Down Memory Lane : Cooking With Mum

My friend Michelle from The Tiffin Box has written a beautiful post on Cooking along with her Mom and so much of it holds true for me too.

I started to comment on her post, but I had so much to say, that I decided, that I should blog about it too and since mum's birthday is coming up, I've scheduled this post to go up for the 9th.

My mum's attitude to cooking is pretty much like Michelle's mums - it was more practical and necessary to start with, than a pleasure (like it is for me). I got my initial love of cooking more from my grandma than my mum, because mum was too busy managing 4 of us kids on her own (dad sails with the Merchant Navy) to be able to "enjoy" cooking - in those days it was more about serving up a healthy balanced nutritious meal on the table. So she mostly needed us out of the kitchen, so she could focus on the multiple things that she had going on simultaneously in the kitchen.

The rare exception was when she baked cakes for special occasions, then we were all allowed to lick the spoons clean and we used to fight over who got the pots/pans/spatulas that had the maximum amount of raw cake mix on it (I know a lot of people would scream "salmonella poisoning", but those were simpler days and if I can eat mayonnaise, I can eat cake batter) She would ask us to help with sieving the flour or managing the hand beater and constantly remind whoever was wielding the beater, not to change direction.

Mum makes excellent cakes (not just tastewise, but also decorative ones) and in those days of 100% home made birthday parties, mum's were some of the best cakes around town. Even today, when my sister travels back to Mangalore, her whole office, requests her to beg mum to bake her chocolate cake with fudge icing. She makes a mean date and walnut cake too. I got my brother who is currently at home in Mangalore on vacation, to dig out some of the pictures of the cakes she baked for our birthdays.

I on the other hand, hate baking and shy away from it, because I hate following instructions accurately, the rebel in me can be quite stubborn, but I'm trying to get over the mental block.

I did however learn to cook some things from my mom, because as the eldest, I would sometimes help her in the kitchen if she had to leave to attend one of my wailing siblings, this often just meant stirring the pot or keeping an eye on something to check if it was done and turn it off at the right time, it later graduated to turning fish over when it was fried on one side, so yes, I did learn a few tricks from her.

Strangely, now when I think back, it was always me whom mum would turn to, to check the "hult" (perfect balance of flavours?) of whatever was being cooked and she still does that to this day.

Mum had done her home science at Nazareth Convent (after an MA in Economics) and she had learned how to cook "Chinese" and other "exotic" stuff for those days, which were only cooked when there was a "dinner party" at home and we got rationed quantities as the food was for the guests! Oh how we resented those guests - we would get 1 large prawn each or half a nargisi kofta (Scotch Egg) and the guests would be plied with unlimited quantities "Have more, have more, otherwise how will I know that you have liked it?" So many of my friends share similar stories with me about our mums in those days.

Normal fare however included basic meat/lentil curries, a vegetable fugath (stir fried with coconut) or tel piyao (simply cooked with onions), fish curry if dad was around or fish fry for us. Dad doesn't like spicy food and the rest of us LOVE it, so it would also mean taking a portion aside for him and adding more chillies to the rest of the food.

A real treat for us would be when she made bacon fried rice or prawn pulao. Mum's repertoire was hugely wider than my grandma's and mum managed her kitchen alone (grandma had maids to help her with prep in the kitchen), so she also looked for quicker recipes when she could find them. The simplest and fastest meal she would cooked at home would be red rice, bimbli saar (dhal with a sour fruit) or chilli saar (a thin heavily spiced soup), fish fry and a vegetable fugath. Even to this day, when I go home to Mangalore, this is what I request her to cook for me for dinner (after a meal of pork and sannas for lunch)

What she cooked, also depended on the tight monthly budget that my dad restricted her to. As the eldest of 13 siblings and his own father almost retired, a lot of his salary was spent on the education, clothing and maintenance of his siblings and the ancestral house. Of course, this realisation came much later, mum never let us feel that we couldn't eat something because it was too expensive, she would buy cheaper cuts of meat or cheaper fish to balance her household budget. Today when she sees the way I buy ingredients from across the globe (when I travel, my shopping is restricted to souvenir magnets, books and food), she shakes her head smiles and says "kai taun aila yeh, tuka?" (where have you got this habit from?)

