How the Year Started or my Veg Kofta Saga

This year started quietly for me like most years. I have hardly been one for new year parties so it's not unusual for me to have a quiet start to the year. I did make a resolution which is not a resolution- to not change anything about myself which destroys the aim of a New Year resolution.

Anyway, that aside, I started this year with some cooking. That basically ensured that I did not even chop up an onion for the rest of the week. Cooking is either appetite based or mood based for me. I would never cook for the rest of my life if food was put in front of me everyday and if it was interesting food. It is always the latter that inspires me to cook and bake, to make food interesting.I started off with an old recipe with a new twist. Vegetable Koftas were something I tried about a year ago when my mother was out of town. I made a huge box of Vegetable Kofta Curry which was promptly devoured at lunch by the rest of my team. I have been subjected to empty flattery ever since requesting a repeat of the dish. I being lazy me did not want to make it. But finally the other day, I bought a packet of paneer and decided to try making deep fried koftas. Yes, I was a wuss last time and did not dare to deep fry anything. So anyway, with a great deal of help from my mother and my refrigerator I ended up with great looking koftas ( mostly) and mom even recycled the leftovers as vegetable cutlets the next day.

On my kitchen counter:

Handful of peas

7-8 cauliflower florets- par boiled and grated

One carrot- grated

About 100g of paneer grated

2 potatoes boiled

Bread crumbs

Salt

Green Chillies- 2 chopped

Red Chilli Powder

Turmeric

Jeera Powder

Amchur

Coriander Powder

Kitchen King Masala

2 Onions

3 Tomatoes 

Ginger Garlic Paste

Garam Masala

Corn Flour

Bread Crumbs

Coriander leaves- chopped

1-2 Cloves

A small piece of cinnamon

A small piece of bayleaf

Jeera

How to make this curry:

1. Start with some oil in a pan, add green chillies and saute them for couple of minutes. Add peas and some water and cook until the peas are boiled.

2. Grate the parboiled cauliflower and add to the pan along with the grated carrots. Add turmeric powder, salt, chilly powder, jeera powder, coriander powder, amchur  and a pinch of garam masala and mix well.

3.  Saute until all the vegetables are cooked and do not retain too much water. This is to make the forming of the koftas easier.

4. Combine the grated paneer, mash of the boiled potatoes and the bread crumbs and corn flour along with coriander leaves. Take the mixture in step 3 and allow it to cool before kneading it together with the above mixture.

5. Shape into small spheres between your hands and deep fry the Koftas in oil and drain excess oil on a tissue and allow to rest.

If koftas begin to break when you are frying them, give them an additional coating of bread crumbs and place in fridge to set before frying again. If your oil has crumbly bits, filter it before continuing with your frying. Try to make it homogenous on the outer layer by mashing up the peas or pushing them to the center of the kofta, else you might have a case of exploding peas.

6. The curry is quite straight forward. Add jeera and allow it to splutter. Add cloves, bayleaf and cinnamon.

7. Add ginger garlic paste and chopped/pureed onions and fry until it is well cooked.

8. Place tomatoes in boiling water and allow them to cook. Remove the skin and puree.

9. Add puree to step 7. Add turmeric, jeera powder, coriander powder, kitchen king masala, chilli powder and salt. Mix well.

10. When the tomato starts to exude oil, add water and oil to bubble and boil.

11. When the curry boils and reduces add a dollop of cream and mix well.

Just about 1/2 hr before you eat, remember to add the koftas to the curry and mix carefully without mashing them. Also avoid soaking them for too long as they will break apart and make a mess of your gravy.

This hot dish can be enjoyed with steaming phulkas or rice, whichever way you like it.

