Restaurant Review : Idli House, King Circle

 

For the last couple of Saturdays, Agent J and I have been following a set pattern - leave work on time at 1 sharp (no more working till 4 or 6 or 8 on Saturdays!), catch a quick bite at one of Matunga/King Circle's numerous South Indian eateries and then head to our respective homes. I reach home just in time for a relaxed siesta - full to the gills with yummy food, but without that bloated queasy feeling that often follows a big lunch. Can there be a better start to the weekend? :)

Yesterday was our first visit to Idli House, just a bit ahead of King Circle, towards Sion. A. Rama Nayak's Udipi Idli House is the only restaurant I know which speacialises in idlis and only idlis. For the uninitiated, idli is a steamed rice-and-urad dumpling. Now, urad is generally considered 'heavy' to digest, but the idli batter is fermented before steaming, which makes idlis very light, and easy to digest. It also is apparently is one of the lowest-cal foods, in terms of calories/gm.

Idli House does 32 variants of Idlis - from the unadorned simple, steamed idli through the usual suspects of Kanchipuram Idli, Rasam Idli and Butter Idli all the way to the never-seen-before Jackfruit Idli, Cucumber Idli and Pepper Idli.

The specials board

And has a line up of SEVEN chutneys as accompaniments. Plus, the menu matches specific chutneys with specific idlis - kind of like how la-di-da restaurants pair a different wine with every dish. Needless to say, rasam and sambhar are present too.

:) :) :)

As we grabbed the last of the 3 (!!) tables in the tiny eatery, Agent J tossed me the laminated A4 menu and gave me cartle blanche to order - "Order any 2 or 3 to start with" To start with!!! A guy after my own heart! :P

We started our food fiesta by asking for a Mysore Rava Idli, a Vegetable Idli and a Masala Idli. The Mysore Rava Idli was a disconcerting sunny-yellow, and soft and crumbly. Maybe I had expected an adaptation of the Rawa Dosa aor Mysore Dosa - crispy, crunchy, golden brown, onion-strewn, and so, found the soft yellow, mild idli startling. :)

The Vegetable Idli was the usual white idli speckled with some greens. Truth be told, I couldn't make out much difference in the taste of these 2 types of idli.

 

 The Masala Idli, though was a whole different beast - steamed in a leaf, soft, dense, moist and fragrant with spices.

Masala Idli

Each Idli was paired with a different chutney - green coconut chutney with green chillies and garlic, red coconut chutney with red chillies and the traditional white coconut chutney. Plus little bowls of sambhar, too. The sambhar and white chutney were refilled for free, without our having to ask for it.

The solitary waiter also brought us a trio of sidekick accompaniments - Limda (dry powdered chutney made with curry leaves), Mulgapodi (dry powdered chutney also called 'gunpwder) and mixed vegetable pickle.

 

Along with these came a tray carrying two squeezy bottles of oil - coconut oil to be mixed into the Limda and normal peanut oil with the Mulgapodi. It was a little - confronting - to pour coconut oil straight from the trademark blue plastic bottle - which is generally used for oiling one's hair - but it did add a depth of flavour to the Limda.

Next up was the Rasam Idli - the rasam was flavourful and not too spicy, but the idlis had been dunked into the rasam for a tad too long, and were ready to disintegrate into soggy crumbs at the touch of a fork. Rasam Wada is a far more successful dish, methinks.

Rasam Idli

To round up our meal, we ordered Filter Coffee and the Seasonal Special - the Butter Jackfruit Idli. Oh my, such gooey goodness! Served with a dollop of white unsalted butter, the 'idli' was more like halwa - soft, squidgy and gleaming with melted butter that ran in tiny rivulets down the cracks and crevices in the idli.

Phonsa Muddho - Butter Jackfruit Idli

 The sweet nectar-like aroma of jackfruit, combined with the unbeatbale taste of melted butter pushed this idli to the top of the charts for me.

What's even more amazing than the sheer variety of idlis and their tantalising taste, is the prices on the menu. Idlis start from 20 Rs all the way till - wait for it - 25 Rs.The Seasonal Special dessert idli is the only aberration at a royal Rs 28. Agent J and I ate till we couldnt eat a bite more - for a grand total of Rs 143.

Fast, Tasty, Healthy AND Cheap food. What not to love? The crowds in the photo below will concur! :)

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!