Nowadays she loves watching the food programs on TV and trying out some of the recipes. She prefers TV recipes to looking at recipe books (she normally uses recipe books only for trying out a new cake)

She recently baked a variety of breads whose recipes she got from different shows. She loves cooking in my house because I have loads of ingredients that are sometimes difficult to find in Mangalore (however, I rarely give up control of my kitchen to her).

All said and done, mum and I have extremely different styles of cooking. I can assist her in the kitchen, or I will sometimes ask for her help if I'm in a rush to pack B's lunch, but its difficult for me to cook simultaneously with her. If I'm cooking something (esp if its in my house) I let her finish whatever she wants to make or I have requested her to cook, and then I scrub down the kitchen and only then do I begin my own cooking.

In my first job in Bangalore, I remember mum coming to visit and then reorganising my kitchen (while I was at office) in an order she thought made more sense and then I would have to re-re-organise my whole kitchen after she left, to be able to find anything and achieve any speed at cooking.

As we kids have grown up and left the nest, Mum has slowly discovered the joy of cooking and enjoys cooking for us or anyone who is visiting. However she hates washing up, whereas for me washing up is extremely therapeutic and calming.

We have extremely different attitudes to cooking, but have the same attitude when it comes to feeding others - the more the merrier. While I may not copy my mom in her attitude and style of cooking, it is she who has shaped me into the cook I am today. Love you mommy and Very Happy Birthday to You :)

Book Review : Korma, Kheer & Kismet - Five Seasons in Old Delhi

I first heard of Pamela Timms, when I had just returned to India in December 2010. We were posted to Delhi and by February 2011, I had connected with local foodies and heard rave reviews of her Upar-Wali Chai's - the pop-up High Tea Parties - that she used to organise with her friend Laura. Sadly, by the time I could contact her, Laura left for the Netherlands and these pop-ups came to a full stop and I had to satisfy myself with drooling at the pictures on her blog - eat and dust.

Baking is something that is stressful for me as I am too much of a rebel at heart, especially when it comes to cooking. I'm more comfortable cooking by andaaz (touch, smell and feel), than in following exact measurements. I happily "adjust" recipes from blogs and recipe books when I cook for ourselves, but you see the potential for disaster when it comes to baking? Hence the need to be satisfied with drooling at pictures.

Pamela Timms is a Scottish Journalist who has been living in Delhi since the last 10 years. In 2005, her husband Dean moved to India as a foreign correspondent and she and their children accompanied him.

I saw so many similarities in Pamela's life as an expat in Delhi, with my life as an expat in Cairo and perhaps this is why I connected even more with the book. Except for the food, the monuments and the history of Delhi, there is little else that I love about the city (its just too aggressive, rude and in-your-face for me, I'm happier in a Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad or Mumbai than Delhi. Even living in Guwahati and Ahmedabad has been a 100 times more pleasant)

By a strange coincidence, the last book I read was : Ismail Merchant's - My Passage From India - and in that he recounts how one of the Rejection Letters that he received from a studio for their movie "Heat and Dust" (based on Ruth Prawer Jhabwalla Booker Prize Winning novel of the same name, the movie later won a BAFTA and was nominated for 7 others) was "we are not currently interested in your project of eat and dust" Mr, Merchant wasn't impressed with the production house getting the name of his movie wrong, but it has proved to be an apt name for Pamela's blog that is currently extremely popular.

Another strange connection between these 2 books is that Merchant Ivory productions, produced 3 movies based on books by E M Forster - A Room With A View, Maurice, and Howards End and Pamela was inspired by the heroine of another E M Forster Book - "A Passage to India" that she read shortly before she moved.

After a couple of disastrous rental accommodations (which made it difficult to cook) and the extra attention of being a fair skinned expat in Delhi (constantly besieged with "you want maid?", "you want driver?" and once even being bundled into an autorikshaw by policemen, when all she wanted to do was walk!), she found a refuge (from the stifling Expat Bubble of New Delhi) in Old Delhi.