The 2015 Book Challenge- My Year with Eleanor

The Good-reads beginning of the year book challenge is my perpetually broken new year resolution. Every year I start with an ambitious number of books that I want to read. Inevitably I start and never finish on time. My book reading habit falls along the side when I watch random series and don't take up any books. Months go by before I read a book. This year hopefully, Scribd will keep me on the straight and narrow with a book on my phone, anywhere anytime. But I decided just like many others taking up this challenge this year, that I would not challenge myself to read a large number of books, but just 75 books from which I am able to at least take away one thing, which makes me laugh, cry or inspires me. I am not going to aim to read a large number of pages like some have chosen to do- say with War and Peace or Crime and Punishment. One of the most intriguing books of all times is Antoine De Expury's Little Prince which is not longer than fifty odd pages if I am right.

So I guess, if I have 75 "Aha" moments in some way, those 75 books will make the list and I will meet my goal. I found my first 'interesting idea' book . It's a book called 'My Year with Eleanor '. The author embarks on a journey of fighting her fears inspired by a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt. She goes on to read about Eleanor Roosevelt and agree and disagree with her, be inspired by her. Most of what she does is confront her anxieties and worries and discovers ways to combat them. She chooses to do this on her year transitioning from 29-30. The reading does get a bit whiny at bits, but she draws you in, makes you relate to her and you almost wish you were skydiving with her or climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. It was a good beginning to the year, helped me resolve to breathe and relax when I find myself worrying about anything. It reminded me to challenge myself to do something I have never done before, each and every day of my life.

Pav Bhaji Reloaded

So this is pretty much old wine in a new bottle. A recycled post on Pav Bhaji, since I already waxed eloquent about this dish in an older post about couple of months ago. I had all the vegetables to make Pav Bhaji yesterday, thanks to my mother and I picked up some minuscule pav buns when I was out shopping for other stuff. I had one of my closest friends over yesterday for dinner on a very very hurried visit. So it is a funny story why her visit was as short as it was. She was heading down from her hotel on Richmond Road and had booked a cab with Ola. About 10 minutes past the time of arrival, she was frantically calling the cab driver to find out why he wasn't still there. Imagine her surprise when she discovered that he had already left with another passenger who had also booked an Ola. To put it in her words, the girl who took the cab also shamelessly spoke to her and said she had taken the cab and was half way to her destination. The only saving grace was that she hadn't recharged her Ola account and didn't end up paying for a trip they did not take.

So anyway, getting back to Pav Bhaji, I had a recipe which I tried the last time I blogged about it. But I wanted to do more research to oomph up the recipe. A few articles were read and a few videos were watched. The recipe I tried yesterday had a smack of authenticity because it was a video of a beach-side stall in Juhu, Mumbai. So here goes another yummy version of Pav Bhaji.

On my kitchen counter:

5 Tomatoes

3 medium sized potatoes 

Quarter of a cabbage- Finely chopped

Beans- 3/4 chopped

Carrot-1 chopped ( Too much will make it sweet)

Peas- A handful and a half

Pav Bhaji Masala

Hing

Salt

Chilli Powder

Turmeric Powder
Green Chillies-3
Ginger Garlic Paste
Oil
Butter
1 chopped onion

What you need to do:

1. Puree the tomatoes and keep aside.

2. Boil all vegetables except potatoes with some water and run through a blender to get a coarse paste.
3. Boil potatoes and mash well.
4. Chop up 3/4 green chillies. Add a mix of oil and butter in a tava and add the chillies and fry well. If you have capsicum you can add at this point and roast it until light brown.
5. Add 1 tsp of ginger garlic paste and saute well. Add the tomato puree and some more butter if needed. Allow the tomato puree to cook until it starts releasing oil. Add salt and turmeric powder at this point. Add chilli powder according to taste as well.
6. Now combine the vegetable paste and add about 2 Tbsp of Pav Bhaji Powder. Mix well and add some water. Allow to boil and cook well. Taste and add more chilli powder or salt at this point.
7. Once the vegetables are well combined and the mixture is bubbling, add the mashed potatoes and some more Pav Bhaji powder if needed and mash further to combine.
8. On another tava, heat up a Tbsp of butter. Add a tsp of ginger garlic paste, some chilli powder, salt and the chopped onions. Saute until light brown and combine with the mixture in step 7.
9. Your bowl emptyingly yummy Bhaji is ready to be enjoyed with buttered pavs.

