Em nein chaalen... No Parsi restaurants for Bandraites

My Parsi (and only) mother in law often complains about the contestant in Kaun Banega Crorepati (Who Wants To Be a Millionaire) who didn't know that dhansak was a Parsi dish.

The Parsi community is a fairly small one. I don't think there are enough Parsis in India to fill up Eden Gardens (a cricket stadium in Calcutta). So many would be unaware of the culinary treasures of this quirky community. But those who know of Parsis, and there would be many in Mumbai, would know that Parsis love their food. And it's not just dhansak but quite a few other dishes such as patrani machhi, farcha, lacy cutlet, custard and sali boti which are legendary too.

Strangely enough, Bandra, which is a hot bed of restaurants, doesn't have a good Parsi restaurant. Lebanese, Thai, Italian, Japanese, Mexican ... yes. Parsi? No.

There are quite a few Parsis who live at Bandra and there are a couple of Parsi colonies too. Yet the famous Parsi restaurants, Britannia (only lunch), Mocambo (only lunch), Paradise (I have never been there), Jimmy Boy (great memories but apparently down the drain) are all at the Fort area in extreme South Mumbai. It is as if the community which built South Mumbai never look bothered to look down to the burbs.

The closest to a Parsi restaurant at Bandra is Snack Shack at Pali Naka. they have four tiny tables under an awning. They home deliver too (26005010). Their chicken cutlets are pretty good, the filling is squishy and is a big hit whenever we have guests over. Their fare is slightly limited though as they have different dishes on different days of the week. As far as I remember it is dhansak (well made and very tasty) on Sunday, pulao daal (again very good but very little daal) on Thursday, Patrani Machhi (passable, Mamma used to love it) on the weekend, you get the idea. Snack items like cutlets, farcha, custard, sali par eendu (I prefer Kainaz's, she loves their's) and sali boti ( a bit sweet.. I like them, Kainaz doesn't, my in laws do) are there everyday. They serve sandwiches as well and my father in law is a big fan of their Club Sandwiches.

So what do you do if you want dhansak on a weekday?

I had some friends coming over the other day and one of them is a Parsi food fan. He is a Maharashtrian who grew up in South Mumbai and now misses Parsi food in Dubai.

I found out about this place called Cheron at Hill Road. You get dhansak and other non Parsi dishes there. It is a takeaway joint. Their dhansak was very substantial (more than Snack Shack's). Kainaz really loved it. That's the true test. For whatever its worth, my friends liked it too. But they were in their old boss' house.

The only problem was that we ordered chicken dhansak and each portion came with one big chunk of chicken on the bone. This is a problem if you have guest. Snack Shack's comes with smaller pieces. I think Cheron has a 20 % discount after 8 PM.

There is also a RTI outlet at the beginning of Turner Road at the Parsi Colony there. RTI's quality and taste is a bit inconsistent to put it politely.

Another very good Parsi option if you are entertaining at home is Elphinstone Club at Sterling, South Mumbai. They deliver home if you give a day's notice, pay cab fare and the order's five hundred plus. But their dhansak (very venerable), patrani machhi (best I have ever had and yet so cheap) and chicken farcha (so succulent that people are still raving about it) are show stoppers. They send the food in a container and you have to unload it and give the container back. Let me know if you are interested and I will mail you their number. They deliver to non members too.

Here's hoping that one day we will be able to chant the Parsi war cry jaamva chaalo ji (let's go to eat) and walk into a good Parsi restaurant at Bandra.

Watch this spot for my laments on the lack of Bengali restaurants in Bandra.

Note: Most dishes mentioned at Snack Shack and Cheron are less than Rs 100 (2 USD) each. The stuff at Elphinstone is very reasonable too for the quality and the portions are as a big as a Parsi's heart.

Brownies are brown bread - my experiments with dieting

Warning: longish post

I was quite chubby as a kid. My mom used to explain it off by saying that it was thanks to the full cream and good quality of milk and Swiss chocolate abroad. Kids would rib me on this. I even remember a teacher who used to call me ‘baby elephant’. I once won some special prize in the ‘healthy baby category’.

I did yoga when I was ten and some sort of sanity was brought into my diet – four rotis instead of ten parathas, one instead of four samosas in the evening, a dab of ketchup versus a bowl – and I soon shed most of what was politely called baby fat.

I was fairly skinny through school. College posed another problem where a number of girls, and their mothers (!), felt I was too thin and gangly and would keep exhorting me to put on weight. That’s Bengal for you. I actually used to have bananas, small packs of peanuts and the odd tiny Cadbury Dairy Milk after exercising to gain weight. No wonder we miss our college days so much.