To paraphrase Pamela, the people of Old Delhi were too busy with their business and their lives to give them any extra, unnecessary attention. Each one was caught up in their own routine and treated them as just another customer. Old Delhi was a sensory overload, but left them exhilarated. (I know the feeling: wandering around the Khan el Khalili in Cairo, in a long sleeved kurta and jeans, with my basic Arabic - as long as I didn't get into a conversation - I blended in as a local and was pretty much left alone to explore the area on my own whims.)

I completely empathise with and understand Pamela's experience of cooking Roast Chicken with Pasta and Tomatoes (an excellent recipe by the way), I've been through it myself.

In Egypt and Dubai (or even Mumbai or Bangalore), when I had a dinner party at home, I just had to visit one large hypermarket and get everything I needed from there. In Delhi, it was a trip to a large supermarket to buy staples, one to Godrej Nature Basket in Def Col to buy boneless meat, imported ingredients and cold meat, INA market for fresh fruit and vegetables and Jor Bagh Market for pork. This is manageable (except for the time taken to get from place to place) as long as you go with a fixed menu in mind and a list of ingredients, but a bit of a toughie for someone like me who looks at ingredients (which are the freshest and the most inspiring?)  and then decides what to cook. This turned out to be more of a mystery box challenge for every dinner party - as I never knew what I would get at the next shop and whether it would match with ingredients I had already picked, to make up a cohesive meal.

But this review is not about me, so to come back to this brilliant book :  Korma, Kheer and Kismet - Five Seasons in Old Delhi - is a a beautiful food memoir of Old Delhi / Puraani Dilli / sheher.  The book has history, culture, food, travel, recipes (just about 14-15) and personal stories all woven into each other. I absolutely LOVED it - if I ever get around to writing a book, this is the book that I would aspire to emulate, it has captured all my favourite interests.



I read this over last weekend and I loved it so much that I gave it to Brajesh and asked him to read it immediately and he also finished it at one shot. While he promised Rushina, that hers would be the first "food" book that he would read, he just read through the introductions of each chapter in "A Pinch of This, A Handful of That" and skimmed over the recipes. In "Korma, Kheer & Kismet" he again skimmed over the recipes, but as it is more memoir than recipe book, he felt that he had actually "read" it. He is now fixated on locating "Ashok & Ashok" on his next trip to Dilli.

As I was reading this book, I found that I was marking a few statements and underlining the names of restaurants and locations and other food writers mentioned in the book. Then I realised that this was the first time since college that I was doing this in a non-management book. (I hate having my books marked permanently in any way, I prefer to use post-its for the occasional note.) This is just a sign that I valued and wanted to emphasise all the new things that I learned in this book - even if it was just the name of a dhabha in Amritsar - but it serves the best cholle bhature in the world.

There is so much depth in this book

- a depth of knowledge of Indian food - Pamela is not just another "visitor" to India, penning a book after a 2 week holiday in the country, she has spent time, energy and effort into researching the topics that she writes about.
- a depth of research - into the families and people cooking up old favourites in this part of the City and into the history of food in general.
- a depth of passion and love - for food and the Old City.

My only issue with this book is the pictures. Being spoiled by the gorgeous technicolour / HD photos on her blog, the Black & White pictures in the book are a disappointment, some of them have become very blurry in grayscale. I understand that printing colour photos in a book, raises costs significantly, but I think a lot of them would have been better off as a link to a colour photo on her blog than as a grainy image in grayscale.

A lot of my Delhi friends have read this book over the long weekend and are already planning an eating expedition to the Old City, while also keeping Rahul Verma's tips for the monsoons in mind.

Charmaine O'Brien's - "Flavors of Delhi" is much more comprehensive and wide in its spectrum, but Pamela's book has a ton of passion - which clearly makes it a much more emotional and enjoyable book.

If you like (notice I don't say love) food and live in Delhi or are visiting Delhi, this is a book you MUST read. Its also a beautiful gift for someone moving to Delhi.

