternoon was the standout experience of my trip to the city of many gastronomic delights, Lucknow.

And that was quite an achievement for the kebabs and shirmal of Tunday’s.

The wisdom of kebabs

So are Tunday’s kebabs overrated? Do they deserve to be called the best kebabs in India? Are their glory days over? Are their better kebab places at Lucknow now?

Well I will ignore the cynicism for the moment.

To me Tunday Kebabi will stand for two magical eating experiences.

One flavoured with history and the warmth and generosity of strangers. The other where I was lucky enough to experience the gastronomic experience of a lifetime.

The memories of both meals bring a smile to one’s face.

And that folks, is something to be treasured.

Shukriya Haji Murad Ali Janab AKA Tunday Kebabi…your legacy made this hungry traveller a happy man.

IceRocket Tags: lucknow,kanchan gupta,chowk,aminabad,tunday kebabi,gulauti kebab,shirmal,wahid,bryani,paratha

Catwalk…The new Le Pain Quotidien at BKC, Mumbai

2012-06-01T03:10:00.001+05:30

I guess Le Pain Quotidien at Colaba is the only place that could inspire me to get up on a Sunday morning and drive all the way to town via the Sea Link for breakfast.

There is a certain feel good factor about the place that draws one there. It leaves you with the languorous feeling that is so typical of a weekend. The ambience with its high ceilings and wooden hues, pleasant service, cheerful food…there is a certain charm to LPQ that envelops you in its glow when you are there.

A new branch of LPQ has opened at the Bandra Kurla Complex recently. Towards the beginning of BKC in the complex which hosts the California Pizza Kitchen too.

I got to know about it from their PR folks who had sent an invite to come and eat Le Pain Quotidien. I normally stay away from organised reviews. Don’t feel comfortable doing them and find them too artificial. But I did decide to go to LPQ as it is close by, I like the place and there was no compulsion to write I was assured. I had planned to go for a weekend breakfast but finally ended up going there mid week for dinner.

The LPQ at BKC retains the same cosy, warm, golden look and feel of the one at town. The new LPQ is in the middle of a new concrete and glass complex at BKC and, unlike the one at town, doesn’t have Colaba attached to it. The LPQ at BKC is a 2.5 sectioned one across a single floor unlike the two storied one in town.

The new LPQ, like the one at Colaba, has that certain French charm which is so quaint yet artistic. Visions of which for many of us is conjured by Hollywood films and Samantha Brown’s jaunts on TLC.

While I like going to LPQ for a late breakfast, this visit was at dinner so I tried a few small portions of stuff I hadn’t tried at the Colaba outlet.

That’s the idea of a tasting versus the real deal. You can try out a variety of stuff. Pity you don’t get small plates in India.

First of the dishes was a French onion soup which added to the melancholy miasma that shrouds a solitary table. The invite was two but I don’t feel comfortable these day with the freeloading that a review entails and prefer going alone. The cheese bread was the only bright touch in this clear onion soup. I don’t think I have ever liked French onion soup. I should stop trying to.

Unless I come across what Pradeep Rao described how French onion soups should be on the Finely Chopped facebook page when I put up the picture.

“It needs to be made with strong beef stock and completed in the oven with a slab of gruyere cheese completely covering the bowl, like they do in France. Then it tastes really good esp the soft onion in the soup. I have never had a really good French onion soup here, just half hearted ones.”

The one at LPQ was rather weak hearted.

The bread takes a bit of getting used to at LPQ. they tend to be fairly dry as they are virgin whole-wheat, rye sourdough breads and not the indulgent, soft, anything but strict breads that surround us. If you like the buttery loving of bread rolls and brioches then the rather disciplined bread here will scare you. But if you are made of sterner stuff then this very European bread might catch your fancy.

I tried one of the new salads. My trips to Australia has done this to me. Make me like salads.

This one was a mandarin salad. A very interesting taste mix of tangy mandarin, sweet boiled beet, juicy cherry tomatoes and the zesty rocket leaves. There was ricotta according to the menu which was quite invisible as the focus, I was told, was on the mandarin. There was a faint balsamic reduction too. If you are into salads then this is quite a competent one.

For the mains I chose the braised pork.

The braised pork at LPQ has to be, review bias or no review bias, one of the best pork dishes that I have had in town.

Again an instance of the combination of diverse tastes coming together so perfectly in a dish. Pliant thin pork belly slices in jus which gave a central meaty texture to the dish. Meatiness cut with tangy bits of tomato, an apple soufflé which was more garlicky than sweet and complimented the meat well with its sharpness and then a side of creamy buttery bacon broccoli and bokchoy. Add all these elements together to give you an unforgettable palate experience.

I also tried out the Asian inspired laksa tagliatelli with chicken. The pairing intrigued me.

The laksa paste was sharp, authentic and added a certain piquancy that is foreign to pasta. The chicken was cut in a typical Asian was. Fairly tender and well seasoned. They say that Marco Polo had taken back the idea for pasta after his visits to China. This dish at LPQ conjured by an Indian chef seemed to complete the story.

The dish was no comparison to the braised pork as a dish but if food fusion interests you then you might want to try this laksa pasta.

I have had most of the chocolate LPQ desserts at Colaba and so chose a lemon tart to go with a nice strong decaf coffee.

The lemon tart was quite a pleasant experience and seemed a lot lighter than the average LPQ dessert. I finished most of it unlike with their other desserts. There was a certain cool, tanginess to the lemon curd which was just right for summer.

Examination done I headed back home.

The evening was an example of why I don’t like reviews. I was incredibly bored. The experience very ersatz with my having to give reactions after every dish to the manager. At least there was no pressure to write. Perhaps if Vodafone hadn’t taken two days and counting to activate my sim in the new phone I could have played on the net on the phone while I ate.

Or, of course, not been pig headed and not gone alone.

Still, the braised pork made up for it.

This is not an anonymous review and the dinner was hosted by LPQ

IceRocket Tags: Le Pain Quotidien,BKC,French Onion Soup,salads,lemon tart,braised prok

A quick single to reach post number 1000… Roasted soya marinated chicken with broccoli & stuff

2012-05-29T01:43:00.001+05:30

Ever since I saw this little statistic on blogger a couple of days back I knew I had to change it fast.

Yes, I was at 999 published posts.

The next would be post number 1000. Even if it meant with a streaky single. A quick post.

Even if it was a post centred around a vegetable that I had just bought possibly for the second time in my life. Broccoli. (The first time was when I had made a quasi Thai green curry for a vegetarian guest at a dinner.)

Even if it was a short and simple recipe post.

Which in a way is symbolic. A recipe post that is.

I was recently perplexed when a guy wished me a ‘happy mother’s day’. Then it made sense as I came across a few guys who said they use recipes from the blog to cook for their girlfriends. In one case an ex. Though the young man in this case did clarify that his ex didn’t become an ‘ex’ because of the cooking. He gamely assured me that their relation lasted two years more because of his cooking. And then I met this couple the other day where the girl told me that her boyfriend reads up recipes from the blog and cooks for her…a change apparently from his earlier repertoire of coffee…and that’s about it.

Well this recipe is as simple as it gets and my mom would be mighty pleased to know its absolutely oil free.

A bit of chicken bulked up with mushrooms, broccoli and baby corn. That’s about it. All done in the oven.

I had no idea how to cut or cook broccoli. A discussion on my facebook page alerted me to the fact that one should not overcook it. The rest fell in to place.

So here goes, my recipe for Roasted soya chicken with broccoli & other vegetables (for 1)

Ingredients:

100 g chicken – boneless, ideally leg cuts, cut in to cubes
50 g chopped button mushrooms
3,4 florets of broccoli
3,4 baby corn stalks slashed into two
1 tablespoon ginger juliennes (strips)
Marinade: 1 tablespoon soya sauce, 1 tablespoon chilli sauce (I used Thai sriracha), 1/2 teaspoon white vinegar, 1/2 teaspoon each crushed black pepper & salt

Cook:

Marinate (mix everything in the sauces) for at least half an hour in the fridge

Roast:

Preheat oven for 10 min at 200 C
Take out the broccoli and corn from the dish and keep aside…you don’t want to overcook them as you want the broccoli and corn to be crisp and firm at the end
Put in the baking dish with the chicken, mushroom and sauces in to the oven for 20 min at 200 C
Take the dish out and guys do use baking gloves or kitchen pads or towels for this…I’ve often singed my palms because I’ve forgotten to do so

Add the broccoli and corn on top of the chicken. You don’t want to plunge them in as you don’t them to mix in the sauce and get all mushy. Add some chopped chillies if you would like
Put the dish back in the oven and keep it in for 5 minutes at 200 C
That’s it. Keep the dish in for another 5 minutes once done so that the juices settle.
The dish is ready

Eat this with steamed rice and you’ve got a fairly non controversial dish from the health point of view.

What you get is a balance of colours in the dish – brown, green, yellow, red – and a balance of tastes too. The bounce of chicken and the mushrooms, the inherent heat of the pepper and chilli, the fresh bite of ginger, the salt of soya, tang of vinegar…and the crunch of the corn and broccoli.

Spoon some of the sauce on to the rice and you are ready to eat.

And this folks, is the one thousandth post to be published on Finely Chopped!

Thank you for being a part of the ride.

PS: The following are the comments on the Finely Chopped facebook page on broccoli which helped me modify my initial plans:

Finely Chopped

24 May Bought broccoli for the second time in my life and for the first time for personal consumption. A culinary midlife crisis I guess

13 people like this.
- Kathakali Jana all the talk about health being wealth has finally caught up with you ;)

24 May at 21:32 · Like
Rini Simon Khanna I love Broccoli with the garlic yogurt dip I make...just steam the broccoli and dip and eat

24 May at 21:33 · Like
Poli Gupta Love Broccoli :) Just the way Rini said, steamed and with some dip. Or even simple steamed, as a side.

24 May at 21:36 · Like
Subhasree Basu It's a tricky vegetable.. U must never overlook it! U can steam, chill and make a lovely cold salad. Use prawns or crabmeat and boiled eggs. Yummy

24 May at 21:37 · Like
Finely Chopped This is meant for a Chinese roast. Guess I'll take the broccoli and baby corn out and bung them in the end. Tks for the tip

24 May at 21:41 · Like
Anjali Koli But Kalyan I can count the number of broccoli florets there ;)

24 May at 21:41 · Unlike · 2
Finely Chopped ‎@kathakali a moment of weakness

24 May at 21:42 · Like
Subhasree Basu Sorry typo.. Overcook

24 May at 21:43 · Like
Sanchita Banerjee Rodrigues Ewww. Never liked that thingy. One day may be...

24 May at 22:26 · Unlike · 1
Finely Chopped ‎Sanchita Banerjee Rodrigues finally a woman after my heart...we aquarians must stick together...loads of broccoli fans on twitter too :(

24 May at 22:51 · Like
Finely Chopped ‎Anjali Koli i told the shop guys 'sab sai chhota wala dena'

24 May at 22:52 · Like
Anjali Koli LOL!

24 May at 22:53 · Like
BongMom CookBook But why ? I mean is it really necessary ? That is the question. BTW do they grow broccoli locally ?

24 May at 23:34 · Like
Rita Roy Massey Love broccoli

25 May at 01:07 · Like
Finely Chopped ‎BongMom CookBook they grow everything here

25 May at 01:14 · Like
Finely Chopped btw put brocolli and corn in the last min after the discussion here. perfect...tks

25 May at 01:15 · Like
Ushnish Ghosh I also had bought once for personal consumption..because a friend told " Eating broccoli is a status symbol"

25 May at 07:54 · Unlike · 1
Preetañjali Paül Bäsu Try raw broccoli with a dip of your choice. That also qualifies to be healthy. :-) I eat it on its own...when my guilt from eating all that red meat overpowers me.

25 May at 07:57 · Like
Finely Chopped ‎Ushnish Ghosh so Ghosh Kaku did people go green?

25 May at 13:10 · Like · 1
Finely Chopped ‎Preetañjali Paül Bäsu dunno if raw vegetables in india can be considered healthy

25 May at 13:12 · Like
Ushnish Ghosh I only like Broccoli tempura ! As such I as a human being and dont have any enzyme to digest cellulose and most vegetables. i just eat vege for kicks . The animals eat vegetables and supply me with meat. By the awesome dish , must try it !

25 May at 15:08 · Unlike · 1

IceRocket Tags: recipes,chinese recipes,oil free recipes,chicken,broccoli,OTG recipes

The Lucknowi biryani pilgrimmage … Wahid’s, Lalla’s, Open Air, Peeli Kothi

2012-05-25T03:47:00.001+05:30

Caveat: Looong post

Smitten by Lucknow

So how was Lucknow you asked?

Well Lucknow was everything I expected it to be and a whole lot more.

I fell in love with the city moment I landed and set out from the airport. This was my second trip after more than a decade.

I headed out past the massive roads…past the awe inspiring pink structures of its recent Rani Sahiba…the sheer dimensions of the grand nouveau Bodhi Park numbed you…then past the cantonment of its British rulers of yore…into Hazratganj with its uniform white and black boards across colonial buildings…a la Istiklal Cadesi of Istanbul, The Rocks of Sydney or even the pink walls outside our very own Hawa Mahal at Jaipur…into my hotel the young and bright Best Western and the quaint lazy slightly crumbly building with it’s spiral staircase that my hotel room looked on to…an hour into Lucknow and I was hypnotised by its charms.

I was smitten by the magnificence of the city. I was in love with it.

Lucknow didn’t just inspire me…it held me in its spell. I returned to Mumbai with kaleidoscopic memories of Lucknow’s kind people … visions of a trip so psychedelic that it took me a while to come back and settle down to the routine… to tell myself that Vajpayee’s puri kachoris were not at arm’s reach anymore…nor was Dixit’s chaats, Raja’s thandais…Shau’s paani ke batashe, Moti Mahal’s imarti, Chhapan Bhog’s alu tikkis, Gupta’s farsan cart, Tripathiji’s chai stand and of course all the meat…Tunday kebabs, Wahid Mia’s biryani, Lallaji’s biryanis…all distant memories.

It just seems like yesterday that I’d drove in to the mystical Chowk at night, or was photographing Hazratganj in the searing sun…or was prancing all over the Imambara like a mountain goat soaking in the vitamin D…or walking past the eerie calm of the bullet ridden walls of The Residency…exploring the meaty wonders of Aminabad or tracing down Lallaji’s biryani shop down Lucknow’s winding lanes…or walking down the grand roads of Hazratganj in search of the Tulsi ‘non veg’ gully… walking back after midnight past families bonding over ice cream…straight into the arms of one hot, plump, imarti before retiring for the night.

