Perhaps because I was visiting sans the family, I spent far more time in the kitchen on my recent trip to Delhi than I usually do. My mother doesn’t cook so very much anymore but her cook is an ace—and I spent quite a lot of time watching and bugging him in the kitchen. I refined some techniques; I finally jotted down rough estimates of ingredients and steps of some family favourites (for example, this lau); I learned some new variations on dishes I already make; and I also learned to make some new dishes. Today’s recipe is in that last class and it is for pakodas made not in the way most familiar to non-Indians—i.e sliced vegetables coated in a besan/chickpea flour batter and fried—but with masoor dal or red lentils. The recipe is simplicity itself. You soak the dal (with some rice if you’re so inclined), drain and grind it to a thick batter, mix a few spices in and then drop spoonfuls of the spiced batter into hot oil for a few minutes till crisped to a golden brown. (You can see my teacher making it here.) It comes together very easily for an evening’s snack with tea and also makes a good passed snack for gatherings. For your first try you might want to start out small as with the proportions of the recipe below. Once you get the technique down (and if you like the results) you can easily scale the recipe up. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Snacks
Peach Panna
I was at the municipal pool with the boys last afternoon armed with a novel (my friend Ben Percy’s The Ninth Metal—available from Content Books and everywhere else) and a large container of aam panna. As anyone who has had it knows, aam panna is one of the best things about life and especially about life in the summer. If you haven’t had it and don’t know what it is, aam panna is a tart-sweet drink made with boiled unripe mangos whose flesh is pulped and mixed with sugar, rock salt and a few ground spices to form a thick concentrate. A few tablespoons of this concentrate per 8 oz glass of water + ice = refreshing bliss. Between sips of my supersized serving of refreshing bliss, sprawled very elegantly on an unclean and uncomfortable plastic deckchair, I wondered idly on Twitter if some Indian-American food influencer or the other had yet presented a recipe for an “elevated” aam panna or made it with peaches in place of the mangos (re elevated aam panna see Commandment 2). Naturally, this led in less than 24 hours to my making peach panna. And it was good. Here now before I forget what I did is the recipe. You are welcome. Continue reading
Keema Chops
Chops mean something very different in India than they do in the West (and when I say India I mostly mean Bengal). They do not refer to a particular cut of meat; in fact, they don’t refer to any cut of meat at all. Chops can have meat in them, they can have fish in in them, and they often have vegetables in them. By “chop” you see we mean what people elsewhere refer to as croquettes. How it is that we came to call them chops I don’t know, and I have no idea why other people didn’t start calling them chops either. Indian English is generally better when it comes to food names: brinjal is a much better word than eggplant or aubergine; and you would have to be mad to think that okra is a better name for that vegetable than lady’s finger (oh the confusion when Indians first see ladyfinger on menus in the West). Anyway, just so you know, a chop is made by taking mashed potato, stuffing it with a savoury filling, breading it and deep-frying it. You can eat them as snacks or as accompaniments with dal and rice. Continue reading
Quick Bites: Honey-Chilli Cashews
A while ago I posted a recipe for simple spiced cashews; here is a stickier, sweeter take on the same. All you need is unsalted cashews, honey, chilli powder/cayenne, salt and ghee/peanut oil. How hot you make it is entirely up to you. I don’t overdo the chilli powder or the honey because what I fundamentally want is the taste of cashews—just fringed by some other flavours. This is my problem with most store-bought flavoured cashews/nuts: they tend to be overly seasoned. Anyway, this is easy and quick (well not that quick: you do have to spread the cashews out so that they don’t form one giant ball when the honey dries). If you’re as cashew-crazed as I am you’ll go through all of this in one sitting with a cup of tea. Which is as it should be. Mother always said you shouldn’t trust a person who doesn’t eat cashews a hundredweight at a time. Continue reading
Simple Tamarind Chutney
Like most Indians, I have a long history with tamarind (imli in Hindi, tetul in Bengali). As kids my friends and I would pick the pods right off the trees and eat the mouth-puckering contents, straining the hulls and seeds out with our teeth, till our lips burned and our stomachs hurt. When not eating it off the trees tamarind candy, coated in chilli powder and about as addictive as crack, was the next best thing. Then there were and are the myriad pleasures of tamarind chutney, sour-sweet-spicy, as a dipping sauce for samosas and pakoras, in chaat, over chhole etc. Here in Babylon there are no tamarind trees (my kids instead go berry picking and to apple orchards). You can get tamarind pods in Asian markets but it’s not quite the same eating them straight out of the packaging. Continue reading
Quick Bites: Spiced Cashews
Those who know me know I have a bit of a cashew problem. I eat them compulsively and can go through a large jar in an implausibly short amount of time. I like them salted and unsalted but my favourite version is lightly spiced cashews. Many commercial versions are available but none quite satisfy. They’re either too salty, too overloaded with spice, too overloaded with non-complementary flavours (garlic) or all of the above.
Luckily, it’s very easy to make spiced cashews at home and get them just how you like them. This recipe is for how I like them: just a bit of heat, a little bit of savoury tang, all allowing the cashewnewss of the cashews to come through clearly. The spices set off the cashews, the cashews are not a delivery mechanism for the spices. Continue reading
My Annoying Opinions 