Kitchen Experiments : Quiche Bhurjiwala

How would it be if a French monsieur et mademoiselle got married at an Indian mahal, complete with the all the naach-gaana, mirch-masala that is the 'jaan' of Indian weddings? Something like that was the latest culinary experiment a la maison - Quiche Bhurjiwala - a union of 2 classic French dishes, Quiche Lorraine and Poatoes Dauphinoise - with a liberal sprinkling of Indian chutzpah.

The experiment was a result of long-held longing to make a tart/pie/quiche. The idea of a pastry shell holding any amount of varied treasures within had been gnawing at my brain for months. The possibilities! They seemed endless - savoury pies, sweet tarts - should I make a pie with kadhai paneer inside? Or whip up a delicious sweet one with voluptuous custard instead?
Finally, after ages, the stars and planets aligned in the right positions and I remembered to buy the eggs for the pie. (Being a predominantly vegetarian household emans eggs are not a staple in the fridge). Luckily, mes parents obligingly went out in the afternoon, giving me free reign of the kitchen (unbeknownst to them, of course!)

The basic Quiche Lorraine recipe I referred to was Rachel Allen's (seen on her very nice TV show, 'Bake'). But keeping Mom's sage words in mind, I decided to halve the quantity of the ingredients (In case the recipe turns to be a big fiasco, there is minimum waste to feel forlorn about!) - and there came the first obstacle.

I am not a serious cook and though my Mom is, she doesnt have things like thermometers and weighing scales lying around in her kitchen. How the hell was I to measure 50 gms of buttter and 100 gms of flour? And precise quantities are a MUST in baking, as warned by the Queen of no-fuss cooking herself, Nigella Lawson (who otherwise doesnt bother with weights et al)
I decided to go with eye and with a prayer on my lips, I scooped out butter that looked like half a 100 gms pack. Holding a half-full 200gms bottle of honey in one hand, I hed a cupful of flour (maida) in the other and because they felt to be about the same weight, assumed that the cupful of flour was 100 gms. You can see what a scientific disposition I have.

After making the shortcrust pastry (wherein I added some atta - wholweat flour at the end because the pastry looked too buttery - quelle horreur!) and dumping it in the fridge, I was faced with making the filling.

Now, the classic Quiche Lorraine has eggs, cream(lots of it!), bacon, onions, parsley, chives and cheese (again, lots of it!). Now I already was guilt-ridden by how buttery the pastry was, so I skipped the cheese in the filling. Also, I didnt have parsley, bacon or chives - so decided to centre the filling around the Indian bhurji (spicy scrambled eggs), and subsituted them with coriander/cilantro, carrot and garlic. And added a chopped green chilli for good measure. :)

I briefly cooked the garlic, diced onion, carrot (diced in small cubes, like bacon lardons) and chilli with some butter and added some fried chicken seasoning (its not made of chicken, its just a blend of salt and spices which echoes the umami atste of meat)

On the other side, I whipped one egg and one egg yolk and added the (gulp!) 100-odd mls of cream and more of the chicken seasoning.

By now, the pastry had enough time to slightly set in the fridge - and there I faced another roadblock - we do not have a small enough baking pan/tart tin. We have large cake pans but nothing even remotely close to a 6-inch pie tin. Considering I had used carrot instead of bacon, I decided to go the whole hog and use a small frying pan instead (Sorry,Mom!)

I rolled out the patry, flipped it into the pan to blind-bake it - and there!-another deviation from the recipe was forced on me - I do not have the kind of cling film thatcan be used in an oven. Mine said (in bold and caps) - DO NOT USE IN OVENS OR MICROWAVE OVENS WITH CONVECTION HEATING. How could I now place the beans (used as a weight, so that the pastry doesnt puff and rise) onto the pastry to blind-bake it? Luckily, I was on a roll where ingenuity was concerned, and I made do with a lot of stackable brass vessels (heavy enough!) which I dumped onto the pastry and baked it in our cranky old oven till it looked done (no timer or temperature controls on our oven!)

When the pastry looked about cooked, I brushed it with some egg white (leftover from the single yolk - waste not, want not!) and spread out the onion-carrot filling. Which looked very lonely and woebegone in the pastry, there was so little of it. I did NOT have the patience to rustle up another batch of the filling and this is where Potatoes Dauphinoise stepped in. I simply sliced a boiled-andpeeled potato and fanned out the slices on top of the filling.

Sprinkled some salt-and-pepper, poured the egg and cream mixture,

and baked it for 20 minutes till the patry looked a wonderful golden colour (I remembered just in the nick of time that since the ingredients were halved, the cooking time would be reduced too - else I would have serenely waited for the stipulated 40 minutes and would have been faced with cinderblock charred pastry - shudder!)

And would you believe it - with the kind of liberties I had taken with the recipe- the quiche slid out as easily from the pan as a hot knife through butter? And that, except for being a little low on salt, the quiche tasted yummy? And that the pastry was oh-so-good, in a crumbly, buttery way, with no soggy patches at all?

