Restaurant Review: Soam, Babulnath

Soam had been on our radar for some years now but whenever Mom would suggest going there, I would quickly circumvent the suggestion by jumping in with a demand to go to our family's all time favourite restaurant Samrat instead. I had visions of having to eat a set meal (thaali) burgeoning with  ghee-soaked, garlic-and-onion-less, spice-free 'satvik' dishes, which made me shudder. Especially when contrasted with rich, perfectly spiced Dum Aloo and tangy Aloo Chat which is our fixed order at Samrat.

A glowing recommendation by my cousin A reduced my resistance somewhat. A is not the sort to wax eloquent about insipid food, so I readily agreed when les parents suggested Soam for Sunday lunch.

We reached just on time at 12:45 and snagged the last vacant table. The restaurant is small-ish but pleasant, with creamy mango-yellow walls, simple wooden tables & stools, and tablemats fashioned out of dry pressed leaves.

The leaf tablemats and beaten-metal plates at Soam

The menu was a revelation - instead of a set thaali meal, the menu had separate sections for staters, one-dish meals, mains and desserts. There was a separate menu for low-cal options as well. And the what was remarkable was the kind of dishes available on the menu - snacks and mains from Gujarati, UP, Bengali, South Indian and Maharashtrian kitchens which aren't usually seen on fancy restaurant menus, all offered here with a culinary twist. For instance - smaosas stuffed with spinach and cheese. Kothimbir wadi livened up with the addition of corn. A red rice dosa (made with organic red rice flour) chock-full of cucumber shreds, served with the traditional coconut chutney. The Bengali potatoes-cooked-in-curd-with-minimal-spices served up with puris stuffed with a gren pea filling. And the most amazing khichadi, with the masterstroke touch of a garlic-and-butter tadka. The khichadi was oh so good, we ordered some to be taken away for dinner!

Green pea-stuffed puris, served with potatoes cooked in a mildly spice yoghurt-based curry

Red rice dosa with cucumber

Paapdi Chaat

Seasonal special - baked mango yoghurt. Mom and Dad liked it, I found it so-so

All of the food is tasty without being laden with spice or oil. That's why despite pigging out to glory (6 dishes between 3 people), we didn't feel heavy or bloated or listless the way one usually does after a rich Sunday lunch.

The menu has lots of interesting dishes yet to be tried (paanki, chilla, bajra pockets etc) so a couple more trips are anticipated. :) But the khichadi will always feature in our selection.......

Vaghareli Khichadi - shortest and easiest route to heaven!

Kitchen Experiments: Hazelnut Flourless Cake

Continuing with the edible record (paradox?) of my travels in Turkey, I baked a flourless hazelnut cake using the roasted hazelnuts I had purchased in Istanbul.

Approximately 75% of the world's hazelnut production comes from Turkey, and given my weakness for Nutella and Ferrero Rocher, it was inevitable I would hunt down hazelnuts in Istanbul. Surprisingly, I didnt find too many shops in the Spice Bazaar selling loose hazelnuts. Though the tiny grocery next to our hotel had small nibbles-with-drinks-sized packs aplenty! I finally picked up the much-desired hazelnuts at a deli .........................at Istanbul Airport! (yes,and not in the straight-from-the-Arabian-Nights Spice Bazaar or on the cobblestone streets of the Old City as I had fondly hoped to do)


Hazelnuts, apart from being delicious to taste, also have a rich aroma and flavour of their own (unlike most nuts which have taste but not SCENT) and do not need any flavouring to compliment them. So the hazelnut flourless cake I baked is incredibly simple - just hazelnuts, egg whites and sugar. No vanilla or cardamom or nutneg or cinnamon required. Try doing that with almonds or cashewnuts and you'll understand what I mean!



Hazelnut Flourless Cake

Ingredients:

1 cup hazelnuts, roasted and peeled
1 cup sugar, ground fine (else use icing sugar) - you can vary the amount of sugar as per taste
3 egg whites

Method:

Preheat the oven. Mine is an old fashioned one with no timer or temperature control, so cant give you exact measures. But preheat it like you would for other cakes.

Line a cake tin with baking parchment. Or simply grease and flour the tin.