The biryani tales

I came back from Lucknow with cinema reels full of memories. Bursting with stories of great food and kind hearted souls. Still I guess the first story that ought to be told is that of the biryani of Lucknow. For that’s what I had gone looking for. The object of my food pilgrimage.

Let me explain.

Years back I had read Vir Sanghvi write about the origins of the biryani of Calcutta. Apparently biryani was taken to Calcutta when the last Nawab of Oudh, Wajid Ali Shah, was ‘parcelled’ to Calcutta by the Brits after the 1857 War of Independence. Now good old Wajid Ali Shah was apparently a gourmand and took his chief khansamahs or cooks with him even after he lost his kingdom.

So what if he was in exile the story went. The pots of biryani could not remain empty.

At some point reality kicked in at Calcutta…the ruler now vanquished couldn’t afford meat for all and then someone had a brilliant, near Bengali, idea of adding potatoes.

Recently I had gone to Hyderabad exploring the other famous gharana of biryani I wrote about my experiences here. Now it was time to travel to the etymological ‘motherland’ of Calcutta’s biryani.. Lucknow

And for all the biryani heretics who say that the biryanis of Lucknow and Calcutta are ‘pulaos’ and not ‘biryani’…all I can say is boo to you. This is a debate which my friend the late Miri wrote about in her blog. Vir Sanghvi also writes that in Lucknow they call it pulao and not biryani.

Well not at Tunday’s, Wahid’s, Tulsi Gulley or in the five stars too, The menus there say ‘biryani’ in big and bold.

Perhaps it was the thandai at work.

There is no Wren and Martin who prescribed that biryani can happen only if the meat, rice and masalas are cooked together as the Hyderbadis did when their armies marched across the Deccan…the Lucknowi style of biryani where the meat and rice are cooked separately and then put together in the last stage…where the dish is all about flavoured fragrant rice and meats … plus potatoes if in Calcutta…where the spices are meant to be sensed and not seen is as much a biryani as the more earthy ones of South and Western India.

The argument that Hyderabadi biryani is biryani and not the Lukcnowi or the Calcutta ones is like saying that clay court tennis is tennis but not the grass court ones.

And then there are so many more strains of biryani – Moplah of Kerala, Irani, hot Andhra ones, the Tamil ones, the Punjabi ones which often have tomatoes and onions them, the Maharashtrian spicy ones of Malvani restaurants…the greasy Mumbai stuff of Jafferbhai… so if anyone tells you that they will tell you what authentic biryani is then beware…they will next try to sell you the Taj Mahal.

Check out Nadia’s blog post on the origins of biryani.

I’ll go a step further and say that India is a federal country which is both united and divided by its biryani…the sooner we learn to accept the differences the better it is…for the phrase ‘ Indian biryani’ is as much of a misnomer as ‘Indian curry’…if anyone tells you that they know where you get the best biryani in India then there are suffering from extreme hubris induced by the summer sun… Anyway it’s really Calcutta which has the best biryani. And at Kolkata, its Shiraz. So there.

Of course the richness of Lucknow’s food heritage is such that I had my first biryani of the trip more than 24 hours after I landed…well after I was done with my alu tick, matter chaats, thandai, Galati kebabs, puri kachoris, chastise and paani ke bat ashes…if there was a city that was built around food then Lucknow has to be the one

Did I say I was smitten?

As my bible, I had a list of 11 must haves that veteran journalist, Kantian Gupta, with whom I connected on twitter over food, sourced for me when I tweeted that I was planning to go to Lucknow. My precocious brief to him … I want a mix of Muslim and Hindu eats.

And he delivered.

Tulsi Gulley Hazratganj…Open Air Restaurant’s biryani

So on day 2 I headed to the non vet hotspot of Tulsi Gulley at the end of Hazrantganj. A place recommended by Rahul and Tushar of the Best Western Lucknow. Kanchanda’s list spoke of the biryani at Dastarkhwan there.

I reached Dastarkhwan and started taking pictures of the gentlemen making galauti and sheekh kebabs and their special chicken masala, which I later found out to be similar in essence to Kolkata’s chicken chaap. The place was quite chaotic…a group of young men who had come there to eat said that I should grab a table and that I should definitely order the chicken masala. They weren’t too convinced about the biryani though. One thing that I noticed at the menu, and saw at other shops too, was that like in the Far East, restaurants at Lucknow offered small portions of biryani …which made so much sense for single eaters.

I was all ready to sit when they suddenly downed the shutters at Dastarkhwan and said ‘food is over'. It was 1030 pm.

I walked around listlessly up the the bustling street..there was Zeeshan’s Biryani, Naushijaan, a few other small places…I chose the place that looked the most crowded…the rather simply named ‘Open Air Restaurant’ beside Dastarkhwan.

Open Air was packed but a waiter did manage to find a seat in a corner table which I shared a couple of locals who were enjoying their chicken masala after work.

My order was brought to me in a jiffy. Half a plate of mutton shammi kebabs and half a mutton biryani…my trip had finally begun.

A few bites and I could spot the DNA of the Calcutta biryani in the biryani at Open Air.

The rice bursting with flavours with no additional masala on it…the grains of rice slightly bigger than that of the biryani at Kolkata…a tad greasier…but what really distinguished it was the succulent meat. Interestingly served as small bits of meat spread across the rice.

I smiled…little did I know that that the best was yet to come…the smile would have been wider then.

On the way out my waiter, who turned out to be from Malda in Bengal, got excited seeing the camera got me to photograph all the food and the folks around. Some of it while I stood on a box for a panoramic view.

As I found out, they love people who take photographs at Lucknow.

Frozen in time … Imambara & The Residency

The next day was a day of history lessons.

I first went to imposing Islamic structures of the Burra Imambara and the labyrinths of the Bhoolbhoolaiya. I skipped the latter and walked across the sunny terrace in my socks, taking in the magnificence around me. Wondering why no one thought of Lucknow as a tourist destination. Surrounding me was Islamic architecture at its grandest. Lying largely ignored except by locals.

Paradise lost as the cliche says.

And then there was the Residency. The site of the attack by the rebel Indian army and massacres during the War of Independence and then subjugation by the British after the end of a siege…barren ruins left undisturbed…canon ball holes in the walls deafening in their silence.

Of course there’s nothing like a couple of hours of walking in the sun to prime you up for lunch.

A glimpse of Lallaji

I headed in search for Lalla’s biryani…not on my list but a place that my friend Aashim, @zedvox on twitter, ex Lucknowite, insisted I go to. His frenzied tweets spoke to me and I headed past the winding lanes of Chowk to look for Lallaji and his biryani at Chowpatiya Chauraha.

We finally reached a hole in the wall and there was Lallaji.

A moustachioed gentleman with a beatific near maternal smile. He was literally making the biryani with his own hands. He was layering the mutton into the vessel in which biryani would be cooked…the smell of meat intoxicating…the only problem, as the smiling Ustad told me, was that the biryani was yet to be ready. His shop was open only for dinner.

I stepped out. Though something told me that I’d be back.

Aminabad & Wahid’s Biryani

Off we headed to Aminabad. The hot spot of Awadhi food at Lucknow. A lane packed with Muslim restaurants. Extending from hole in the walls to…well slightly bigger holes in the wall.

There was Tunday Kebabi. The flagship of Lucknow to the rest of the world. The one at Aminabad, is not the first Tunday Kebabi though contrary to what most tourists think.

The Tunday Kebabi at Aminabad is about 15 years old and is manned by the late Tunday Mia’s grandson. This restaurant is air-conditioned and has range beyond the burre (buffalo) gulaoti kebas and parathas of the Chowk outlet. The Tunday at Chowk where I went gone the previous night and is basically a single dish place – kebabs and parathas. It is about 80 years old and more like a simple cave. Tunday Mia’s son sits there while the grandson manages the newer Aminabad shop.

The Aminabad Tunday had chhote (goat) kebab, parathas, shirmals, curries and biryanis. I saw the biryani being served from the vessels and it looked too colourful for me. So I decided to to give it a miss though I did come back a short while later for some more burre ke gulauti and shirmal…lip-smacking but that’s a story for another post.

I spotted a board beside Tunday. Wahid’s Biryani. That rung a bell. It was in Kanchanda’s list. I stepped in.

Tiny little place. Air conditioned. I got a table. There were two young boys sitting there. I placed my order. Half biryani.

I spoke to the boys while I waited.

“Is this place famous for its biryani?”.

“I don’t know”

“Why did you come in here”

“We just walked in”

“But why did you choose this over the next shop”

“Just”

“Aren’t you from Lucknow?”

“No. We came here to take our tests. School final exams”

“Are they over?”

“Yes”

“Did you do well?”

“Yes”

“Great. Have fun then”

Our biryani arrived bringing our riveting conversation to an end as we started upon our biryanis with studious expressions.

I looked at my plate and suddenly it all became clear.

The biryani at Lucknow is all about the meat. The rice and everything else exists just to celebrate meat.

This is meat in its purest. The chunks of meat in the biryani at Wahid’s larger than those at Open Air the previous night. More primordial and pure.

I took a bite of the mutton.

Rarely had I tasted meat so succulent. So sensuous. So raw. So full bodied. So bursting with passion. So tempestuous. So earnest. So illicit. So forbidden. So alluring. So innocent. So lovable. So nibbleable even the morning after.

The temples of flesh as they say.

The rice seasoned perfectly. A perfect foil for the glory of good, honest, meat. With a nice light curd raita to go with it.

The key differences from its descendants at Calcutta are : 1. No potato 2. The meat is a lot more glorious in the Lucknow biryani 3. The rice richer, perhaps excessively for devotees of the biryani at Calcutta. Often more colourful than at Calcutta

On the way out I met octogenarian Wahid saab and his brother Wazid. They treated me to a cup of tea as I kept raving about the biryani to them. Wahid Saab had set up his shop in the mid 1950s. And since then had been perfecting his biryani.

Yes, I felt privileged to share a cup of tea with the two venerable brothers that afternoon.

Chaupatiya Chauraha & Lalla’s Biryani

I picked up the biryani trail at night after I was done with my work. I headed back to Lallaji’s at Chaupatiya Chauraha.

I walked in to the little garage like shop. You can sit in one corner with a shelf kept to place your plates. Or you could pack your food. But will Lallaji welcoming me back with a big teddy bear of a smile I didn’t even think of packing my food. I sat down and soon my half plates of shammi kebab (mutton) and biryani were bought to me.

Once again the biryani was all about the meat. The same mutton that Lallaji was so loving layering in to the pan in the afternoon was now presented to me. The aroma of which drew me back that evening.

And what exquisitely cooked mutton it was. Sheer art. Meat so juicy that it made you forget your weariness at the end of the day.

The rice a bit more colourful than at Wahid’s. But then this was a biryani that was filled with extra cheer.

Yes, the wizards of Lucknow had got it right. Biryani perfection to them was all about the meat….with an accompaniment of some rich and yet not overly spiced rice. They kept it simple and uncluttered. No excesses in this school of biryani. The school that was then further developed in Calcutta. A school which was about simplicity leading to great taste. Not about excesses.

Just the way food should be.

The deal with the biryani at Lallaji is that it comes with his big smile and blessing. What an affable man indeed is Lallaji. I could understand Aashim’s affection for Lallaji as the kind gentleman patted my cheek and gave me a warm smile.

This was indeed mutton biryani for the soul.

Lallaji is unique as he is probably the sole Hindu, as Aashim put it, who makes an exquisite biryani…normally the domain of Muslims in Lucknow. Lalla told me that more than thirty years back he had got the idea of setting up a biryani shop. Got a Muslim cook friend to teach him.

I am sure Lallaji has done his friend proud through this wonderful story of communal gastronomic integration.

Unlike Aminanabad

, Chowk or Hazratganj there’s no further food of note near Lalla’s Biryani at Cahupatiya Chauraha barring the odd kulcha, kulfi and lassi shops.

Yet, I would strongly recommend a trip just to experience this wonder of Lucknow.

As a gentleman at Wahid’s told me when I mentioned Lalla’s “sirf khaane ka shaukeen ko unke baare main maloom hain” (Only true gourmands know of Lalla’s)

Best Western Lucknow’s Peeli Kothi and its biryani

My biryani tales didn’t end there. I had to extend my stay at Lucknow and had my last dinner at the Best Western’s fine dining Awadhi (Lucknowi) restaurant, Peeli Kothi. It was set at a place where Mirza Ghalib once wrote his poems. For me this was an interesting counterpoint to my earlier commoner’s meals. An opportunity to see how the new nawabs of Lucknow dined. And yes, like all fine dining Awadhi restaurants in India, Peeli Kothi too had a ‘Qureshi’ as its head chef!

Apart from some goat gulautis and kakoris I went for the biryani here. No half plates of course so I couldn’t finish it all.

Where this biryani was different from the earlier ones was in the quality of rice. More exquisite and fragrant here. Suddenly not playing a passive role to the meat unlike at the humbler biryani shops. Here both the rice and meat vied for your attention unlike elsewhere when the meat had you in its spell. What I also liked was the touch of caramelised onion interspersed strewn through the rice. The taste perhaps a bit more nuanced than the raw passion of the biryanis at Wahid’s and Lalla’s.

And so my biryani pilgrimage ended. I had gone to the source of the Calcutta biryani, Lucknow, and came back baptised. This was an experience which in a way was life defining.

I came back with the knowledge that there is nothing wrong with setting your expectations high in life. If you yearn for something hard enough at Lucknow then your desires will be fulfilled at the end. Your prayers answered.

And the biryani will be exquisite.

PS: I have no idea how the chicken biryani tasted but would strongly urge you to try the mutton or goat biryani first. After all best to try things the way God meant them to be.

This post was shared by Blog Adda as part of their Tangy Tuesday picks. Thanks guys and thanks for sharing the Lucknow Love

IceRocket Tags: wahid's,lalla's,tunday,lucknow,biryani. lucknow,hyderabad,chowk,aminabad,tulsi gulley,dastarkhwan,open air,best western lucknow,hazratganj

'How Blogging Can Change Your Life' NOT by Baba Bangali

2012-05-17T00:24:00.001+05:30

A few emails this weeks following a tweet and this rather ambitiously named workshop was planned.