French chefs might be spinning in their graves (or fainting in their kitchens)- but what the hell, Quiche Bhurjiwala was a success as far as this Indian almost-cook is concerned. :)

Chocolate Seduction

The best place to eat a Lindt Lindor is anywhere in or near the tropics. And no, I am not joking or being ironic.

VS, (aforementioned friend and foodie) on her recent holiday here from the US, brought me bag of Lindt Lindor chocolate truffles. The first one from the treasure trove was consumed fresh from the fridge because of which the soft centre was not too noticeably softer than the outer shell. It was yummilicious neverthless. :P

Today I was to have one of the blue ones (filled with dark chocolate ganache) after lunch. But since I had to rush off for a post-lunch meetup-with-a-friend, the Lindor lay forgotten (yes! what a travesty!) for hours, outside the fridge.

When I got back, I noticed the forlorn little chocolate putting up a brave face after being callously ignored the whole of the afternoon and I HAD TO MAKE AMENDS right away. (Did I even have an option?) So I unwrapped the goodie and as expected, my fingers left smudge marks on the about-to-melt smooth outer cover. The Lindor is made for cooler climes than an Indian afternoon, and it was on the verge of melting into a chocolatey puddle. I nibbled on the chocolate shell - and - whoosh! the soft velevet-like ganache flooded my mouth. And the chocolate shell collapsed, just like a deflated balloon - intact but shapeless. It was surreal to see a choco balloon! Even more out of the ordinary was the texture of the ganache filling - smooth, satiny and almost plasma-like - you know, a state somewhere between liquid and air - so light was it. As to the taste - words cannot do justice to the buttery, chocolatey goodness.

So - keep your Lindt Lindor (or any soft-centred chocolate)out in the sun for a few minutes before you bite into it - for an almost-orgasmic experience.

I now know why chocolate often fetaures in seduction routines.

New Year Trip : Pune

To start off - a very happy new year to all of you! May the year be full of good times with food, fun, friends and family! :)

So this New Year's eve a bunch of friends and moi drove down to Pune after work. We reached the city limits at around 10:00 PM, and it being the Eve, obviously no halfway decent restaurant could accomodate a gang of last-minute guests. (We tried calling, we did!) So it was 'rush into the first restaurant with table space and fuel the body's dying metabolic fire' (especially as one of us was getting cranky due to hunger pangs)

We stopped at one of the ubiquitous 'garden restaurants'(garden - aka a few trees with more twinkling lights than leaves, plastic 'patio' furniture, scrubby grass - you get it) scattered around the outskirts of Pune.

Called 'Saundarya', it was prettier than most I have seen, though and it was located en route to the Hinjewadi Infotech Park. I didnt have too many expectations from such a place though the prices were pretty steep - I thought it was a simple case of high demand, low supply which dictated the prices.

Luckily for me, Saundarya came through with some amazing grub. We sipped on Manchow soup (steaming hot, spicy hot and with a touch of tongue-tingling sour), feasted on a chicken banjara kebab that was lusciously soft and yummily spiced, fought over the zingy Paneer Chilly and Veg Crispy (Indian-Chinese aka Sino-Ludhianwi starters) - though the Veg Crispy was accurately described as 'Schezwan Kanda Bhaji' by one of my friends.('Schezwan' being the Sino-Ludhianwi bastardisation of Sichuan)

The main course - Paneer Butter Masala and Murg Mussalam (more like Chicken Tikka Masala with leftover Tandoori Chicken rather than leftover Chicken Tikka)and hot crispy rotis and soft naans was equally tasty. When the same old oft-ordered dishes manage to awaken your tastebuds and give a prod to your palate, you know you have hit upon a culinary winner.

The next 18 hours or so passed by in a wirlwind of long, long drives through the moonlit countryside,
a mesmerising firweorks display atop one of the hills around Pune, singalongs to the tunes strummed on a guitar in the wee hours of the night, a watful of comforting Maggi at 6:00 AM in the morning, a tummy-soothing South Indian breakfast, a delicious home-cooked lunch at a friend's - all culminating in one of Pune's culinary achievements- the chocolate thickshake at Cadby's.

Cadby's is a drink, a dish, a place, a concept. Rich chocolatey milkshake (I doubt there's ANY milk in there, it is more like chocolate icecream churned with even more chocolate) with surprise nuggets of milk chocolate buried deep within and topped with a half-an-inch thick layer of chocolate rubble.

You cant sip this heavenly concoction with a straw - it needs to be 'eaten' with a spoon. As you wade through the chocolate carapace on top and start dredging through the intensely chocolatey milkshake underneath, you are bombarded with half-molten chunks of real chocolate. Every gulp is a revelation of rich chocolatey goodness, unlike any ever tasted before. Even a die-hard chocaholic like me can manage to reach the bottom of a half-glass but the truly intrepid (one of my friends is one!) can take on the full glass and emerge victorious in a haze of suagr-and-chocolate-and-cream. :)

Mid way there - whew!
So, the next time you're in Pune, dont miss on this treat to the tastebuds - available at Kothrud and Deccan Gymkhana.