Grind the hazelnuts in a coffee grinder. Be sure that you give just 2-3 short spurts of grinding and not a continuous whirr - else the oil from the hazelnuts will start separating and give you hazelnut paste, and not dry rubbly hazelnut meal.



Whisk the egg whites till they are thick and shiny and just near the soft-peaks stage. (I did this by hand - takes about 10-15 minutes of whisking - but you are welcome to use a hand blender)

Add the sugar gradually, whisk strongly in between batches.

Add the ground hazelnut and fold gently.

Pour the mix (it should be thick and voluptuous, not runny) into the cake tin, and push it into the oven.


Bake till the mixture turns colour and becomes a dark golden.

Insert a skewer to check if the cake batter is cooked - if the skewer comes out clean, switch off the oven and immediately take out the cake and cool it as soon as you can under a fan.

Cut into pieces/slices, dust with powdered sugar (you may mix some powdered cinnamon with the sugar before dusting for added oomph) and serve with tea/coffee.


AND NOW THE DENOUMENT:

This post is a grand forgery. I started out making hazelnut macaroons, not cake. (See this recipe) But a series of events led to their transmogrification into cake:

• My parents were too hungry for their lunch (the oven was taking up space on the dining table and I was taking up space in our small kitchen), so my Dad chivvied me into making one giant macaroon instead of piping the batter into individual macaroon rosettes and baking them in batches

• Either my oven is not powerful enough, or I was too impatient, or my parents were too hungry and cranky or the one-giant-macaroon approach didn't work - and I pulled out the "cake" when it was cooked through but soft, rather than crisp and crunchy.

Anyhow, the "cake" was delicious, and in a blind test (as in presented proudly as "flourless cake" instead of "failed macaroons" to unsuspecting friends at work) it emerged as delicious, rich, nutty and was polished off in record time.


So all's well that ends well, eh? :)

Kitchen Experiments: Turkish Sausage on Toast

To quote legendary director Hrishikesh Mukherjee's movie 'Bbawarchi',
"It is so simple to be happy,
But so difficult to be simple..."

This is especially true in the kitchen - ever so often, we surrender to the temptation of "just a pinch of garam masala" or "just a spoonful of soy sauce" to "liven things up" that we end up with a mish mash of tastes and flavours and totally lose sight of the essentials of a dish. Perhaps we are afraid of an insipid, bland dish (dis)gracing our table.

But when done right, a simple dish is a joy forever. I added one such dish to my repertoire over the weekend - Turkish sausage on toast.

A recent holiday in Turkey yielded a packet of soujouk (sucuk in Turkish) - spicy Turkish sausage, similar to chorizo.


All it took was some tomato, onion and Parmesan cheese to rustle up a superhit starter or a quick meal for one!

Turkish Sausage on Toast:

Ingredients:
Turkish Sausage, or any spicy sausage
Spanish onion, sliced lengthwise
Tomato, sliced
Parmesan cheese- grated or powdered (you can use slices/powder/spread of any cheese you like
Sriracha Chilly Sauce ( or any spicy sauce)
Sliced bread

Method:
Add a teeny bit of oil in a frying pan, swirl it around and place on low heat. Add the sausage(s) and cook till done, i.e. the skin looks about to burst.

Slice the sausage into 0.5 cm thick slices, keep aside.

While the sausage is cooking, slice the tomato and onion, and grate the cheese.

Spread the cheese over the bread, and top with onion and tomato.

Dot with chilly sauce

Add the sausage slices on top. You can add another layer of cheese, if you wish. :)

Grill on a hot griddle (with a lid) or in the oven, till the bread is toasted to crunchy perfection.

You can top the open sandwich with another slice of sauce-smeared bread and grill in the sandwich toaster too.

Enjoy piping hot. Tomato ketchup is an optional condiment, but is not really needed.

PS: For a more dainty take on the dish, to present it as a starter, use canape cases or mini tart shells instead of bread. Upping the ante would be using puff pastry - press down small rounds of pastry dough into mini muffin cups, spoon in the filling and bake in a hot oven till pastry becomes golden and puffy. Bliss!