I am not sure about the 'changing your life bit' which the organisers have promised. The workshop is unlikely to 'make you stronger', cure baldness or even help you find your soul mate... and it will definitely not involve a powerpoint presentation

The plan is talk about one's journey as a blogger...the things one has learnt...the experiences one has had... and in the process hopefully spark off some ideas on blogging ...

The workshop is at OPA Juhu and organised by the folks at the Extra Mile Cafe and I'll be conducting it

The venue is OPA at Juhu. Time 2.30 PM on 19th May 2012

Here's the link with the details in case you are interested

Lucknow so far

2012-05-14T01:03:00.000+05:30

Day 1: Chowk ...Dixit'st chaat, namkeen sampling at Guptaji's stall, chai at Tripathiji's, kebab parathas at Tunday's, thandai spiked & non spiked at Raja Thandai

Day 2: Kachori puri & Khasta at Vajpayee's Hazratgunj, chhaapan bhog alu tikkas & paani ke batashe at Shau's, Sadar...mutton biryani & shammi kebab at Open Air Tulsi Gulle, Imart, Kheer at Moti Mahal Hazratganj...A day of realisations. Yes, the Lucknowi biryani is indeed the mother (origin) of that of Calcutta's. That Calcutta's chicken chaap is a cousin of the chicken masala of Lucknow's Tulsi gulley. That aamritti is Bengali creole for imarti. And that the guy who invented ragda pattice in Mumbai needs lessons from the creator of Lucknow's alu tikki...two focus groups

Day 3: Another egg white omelette and capuccino start... deep fried in the Lucknow sun...the magnificence of Imambara...the eery calm of the bullet holed walls of The Residency...Wahid's luscious mutton biryani at Aminabad after the search for Lalla's biryani turned futile...Mr Lalla was still making his mix for the evening...but the octogenarian Mr Wahid treated me to tea too...shirmal and bade ke kebab at Tunday's Aninabad...poetry on a plate...met the late Mr Tunday's grandson who sits at the newer shop...Mr Tunday's son sits at the original shop at Chowk and I met him on day one...focus group in the evening coming up...and then...dinner of biryani and blessing at Lalla's and chai with my friends at Chowk

Met some very nice people, in most cases people didn't let me pay...and folks here love being photographed

Pics from day 1: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.429388263745870.103908.120204191330947&type=1

Pics from Day 2: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.430090880342275.104022.120204191330947&type=1

Pics from day 3: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.432861706731859.104453.120204191330947&type=1&notif_t=like

Glitter … Punjab Grill, Juhu Mumbai

2012-05-13T00:58:00.001+05:30

In college we had learnt in our sociology lessons that is acceptable to have biases. The important thing is to table to them at the start of a report or study. Let the reader know of your biases.

I try to do that when I write.

So to start with I must admit that I rarely to go to Punjabi restaurants. Even lesser when one is spending a fare bit of money for a meal.

A case of familiarity breeds contempt I guess. One has had an overdose of North Indian Punjabi food when it comes to eating out. Punjabi restaurants don’t really excite me. Specially when outside of Punjab or Delhi.

Yes, I do call in for a bandore chicken and roomali roti from Khaane Khaas and Bandra. But that’s about it. I normally consider curries in Punjabi restaurants at Mumbai to be bad news. Sticking to the tandooris and tikkas, the black daal at the most is my strategy when it comes to Punjabi restaurants at Mumbai. And the odd sarson da saag in winter.

Which is why the opening of the legendary Jiggs Kalra’s Punjab Grill at Mumbai had left me cold. Punjab Grill has become the darling of food events and awards here since then but there was no way I was going to spend good money and go to a Punjabi restaurant. I didn’t expect Punjab Grill to be bad. Just not my cup of tea.

An occasion to go to the Punjab Grill at Juhu came up recently. I was meeting the boys of my first ever team at work for dinner. Punjab Grill was suggested because of the locational convenience. Plus Punjabi food is always a common denominator when it comes to group. So I agreed.

I reached Punjab Grill on Friday night. Slightly late. Punjab Grill had already engaged me on twitter after I tweeted that I was going there. A connect was made.

The Punjab Grill at Juhu is quite spacious by Mumbai’s standards. The ambience minimal yet classy. Not the usual overtly faux Punjabi look typical of Punjabi places. The place was packed. I spotted quite a few expats as well quite a few families. It seemed that sort of place.

The service friendly with the steward expressing a point of view when I asked him for suggestions. This I appreciate. I took some of his suggestions and disregarded some.

Oh, in case you didn’t know, when you are dining with me than it’s given that I place the order. Except for the two vegetarians in the group who in one corner quietly asked for some paneer tikkas and later mixed vegetables for themselves.

The menu at Punjab Grill is not particularly different from the average Punjabi restaurant. Most of the usual suspects were there….tandoori chicken, tikkas, butter chicken, rara, mutton, biryani etc…there was no attempt to ‘redefine’ Punjabi food. The attempt possibly just to package regular Punjabi fare in a sanitised form for those who didn’t want to get their hands dirty in dhaabas and small crowded restaurants. Yes, there was the odd tandoori broccoli, salmon and duck…but given that this was not a gourmand dinner one didn’t see the point in investing in these…and I firmly said no to the stewards attempt to sell us the raan. There was a morel pulao too but my dinner mates shrugged, said ‘mushroom biryani’, and declined it.

I skipped the Patiala pegs and went for a kesar lassi recommended by our steward. The flavour of saffron made the drink quite appealing, pleasantly cool in muggy Mumbai…the thickness and sweetness well balanced.

We went for the signature tajdar lamb chops for starters. The chops were marinated in a very elegant masala mix which was so subtle and yet enticing that I didn’t mind fingering off some of the masala from the bone and savouring it. Which was a good idea as the meat quotient of the chops was very low. The mutton was quite tender and pleasant to bite into. It’s just that there was hardly any flesh on the chops!

The other starter was some sort of paneer tikka with a green chutney marinade. I took a bite of the paneer. The marinade, like that of the chops, again quite delectable. The paneer per se was a bit hard though. Surely did injustice to the Punjabi ethos. You get such good quality paneer at Sindhi Punjabi shops of Bandra and Khar. If handled with care they can yield some fairly well flavoured dishes. The paneer at Punjab Grill erred on the side if being over cooked. Which was a pity given the elegant masala it had been dressed in.

The main courses came and went largely in a blur.

I didn’t even bother trying out the mixed vegetables. They looked quite unappealing. And no, despite the premium pricing, none of the the food was really plated aesthetically.

The black daal that I ordered hit the spot. It was truly a work of art. The texture silken. The taste regal. A lovely mix of creamy fragrant spiced tender love. To me the black daal was really the stand out dish of the evening. Highly recommended.

The rotis were buttery and we tried the safron ulta rumali rotis suggested by the steward. Rather heavy and cloying…possibly would pare better with a Lucknowi kakori kebab than heavy Punjabi curries.

We wanted a chicken curry and I wanted to try out the butter chicken. The steward insisted on the murg tikka labradar or “chicken teeka masala” instead.

The dish was marshy and swamp-like…un-dimensional, monochromatic…neither the curry not the meat were tempting enough to induce a second helping. A very unforgettable dish.

Tell you what, I have no recollection of how it tasted.

A blank page.

We wanted a biryani and went for a prawn biryani. The rice nice and firm. Seasoned with caramelised onions that seems to be the characteristic of Punjabi biryanis.

The prawns completely undistinguished though. As fresh as poor Dada’s batting these days. Think of those moments in the IPL this time when Ganguly lofts a spinner and the ball soars of yore….only to fall midway well before the boundary. That’s what the prawns in the biryani were.

Big, deceptively juicy looking. In reality a bit soft with no flavours of the prawn spreading to the biryani.

Like I said, only the daal was memorable in a meal which cost approximately Rs 1000 (20 USD) per head for the 5 of us with 2 local beers. But the company was good. The setting encouraged you to stretch and have a good time. The restaurant perhaps, a bit, as Pavan said and we agreed, ‘a bit overhyped’.

And yes we did have the complimentary paan shots at the end. A nice, milky and a pleasant farewell.

Not enough to define a restaurant though.

Note: wrote this piece on the fight from Mumbai to Lucknow on Indigo Airlines. Really impressed by the service, punctuality, the aircraft & the sandwiches. My first evening at Lucknow was head – alu tikki & mutter at Dixit at Chowk, dalmut tasting, chai on the house, hosted by stranger at the legendary Tunde Kebab at Chowk. Raja ki thandai at the end

IceRocket Tags: punjabi food,punjab grill,juhu,jiggs kalra

The Lucknow List

2012-05-12T02:52:00.001+05:30

If things go as planned I’ll be at Lucknow this time tomorrow.

I’d gone to Lucknow more than a decade back before this. Those days the high of work trips was ordering room service in hotels. Didn’t really explore the city then.

Now I am finally heading back with a camera and a list to the one city in India that I have wanted to visit after I began food blogging. For, among other things, Lucknow, as Vir Sanghvi tells us, is the home of the legendary Calcutta biryani

This is the list that journalist & twitter friend, Kanchan Gupta, associate editor of The Pioneer, sourced for me when I said that I was going to Lucknow:

“1. Tunde Ke Kabab - in Chowk and Aminabad.
2. Idris ki Biryani - Patanala.
3. Rahim ki Nahari - Aminabad.
4. Wahid ki Biryani - Aminabad.
5. Netram ki Kachauri (Kabarwali Dukan) - Aminabad.
6. Ram darbar's kachauri - Baanwali Galli
7. Raja Ki Thandai - Chowk.
8. Prakash Kulfi - Aminabad.
9. Malai of Gayadin in Fatehganj (Aminabad)
10. Makhkhan-Malai of Chowk (It is available only in winters).
11. Shirmaal and Kabaab - Dastarkhwan (Mughlai restaurant in Lalbagh).
12. Kakori Kabab of Aslam (Chowk).
13, Dahi vada of Pt Ram narain Tiwari - Ganeshganj.
Then there is Dixit's chat in Chowk for evening snacks.”

Apart from this Rocky & Mayur suggested Salim’s, near Tunde’s, to me on Twitter. And colleague suggested Sharma’s chaats.

If you have a point of view on these please let me know. I’ll probably have 6 meal opps and of course one tummy so tips that helps me optimise would be most welcome

See you at Lucknow

E Age & me… The story of a socially networked Indian lady in her sixties by Rekha Karmakar

2012-05-10T02:02:00.001+05:30

(This is the story of a sixty plus Indian woman, who was bewildered by the ‘ brave new world’ of computers and of finally how she felt when she first tasted the joys of blogging, social networking and internet search after her retirement)

After I passed out my Higher Secondary Examination, my father suggested that I should take up English as the subject of my Honors course saying it was ‘the king’s subject/’Rajar subject’ as its demand would never go down in the job market and would also open up a whole new world to me.

He proved himself right. After I passed out my Master’s, the demand for the subject was at its peak and we had no difficulty in finding a job.

Having worked in Delhi for a few years, I went abroad when I got married.

We came back to Calcutta in the eighties and found that the scenario had changed quite a lot. The CPM Government in West Bengal had discarded the teaching of English in schools at the primary stage. It was to be taught only from class VI. The vogue was for everything ’deshi’/’native’ including languages. I became quite apprehensive of the status of English, the so called ‘king’s subject’ in India.

In the eighties, the general Indian public was quite unaware of a device called ’computer’. It was Hongkong Bank in Calcutta which first thought of bringing in computers for office work. All the labour unions, with the support of the government, were up in arms. They vigorously opposed the introduction of computers fearing it would cause sacking of employees as most of the work would be done by computers. Hongkong Bank, however, did not give up and computers were brought inside the office at night. Thus computers were introduced for the first time in West Bengal by Hongkong Bank. Selected employees were chosen for training.

India has come a long way after that. Not only that, the labour unions and the government also regretted their previous move and admitted that it was a ‘historic mistake’.

The telephones, in the eighties, were in a sorry state too. They used to be dead for months together. Typewriters (mostly Remington) ruled in offices with their ’Taka tak Taka tak’ sound.

In the nineties, ’computers’ became a more familiar work. Private concerns were mostly computerized. People came to know about ‘call centres’ where you could earn quite a lot of money even with moderate qualifications, though the office hours were a bit erratic. China and India started competing for the ‘American pie of outsourcing’. India was in a better position because of its knowledge of English. Demand for the English language started being felt again as it was an indispensable part of computer operation.

Computer training schools started coming up. Everyone felt that the next generation could not do without computer knowledge.

We, the parents and the guardians of the new generation, however, felt that computer knowledge was only for the next generation and that we did not need it anyway. What fools we were! We did not imagine that in a few decades, computers would engulf all aspects of our lives across all generations.

In the early nineties, people started hearing about mobiles too. Very few people in Calcutta used mobiles at that time. Even if they had one they jealously guarded their mobile numbers as there were charges for incoming as well as outgoing calls. After a while, the simple mobile became multifunctional. Very soon all and sundry started using mobile.

At the turn of the century, computers became quite popular. Even PSU offices and PSU banks started computerizing their units. It was a mammoth task to train the personnel as many of them were on the other side of forty.

As usual, the whole process faced teething problems. Mistakes after mistakes were followed by rectifications. In the recent years, however, everything seems to have stabilized.

Cyber cafés have come up in every locality. A ’man Friday’ there book tickets, pays bills, fills up forms online with help of his computer. They do quite a brisk business as many people do not have computers at home or e-knowledge.

In the first decade of the twenty first century, I started being bombarded by volleys of words like log on, log out, menu, e-mail, fax, website, face book, twitter, Google plus, access, i-pad blogging, post and so many other words like these. I would often wonder which language it is! Is it the English that I learnt in my school and college days? Soon I felt that I was lagging behind. There was a divide, ‘a great divide’ between me and the younger generation. My curiosity did not evoke much response. It was as if to say ‘you will not understand it’. I resigned to my fate finding solace in the fact that many of my friends did not understand it too.

Then it was by chance that I started blogging, I mean to say ‘proxy blogging’, towards the end of December, 2010. It all started as a coincidence.

I had gone to Delhi that year after a gap of almost forty years as my younger son Sid was posted there. All my past memories of Delhi came rushing to me. I revisited my school, my college as well as the house where I had stayed last before leaving Delhi! I was thrilled, when my elder son I called me up from Mumbai, I probably conveyed some of my nostalgic feelings and excitement to him. He asked me to put down my experiences on paper. I did so and Sid sent the post to K by e-mail.