Rating : 4.5/ 5

Recipe: Pork Indad - Manglorean Sweet and Spicy Pork

Pork Indad is a traditional Manglorean dish and used to be served at any celebration - weddings, Christenings, Christmas. Among the Pork dishes cooked and served by the Manglorean Catholics, Indad is perhaps second only to Laithaun.

Preparation of this dish requires a lot of patience because the masala needs to be cooked slowly and steadily. Unlike a Pork Bafat where everything is popped into the dish and cooked together, the Indad has multiple steps to be followed, but the end result is well worth it.

For those who don't eat pork, this recipe, works well with chicken (please use chicken with skin for Chicken indad, you can discard the skin later if you like, although I personally believe its the tastiest part) and eggs. The only reason I don't make it with chicken or eggs, is ecause I feel that if I'm putting in this much effort, I might as well make it with pork.

Nana used to make the most fantastic Pork Indad and it was famous in her entire extended family. If anyone had the good fortune of eating Nana's pork indad even once, they would most certainly request it the next time they were due to come over.

When I lived in Bangalore, I used to take little frozen dabbas of nanas pork indad when I came to Mangalore for the weekend, and savour it slowly over the week. Before my husband first visited Mangalore, he would just about taste the gravy of pork if I cooked it. One weekend with Nana's Pork Indad changed his attitude towards Pork forever. If I remember right, he ate Pork Indad for all 6 of his meals on that trip.

On the Feast of Mother Mary - Monthisaibinechi festh - on September 8th, traditionally we are supposed to eat a completely vegetarian meal in honour of the harvest. But nana also used to make us a nice big pot of pork indad which she would serve us AFTER we had eaten up all our vegetables.

Sadly none of her daughters or grand-daughters have perfected the same halt (balance of flavours and textures) as nana. After Nana passed away 3.5yrs ago, I hadn't even attempted to make Pork Indad, because this dish is so intricately linked with her and my memories of her. And even thinking of her food, reminds me how much I still miss her.

However on this years Monthisaibinechi festh, the urge to cook Pork Indad got very strong and I finally succumbed to the temptation by the end of the month :)

My version is not as good as nana's, but with a few tweaks, I think I can get it there. First on the list of changes would be to buy a table top mixer grinder to grind this masala, rather than in a mixi.

Each Manglorean family has a different recipe for Pork Indad, some use mint leaves, some use dates, some use raisins, some use jaggery some use green chillies. To see what I'm talking about, you can check out Shireen at Ruchik Randhap's recipe and Michelle's recipe on The Tiffin Box.

Ingredients:
2 kg pork (use pork that has fat and skin for the authentic flavour, curry cuts work well) cut into 1" cubes
15 long red chillies (kumti/beary chillies) - these give colour
10 short gaunchi chillies - these give heat
15 black peppercorns
1 tsp jeera
2 tsp haldi powder

10 cloves
6" cinnamon
6 medium onions
2 pods of garlic (not cloves, pods)
2" ginger
table tennis ball size of tamarind - extract pulp for use 
4 green chillies
1 handful of corriander leaves
1-2 large potatoes skinned and cut into 1cm slices (soak in mildly salted cold water)
1 small onion sliced

1-2 tbsps ghee
sugar, salt & vinegar to taste (I like to use Goan toddy vinegar)
dark rum - preferably Old Monk for punch (optional)


Method:
Dry roast all the dry ingredients individually.(red chillies, pepper, jeera, cloves, cinnamon)
Grind these together with the 6 medium onions, ginger, garlic,tamarind, green chillies and corriander leaves and a little vinegar when grinding for moisture
In a large pan, cook the pork with just a pinch of salt. The meat will release water.
When the water dries up, add 2 tbsps ghee and fry the pork untill the fat of the pork breaks down and starts melting . (If you are cooking with 2 kgs, its better to fry it in 2-3 batches, so the meat gets evenly fried)

Remove the pork from the pan and keep aside, there should be a lot of melted fat + ghee leftover.