PPS: In retrospect, this dish is not really original, but is more like a vampish cousin of the bland American hotdog. But what the heck, its quick, tasty, and filling. All boxes ticked for a recipe worth repeating! :)

A foodie day out in South Bombay!

It was meant to be a a true-blue touristy day, akin to my day in HK with K. I wanted to be the Fairy Godmother to VS's Cinderella and show her the unseen wonders of South Bombay - the fact that they were unseen being a shame, considering that both VS and I have been born and raised in Bombay.

But I digress.

So, the agenda was to do a proper 'Bombay Darshan' walking tour - with carefully chosen refuelling pit-stops on the way, of course. :) But what the day turned out to be was a foodathon, with some sightseeing thrown in. :D There you go!

Our day began bright (and not so early) at 11:00. And we hit a roadblock (literally) almost rightaway - traffic snarls! It took us more than an hour to cover the 10-odd km we had to travel! VS, who is the most easily carsick person I know, looked kind of green around the gills by the time we emerged at Kala Ghoda. Given this, and the delay in our schedule, we struck off the heaving-and-lurching ferry ride from Gateway of India to Elephanta from our itinerary!First stop - was the Jehangir Art Gallery.

Neither VS nor I get modern/abstract art (if anyone gets the symbolism behind these kinds of art, please please teach me!) so most of the exhibits were lost on us, but there was one painting in one exhibit which had us both yearning for it - a simple oil-on-canvas of an old-style oil lantern perched in a window. It was so realistic, that the brightly lit gallery was transformed into a cold, windswept night on the moors with the solitary lamp in the window beckoning us home, toward warmth and comfort. "Me want!" was the acquisitive buzz in our heads! :)

One cannot visit Jehangir Art Gallery without a quick break at Samovar- the quirky cafe at the gallery which has fed and soothed a lot of avant garde artists before they became famous.

Made famous by the rib-ticklingly warm movie Chhoti Si Baat, Samovar is poky, narrow, and very 60s in its decor and ambience. Bright yellow marigolds in vases, hot pink hand-painted napkin holders, old-world lanterns hanging from the columns...there's no place quite like Samovar!

Even if you aren't hungry, do visit just to sip on the mint tea. Delicious! Of course, VS and I had more than just the tea. :) We made short work of the chicken roll that was oily, tasty and chock-full of tender shreds of chicken in a spicy sauce.


Next up was a leisurely browse through the legendary Rhythm House, the Mecca for music lovers (and film lovers. too) This old store underwent a facelift a decade ago to resemble modern trade formats- shelf upon shelf of cds, dvds, tapes, vintage film posters, and state-of-the-art listening stations to try on some music before buying it. But at heart, its still a haven for true afficionados- a place where the owner and the floor staff are connoisseurs themselves and more than willing to share their knowledge with you, to make recommendations, and to hunt down that elsuive album for you. This is what separates Rhythm House from newer, fancier, roomier and soul-less stores. The feeling that you have come home, where people not just speak your language, but can debate in it too. :)

After shopping our hearts out at RH, we took a short walk through the meandering bylanes of Kala Ghoda to locate the much-acclaimed Kala Ghoda Cafe. We found it in a impossibly narrow alley called Ropewalk Lane (isn't the name charming?!) after passing over it a couple of times - so discreet is its signage! KGC is a tiny eatery with a high ceiling - it looks like a refurbished barn/stable, complete with a high, over-the-door window and whitewashed, rough-textured walls. A complete contrast to the modern starkness of white chairs, white tables and golden-brown wooden banquette along one wall. Clusters of cheery red and white balloons floating from the ceilings add warmth and colour.


VS, who is a careful eater, at once gravitated towards the salads on the menu. Her choice was the Med Salad ("Why? Why? Why? Why, when there's chicken rosti on offer?" clamoured my brain, but I shushed it, feeling virtuous about nibbling on salad). And was it not a great choice! One of the best salads I have tasted, the Med Salad was a harmonious blend of roasted/grilled peppers, zucchini, and non-sweet sweet potato, tossed through with lettuce and dressed with delicious vinaigrette. Nestled on top of the heap of salad was a fat chunk of creamy feta. Oh, the glorious taste of a forkful of salad and a sliver of feta atop the crunch toast served on the side...bliss!