K posted my writing on his blog. All his readers were very supportive and encouraged me to write more. So I kept writing about my various experiences that I had abroad as well as in India on K’s blog as a ’guest blogger’. I cashed in on the popularity of my food blogger son K.

Blogging is a wonderful gift of the e-age. Previously one had to either publish a book or find a place in a magazine or a newspaper to see one’s writing in print - all of which were equally difficult. Now you can open your own blog and be sure of at least some readership. It allows you to express your feelings and thus it acts as a therapy of the mind.

Sid gifted me new mobile in 2011 which would enable me to access internet. Then both husband and wife started teaching me how to operate it and soon became flabbergasted with my inefficiency. However, I preserved and made a break through. On sending my first one line e-mail to son K, he wrote back, ‘welcome to the digital world’ .Thus it all started and I started accessing internet, send e-mails and even be on face book. Six months have passed and I have quite a nice time everyday fiddling with my toy i.e the mobile. But to be very frank, I find the mobile a bit inadequate now.

Accessing the internet has opened up a new world to me and has helped me in boosting my self-esteem. At this stage, you may say,’ you are speaking too much of yourself. My so and so uncle or aunt of your age is a computer wizard. It may be so. But I always like to go in my own pace as it saves me from a lot of heartburn as well as going ‘green’.

If you have got bored with my exuberance at accessing internet through my mobile, please dismiss it as the ‘babble’ of an old lady.

You, the young generation, do not realize how much the world has progressed in the communication sector in a matter of three decades. There was a time when if your dear one went out of station, you had to wait for days to receive a letter of his well being after receiving his ‘one line telegram’ on reaching.

But I cannot blame you for not realizing all these. When you are yourself getting churned in the cauldron, you do not feel the speed. It is for an outsider like me who can stand a bit far and notice how fast the wheel is moving.

All these talk about computers and internet will not be complete if I do not narrate my experiences that I had recently, when I visited the office of the internet search giant Google in Gurgaon.

Soy, Sid’s wife, is an employee of Google. She had been asking me for a long time to visit her office. So one fine morning, I landed up in her office. As I reached her office on the top floor, she pinned a ‘guest badge’ on my sari. Then we proceeded towards the canteen.

On my way, I could see from far rows and rows of computers in the work-station where many young people were working.

As I passed through the corridor, I noticed quite a few glass almirahs which were stacked with chocolates and fruit juices. Before going to the canteen, we stopped at a ‘break in area’ where the employees refresh themselves after working at a stretch for two to three hours. There was quite a few such ‘break in areas’ in the office.

I was amazed at what I saw inside the ‘break in area’. The racks were filled with different types of health drinks, bread, biscuits, and jars of almond, cashews and loads and loads of different types of chocolates.

Fruit juices, different types of tea bags, coffee machines were also in abundance. A microwave oven was there too. Apart from these, there were huge bananas, oranges etc in the food bowls kept by the side of the luxurious sofas. It seemed like a wonderland.

Then we went to the canteen. At that time, they were clearing the left over breakfast so that they could bring in food for lunch. The employees are given complimentary food as long as they stay in the office. There were different counters for different types of food e.g. Indian, Chinese, Thai etc. Not only that, there were also counters for ice-cream and Costa coffee. In another counter, there were heaps of cut fruits of different countries. It seemed like a land from the fairy tale where the walls of the houses are made of chocolate and pools are filled with milk and honey.

At about 1.p.m., the smart, young and lanky employees trooped in. I looked like a creature of the prehistoric age in my sari. I asked Soy how they managed to keep themselves so slim in spite of having such tempting food every day. She said that they were very wary of eating to maintain their weight and also because of work-pressure.

I had some lunch as well as they are allowed to treat guests occasionally. It was the life time experience of a person like me who had worked all her life in a completely different environment.

Please note that this is not a paid review of Google (Ha! Ha! - as if Google would engage a petty person like me to campaign for it).

So this is the saga of a sixty plus lady who is just a novice but is still trying to enjoy the newly found digital world as much as she can. My main problem with computers is that I cannot type long materials on it due to my shoulder pain. So I have to get all hand written posts typed from a cyber café, where I get innumerable typos as free gifts.

Please do spare a thought for your elders and initiate them into the digital world, if they show any interest, as my children have done.

Hundred years from now, I do not know to which height the communication sector will reach. My imagination does not stretch that much. The latest that I have heard of is the iBrain that has been fitted to the headband of physicist Stephen Hawking, so that it can interpret the brain signals of the paralyzed physicist. It is still in an experimental stage.

Sometimes I feel that the world may become paperless in a hundred years time. Everything will be digital. Paper, books, pens, pencils and erasers will be kept in the museum. The future generation will watch them with curiosity as we did when we saw the feather pens and ink pot stands of Charles Dickens in his house at Broadstairs , Kent in the U.K.

Let future take care of itself. My only wish is that all advancements should be used for the welfare of the mankind. Till then ‘good bye’.

Rekha Karmakar

29/04/2012,

Kolkata

Irani Cafes botoxed….Jumjoji, Bandra, Mumbai

2012-05-09T02:25:00.001+05:30

If you can’t make it to South Mumbai’s magical lands of Fort or Ballard Estate at lunch time, if eating in air-conditioned comfort matters to you, if plain walls and high ceilings don’t work for you during meals. Or sharing tables. Or orders being taken by the owners themselves…often octogenarians. If chipped plates put you off … or if nostalgia and history doesn't turn you on, if what you are always looking for is the ‘latest place to eat’ at then Jumjoji, the new Parsi eatery at Mumbai’s, Bandra Reclamation, will be perfect for you.

Jumjoji, which translates as ‘please eat’, has thrown open the gates of Parsi cuisine to those who do not go to the Irani cafes of old Mumbai or those who do not have access to Parsi wedding feasts or do not know of the Parsi caterers from whom they can order Parsi meals from.

Jumjoji demystifies Parsi food and makes it accessible to civilians.

What Jumjoji is not is a place like Bohemian at Calcutta which offers a fresh take on the traditional genre of food. It is more expensive than most Irani Cafes, barring perhaps Britannia. Unlike Britannia it is air conditioned but doesn’t have the magic of the latter starting with grand old Boman Kohinoor Irani who will take your order at Britannia and say ‘good boy’ or ‘good girl’ at the end and will refuse to give you the raspberry drink. ‘It is for the Parsis’ he will say and offer you lemonade instead to ‘beat the Mumbai heat’.

Jumjoji is more expensive than the traditional cafes but does not qualify as ‘fine dining’. The food is hardly plated. Their kitchens evidently bereft of squeeze bottles and blow torches required for the same. Jumjoji doesn’t have the plain walls of the Cafe Militaries or the Cafe Excelsiors. Unlike any of these restaurants, of Yazdani Cafe or Ideal Corner, Jumjoji didn’t have the traditional Irani Cafe owner sitting at the cash counter…lovely folks to chat with…normally fairly garrulous.

Jumjoji makes up for all of this with witty inscriptions on the walls, photos with stories printed on them and menu cards which tells tales of the colourful clan.

For someone who doesn’t want to hit the field and explore the lost world of Irani Cafes, Jumjoji offers a convenient look into the culinary culture of this fast depleting race.

The food at Jumjoji is a bit like that in most Irani restaurants, including the hallowed Britannia. Hit and miss. The two most consistently good places that I have come across in the genre is Ideal Corner at Fort with its daily changing menu and Mocambo with its lunch menu. The rest have their stars and the odd duds.

Jumjoji doesn’t really push the boundaries when it comes to Parsi cuisine. It doesn’t bring you dishes which you don’t find at average Irani Cafes. In fact, its menu is limited compared to even what exists in the traditional Parsi restaurants.

What Jumjoji does is that it takes most landmark Parsi dishes and presents just those to you. Which is not a bad strategy. Given that the Parsi cuisine is not very well known, beyond the basic dhansak, even at Mumbai. Specially since they don’t seem to have the sort of waiters at Jumjoji who can take you through the menu or explain the basic rules such as dunk the sali into the chicken curry for sali chicken and have it rotlis, the soft ghee infused Parsi chappatis. Oh but wait, they don’t serve rotlis at Jumjoji.

‘#facepalm’ as they say in twitter.

I went with Sue and Nathan part of the expanding clique of Finely Chopped Knights. I helped them navigate the menu and place the order. The advantage of there being three of us is that we could try a range of dishes.

We placed our order and had some of the sweet and tangy laganu achar (wedding pickle) as we waited. Pity the sago papads – saariyas – weren’t there.

First came our akoori, or the spicy Parsi scrambled egg.

This was the only fish which had some attempt at ‘plating’ to it with slices of onions and an inexplicable slice of lime. The akuri was a bit of a damp squib, no pun intended. Its texture was semi-soft akin to Western scrambled eggs while it is actually meant to be tighter like an anda burji or local scrambled eggs. Akooris are also supposed to be pretty hot with loads of chilli. The akoori at Jumjoji was placid to the point of being boring. perhaps one should have bit on the green chilli.

Next was the Parsi flagship dish of patrani machhi. Pomfret marinated in a coriander and coconut chutney and steamed in banana leaves. The portion had one third of a small pomfret priced at upwards of Rs 450 ( 9 USD) which just didn’t make any sense even when compared to fish dishes at the upscale continental restaurants of Mumbai.

What made it worse was that the waiter broke the fish while taking it out to serve even though I was telling him that I would unwrap the fish myself. Not ‘fine dining’.

The taste of the fish was fairly inert as it often is even at Parsi weddings. I have had Patrani machhis which are more flavourful and fresh and the one at Jumjoji didn’t measure up.

Thankfully the other two dishes that we ordered were a lot better.

The curry in the sali chicken was quite well balanced. The consistency of the gravy pleasantly light…the sweetness of the jardaloo or figs just right and not over powering…complimenting the tanginess of the dish. The chicken could have been more tender but was acceptable. The sali chicken worked for both my experienced palate as well as that of Sue and Nathan who are not that experienced when it comes to Parsi food. They liked the dish in absolute terms.

The rice in the mutton dhansak was too oily and bright in comparison to the usual caramelised rice. Reminded me of the rice at Excelsior Cafe.

The dhansak daal, on the other hand, was quite well flavoured. The taste was that of home-made dhansak. The colour too. Lighter than that of restaurant dhansak. The only thing was that the daal was thinner than that of the average dhansak. Frankly I don’t know what a true blooded Parsi would say about it but as an outsider I didn’t find the texture to be a deterrent.

What was disappointing were the tough pieces of mutton. Parsis pride themselves in their love for red meat and no self respecting Irani Cafe would serve such tough mutton.

We finished our meal with laganu custard or wedding custard. A dish which is difficult to get right. As it happened at Jumjoji too. It was too sweet even for a Parsi custard, the texture not as tight as it should be with an infuriatingly strong essence of either cinnamon or synthetic vanilla which cut through.

And no, they didn’t have caramel custard if I remember right.

At the end of the day we had a pleasant afternoon. Were lucky to get a table. Weren’t rushed. The food didn’t set the house on fire but didn’t disappoint either. We didn’t get Parsi Sunday drink of beer but had wine and sangria like a Cusrowbaug Parsi would.

If you want a feel good meal and a cursory introduction to Parsi cuisine then Jumjoji is a place you can go to. As I said somewhere, Jumjoji is the Oh Calcutta of Parsi food.

But if history, colour, character, adventure and romance is what you are looking for then make the effort to get out of your comfort zone and head to the Irani Cafes of South Mumbai.

After all, to steal a line from the poster at Jumjoji, the cafes 'are available till Parsis last’.

IceRocket Tags: jumjoji,parsi food,irani cafe,bandra,mumbai,dhansak,sali chicken,patrani machhi,akoori

Three step Oriental Roast Pork Chops recipe

2012-05-07T02:56:00.001+05:30

Couldn’t get pork belly the other day.

Jatin at Meghna Agro, Pali Market, told me that most of the belly he got recently was high in fat with very little meat. So he didn’t stock those. I called for some fresh pork chops instead.

The last time I made pork chops I used the micro. I planned to make them in the oven this time. Wondered if the settings that I used recently to make pork belly in the oven would work.

I texted my friend Gia “30 min at 200 C will work for chops the way they did for the belly?”

Being a Goan, an understanding of pork runs in her blood. G texted me back “40 min at 180 C would be better. Won’t dry out that way”.

I remembered her other tips. Sear the meat first to lock in the juices. Seal the tray for half the cooking time so that the juices don’t dry.

I used all this training to come up with this 3 step recipe.

Step 1. Marinade

500 g chops in 4 tablespoons soy sauce, 2 tablespoons honey, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 tablespoons chilli sauce (I used Thai sriracha), 1 tablespoon Chinese 5 spice powder (which Dennis got me from China), 1 tablespoon Thai chilli paste, 3,4 star anise, 2 chopped red chillies, 1 teaspoon vinegar.
This mix can be changed to your preference. Have fun with sauces.
Punch holes into the chops with a fork and let it rest for at least 2 hours. Longer the better.

Step 2. Sear

Heat a flat pan.
Take the chops out of the marinade and place them flat on the pan with the flame of the hob on high.
After a couple of minutes when the meat begins to sizzle turn the chops around.
Repeat and turn off the flame. The surface of the chops would have changed colour
Place the chops back in to the tray. I placed the chops on some bokchoy that were at home. This was to ensure that the chops didn't stick to the tray. Spoon the marinade on to the top of the chops. Cover the tray with cooking foil

3. Roast

Preheat oven at 180 C for 10 min
Put in the covered tray for 20 min at 180 C. The chops will get steamed in the process
Uncover the foil. Spoon some of the marinade on top of the chops, Roast for another 20 min at 180 C

That’s it. Let it rest for 10 minutes so that the juices settle. Take some pics and eat

The texture of the meat was just right. No wonder I didn’t question Gia’s advice.

IceRocket Tags: pork recipes,pork chops,pali market,meghna agro,roast pork,chinese pork

The team that eats together … Cafe Mangii, Khar

2012-05-05T21:07:00.001+05:30

We were quite fond of Cafe Mangii at Khar. There was a certain intensity to the smartly plated continental fare that they served. The food consistent. A bit crowded though cozily done up, Cafe Mangii was a place that one remembered fondly.

Then it shut for a short while for renovation and opened for business post that. We had not been to the new Cafe Mangii.