Of Letters and Novels

How long has it been since you wrote a letter or received one? Very long is what I think.  When I was young, I used to look forward to my grandfather's letters. They inevitably contained a cheat sheet for an upcoming essay or elocution contest. He also sent me pictures for my favourite academic activity, making the fattest prettiest geography record book. I know, I am such a nerd. I was also fascinated by Nehru's book, Letters from a father to a daughter. It goes through prehistory, the industrial revolution all the way until colonial India. That book makes you wish that somebody would write to you like that. This is not an essay in defense of handwritten letters, I like them as much as the next person, but I type faster than I write. All I am defending is a good long email. We all instant message, WhatsApp, we share information in small units and expect instant reactions. It is convenient and wonderful that we can share our lives with people we care about. But we tend tp lose sight of some special quirks that communication should have. 

A letter contains a lot of its writer, consciously or unconsciously. That' s the best part of a letter. It conveys a feeling, a tone, sometimes things that you never meant to convey at all. I have often had this argument that writing is a projection and not the truth of the author. It might be true. But sometimes reading between the lines tells you much of things left unwritten. I find it difficult to understand even this, because most of the time my writing sounds exactly like me- pedantic, opinionated and with more asides than topics of conversation. While I don't write rude emails, I often have been told that I sound angry. Lots of times I do mean it, rest of the time even when I am writing a forced polite reply, the anger seeps into what I am trying to say. See what I mean about conveying things the author doesn't mean.

I have always loved epistolatory novels. I think they make great serial stories and keep you waiting for the next installment. Some of my top favorites are Daddy Long Legs, Dear Enemy, Anne of Windy Willows. All of these are romances. Daddy Long Legs is a budding college girl romance. It's a one-sided communication. That's what is great about letters right now, they are sort of unconditional. You keep it open so the other person can decide how they want to respond. Dear Enemy is a beautiful documentation of escalating clashes of opinion, wills and theories culminating in a romance.  Anne writes to her fiance while she waits to get married. The book is tilled with newsy prosy letters you wish you could write. I recently re read one of mu other favorites, The Guernsey Potato Peel Pie and Literary Society. Filled with different voices and styles blending to form a single story, it could be a manual for letter writing.

For all my enthusiasm on writing letters, I become rather stilted when I write a letter. I write 3 word sentences. I am funny unless I try to be funny. If I try, it makes bad reading. So if I want to write a great epistolatory novel some day, I need oodles of practice writing letters.

This week in Reading

So this was a good week for my reading. Despite various distractions I have been making headway on and finished a couple of books. So the first book on my bookshelf was Major. Pettigrew's Last Stand. Now this a book I bought purely based on the opinions of a blogger whose blog review I happened to read. Well, at one level this book made me glad that I did not buy a brand new copy. So most readers have their top lists right, books they love, like, endure. My meter goes pretty much like airport or rail book( the kind u read and pretty much don't care abt) they are sort of those short mystery thriller types, unless you read gone girl on an air trip. Then there are your well thumbed childhood favorites, either you know them off by heart so you don't buy them or you keep really old copies and hate yourself when you sell them.  Then there are the books you like to read and preserve, like if you are collecting a series. So you handle those with care. Then there are those which you just might spare cash to but the hard bound edition.  But a little annoying are the books that you wonder why you bought.

This book was definitely one of them. I couldn't quite put my finger on one single thing that troubled me. At the face of it, it claims to be a twilight romance of an unlikelcy couple which is actually an interesting subject. It' s just that I didn't like any particular person in the book at all.  The major is pompous, and a tad bigoted absolutely until the last page. Mrs. Ali is a one dimensional character who tries to break all the rules. It is interesting though that you actually like the characters you are expected to dislike, that is partly intended by the author, but it's also because they are the ones with any sort of variety.

It wasn't a complete waste of time though, some of the observations are wry and the descriptions of the English countryside are great. But for all its attempts,  it seems to me like it is a glorified multicultural catalog.