Just when I was feeling amazingly good about being able to enjoy salad for lunch, VS catapulted and ordered the waffle for dessert. Oh, well. :D The waffle was a vision of buttery gold and the little pot of chocolate sauce was just the right degree of bittersweet.


After lunch, we walked across to the Asiatic Library (whose iconic steps feature as ‘High Court/Supreme Court’ in so many Bollywood flicks), and tried in vain to locate the stone marker proclaiming that point as ‘Sea Level’. A rib-tickling photo-op at the Horniman Garden (known as the Bombay Green during the British Raj) later, we were combing the lanes and alleys of Colaba to find (what I believe are mythical) Colaba Woods. How can one heavily wooded park remain hidden in the tiny pocket of land that is Colaba? If anyone one knows their location, please let me know!

The Asiatic Library

Loved these little parapets at the Asiatic Library!

The lovely sculpture/installation at Horniman Garden

The search for the woods-that-weren’t left us feeling low and dispirited. A quick stop at the sublime-but-overpriced Theobroma on Colaba Causeway to share a lemon tart was ample consolation. :D

Droooool.....

Evening was approaching, and with it came the threat of heavy north-bound traffic, so VS and I beat a hasty retreat from SoBo and made a beeline for the shopping haven of Phoenix Mills. Two hours later with aching feet and shopping bag-laden hands, we headed for the last pit stop of the day – Café Moshes at Palladium.

I know, I know, you CANNOT believe we took yet another refuelling break, but we did! This time we shared the Chicken Harissa wrap (divine! As good as the Chicken Harissa sandwich I’d sampled at Café Moshes at Kemps Corner) and a wedge of the gooey choco-orange flourless cake.

Needless to say, the next step was bed. For the next 10 hours! But the day was totally worth getting tired…I cant wait for VS to get here again!

Breakneck Breakfasts: Bread and Butter

So I thought that a new category about speedy breakfast dishes was called for - given that breakfast should be a big meal (especially if you lunch late) and given that most of us have scant time to devote to making breakfast before rushing off on our whirlwind days.

OK, I'll come to the real reason for the post - I have been whipping up breakfast for me and les parents these past few days (and feeling rather proud of it!), and thought some of the ideas just HAD to be shared. There.

So let me begin.

When I was in school (its best to begin in the beginning, right? :P), we had what was called a "short recess" - half an hour to down your snack packed from home (our school had no cafeteria, only a "canteen" which served greasy-but-tasty snacks like wada pao and samosa which no one in their right minds would eat every day - besides our mothers never gave us any "lunch money", opting to give us "lunch" itself) and indulge in games or gossip.

A popular recess-time snack (especially among kinds with working mothers) was bread and butter, sprinkled with sugar.In the 90's this meant standard-issue Wibs white bread, Amul butter and granulated bleached sugar. (I doubt if anyone had heard of wholewheat bread, cured butter and demerara sugar back then) Back then, I was mildly repulsed by the idea of sprinkling sugar on salted butter, but on closer inspection (aka stuffing one half-sandwich down my gullet), I found that the concoction tasted better than it sounded.

Last week, during a work-related trip to South Bombay, I picked up a half-loaf of rye bread from Le Pain Quotidien at Colaba.




At breakfast the next day, the bread called out - virtually demanded - something more than just butter. Bing! went the bell in the my head, and off I went, to give the old bread-butter-sugar combo, a glamorous makeover.

Took some butter (Amul!) out of the fridge and let it often. Mixed half of the butter with crunchy brown demerara sugar and added a generous sprinkling of powdered cinnamom. Whipped till the butter was light and fluffy.


In the other half, mixed normal granulated sugar and a few drops of orange extract (brought from the US on demand by VS) and mixed through, thoroughly.


Slathered one slice of (amazingly robust and sturdy) bread with cinnamon butter, and the other with orange butter, folded the bread over and voila! Bread-butter-sugar sandwiches, reinvented for the modern epicurean.


The taste, needless to say, was sensational. My colleagues at work loved the packed breakfast - even super-fussy non-sweets-eating Agent J. Maybe it reminded everyone subliminally of their own recess-time snacks in school. There's nothing like a haunting memory of the past, dressed up in the colours of the present!