Fry the potato slices in this fat (dry the potatoes on a kitchen towel before frying to prevent splattering)
Remove the fried potato slices and keep aside.
Fry the sliced onion in the fat until caramelised.
Then add the ground masala to the fried onions.
Fry on a low flame, adding a tsp or 2 of water as required until the masala is completely cooked and no raw taste remains.
Add the masala water (water got when washing the grinder) and a little more liquid to the masala and cook until it bubbles (this is a thick curry, so you need a semi-gravy consisitency)
Add the fried meat to the masala and cook until the fat breaks down some more and the meat turns soft.
Adjust salt, sugar and vinegar to taste. The dish should be slightly sweet, with a hint of sourness.
Garnish with fried potatoes

The potatoes taste good either crisp or when they have soaked up the masala, so you can mix some fried slices into the curry and reserve the rest for garnish.

Serve hot with appams, sannas, panpole (neer dosa), pau bread or white rice. I've served it with appams in the pictuire below.

As with most other Manglorean pork curries, indad tastes better with age. So you can make it 2-3 days before you plan to serve it and reheat it daily. Adjust salt, vinegar, sugar on the last day and add potatoes only before serving.

Recipe: Mangshor Jhol - Bengali Mutton Curry

Jhol is a thin Bengali curry. Mangshor is mutton (goat meat, lamb can be used as a substitute if goat isn't available).

In my singleton days in 1999-2000, I had a group of 8-10 Bengali & Oriya friends who rented the first floor of a house in Bangalore. My apartment had a very basic kitchen, but these guys had a slightly larger kitchen. If I was in Bangalore for the weekend, then most Sunday afternoons were spent with this group of friends, because they would make awesome mutton curry with hot rice that was so welcoming after a week of slogging away at office and eating fast cooked meals. (normally pulaos of every kind where meat and veggies were tossed into a pressure cooker with herbs and spices & cooked for 3 whistles) Plus after Saturday night out on the town, this mutton curry really hit the right spot at 3pm after waking up at 2pm.

I normally don't cook a lot with mutton. The quality of mutton that you get in Mangalore is not very good. It is stringy, fatty and sometimes a bit smelly, so mum n grandma also rarely cooked mutton unless it was a traditional polov (Mutton & ash gourd curry) needed for some ceremony or the occasional stew, butI remember grandma used to add beef to that dish just to get some better quality meat into it.

Personally, I mostly cook mutton only in Biriyanis or the occasional chops. I did cook more with mutton wheil I was in Bombay & I do believe that the best quality mutton in India is found only in Maharashtra and Rajasthan. So I was quite suprised to recently learn that a lot of Rajasthan's mutton is imported from Gujarat under the so-called "Pink Revolution" akin the "White Revolution" where Gujarat exports milk & milk products to other Indian states

As I was hosting a dinner party for 20, I thought I should do something other than the regular biryani with mutton (as cooking biryani for 20 needs much bigger pots than I have) or a stew (since I was already making the chicken curry with coconut milk) and I remembered the simple homestyle mutton curry that my Bengali friends used to make on the weekends. I looked up a couple of my recipe books and some online recipes, then decided on the following. I cooked with 2 kilos of mutton. 1kg boneless + 1 kg with bone so you can halve the quantities for 1 kg.


Ingredients:
2kg mutton (use at least some large bones) - chop into curry size pieces, wash and drain

Marinade:
2 tsp turmeric powder
2 tbsp red chilli powder (adjust to your spice tolerance)
6 tbsp mustard oil
8 tbsp thick curd (yoghurt) - drain it in a cheesecloth if your curd is too watery
6-8" fresh ginger
25-30 cloves of peeled garlic
8 green chillies (adjust to your spice tolerance)
salt to taste

In a mortar & pestle coarsely crush the ginger, garlic and green chillies (you can use a chopper or mixi if you prefer, but the mortar&pestle give the best flavour) You can also use ginger paste & garlic paste and just smash the chillies with back of your knife.
Mix all the marinade ingredients together, adjusting salt for taste and marinate the meat in it for a couple of hours. Overnight in the fridge works best and even longer will work as well.