Finally went there for a group lunch at work this week. I suggested the usual suspects…places with Chinese buffets for the lunch. Works best in social lunches if you ask me.

Then one of my team mates had an inspired suggestion… Cafe Mangii.

I was a bit sceptical about how an a la carte, and that too a continental plated place, would work for a group of people with mixed choices and dietary preferences. My protests were brushed aside. And I am happy to say that I was proved wrong. The lunch worked out to be perfect.

The first thing that struck as we entered Cafe Mangii that Monday afternoon was the sense of space. The place is twice as large as before. The decor has changed. Gone is the congested Parisian apartment look with its pillars and grandfather clocks and cupboards and posters. The place seemed more Mediterranean now, the walls clay hued – there was a sense of calm and serenity. It almost seemed like Women’s Day as all the other diners were women. And at each table a typically Indian fight to take the bill was going on. One of my colleagues, the only other male customer there beside me, whispered to me that we should pass on our bill to them too.

All for world peace.

We were ravenous so ordered some garlic bread, which was burnt, and ice tea which was not mixed properly, while we waited. I got a bit nervous after the poor start but then the rest of the meal thankfully picked up.

And here’s how the lunch worked for us despite it being at a plated a la carte place.

We split ourselves into two groups. Vegetarian and non vegetarian. One of the non veggies didn’t eat pork or beef which was a bit of a bother but we lived with it. There were about 4 to 5 people in each group. So we ordered 1 pizza, 1 risotto, 1 pasta for each party and a mains for the vegetarians who were slightly more in number.

We placed the plates in the middle so that I could shoot the food, I’d picked up a point and shoot from work, and then we served ourselves.

Ended up being quite a satisfying meal.

Cafe Mangii used to advertise their wood fired oven pizzas in the early days. They knew their strengths evidently. The pizza that we ordered was a delight. Passed my ‘bend test’. The crust bent to my approval when I held a slice at 180 degrees. We unanimously chose a great set of toppings. Caramelized onions, robust ‘Italian’ sausages made with a meat exotic to Italians from what I hear – chicken - and chunks of sharp feta. The texture of the base and the symmetry of the diverse toppings combine perfectly. I took quite a few extra slices after the girls remembered their diets and didn’t finish it all.

We had an animated discussion on how risottos with rice that is congealed do not work for us. The risottos at Cafe Mangii gave pleasure too. The texture just right. We all appreciated the bounce and airiness of the risottos. They hit the spot.

The vegetarian frommagio risotto was all about the loving, nurturing flavours of creamy cheese with mushrooms adding a pleasant contrast. We non vegetarians bullied our way into spoonfuls of the vegetarian risotto. Cheese wins over all.

Our risotto was the seafood one with some pretty intoxicating flavours of prawns swirling through the risotto. They had possibly used red wine here and the flavours were again the sort that lingered with you like the memories of a pleasant crush. And as in an unfulfilled crush there was a sense of incompleteness to the dish. It was under salted. We all felt the lack of salt and had to correct it.

The non vegetarian Al Salmone spaghetti was cooked in a vodka sauce…though unlike the Spaghetti Kitchen one, this one didn’t have a tomato base. What made the dish stand out were the itsy bitsy bits of pink salmon which were nestled happily across the strands of spaghetti. This dish had salmon written all over it. Heady and yet delicate. This was poetry in a plate.

The vegetarian Sicilian pizza was an interesting contrast to the salmon pasta. Just as the vodka spaghetti, with its origin in post WW2 Naples as Chef Max once told me, was ephemeral, the Sicilian pasta from the South was robust and full blooded. It was made in a feisty Arrabiata where the intense flavours of pulped tomato seasoned with pepper lit up the afternoon. Not the usual ketchupy stuff that makes me so hate hate red sauce based pastas. This pasta had character. It had a spine. The the sort of dish one respects.

The vegetarians also went in for a dish which had couscous topped with a creamy mushroom sauce. It was initially plated with a strand of hair and we got the dish changed.

I personally like couscous in light Mediterranean salads so had an ideological disconnect with the dish. Though I must say that I liked the creaminess of the mushrooms but just felt that it overpowered the couscous a bit. On the other hand the vegetarians, who did not share my couscous biases, really enjoyed the dish.

We skipped desserts as we were carrying a cake which we gave the folks at Mangii to cut. They probably gave it to a hurt pastry chef. The slices that were brought us were rather mangled.

Overall a good meal. The orders were harmonious. The corner relaxed.

After years of attendiing HR workshops on team building I’ve reached the conclusion that nothing works like a good meal together.

Technorati Tags: cafe mangii,khar,linking road,continental restaurants in mumbai. pasta,risotto,pizza,group lunch

Who framed Swati Snacks ... a tale with a twist

2012-05-02T02:39:00.001+05:30

So what’s the fuss about Swati Snacks?

Yes I know I am Bengali. A non vegetarian. Didn’t eat the palki when I went there. Nor did we have the ‘snacks’.

And Swati Snacks is the vegetarian icon for many in Mumbai.

What would I know about it?

But I did try about 5 things and spent Rs 1100 between 3 people. If that wasn’t enough to alert me to the charms of Swati Snacks then what is?

And yet people rhapsodise about it. Even normal people. Non-vegetarians. Bengalis.

I remember a revered food writer friend of mine, a non vegetarian, and a Bengali food blogger…both men whose tastes in food I respect … ribbed me one evening for not having tried SS. Unless they were pulling a fast one on me.

I know of loads of people who go to Swati Snacks. In fact we did have to queue up for about 30 minutes in a mid week afternoon to get in.

I must say that there were a few on twitter who said Swati Snacks is overrated when I shared my plans to go there. Some said Soam is better. In fact a couple of folks even clubbed Swati Snacks with Bade Miya on the ‘overrated scale’.

Well I stopped going to bade Miya six or seven years back. Didn’t like the food. Found it over-priced.

Swati snacks was over-priced but air-conditioned, had a clean loo….AND the food wasn’t bad.

It’s just that after having lost my Swati Snacks virginity a few days back, after close to 15 years at Mumbai, I was left completely underwhelmed.

Well to be honest the green chilli pickle that they gave with each dish was really good. Pungent yet not fiery. Teased you in a nice way.

pickle & chutney

Fine, I won’t be mean.

The satpadi roti with gatte ke sabzi was quite memorable. Suggested by someone on twitter. Satpadi, as our waiter explained, meant rotis whirled out into seven layers on the tava while cooking. It had a rough rustic feel whose wholesomeness was accentuated as it was bathed in ghee…a dish of near tribal purity which combined so well with the slightly tangy cooling gatte (besan dumpling) curry.

This was the one and only standout dish of the afternoon. The only one I called for repeats of.

satapadi roti gatte ke sabzi

The other twitter recommendation…corn handvo…seemed to be like a fried dhokla with an identity complex. Call me a barbarian but this didn’t work for me. The proclivity of Mumbai restaurants to add corn to make anything vegetarian seem exotic is quaint to say the least and can often be trying.

corn handvo

The drinks? My non Bengali lunch mate who had the aam panna said that the one in the Bengali Bijoli Grill was better.

I would have told you how my sugarcane juice was if I could have tasted anything beyond ginger in it. Give me the Linking Road sugarcane juicewallahs any day.

We had paneer chillas. I was told that chillas are ‘like dosas but are not dosas’. Well given that it tasted like a greasy dosa I would be better of at the Shiv Sagar restaurants who are adept at churning out corrupted dosas.

paneer chilla

The other dish which we went for was the fadani khichdi. The waiter recommended it and the menu described it as a cracked wheat pulao.

fadani khichidi

Well it tasted like a regular sloppy daal and rice khichdi and didn’t have the magic of the bhoger khichudi that talks to us Bongs.

What else?

Yes. The ice creams.

I am not fond of coconut based ice creams. My Bengali colleague went for the fresh coconut ice cream. I shook my head with disapproval at his youthful folly.

Was guilty of saying ‘I knew it’ when he said he didn’t like it. He was looking for the ‘Naturals Ice Creams like taste’.

coconut ice cream

I chose for the fresh mango one looking for the creaminess of the sancha ice creams of Bohri Mohalla’s Taj Ice Creams.

I was disappointed.

mango ice cream

Yes, you could say that the five minutes I spent chatting with my Bong colleague about pomfret fry and tava prawns of Malvani Asvad, while we waited for the food, biased my views.

But the fact is that I have had better vegetarian food at Mumbai. The Punjabi fare of Uttam da Dhaba, the Keralite Onam Sadiyas of Deluxe, the Marathi fare at Prakash and Aswadh and the Udipi delights of Swagath of Fort. These were memorable.

Swati Snacks, as they say in cricket, was military medium.

Dinner at the Desais

But if you are Gujarati or vegetarian and plan to troll me then hold on.

The man they call ‘God’ on twitter, Anaggh Desai or @anaggh, not Tendulkar, saw my anguished tweets from Swati Snacks that afternoon. He DM’d me ‘come over to my place for dinner if you want to try authentic Gujarati vegetarian food’.

I jumped at the offer and headed to his place and joined some of our other friends from twitter.

Anaggh is the perfect host and his mom and his wife did all the cooking.

We started with snacks or farsan which combined perfectly with Tallisker for me and Old Monk for some of the others. Dhoklas, patrels, the pasta like things (khandvi?) and there was those little medu vada like balls which I just couldn’t get enough of.

Dinner was a proper sit down affair with Anaggh’s wife and daughter serving us on proper thaalis (plates and bowls). The three of them attentively fed us without joining in. Hospitality at its warmest.

And what an outstanding dinner it was. Pity I wasn’t carrying my camera but still let me tell you about the lovely fresh rotis, the potato bhaaji tempered with mustard seeds, the dry okra sabzi with a slight tang which we lapped up, a lovely nourishing wholesome daal, a thin and delicate Guajarati kadi and at the end homemade aamraas. I had three of these bowls of mango nectar.

I guess Surekha summed it up best through this tweet: “ @surekhapillai: yum dinner at @anaggh's place: http://t.co/4iuJuNSh never seen@finelychopped this happy eating a vegetarian meal. “

In fact the wisecracks continued at my vegetarian capitulation :)

“Netra Parikh ‏ @Netra: Breaking News : This is just a pic of @Finelychopped's having vegetarian food... Wait for CD :p http://t.co/NvWT1QFP “

Still, what a wonderful comeback thanks to Anaggh after the disappointment of the afternoon.

I am now a fan of Gujarati vegetarian food.

And that’s when it struck me. The truth is that if you want to appreciate and experience the beauty of any cuisine, be it Bengali or Gujarati or anything in the world, your best hope is to find yourself a great host and hope to get lucky.

And with the Desai family you have got the best around.

Thanks guys.

Next time it’s my turn to cook for you.

(Some of the others at the dinner included some fairly popular twitter folks from Mumbai such as:@neetakolhatkar @shubHASHISH @surekhapillai (Delhi) @calamur @manishalakhe @anaggh @netra @NomadWanderer)

IceRocket Tags: swati snacks,anaggh desai,gujarati food,vegetarian food,aamraas,handvo,ice cream,juices,satpaki roti,chilla

Tandoori chicken glammed up. The making of the The Times Life shoot

2012-04-30T20:56:00.001+05:30

If you remember I had written that there was more to the story when I wrote about the pesto pomfret recently.

Well the second half of the story played out yesterday.

It started first with the tweets and texts and fb mails that I got from across the country and then the newspapers were finally delivered at our place.

The story Times Life did on us was out. On the front page.

I was overwhelmed with the messages, calls and wishes coming in. Blog page views tripled. Friendship requests, follower counts went up. I realised that a front page Times Life release in media terms possibly has the same impact as using Tendulkar as your brand ambassador.

Oh yes, we in the social media do love the big daddies of mass media. Specially at times like this.

So thanks Ismat, Anuja and the team at the Times.

There were three of us at the shoot.

There was Maria Goretti, whose terrace we shot at. I’ve been reading her blog for a while and she writes some pretty powerful stuff along with the stories of her bakes and cooks. Her recent posts have been from the cooking course she attended at Europe.

This is the link to Maria’s blog. Maria was the perfect host that afternoon. Very warm and did not make me feel bad at all about my being 45 minutes late in reaching.

(It’s Karmakar without an ‘r’ by the way)

Maria had grilled some beautiful chicken and even vegetables which looked so tempting and introduced me to roasted garlic cloves. Her piece de resistance was, the dessert that is the darling of Mumbai these days, a many layered moist & scrumptious red velvet cake.

Another blogger whom I met for the first time was Kajal Tejsinghani. Her blog is called Aapplemint. I checked out Kajal’s blog before coming to the shoot. I knew that the feature was on photography and as I saw the exquisite stratospheric photos on her blog I wondered why they had contacted me for the same feature! The pics Kajal takes are in a different league.

As is the cooking Maria dishes out on her blog.

Kaajal had got some really cherubic chubby chocolate chip muffins. She also put together a beautifully balanced Oriental salad. Those things always photograph so well. And taste exquisite too.

I got the pesto pomfret for the shoot.

Apart from the fish I had made some tandoori chicken as well. A politically safe meat, which made it to the cover.

I dressed it up a bit for the shoot and thought I’ll share the secret for making ‘good looking’ tandoori chicken at home.

Well it’s primarily the redness that one aimed for and I used Kashmiri mirch for that and the Mediterranean spice, sumac. The sumac adds to the redness without making the dish hotter. And a touch of extra virgin oil brushed on for a bit of glitter to make the earthy chicken fashion shoot friendly.

Here’s the recipe:

Marinade: 3 tablespoons of curd, 1 tablespoon Kashmiri chilli powder, 1 teaspoon sumac, 1 teaspoon coriander powder, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 tablespoon garam masala
2 chicken legs. ‘Score’ the chicken – slash with a knife on both sides. This ensures that the masala goes in and the slashed surface looks that much more dramatic. Apply the marinate on the chicken
Preheat the oven for 10 min at 200 C.
Place the chicken on a grilling rack and put it into the oven. Sprinkle some sumac and chilli on the upper surface of the legs
Roast for 35 min at 200 C
That’s it. Brush on a film of extra virgin olive oil if you plan to photograph the chicken. Adds to the glam quotient
I plated the chicken with a salad of corn, mushroom, mint leaves, cherry tomatoes, capsicum seasoned in sumac to build to the colour theme

Anuja, the photographer, completed the shoot very quickly and then we dug into all the beautiful and delicious food.