The next life changing experience happened when I begun working in Calcutta in an office which had exotic evening snacks on the house. Dry fruit milk shakes, masala dosas, mutton rolls, fish fries were like rain in a drought hit area. A big change from college days, when six of us would share a vegetable chop in Pramod da’s canteen at Presidency.

I put on close to ten kilos.

I then shifted to Mumbai where P G (Paying Guest) living, vegetarian dinners at the P G, climbing the bridges in train stations, long walks from Dadar Station to work and later from work to Churchgate Station and then the travails of courtship kept my weight in check.

The dam burst after I married a chocoholic. Moving to our own rented house from the restrictions of a P G, the contentment of marriage and nights of sharing a half kilo truffle cake from Croissants etc, a family pack of ice cream from Snow Bite, 250 g packs of gulab juman from Damodar Sweets and the odd box of Ferrero Rocher between the two of us while watching TV began to show.

That’s when Kainaz came up with the amateur dieter’s favourite, the G M diet. I have often heard people talk about this since then. Listening to them takes me back to our G M diet days – when we went to a movie on the first night with a box of water melons to forget our hunger, when I rustled up a few recipes (slices of potato baked in the micro with a touch of butter, oregano ad chilly flakes and chicken stir fried in soya sauce,no oil, and spring onions, ditto with mushrooms), when I searched for a road side sandwich guy in Nariman Point who had brown bread for the brown bread day and when I politely refused a client invite to a party as it clashed with the last day of the diet!

I did the diet twice. Lost 4.5 kg the first time, 3 the next. Tried twice again. And failed. Kainaz lost far less both times but I believe men lose weight more quickly and I had more weight to lose.

Our next big diet programme was with Dr N. This was a fairly simple plan, no carbs at night, roti or rice on alternate weeks for lunch, sugar free sachets, no limits on meat and oil AND one ‘break’ day where you could eat anything. They had the odd powder stuff too which we had to mix in water and have. We used to really look forward to the break day – biriyani, waffles, ice cream, cake, hakka noodles… we piled it on then. Mutton chaap, pork and potato curries and beef steak from Martins for dinner on other days would help us forget carbs. Good fun.

I lost about seven or eight kilos in close to six months.

And my cholesterol count went for a toss!

I made two other paid attempts to lose weight since then. I gained weight both times as I didn’t really find them practical to follow. And my heart was into dieting anymore.

I was slowly turning into ‘The Knife’.

The first was with a filmi dietitian who sat in the basement of a hair dresser. My ex boss and I used to go there on Saturdays. We were the only two men waiting there for ages amongst a gaggle of matronly aunties.

The key mantra of the diet were no oil and eat EVERY two hours. A great idea. I ate every two hours but I think I strayed a bit from stuff like Marie biscuits which she had in mind. I gained two kilos before I decided to stop.

The last attempt was what still makes my blood boil. It was a monumental waste of a very large sum of money. It was at this cult like organisation where they promised to change your Life through diets, exercise, psychotherapy and technology.

The place was every disorganised and one would waste a whole Sunday morning there. They promised a never before international experience. What one came across was a set of instructors, running around like headless chickens at various levels of disinterest.

There was a dietitian who was good. But the dietitians kept changing and the others didn’t match up to her. And who can have dinner by 8 P M in any case? They also had this thing about counting measures of everything one ate at the end of the day. Now as a market researcher all I can say is that data is useless and unless you get some insights out of it and use it. That didn't happen here and all one got was some exercise from writing it down everyday.

The exercising would aggravate my back and they would give fancy gadgets to count steps while walking which never worked. There was the odd electrode session where one would lay strapped under things that tickled you for half an hour.

And, if one hadn’t suffered enough, there was the life mentor. Clearly the most un-enthused person in the set up. She made me fill a long questionnaire in the first session. She never told me what to do with the results. She would take me to the weighing scales on other days, sigh at my weight gain and shunt me to the next person. So much for the life changing psychological counselling!

She did try a bit of shrinking after I pestered her about it. She asked me to imagine my favourite pastry (Birdy’s New York pastry) and then imagine that it had turned red. She then asked me whether I’d still eat it? I said I would as it was probably a cherry cheese cake.

I think she was meant to say that it was covered with blood.

We were mutually happy to see each other’s back when the programme ended.

The experience was life changing as promised.

I moved away from organised diets for ever.

The Knife was born.

Bachelor days - Indo French Toast

The other day I read an article by Vikram Doctor, one of my favourite Indian writers on food, in the Economic Times. This was on the Indian version of French toasts.