Ingredients:
2kgs marinated mutton (as above)
6 medium onions sliced finely
1/4 cup mustard oil (since this adds flavour, don't decrease oil at this stage, you can strain it off the top, once the dish is ready)
4-5 bay leaves
3-4 dried red chillies
6 medium potatoes peeled and chopped into 8 each (if you like larger sized potatoes, just quarter them)
2 tbsp turmeric

3 tbsp corriander powder
2 tbsp red chilli powder
2 tbsp jeera powder
salt to taste
fresh lime segments
corriander leaves to garnish - optional

Method:
Bring the marinated meat to room temperature if refrigerated.
Add a little salt & 1 tbsp turmeric to the chopped potatoes and mix well.

In a large pan/ pressure cooker, fry the potatoes in 2-3 tbsp mustard oil, until they start to brown/crisp up on the outside.Stir frequently to prevent potatoes sticking to the pan.
Remove the potatoes from the pan, leaving the excess oil behind.

Add the rest of the oil to the pan.
When hot, season with the bay leaves and dried red chillies.

Before the chillies can burn, add the sliced onion and fry well until they start to brown.
Stir frequently to fry evenly and prevent them from sticking to the bottom

Add the marinated meat (but reserve the excess liquid marinade) to the pan with the remaining turmeric, chilli, corriander & jeera powders and some salt
Stir frequently to prevent meat sticking to the pan and cook till all the liquid dries up and the meat is well coated with the marinade and powders and slightly browned..

Add the reserved marinade, fried potatoes and 6-8 cups of water (depending on how thin you want the stew).
Cover and cook till done (3 whistles in a Hawkins pressure cooker)
Adjust salt to taste.
Cook uncovered if you want to thicken the gravy

Just before serving, squeeze lemon juice or serve lemon wedges on the side.
Add corriander leaves if you like as garnish

Serve hot with rice or lucchis (maida puris)

This jhol/curry can also be made with lamb or chicken

Kim's tips:
1. Choose a good quality mustard oil, as that will make a huge difference in the taste. There is no substitute for mustard oil in this particular recipe.
2. Mutton curries need some amount of large bones in the mix which really flavour the stew
3. If you are refrigerating meat during marination, always remember to bring it back to room temperature before cooking it.
4. Onions fry a little faster if you add a little salt to them while frying.

Kuswar - Manglorean Christmas Preparations - Sweet & Savoury

Kuswar is the term given to all the special preparations that are made around Christmas time in Mangalore. The preparations are either sweet or savoury. They are made in the run up to Christmas.

Fruit for the fruit cake is soaked well in advance (sometimes upto 2 months), but the rest of the preparations start around the 1st of December, depending on how many varieties and how much quantity is to be prepared.

This kuswar can be kept in air tight boxes at room temperature for 3-4 weeks and is served to everyone who visits the home. On Christmas day an assortment of kuswar is sent to friends and neighbours. In my grandma's time, all the kuswar used to be homemade and there were long discussions with each plate of kuswar that came home as to who made the best kokkisan, whose cakes were the lightest and moistest, which aunt had splurged on nuts and made marzipans and who was stingy with the filling in the neuris.

At mum's house, we kids learnt quickly which our favourites were and would call dibs on Aunty V's kokkisan and Aunty J's marshmallows as early as November. Even in the last few years, when I've lived continents away from mum, I call telephone dibs on some of these goodies  - since I always make it home for Christmas (except for 2 years).

My mum and her sisters too had their own specialities. And even though they were all settled in different cities, they all came home to Mangalore for Christmas to spend it at our grandparents place. Bringing kuswar goodies from their own kitchens.

Grandma always made the traditional kuswar - kidiyos - kulkuls, guliyos - marble balls , neurios - a cross between gujiyas and samosas with coconut filling, tandlache ladu - rice laddus (nanas were to die for), tukdyos, karakaddis, chaklis and the rest

I remember running to grandma's home as soon as school was over to help make the kuswar. An assembly line was set up around the dining table, under the efficient eyes of grandma. Mum, my aunts who had come in early, uncles who were cajoled into sitting down with us and the kids who were old enough to lend a hand, would all be seated round this table talking, laughing, joking and singing carols. It was so much fun and just thinking of those days warms my heart.