One person from the feature whom we missed that afternoon is my twitter friend from Bangalore, Monika Manchanda. Her food blog is called Sinamon Tales. She’s now taken her blogging to the next level as she retails her bakes and conducts some pretty popular cooking classes too.

Thanks once again to everyone who has written in, messaged, congratulated us on the feature.

Yes, I have not stopped grinning since yesterday morning.

This is the link to the e paper with the article and this is the text link.

IceRocket Tags: times of india,times life,food bloggers. maria goretti,kajal tejsinghani,monika manchanda,tandoori chicken,red velvet cake,pomfret,pesto,muffins

The Legends of Lalbaug… Hotel Kshirsagar & Nanji Gausar Masalewallah

2012-04-29T17:36:00.001+05:30

Caveat: Long post

This meeting could have happened anywhere in the world.

The building new. Solid, muscular with a large bust of the Buddha in the parking lot balancing its karma. The office white. Stark. The chairs in the conference room business class leather. The air condition primed to perfection. The cast involved local employees of a multinational manufacturer, a multinational ad agency and a multinational market research agency. The conversation built around a globally used model of branding. The language used Queen’s English.

Meeting over, you took the glass and chrome elevator down and stepped out of the building.

Out on to a half constructed concrete road. Another swanky corporate complex dotting the horizon.

Then, as your eyes adjusted to look beyond the shimmer of the sun you began to focus on small shops, folks walking around languidly dressed in simple clothes far from the latest boardroom chic, cycles parked with milk containers perched on them, stray dogs running around with little children playing without a care in the world….a sunny dusty afternoon….a lazy afternoon.

This was at one of the inner lanes of Mumbai, Lalbaug, close to the ITC Central Hotel.

Nowhere is the dichotomy of Mumbai captured as poignantly as it is at Lalbaug. Lalbaug was once the heartland of Mumbai’s textile mills. The manufacturing core of the country’s commercial capital. A commercial area surrounded by the homes of numerous mill workers who lived there.

With the tide of time the Mills of Mumbai lost their place in the sun. The Mills began to shut down and Mumbai, the city of dreams, was no longer a textile manufacturing city.

The mill lands were given a new life as the city showed its global aspirations. The mills were sold to developers who then began to create first malls and then swank residential and corporate complexes – Parel, Lalbaug, Lower Parel or Upper Worli - all home to rather incongruous islands of plush modernity springing up from a decayed past…two worlds not integrated…socially or architecturally.

Two cities residing in one.

But this is a blog about food. Not urban history and development. An internet search will lead you to many experts on the subject. And of late there is a slew of acclaimed Marathi films dealing with the issue.

This post is about the discovery of a lovely little restaurant thanks to twitter and then a spice shop and then a sweet shop…meeting the entrepreneurs who had set up their places half a century back…folks who have lived the history of Lalbaug … an afternoon of discoveries spiced up by some incredible food.

A twitter query asking for ideas on places to eat led to two suggestions.

Sachin Kalbag of Mid day suggested Ladoo Samrat for Maharashtrian snacks. And then a few mentioned Malvani restaurants close to where I was. And then Colaba based food writer, Antoine Lewis, stepped in suggesting the mutton at Kshirsagar.

That seemed like a good call and I headed there. Kshirsagar was just round the corner at S S Rao Road and I found it very easily.

Kshirsagar is one of those nondescript places which you would not give a second glance unless someone pointed you to it. I walked in, happy it was open for lunch though it was close to 3 pm.

The place was packed. As I later found out Kshirsagar is not just a Lalbaugh legend. Folks had come there from across Mumbai and beyond that afternoon. And not just Maharashtrians…I could see a Sikh gentleman in a turban..met a mithaiwallah from UP… the love for the food at Kshirsagar cut across communal boundaries….yet I had never heard of the place till then.

Across me at the table were two young event managers from Thane. Like me they too had come to Lalbaug for work and stopped by at their favourite joint. Turned out that they were fond of Malvani Aswadh at Vile Parle E where I go so often to eat.

Their taste credentials established I asked my table mates, Sachin and Rahul, to recommend a fried fish for me to order. They were quite headstrong about their choice of surmai fry.

I placed my order with the waiter who then asked ‘mutton or chicken’. The restaurant is popular for its meat apparently.

Mutton masala I said following Antoine’s advice.

As we waited the three of us discussed the fish preferences of Bengalis compared to those of Maharashtrians. I pointed out that I am half Maharashtrian now given that I support the Pune Warriors India at the IPL.

“Ah Dada” they said knowingly as they looked at me. Yes, Saurav Ganguly captains PWI now of course.

Sachin observed that ‘Dada’s’ fans are really passionate. And then said that Tendulkar is possibly not that popular at Calcutta.

I explained that it is not so. Tendulkar is held in high regard in Calcutta as he is in the rest of the country. But unlike Mumbai with its Gavaskars, Bedis, Shastris and Vengsarkars apart from Tendulkar…Bengalis have had only one cricketing legend…we can be allowed our Dada frenzy given that.

Then the food arrived and the table talk ended.

I took a bite of the fried surmai, a fish which is not my favourite one. Well, I was sceptical about my order but had put myself in good hands as it turned out.

The surmai (Rs 150 or 3 USD) was sliced thin, thinly coated in semolina and fried … the flavours of the fresh fish took over your palate with a pleasant understated spice background. This was fish fried in its pristine glory. Fried by a cook who respected and loved the fish and had turned out a glorious dish in the simplest of settings.

And then I took my first bite of the mutton masala. The first sensation was that of a walloping heat. The sort of heat that makes you sweat and yet smile in masochistic pleasure. And then I encountered my first bite of the mutton.

The meat was just as tender as the curry was fiery. Balancing each other out to create such a harmonious memorable dish. I just couldn’t get enough of the luscious, sensuous, soft and silky little cubes of mutton. With each bite my smile broadened with ‘love me tender’ written all over my face.

I had my mutton with vade… the Maharashtrian ‘multi-grain’ puri made from a dough of rice, corn, udad daal, channa daal, black pepper, coriander and methi seeds. I’ve had vades before which were too oily. The ones at Kshirsagar were fried just right and the grainy texture of the puris combined so well with the mutton masala. Much better than the steamed rice that came later. For some reason Malvani (Maharashtrian coastal) preparations taste a lot better for me with rotis or vades than the local favourite of steamed rice.

There was also a very sharp coriander and green chilli chutney which was full flavoured and combined very well with the chutney. It had a certain rustic purity to it which transcended to the sol kadi too…everything at Kshirsagar seemed a lot simpler than what what one gets at other restaurants. Spoke straight to to the heart.

Lunch done I met Mr Gopal Totaram Gore at the counter.

Gopal Bhau is the octogenarian owner of Kshirsagar. He set up the restaurant fifty years back. Bringing the treasures of his native Malvan to feed the workers of Mumbai.

The mutton thali that cost me Rs 130 (1.5 USD) today was priced at 80 paisa or 0.8 Rs when he started 50 years back. Gopal Bhau gave me a single toothed smile when I said that he must have seen a lot of changes around him. The latest of course are the pillars for the Metro coming up.

Through the years one thing has been constant at Lalbaugh. Gopal Bhau would come to the restaurant every morning and evening, take out the spices himself, and taste the end product for consistency.

Is it any wonder that the food was so magical? So mythical?

I guess we connected at some level as we spoke in our Maharashtrian and Bengali Hindis. Gopal Bhau suddenly reached to drawers of his table.

“You liked the mutton masala? I’ll show you what goes into it”.

And out they came one by one.

Looking lie a kind wizard enthralling giggling children Gopal Bhau took out each spice out and described them to me. We counted. There were ten at the end. Pepper, cardamom, cloves, large cloves, shah jeeraa, chakra phul (star anise), rampatri, dagad ka phool (pardon my Marathi but I tried to write them down as I heard them).

These would be roasted, ground and then mixed with a mixture of desiccated coconut and crushed red chillies. The coconut didn’t dominate the curry. And then there were the fish curries, which Gopal Bhau explained are low on spice. There the curry mix is made with desiccated coconut, crushed red chillies and coriander.

It was all about the right balance of tastes, textures and colours.

These important life’s lessons parted Gopal Bhau shut shop and walked into the horizon….the 80 year old’s silhouette framed by the pillars of the Metro as two eras of Mumbai were frozen in time for a few seconds.

I walked around. Photographed. Noted the interestingly named ‘Gobbet’ Restaurant. The Bengali derisive word was obviously acceptable in Mumbai.

My eyes then fell on what looked like a spices shop opposite Kshirsagar.

Nanji Gausar Masalewallah.

I walked across to the shop. Turned out that Mr Nanji was there himself. He too had opened his shop 50 years back. Same time as Kshirsagar. He manufactures and sells Maharashtrian masalas and pickles. He buys the raw material and sends it to his workers at Udad at Malvan who make the produce and sends it back to Mumbai.

Proudly Nanji opened each bottle – lemon, mango, mixed, dry mango, green chilli, sweet mango pickles – what struck me was how the shop would be enshrouded with the fresh flavours of pickle each time Nanji opened a bottle. And each was so distinct.

I stood back and took in the pure aromas and colours and tastes swirling around me…awakening senses that have got dulled by processed assembly line modern day spices.

And there was more. Nanji took out the kopre masala made with desiccated coconut, garlic and red chillies and served with vada paos and a fixture in Maharashtrian houses. The spring in the texture of the masala was so intoxicating. And as a contrast to the delicate robustness of the kopre masala was the searing heat of the powdered red chilli based ‘Ghaati Masala

I finally bid goodbye to Nanji but this wasn’t my last stop at Lalbaug.

I left the inner lanes of Lalbaug and hit the main road to Rajesh’s sweet shop. I had promised him a visit after we met at Kshirsagar. Rajesh is a second generation Mumbaikar and owner of a fifty year old sweet shop. A Kshiragar fan.

My afternoon finally ended after we chatted for a while, met his sweet makers, photographed and tasted his wares.

It was time to leave Mumbai and head back to its present.

This one’s for you Rohit. Yes, I had missed writing about places like these too.

The tweets that led to this post:

Antoine Lewis ‏ @chezantoineb @Finelychopped Some very good Malvani restaurants around the corner. Walk down bharatmata signal towards animal Hospital. Take first right.

Antoine Lewis ‏ @chezantoine@Finelychopped Oh well. For future ref: the place is Shir Sagar. Good mutton masala, kheema etc. Try Prisha at Hindmata for Guju Thali

rur ‏ @basrur @Finelychopped There is a malvani place next to the new residential complex by Peninsula

Nidhi D. ‏ @TypeWriterMom @Finelychopped itc does a good buffet lunch - you could head over to Prisha for a Rajasthani thali too - else only lower parel !

Sachin Kalbagof ‏ @SachinKalbag @Finelychopped Ladoo Samrat. Opposite Bharat Mata signal. 300 metres from where you are.

IceRocket Tags: Lalbaugh,Kshirsagar,Mutton masala,vade,surmai fry,pickles,masalas,Antoine Lewis,Sachin Kalbag,Nanju masalewallah,mithai,Central Mumbai,Mills of Mumbai,Malvani food,Maharashtrian food

Letters to the editor

2012-04-26T11:39:00.001+05:30

An anon troll comment on the blog recently:

''What an arrogant self-proclaimed food critic you are!! Have been through your blog to discover your pathetic reviews, insipid, poorly written, where price is always at the core of discussions in spite of your royal attitude (if you don't have money, stay at home ;)"

And then an interesting sms yesterday from an ex client and now a reader and friend:

'Sir, missing your posts on small inexpensive, family run places. Off late most of your posts are about pretty posh places.'

The second one worries me. The flipside of being at Andheri E. Town with it's honest little restaurants seems a mirage these days.

Got 5 restaurant review/ event invites in 2 days ever since I did one after ages! The Indigo Deli one.

What did I walk into?

The Pork Warriors… Triple cooked soy chilli pork & bacon fried rice recipes

2012-04-25T03:34:00.001+05:30

There was much mirth and leg pulling today on twitter after I first tweeted about the Bombay toast sandwich and then about a planned trip to lose my, vegetarian restaurant icon, Swati Snacks virginity.

“Finely Chopped’s gone veg” went the chant. A bit like a group of kindergarten kids taunting…”Barnie’s got a girlfriend’ and all.

So this post had to be written. Just to get in touch with my carnivorous side.

The story of finally cracking pork belly this weekend.

Just as Professor Higgins needed Pygmalion, a good cut of pork is my muse in the kitchen. Perfecting the belly in a manner which I am sure would make a Hainanese granny approve made me smile.

I had picked up a slab of pork belly from Meghna Agro for a press shoot. But then I was reminded that we don’t talk of politically incorrect meat on Indian media. I put the pork in the cold storage and tandoori’d some chicken leg instead for the shoot.

Thankfully, as Kunal Vijaykar told me on the topic, ‘you bloggers are lucky’.

So while it’s legal here’s the recipe of what I did with the pork belly.

The recipe was inspired by a food truck programme that I saw on Fox Traveller. Food trucks are the current food craze in the US from what I believe. And this was a truck that served pork belly sandwiches.

The cooking style is based on what I remember what I saw there. The recipe is exceedingly easy. Triple cooked as they say in the trade. In this case…1. Braise 2. Roast 3. Stir fry.

Though you could have left it after stage two. The pork was ready to eat & quite char suey’ish in form and texture at this stage itself.

This was also the first time that I cooked an entire slab of belly and then cut it. Before this I’d get the butcher to cut it and then come back and cook the cut pieces. At the end the ease with which I cut the belly using the cleaver I bought at Chiang Mai was so self satisfying.

