Happy Holi!

Holi is the festival of colours, of joy, of merry-making and prosperity. On a serious note, it is the day when one lets go of old quarrels and fights and bitternesses and brings in a fresh new start to relationships.

One of the most enduring memories of Holi (rather, the day after Holi, which is a holiday) is coming home late in the afternoon drenched to the bone with luridly coloured water (courtesy pichkaris (sprinklers) and water balloons). Of being liberally smeared with gulal and other powdered colours till one could be mistaken for a veritable walking-talking rainbow. Of washing off all the Technicolour splendour under a steaming hot shower and THEN sitting down to a late lunch - a lunch of hot, just-off-the-tawa (griddle) puranpolis generously doused with fragrant, molten tup (ghee/clarified butter) and other 'satvik' delicacies. And finally giving in to the exhuastion brought on by the all the dunkings and water balloon fights and shouting-at-the-top-of-the-voice by sleeping till evening. Bliss!

These days, the only Holi tradition we still follow religiously is making puran polis for lunch. My Mum, being a good cook, and even more important, an enthusiastic one, has been making them since the first year she came to Bombay as a bride. This year, she took on the scary task of teaching me how to make them. Brave woman!

Puran Polis are stuffed dessert rotis - and a nightmare to make. They are fraught with risks and danger of failure at every step. The puran (stuffing) has to be just right, in terms of texture, consistency, sweetness (enough to sweeten the roti covering it) and fragrance (of nutmeg). The covering should ideally be soft, soft, soft and almost translucent in its delicacy - it should be just thick enough to hold the stuffing without being torn - no doughy taste for the purists! The puran poli should melt in the mouth, leaving behind a rich taste of nutmeg and gul (jaggery) and golden ghee. Mmmmmmm.....

So, coming back to our kitchen, Mum had made the puran the day before. So I skipped learning that step (there are limits to how much I can take in, in a day!) She started off my lesson by demonstrating one of the most critical steps of the recipe -kneading the dough for the cover. 'Dough' is a term to be used rather loosely here (pun intended!). The dough is half-maida (refined flour) and half-atta (wholewheat flour) and kneaded (massaged/pounded/pulled/pushed, what have you) with lots of water and gallons of oil. The idea is to work the gluten in the flour to make the dough elastic and stretchy. Its almost liquid, so loose is its consistency. Its even kept submerged in a lake of oil so that it doesn't dry out.

Puran Poli goddesses take a ball of dough which is 1/4th the quantity of the filling and stuff it with the puran. The stretchy dough means it envelops the ball of puran thinly and uniformly without breaking. The end result being a thin, soft, delicate poli with just a whisper of a covering and tasting entirely of the puran. Mere mortals like Mum and I make do with dough which is 1/2 the quantity of the stuffing. Consequently, our polis are sturdier. :)

After watching Mum make a poli from start to finish - stuffing the puran, rolling out the poli (a torturously delicate job, using NO FORCE AT ALL), transferring it to the griddle using a newspaper (a spatula would be too narrow and the poli would break) and flipping it twice during the cooking process (newspaper to the rescue once again!) - I was ready to try my hand at it.





The pictures will tell their own story, but suffice to say that after one triumph, one crushing defeat (again, pun intended!) and 3-4 safe landings, I have learnt that rivulets of ghee hide many a crack and imperfection. :D



AND I have lost my terror of making Puran polis. (I had refused to try, thinking it was a lost cause for a clumsy cook like me). Maybe next time I will make them from scratch. Or maybe not. :P

Restaurant Review : Kobe Sizzlers, Hill Road

Kobe is a chain of restaurants - the original harbingers of sizzlers to the city. (An aside -isn't 'sizzler' an amazingly evocative name? A pity that its become a blind spot and just another name of a dish now. :( ) Though later entrants on the sizzler plate are supposed to be better than Kobe, the word 'sizzler' still brings to mind 'Kobe',like a Pavlovian response.

I have sampled the fare at several Kobe outlets across cities, but the other day it was the turn of the outlet on Bandra's Hill Road. I'd been to lunch with GP, a vegetarian friend with a strong 'stick-to-the-tried-and-tested' philosophy and she placed an order of Vegetable Shashlik and Orange Squash in a matter of moments (I knew what her order would be before we even opened the menu!) On the other hand, faced with so many choices (about 6-7 in chicken 2 in lamb, 4-5 in seafood and 6-7 in vegetarian) I hemmed and hawed and tried the patience of our waiter who admirably answered all my questions about the sauces on offer, the vegetables I could choose etc. :)

Kobe's is one of the few non-fine dining restaurants in Mumbai serving beef, and a plethora of options in that. But since I don't eat beef or mutton, I finally ordered the Sizzling Chicken with Pepper Sauce, swayed by memories of the delicious peppery sauce relished at Ovenfresh (at Dadar) years ago. And in a bid at being virtuous, I asked for mash to replace the french fries, to the approval of my companion. :D

The condiments on offer on every table - kethcup, mustard, Worcestershire and chilli sauces and salt-and-pepper)

Our sizzlers arrived in record time (20 minutes) wreathed in plumes of thick steam/smoke, which made visibility a problem. (Or not a problem, since I took advantage of the invisibility to blow the steam into GP's face till she realised my ploy when the steam started clearing :P) My sizzling chicken plate had a massive cloud of mash, a large-ish chicken steak and steamed veggies (carrots, cabbage, spinach, peas and french beans), all ladled over with a dark brown pepper sauce. Thankfully, my noble intentions of cutting back on the grease were fulfilled as the mash was purely that - boiled potato - and not the usual cream-and-butter-laden indulgence.

My behemoth of a sizzler

While everything was good - crispy, just-cooked vegetables, comfortingly soft mash, well-done chicken - the sauce was nowhere close to the one I remembered from Ovenfresh and was unconsciously expecting. This one was good too - just a tad too salty - but my palate is attuned to a sweet-and-spicy taste and this sauce was simply salty-and-spicy. On the other hand, GP's Shashlik sizzler had a yummy sweet-spicy sauce (how alliterative!) which had me dipping my fork into her plate all too often. :D

GP's Orange Squash and Veg Shashlik- don't miss the pineapple on the top!

While I polished off my sizzler (to reveal a Kobe-branded sizzler plate underneath - nice attention to detail!) GP struggled to finish her's (she loyally said that her sizzler being a carb-overload thanks to the mound of rice AND fries,made it tough for her to finish it and no, it wasn't that my appetite is Goliath-ish. :P ) Obviously when the last 10 minutes of your meal are spent watching your pal finish her's, there is no room (literally and figuratively!) for dessert. Thanks GP, for keeping my dietary resolutions intact! :D

On the whole, Kobe's offered a good dining experience - my failure to love my sizzler was born out of my over-expectations and not a serious shortcoming in Kobe's execution. The price mark is reasonable given that sizzlers, as a dish are expensive (Average price is INR 330) And the comfortable seating, lack of noisy crowds (as would be there at the nearby Elco restaurant) and pleasant interiors made it a good place to earmark for a leisurely lunch with friends.

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.