The frying was tough business because of the quantities involved and the Manglorean humid climate, so the frying station would be taken in turns. The younger kids kuswar shapes and sizes would be all over the place, but grandma would fry those misshapen pieces too and serve them for tea the same day. It was so much excitement for the little ones.

Mum does most of the baking. Since the majority of her kids hate raisins in our sweets, she normally makes a date and walnut cake rather than a fruit cake. Macaroons, date rolls, nankhats and other cookies.

Aunty T makes the stuff that needs strong arms for stirring - fudge, coconut burfi, peraad (guava halwa) and banana halwa.

Aunty M makes chocolates of different flavours and wraps them individually. Her secretary Sunita is East Indian and Sunita's mother an expert at East Indian cooking, sends us Marzipans, marshmallows, milk toffee, jujubes and other such goodies.

Aunty Z makes a mix of traditional kuswar and baked goodies. Her husband Uncle A makes some awesome homemade wines from a myriad of sources - rice, raisin, grapes, ginger or pineapple. He also makes a mean Irish cream.

I do have a lot of uncles who are completely at home in the kitchen. Uncle O's Christmas cake is famous. More fruit than flour. The pudding is so rich, you can just have a sliver of it, with a healthy side of vanilla ice cream to balance the richness. His pudding lasts for years in the fridge with no side effects.

Me, it depends on my mood. I know what mum is gonna make and try and make something different. But what I make is dependent on where I am, the availability of ingredients and the climatic conditions. Most often it is something completely non-traditional (because I know I can never cook kuswar as well as nana or mum and her sisters and I will get those goodies at home). One year it was gingerbread cookies, another I ended up with shaded marzipans (I couldn't get the colouring right), yule logs, jam rolls, thumbprint cookies, coconut cakes and so on.

When you try to keep refined flour, sugar and deep fried stuff at a minimum in your diet, its difficult to let go just because it is Christmas.

Traditional Manglorean kuswar uses rice, coconuts - grated and coconut milk, jaggery (now substituted with sugar), cashewnuts, eggs and cardamom for flavouring. And if frying was involved it was Dalda or Postman oil (not coconut oil except for banana chips). All these ingredients are grown locally and in the early days these came from ones own land. Soon cocoa and maida made an appearance in the ingredients list. With a populace that traveled the world and returned to Mangalore for Christmas, the influences soon trickled in from Anglo Indian, Goan and East Indian styles coupled with recipes from Australian and American issues of Womens Weekly and Good Housekeeping. All these recipes have been included in the Manglorean kuswar repertoire.

While the recipes I will cook myself in the run up to Christmas will not be the traditional ones, I will add my mums recipes with pictures once I go home. So you can expect the kuswar series to go on well into January when I'm back from my Christmas Vacation.


Edited on 5 Jan 2011 to add these pictures:

Suprisingly, I can't find a kuswar picture in my albums until 2007, will search further or take a better picture when I'm home later this week. Until then, "May the Peace and Blessings of the Christmas Season be with you and your family"

Terra Madre Day in Mangalore

Today was Terra Madre  day and I had hoped to cook something local, instead we were invited out for dinner with friends who were in the country for just awhile, so we ate at a local restaurant :)

Since I hadn't cooked, I asked my sis to send me a pic of something mum had cooked. Mum almost always cooks with locally available ingredients. Some of these ingredients and vegetables aren't even available outside of Mangalore.

In this picture is red rice (unpolished rice that is commonly eaten along the Kerala to Goa coast. Locally grown and sold. It takes much longer to cook than white rice and is not as soft to eat. It has a nutty flavour and is extremely high in nutrition. Nees - the water that it is boiled in, is extremely high in nutrients and is served to patients who do not have the strength to eat solids.

As kids with colds or fever that made us lose all taste for food, the remedy was a hot glass of nees with a piece of hot and spicy lime or mango pickle mixed into it for flavouring.