Here’s the recipe:

Triple cooked soy chilli pork

Ingredients:

500 g pork belly
Marinate…this is what I used…there’s no fixed formula… 5 tablespoons soy sauce, 3 tablespoons honey, 1 tablespoon Chinese 5 Spice powder (use pepper otherwise), 4 star anise, 3 tablespoons any Chinese chilli sauce, 1 tablespoon Thai chilli paste (optional…if you don’t have you could use a bit more of honey)

Step 1.0 Prep

Score the skin (slash with a knife…go for a diamond pattern)
Marinade the pork in the sauce for at least two hours. More the better

Step 1.1 Braise

Heat a flat pan
Lift the belly from the marinade and place it on the pan.
Wait till you hear a sizzle
Turn the slab around and put it on the pan till you hear it sizzle.
Repeat once
The idea behind this is to seal in the sauces into the meat

Step 1.2 Roast

Place the belly on a baking tray. Skin facing the top
Add the rest of the marinade and brush some extra marinade on the top surface. You can add a bit more of the sauce. You don’t need salt with the soy sauce there
Cover with a baking foil and put into an oven preheated for 10 min
Roast (heat on both sides) for 20 min at 200 C
Take the tray out and remove the foil
Put it back in for another 10 minutes at 200 C
Change the controls to grill (heat from top), apply some of the marinade on the surface. This is called feeding the meat.
Keep it in for another 5 minutes at 200 C.
Once done take out the meat and let it rest for at least 10 minutes. This lets the juices flow evenly inside and allows the blood to settle
After 10-15 minutes cut the belly into cubes along the lines which you had scored

I looked with awe as the cleaver went in cleanly through the meat and the cherubic pieces of pork smiled at me. It was such a sense of triumph to see the pork cook so perfectly.

The Pune Warrior Vs Delhi IPL match was going on on TV while I cooked. Dada had just taken a wicket on the first ball and was celebrating in a manner reminiscent of Shoaib Akhtar meets Lillee.

I could have done that after I cut the pork.

I was as thrilled.

Frankly the meat was ready to eat at the point with a char siew or siew yoke like consistency.

You could serve it as a starter. Can put in to roast when guests arrive. Get the roast to table and carve it with fanfare. You could have it with steamed rice and chilli sauce as the Chinese of Malaysia and Singapore would.

However I did not leave the pork at that and moved into step 3 as I had planned to triple cook and not double cook it. The plan was to add bokchoy as friend and reader Chef Kunal Dhume of Melbourne once suggested. Plus chillies. And sprouts. The latter a touch I picked up at Penang and Chiangmai.

Don’t tell the vegetarian brigade this, they will get encouraged, but I actually like a crunch of greens adding a spring to the doughty bouts of meat when it comes to pork these days.

Step 1.3 Stir fry (optional)

Ingredients: 1 stalk bokchoy shredded. 4 chopped chillies – red & green. 1 cup bean sprouts

The pork is actually cooked so you don’t want to cook it too much. More like adding a seasoning of greens and chillies at this stage.

Heat a teaspoon of cooking oil in a wok
Add 1 stalk of shredded bokchoy & the chillies and toss. Don’t bother if you think the oil is not enough. There is enough fat in the meat which will come into play
Add in the remaining marinade or jus of the pork
Add the pork cubes
Stir for 2 minutes
Top with bean sprouts. The dish is done

You could have this with steamed rice. That’s how they have it in the Malay peninsula. Or whip a quick bacon fried rice like I did that night. Took 5 minutes. Here’s the recipe

Bacon fried rice

Ingredients: Boiled rice, 1 egg, 200 g bacon bits, garlic, soy & chilli sauce, vinegar – 1 tablespoon each, some greens

Cook:

Heat a tablespoon of vegetable oil in a wok
Add some chopped garlic
Add a tablespoon each of soy and chilli sauces
Break in an egg and beat it with a ladle till the egg scrambles
Add chopped bacon. 200 g for 2 is good
Stir a bit. Add the rice
Add some salt, vinegar. Stir
Add some greens. I added bokchoy.
Stir. you are done

And here are the tweets that led to this post :) :

Nikhil Merchant ‏ @nikhil_merchant: +ha RT @Finelychopped: No! RT @poojars: @Finelychoppedsooooo, are you vegetarian now? O.o

Netra Parikh ‏ @Netra @Finelychopped next time, am gonna do a video shooting about, you buying veggies :P @kishiarora @cookinacurry @nikhil_merchant

Kishi Arora ‏ @kishiarora @Finelychopped i'll be the happiest person if u turn vegetarian!@cookinacurry @nikhil_merchant @netra

@nikhil_merchant: @cookinacurry @Finelychopped i'd eat snakes if I heard he converted ! #highhopes

Maunika Gowardhan ‏ @cookinacurry@nikhil_merchant @Finelychopped Listen he's a changed man now;) There's talk of swati snacks instead of bheja fry & paya!

Maunika Gowardhan ‏ @cookinacurry @nikhil_merchant @Finelychopped Dont you know Kalyan is a veggie convert! He'll LOVE a veg dhansak! Ha ha!

IceRocket Tags: Chinese,recipes,pork belly,roast pork,triple cooked pork,OTG recipes,bacon fried rice,fried rice

Now showing at Bandra… Indigo Deli, Pali Naka

2012-04-23T02:01:00.001+05:30

When the restaurant in question is just next door and is the part of a franchise one is fond of then you had a restaurant event invite you just couldn’t say no to.

I went to the preview of the Indigo Deli that’s opening at Bandra’s Pali Naka this Sunday.

Four hours of conversation with some interesting folks including the iconic restaurateur & owner of Indigo Deli, Rahul Akerkar. Dishes ordered from a long menu. A few hits and the odd miss. If a Sunday is going to be one of discoveries then this was a good one.

The first thing that struck me when I entered the new Indigo Deli was its roomy airiness. Very different from the Indigo Deli at Palladium. The design at Bandra uses large glass windows to pool in the sunlight creating an ambience that is cheerful and yet cosy. The fact that one sat on for so long is testimony to the comfortable vibe of the place. It really does grown on you and it is one of the warmest restaurant settings that I have come across recently. Mumbai has seen the opening of a spate of ‘good looking’ restaurants but there was a certain understated elegance about the Indigo Deli at Bandra which seems to capture the relaxed mood of this suburb just right.

This was not a set meal sort of event so one ordered from the menu. I asked for recommendations too.

The watermelon capprioshka that they were serving was just what one needed in a sunny afternoon. The soothing taste of the chunks of the watermelon made this such a wonderful summer drink. I wasn’t surprised when I saw Akerkar himself grab one when he walked in to the restaurant.

watermelon capprioshka with a sangria in the background

It was good to know that Indigo will open at 9 am and yet serve breakfast though the day. Finally an option to have waffles and eggs without being spanked by restaurant owners for being bad children by waking up after noon on holidays.

Talking of breakfasts I tried another of the recommendations. I asked for a small portion of ‘eggs on the beach’. Cheese on poached egg on bacon on crab cake. An inspired take on egg benedicts with a texture and taste combination which lingered till long. Conceptualised perfectly right up to the point when the rivulets of runny egg yolk streamed on to the roesti on the side. This was sheer indulgence bordering on raciness. A breakfast that would signal the start of a very adult day.

Featured on every newspaper and portal announcements of the launch. The folks at Indigo Deli are rightfully proud of their creation.

eggs on the beach

The other recommendation which I got, crispy carbonara pizza, would work for you if you like really crisp thin crust pizzas.

I don’t like biscuity pizzas though and proceeded to demonstrate what’s an ideal thin crust pizza in my world to those at the table.

“Hold it at 180 degrees and see if the slice bends by itself to a curved ninety degrees'”.

So far I’ve only come across Prego at Westin getting it right. Keep scrolling down this link to see what I mean.

The crispy pizza base, the runny carbonara sauce and the odd bits of bacon just didn’t come together for me.

Crisp carbonara pizza

I was at a largely vegetarian table with food blogger When Harry Met Celery, ordering the vegetarian stuff.

There was a brownie milk shake which was as good as she insisted it was, a salad (no alcohol dressings, no non veg) with an interesting dressing of the fantastic house mustard of Indigo and a tofu and mushroom burger. The colourful vegetarian pizza was on the soggy side and again with that wafer crisp crust. The Indigo pizzas just don’t work for me.

brownie milk shake

house salad with mustard

tofu burger

some vegetarian pizza

We were almost done when I decided to try out the risotto. I’ve rarely come across a risotto that I like but I still keep trying. A meal one wasn’t paying for seemed to be a good bet and I asked for a wild mushrooms with red wine risotto.

I was a bit surprised when the purple coloured risotto was brought to our table. Different from the white or creamy ones that one is used to.

I took a bite and then did a double take. This was not the usual stodgy dish that one is resigned to expect while ordering risottos. The wild mushroom risotto at Indigo Deli was buzzing with flavours and had a fresh spring to each bite. It was one of those dishes which was of the ‘put the fork down after every few bites …and then pick the fork up again and continue’ varieties.

Social niceties be damned. Full stomach be damned. Anti-carb fascists be damned.

I kept digging into the risotto. Hypnotised.

And it didn’t even have any meat in it. That’s how good the risotto was.

wild mushroom risotto

I don’t know whether it was the light texture of the rice, the headiness of the wine, the regal purple hue or the vintage parmesan but to me the wild mushroom risotto was the dish of the afternoon.

The house ice creams seemed a good idea on a hot afternoon. An Intensely deep dark chocolate one and a mocha and caramelised banana ice cream which had a balance of kiddy and grown up flavours.

chocolate ice cream

But the dessert which really brought me to my knees was the chocolate bread pudding strongly recommended by Deepti of Indigo.

Like the risotto and the ‘eggs on the beach’ earlier, this too was one of those ‘take a bite and then don’t stop’ dishes.

There was something so welcoming about the chocolate drenched bread pudding that just made you want to cuddle up on its lap and lie down.

If ‘just a lil bit of the Human Touch ’ is what you are looking for then chocolate bread pudding at Indigo Deli is what you should go for.

chocolate bread pudding

Accompanied by another of Deepti’s recos, the incredibly crisp Araku coffee.

Rahul joined us for a bit and we chatted off the record on the food scene at Mumbai. I was interested to hear his views on plating - ‘we need to move with the times but don’t want to lose harmony…can’t get too obsessed with it…and yet have to be contemporary’ (paraphrased).

For me the endearing story was that of little Rahul Akerkar sitting in his late aaee’s (grandmother’s) kitchen during summer holidays observing what she cooked. These lazy afternoons had an influence on the course Akerkar's life took as he eventually became one of Mumbai’s most talked about restaurateurs.

So welcome to the hood Indigo Deli.

Rahul Akerkar in the pink shirt

This is not an anonymous review

IceRocket Tags: rahul akerkar,indigo deli,risotto,bread pudding,pizzas,eggs,breakfasts

Going green… Recipe for pomfret grilled in basil pesto

2012-04-21T18:18:00.001+05:30

A good fresh basil pesto has to be my favourite Italian mix so far.

I was wowed by it when I first had a pesto pasta, four years back, at the original Da Vinci in the Papa Poncho lane at Bandra’s Pali Naka.

Then disgusted by soupy pestos served at other Mumbai restaurants I started Finely Chopped.

I finally found inner peace when I saw the recipe of pesto in one of Jamie Oliver’s books and realised how easy it is to prepare. In the book Oliver points out that pesto, like any other base, can be used in various forms.

Since then I have made pesto in a food processor and then, in the more self fulfilling way, with a mortar and pestle. Apart from bacon pesto spaghettis & smoked salmon pesto pennes I’ve sauted fish in pesto, made bread seasoned with pesto, made chicken dips with pesto. The possibilities, as Oliver said, are endless.

With the freshness of basil, the zest of garlic, the salty edge of parmesan calmed down by demure extra virgin olive oil…a fresh basil pesto remains one of the most perfect taste experiences in me.

The other day I had to get some quick cooking done and so I thought of grilling pomfret in pesto. I was looking for a dish which would be novel, look good and impress the taste palates of a few seasoned and experienced food aficionados that I was meeting for a shoot.

The dish delivered perfectly.

The ladies were impressed and the fish snuggled in happily amongst a table full of brilliant and beautiful food.

Keep watching this space for more on that lovely evening.

Here’s the recipe:

Pomfret roasted in pesto

Prep:

I. Pesto (this will yield more than you need. You can store the rest in a fridge)

Ingredients: 2 coffee mugs full of fresh basil leaves, 2/3 garlic cloves, 1/2 a coffee mug of pine nuts (these are expensive. You can use less or use walnuts), 1/2 a coffee mug of grated parmesan (I committed sacrilege that afternoon by using some Australian cheddar that I had at home. Didn’t make that much of a difference). 1 coffee mug of extra virgin olive oil (you could use less frankly)

Prepare (the easy way): Grind the basil in a food processor. Add the pine nuts. Grind. Add the garlic. Grind. Add the cheese. Grind. Add the olive oil. Stir or whip. The rule is ‘dry to wet’

II. Fish – whole pomfret marinated

“Score’ the fish. That is, slash the surface with a knife. This will ensure that the taste and flavours of the spices or herbs spread all through when the fish cooks.

Sprinkle some salt (not too much as the pesto has a salty cheese in it) and pepper and squeeze some lime over the fish and mix in the salt and pepper.

Slowly layer on the pesto on the fish. Make sure to push the pesto in to the ridges where the fish was scored and the hollow part from where the entrails have been cleaned out.

Let it rest for a bit. I didn’t have time so just waited while I preheated the oven.

III. Grill

Put the fish in for 15 min at 200 C with the heat coming from both top and bottom.

That’s it. Add some fresh pesto the side and serve ideally with some crusty French bread.

IceRocket Tags: pomfret,recipes,roast,grills,pesto,seafood

Dinner in a jiffy … Stir fried soy chicken with bokchoy

2012-04-19T00:33:00.001+05:30

I am so pleased with the simplicity and taste of what I cooked tonight that I have to blog about it right now.

Though I promised myself to make it a short post. So here you go.

Stir fried soy chicken (for 1)

Ingredients:

100 g boneless chicken. Ideally leg piece. Cut into cubes
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2.\ to 2.5 tablespoons dark soy. 1 tablespoon sweet chilli sauce/ paste. 1/2 teaspoon salt
3 1/2 teaspoon finely chopped garlic or garlic paste
1/2 chopped onion bulb, a shredded stalk of bokchoy. 3 split green chillies. 1/4 chopped capsicum.
A camera

Cook

Heat oil in a wok. Keep the flame high all through (Remember to bump up the ISO of your camera if you are using the manual mode #facepalm)
Add garlic…stir
Add onion…stir till onion becomes marginally translucent
Add chicken…stir till chicken becomes white and opaque instead of pink
Add soy & sweet chilli sauce (I used Thai chilli paste). Stir
Add green chillies & salt. Stir
Thrown in shredded bokchoy. Stir
Add capsicum stir and turn off flame while capsicum still retains its crunch

You can have this with simple steamed rice. The sauce of chicken juices and soy will stream into the rice adding flavour to it. The bokchoy gives and interesting crunch. The chicken juicy despite less than 10 minutes of cooking. The occasional bites of chilli will liven up the night.