The dhal is a dish we call bimbli saar. Saar is very watery compared to a dhal, just slightly thicker than a rasam and it gets its sour taste from sliced bimblis - a local Manglorean sour fruit. Arhar/tuvar dhal is boiled with bimblis, chopped onions and green chillies in a pressure cooker. Seasoning is with sliced onion or crushed garlic or dry red chillies. - These spicy Red chillies are grown and dried in Kundapur - a town a few kilometers away from Mangalore.

The red dish is Rawa Fried Pomfret. The fish is caught off the coast of Mangalore. These are slices of pomfret marinated in Meet Mirsang which mum grinds herself at home and rolled in a light layer of rawa before frying with a tsp or 2 of oil.

Also see the recipe for Seer Fish fried with Meet Mirsang

The 2 vegetables are also local to Mangalore although in recent times, Tendli is now available outside the Konkan coast region. Gosale or Ridge Gourd also appears on our dining table quite often.

Tendli Mirya Peeto is made by cooking Tendlis with onions, sol (another local souring fruit that is used in dried form) and salt and pepper powder until done. Then a little coconut milk is added to the dish to tone down the pepper.
(To prep the tendlis, chop off the ends and make a single cut lengthwise upto half the depth of the tendli to allow the flavours to permeate better.

Gosale Naarl ani Tel Piyao is the traditional way of cooking most vegetables in our community. The preparation is also known as Fugath in Goan and Anglo Indian styles of cooking.

Scrape the edges of the ridge gourd to remove the thick and hard skin, but leave enough on. This vegetable is extremely high in fibre and it comes from its skin. Slice into thin circles.
Heat a tsp of coconut oil, add some sliced onions, lightly stir fry, then add the sliced ridge gourd.
Add salt and a souring agent like Sol or tamarind or bimblis to taste.
Cook till done.
Sprinkle fresh grated coconut on top and stir on the fire for a minute or 2 before taking it off the flame.

I have to mention that the coconuts used at home come from Grandma's garden and mum grates, grinds and extracts the coconut milk herself, no store bought Dabur Coconut milk has ever crossed her threshold.

What you see on that plate is a traditional vegetarian meal that is made at home when we want to eat light after nights of parties, when we have just arrived home and want to eat dishes we don't get outside or can't cook in our current cities or on Fridays in Lent. Wedding & Christening season has started in Mangalore and they are already eating light when eating at home.

Reminiscence: British Style Breakfast

I can eat so called "British style breakfast" at any hour of the day or night. My husband finds it really wierd that I can eat it at midnight, just before settling in for the night. I used to order it at the British Community Association - BCA in Cairo around 8pm and I regularly order the Santa Fe Skillet at the All American Diner at IHC whether its before or after an evening of theatre.

In a strange way, this is comfort food for me. In the days when I did eat breakfast, while I was going to school, Mum would rustle up bread and eggs-to-order each morning. We'd get exotic cheeses or bacon or ham, if dad had just returned from one of his trips. The locally made cured meats (from Farm Stores in Mallikatta or this guy who had a cold freeze near Shedigudda) were extremely expensive in those days and were only bought if one of the 4 of us had done very well in our exams.

So a solid breakfast with baked beans, and cold meats in addition to the bread and eggs either meant that dad was home or we were celebrating a minor scholastic success. It meant all 6 of us gathered around the dining table in our little apartment quickly sharing a meal before running off in our respective directions.

Potatoes were never a part of this morning feast at mums, so I never add hash browns or mashed potatoes or fries when I make this meal at home.

I normally start with a cured meat - bacon, ham or sausages. Once this has been fried, I pop in some onions saute for awhile and then add sliced mushrooms with a little salt and pepper and fresh or dried herbs depending on my mood at the moment. This provides the veggies and fibre for the meal. Once I've plated this, I fry an egg or 2 in the pan. The egg absorbs the flavours of the onion, mushrooms and cooks in the meat fat. The eggs go into a different plate. I then warm up some bread in the pan since I prefer lightly warmed bread to toast.

I occasionally spoon a teaspoon or 2 of baked beans onto the plate, but mostly I just use tomato sauce. I love tomato ketchup with omlettes and scrambled eggs.