PS Changed the look of the blog with one of the default templates on blogspot. How do you find it?

IceRocket Tags: recipes,chinese,chicken,stir fry,quick cooking

Plan B… bacon & bokchoy fried rice recipe

2012-04-17T01:21:00.001+05:30

I am yet to come across a Chinese restaurant at Mumbai which serves a fried rice that is similar to what one gets abroad.

The key difference is that restaurants here use long grained basmati rice. The grains of rice are separate.

The fried rice served in Chinese restaurants outside, and I am talking of Europe, Australia, Malaysia & Singapore here, are made with short grained rice with a texture that is more sticky than separate. The caveat of course is that I have not been to China yet so have no idea whether you even get a fried rice there. Let alone how it looks.

The other difference is that fried rice in restaurants abroad are flavoured in sauces and could serve as a one dish meal. The fried rice in most restaurants here except at 5 stars or at Ling’s is white…devoid of any flavours. Kolkata is different where you get fried rice favoured in soy sauce in old school Chinese restaurants.

I usually make noodles at home as rice which sticks together is where I draw my line when it comes to my love for the Orient.

There are times when I to want cook Chinese and yet feel lazy. Those are times when I make fried rice instead of noodles. Fried rice requires less tending as you cook… needs less oil too…plus you can take pre-boiled rice out of the fridge unlike noodles which are best had freshly boiled and tossed.

The basic template that I use is the same for both fried rice and hakka noodles.

Heat oil. Season with sauces & condiments. Add meat. Rice/ noodles. Add egg (if rice). Add vegetables at the end for crunch. Top with pre-scrambled eggs (if noodles).

I made a bacon & bokchoy rice yesterday. Bokchoy, part of what is locally called as ‘Chinese vegetables’ needs to cook a bit more and I added it before the vegetable crunch stage at the end.

Here’s the recipe in case you still need it after the template.

Bacon & bokchoy fried rice recipe (for 2)

Ingredients:

1 coffee mug of boiled rice
1 egg
2 strips of bacon---finely chopped
1 teaspoon chopped ginger and or garlic. 2 or 3 star anise (optional)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 teaspoon dark soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon each of green and red chilli sauce
1 stalk of bokchoy. Shredded
1 teaspoon sugar. 1 teaspoon salt. a pinch of ajino moto if you want. Both optional
Half a lime or a teaspoon of vinegar
1/2 cup finely chopped vegetables – cabbage, carrots, bell pepper, mushrooms, corn, sprouts

Cook:

Heat oil in a wok
Add ginger/ garlic/ star anise & stir for 10 sec
Add the sauces and stir
Add the meat – bacon in this case – stir
Add mushroom & sweet corn and stir. They take more time to cook. This is optional
Add rice. Stir
Add salt, sugar (restaurant Chinese usually has a touch of sweet), lime/ vinegar…ajinomoto pinch if you want to. Stir till the rice takes the colour of the sauces
Add the shredded bokchoy. Stir
Break and add the egg directly onto the rice. I’ve seen this on TV shows and this is how pad thai noodles are made too. Keep stirring the rice and the egg so that the egg begins to wrap around the rice in tiny shreds. This is when the rice, and I use basmati, begins to break and looks more authentic
Add the veggies at the end. Toss a bit and turn off the flame while the vegetables still retain their crunch

This is a one dish meal. At the most finely chop chillies and add to a mix of soy and vinegar to add on to the rice.

When I first came to India as a kid I would refuse to have Indian food. My mom would often make me fried rice then.

IceRocket Tags: Chinese,fried rice,bacon,bokchoy,noodles,recipes,one dish meals

On Camera…Poila Boishakh lunch at Smoke House Deli, Mumbai

2012-04-15T22:15:00.001+05:30

It was ‘Poila Boishakh’, start of the Bengali New Year, yesterday.

It almost seemed as if ‘what are you eating on poila boishakh’ had become the new ‘what are you doing on new year’s eve or Valentine’s Day or for the weekend or ….(fill in your pet grouse)”

Well the question is to be expected for a Bengali food blogger I guess. Or any Bengali for that matter.

The fact is that till about 5 pm on Poila Boishakh I was subsisting on just three tiny bananas and some Tropicana orange juice which I hastily managed to have on the way to the Canon Go Pro class yesterday. I was running late due to some bad planning on my part.

You get to be a part of this class if you buy a Canon DSLR and I got a coupon for my EOS 550. At Mumbai, they hold the class at the Pu La Academy at Prabhadevi. I was quite impressed to see the flurry of activities going on at Pu La. Dance classes, school socials (a hi to the lady who said she recognised me from the blog) …even a North Eastern children’s theatre festival.

The Canon class was pretty interesting. Covered the basics. Ended with a session on using the manual mode of the camera. A throwback to my days of learning photography on my dad’s SLRs as a kid. A habit spoilt by automatics and point and shoots as I grew up.

The class lasted till 4 pm. Famished ,I headed to Phoenix Mills. Too hungry to experiment.

Since it was the New Year I thought I’d go to a feel good place. So I went to the Smoke House Deli at Phoenix Mills. The meal ended up being about 3 times more expensive than the maximum of what I like to spend if I am eating alone but at least it was a special day.

And let me kill any Bong outrage at this point by saying that I had mutton biryani and chaap from Arsalan and kheer kodom, chhanar pulao & mishti doi from Sweet Bengal for Nobo Borsho dinner while I watched Dada and his Pune Warriors on TV win their IPL match. So don’t arrest me.

I called for an apple and rosemary ice tea at Smoke House Deli. I had really liked the balance of its flavours in my last visit. I could feel life slowly seep into my parched body. It was close to 4.30 PM. A weird time for ‘lunch’.

I took out the camera and fiddled with it. Trying to remember what they taught in class. Experimenting with the aperture, ISO, shutter speed. Using the full manual mode while I waited for the rest of my order.

And then my lunch arrived.

What the menu described as ‘My boss’s spaghetti’ with tenderloin meatballs.

Problem is that the dish was not what the waiter described to me. I was promised an aglio olio. And no tomato sauce.

What was placed in front of me was overcooked spaghetti in a suspiciously red sauce. I questioned the waiter about it who assured me that the red colour wasn’t because of tomato. “It’s a mushroom reduction” he said.

The ‘boss’s spaghetti’ was everything that I hate in a pasta. Excess tomato puree. Soggy spaghetti. Drowned in sauce and that sucks in a pasta. Served so hot that your taste buds are numbed.

I am sure there are people for whom it could work but a tomato sauce based pasta makes me see, er, red. Though the waiter of course claimed that the pasta didn’t have any tomatoes in them.

And yet I was hungry. The sort of hunger you saw in the characters in the Indian art cinema of the 80s.

So I ate. Quietly.

Which is when Glyston Gracias walked up to me. Turned out that he is the chief manager operations at Smoke House Deli.

“How is the food sir”.

I looked up, made a Godfather like scowl, put my hands up and said “It’s ok”.

“I noticed that you don’t look happy sir. What is the problem?” Glyston persevered.

“Look this is not what I thought it would be but it’s ok…I am hungry, don’t really want to create a fuss.”

“No no sir, we can’t have you dissatisfied. Let me know what’s the issue and I”ll look into it”.

Well I poured out my heart. Turned out that the waiter had got his spiel wrong. Glyston said that the ‘boss’s spaghetti’ did come in a tomato based sauce. I found the meatballs too be too dense and strongly flavoured. We discussed that and blamed it on the rosemary. A very overpowering herb.

Glyston then insisted on getting me a fresh dish. An aglio olio like I wanted. It wasn’t in the menu. We discussed the meat. I had had enough of the meatballs. Glyston suggested chicken. I suggested bacon. Too which Glyston pointed out that the parmesan in the aglio olio would, in conjunction with bacon would be too salty. Made sense. I agreed. Glyston then agreed to my suggestion of ham. And then went off to the kitchen to supervise the dish. After I told them to make it a small portion as I was almost full from the earlier bucket of spaghetti.

I waited and continued to fiddle with the camera. Suddenly a goat cheese salad landed at my table. I love goat cheese but protested saying that I was quite full.

“While you wait sir”, said Glyston.

And then my pasta arrived.

This time everything that I like in pasta. Love in fact. Spaghetti. A la dente and not a la as flaccido as a mithaiwallah’s owner’s belly. The flavours delicate. The parmesan beautifully holding together the pasta. Almost mother-like in its tenderness. The spaghetti and parmesan forming a demure base that allowed the incredible flavours of the sliced button mushrooms and the celestial imported barbecue ham to flower in the full glory. The temperature just right. Hot. Not singeing hot.

This was as close to pasta perfection as it gets in my world.

Smoke House Deli had redeemed themselves.

My starving for the camera lessons paid off.

Happy 1419 everybody. Shubho Nobo Borsho. Eat well.

IceRocket Tags: Canon eos 550,Canon Go Pro Class,smoke house Deli,phoenix mills,spaghetti,aglio olio,meatballs,ham,goat cheese,ice tea

Highway on My Plate wins at the Gourmet World cookbook awards

2012-04-15T16:43:00.002+05:30

Just watched an episode of NDTV Good Times' Highway on my Plate.

It was the one where Rocky takes on the mighty bhoot jolakia chilles with Mayur playing the compere. One of the many reasons why this show remains the only locally produced food and travel show on Indian television that I look forward to.

So it was good to hear when Mayur wrote in recently with the news of their book winning 'Best in the World' award in the Celebrity cookbook category at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in Paris.

This is what Mayur said, "Hi Kalyan hope your back is feeling better these days?

Wanted to share that our book 'Highway On My Plate' just won the 'Best in the World' award in the Celebrity cookbook category at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in Paris.
There were people and books there from over a 160 countries. At the International Show Kitchen there we made and served over 10 kgsof Sevpuri, bhelpuri and Jhalmudi. We also did a cooking demo at the Cordon Bleu culinary School in Paris for their students and master chefs. They thoroughly enjoyed the 'malai chingdi', 'karari Masala bhindi' and the dhaba style Masala Chai we made.

It was amazing to see the love, warmth and keen interest that our country evokes in the minds of the world.

Thanks for your faith :) now you know who is responsible for the smilies in the book

Take care"

Congrats guys. You deserve it.

And next time you are in Mumbai do drop a line

Lunch break… NH1, Andheri East, Mumbai

2012-04-11T17:27:00.001+05:30

We headed to NH1 to grab a quick lunch while at work the other day.

NH1 is a restaurant located near the ‘cigarette factory’ at Andheri E. In a tiny lane, for some reason, full of tiny shops selling chicken. I later found out on facebook that NH1 is quite a popular restaurant amongst people who work nearby.

NH1 was fairly full that afternoon. The crowd, corporate. It was a fairly large cavernous large place. Dimly lit. A respite from the glaring sun and dusty roads outside. The decor supposedly modeled on the dhabas that dot the highways of India.

The lunch was an unplanned one so I didn’t have my camera with me. I picked up one of the Sony point and shoots from work before we headed out. The simplicity of which was a pleasant nostalgic trip back to one’s pre DSLR days. I was quite impressed by the way the camera, and later MS photo editor, helped compensate for the low light conditions. I was quite kicked with the picture I took of the paneer burjee and roti. Our table was by the entrance. I noticed that a ray of sunlight would come in the moment someone would open the door. I took advantage of this to take the shot below. You wouldn’t guess how dark the restaurant actually was by seeing the photo below.

The menu at NH1 had a Chinese section as well as an Indian one. I thought that sticking to ‘Indian’, essentially Punjabi, made more sense.

I suggested a paneer burjee as the colleague and friend I went with is vegetarian.

The burjee was pleasant and well with the rotis. But like most restaurant paneer burjees it was an opportunity lost.

Paneer burjee is a mashed/ scrambled paneer dish which is best made at home. At the risk of sounding a like a Bengali mother of the 80s when talking about restaurants I must say that I make a much better paneer burjee than the one at NH1. The deal with paneer is that it has a lot of inherent fat and cream in it. One can cook the dish with very little external oil and instead use the natural fat of paneer while cooking. This allows the creaminess of good quality paneer to flower in its full glory. Makes it one of the easiest dishes to cook.

The problem is that most restaurants, like NH1 in this case, use an excess of oil to cook quickly and avoid tending. The flipside is that you lose out on the taste of the paneer as what you get at the end is one inert mass. Texture lost. Simplicity lost.

The paneer burjee at NH1 dish was adequate but unlikely to set your taste buds on fire.

I usually order lassis in Indian restaurants. Doubles up as a dessert too. The lassi at NH1 was quite thick…sweet…but not excruciatingly. A fair balance of indulgence and simplicity.

For non-veg I ordered a dish I rarely order. Butter chicken. I normally skip the curries in Punjabi restaurants and go for the tandoori chicken. I made an exception that afternoon.

Perhaps the mention of the ‘Thai red curry’ in the rather ambitious menu at NH1 made me subconsciously go for this ‘Indian red curry’. Or it could have been @TheBigBhookad and his tweets the previous day searching for the best butter chicken in Mumbai.

Well I am not qualified to say whether the butter chicken at NH1 is the best in Mumbai or not. I don’t know what defines the ‘ideal butter chicken’. I remember reading the sociological travelogue ‘Butter Chicken at Ludhiana’ years back in school. The only thing I remember about the book was the author’s claim that no two butter chickens taste the same.

I remember having a butter chicken from Chawlas at South Delhi which was intoxicatingly creamy. And once at Moti Mahal at Delhi’s Def Col market which once again was fairly full blooded and robust. Butter chickens in Mumbai though rarely touch the spot.

This monochromatic dish with its uniform colour, monotonous texture and one dimensional taste never excites me here.

Though I must confess that most butter chickens that I have had in Mumbai are at buffets.And buffets of course are the graveyards of good taste.

In absolute terms, the chicken pieces in the NHI butter chicken were at least succulent. The curry not overtly sweet. I finished most of the meat and a politically correct and conservative amount of the curry.

No complaints here.

The service at NH1 was efficient and proactive too. The waiter told us not to go for a roti basket as that would be too much for the two of us. The place is reasonably quiet and allowed us to have an interesting conversation on why Indians, specially men, need waiters to serve the food on to the plate rather than take it themselves.

Given how barren Andheri E is, NH1 is definitely an option one could look at. And if you are having a bad day at work then they have a bar too.

Technorati Tags: Andheri E,cigarette factory,NH1,butter chicken,paneer burjee,Punjabi food,Mumbai