Unlike the French version, which is sweet, the Indian one is salty and spicy.

As Doctor says, this is a lovely way of converting tired, limp bread into a lipsmacking dish. He also said, that most men who dabble in the kitchen are partial to this as this is one of the first dishes one learns to make. Very true. I often used to make this for the family on Sundays in Calcutta, years back when I was in college.

I remember Calcutta street food guys selling something called 'deem paruti' (egg and bread) at the office area of Nizam Palace in the early eighties. They use to dunk a thick slice of bread in egg and toast it over a portable coal oven. I used to quite like it as a chubby seven year old on my way back from International School at Lee Road.

Doctor's article brought up some fond memories and I decided to make some French Toast before setting off to work the other day. They turned out to be best 'French Toasts' that I have ever made. Put me in a lovely mood as I sat behind the wheels to navigate the morning traffic to work.

So here's the real and easy way to make French Toast. This version is with olive oil and egg whites to tide over middle age angst of cholesterol, B P, etc. If you are young and restless with the world ahead of you then go ahead and use the whole egg, regular oil or even, dare I utter the forbidden word, butter.

Ingredients:

• 3 slices of white bread
• About 4 tablespoons of olive oil
• 2 eggs whites It's very easy to get egg whites. Crack an egg and let the egg plop into a bowl. Take a spoon and carefully scoop out the yellow and put it into another bowl, the bin, whatever. What remain is egg 'whites' - actually a transparent gel like thingie
• Add a dash of salt, pepper powder and (optional) oregano and chilly flakes and half a tea cup or a third of a coffee mug of milk to the egg and beat it. Note: 'beating' an egg means violently stirring it with a fork, spoon or an egg beater. Do not, I repeat do not, try an upper cut which sends the egg straight on to the kitchen wall. Your land lady, mother, spouse, partner won't see the humour
• Condiments: A teaspoon each of finely chopped chilles, tomatoes, capsicum/ bell peppers and green chillies. Other suggested additions are a touch of chopped ham, left over liver from chicken curry (I used to do that In Calcutta). Keep the condiments to a minimum as it will be dificult to mange the toast if over loaded

Process :

• Heat the oil in a non stick pan - 1 minute
• Put in the condiments (onion, chilly, etc) in the oil and fry them - 1.5 to 2 minutes
• Dunk the bread in the egg and smear both sides of the slice with the egg mixture
• Place the egg smeared bread on the condiments in the pan, let it fry on low flame for a minute or so and delicate flip it over with a ladle. The surface facing you should have hardened a bit. Flip this after a minute and repeat the cycle - 5 -6 minutes
• If you are feeling a but naughty then add a cheese slice or some grated cheese on the toast towards the end. There are few tastes more sensuous than that of cheese melted on a frying pan.
• Garnish with some chopped coriander. Alternates would be finely chopped curry leaves or basil
• Take the toast out when you feel its crisp enough
• Have it with ketchup

Note: there are a few points to keep in mind while making French Toast:

• DO NOT skimp on the oil. You would end up with soggy, limp toast
• DO NOT over do the condiments. You would find it difficult to flip the toast and it could break if there is too much sticking to it
• Try cutting the slice into two if you find it difficult to mange the whole slice

Vikram Doctor calls this 'Bombay' Toast. I disagree with this though as I had learnt to make French Toast it from my mother who had never come to Bombay at that point.

I prefer to call it Indo French Toast!

Blogging in the time of back ache

My back gave in again.

Thanks to being chosen over a taxi service after dinner a few days back, followed by a flooded kitchen yesterday where I had to scoop out the water with a ladle and, close your eyes, found the carcass of a dead rat!

I have been pretty much knocked flat since then and my back's been stiffer than the famed British upper lip. Driving makes it worse and no one has worse luck than us with drivers.

But I have missed blogging like anything. I am addicted to blogging and to writing. And what fires me up the most is seeing the reader stats tick AND the lovely comments which readers often leave behind. I suffer from severe withdrawal symproms when I am the blog. And mobile blogging is not working out to be a satisfactory patch so far.

Thankfully Scarlett kept the Finely Chopped flag flying even when I was out of action with her lovely G M diet friendly chicken and tomato creation.

My back pain's a bit dull right now so I thought that I'll sneak in a few posts while I can.

Brokeback cooking - grilled peri peri chicken and parboiled herbed potato fries

This one's so easy to make that I could even make it through my back ache. And it tasted really good, different and, at the risk of sounding like a food marketer's brief, tasty AND healthy.

I did use a bottled sauce, but hey, do you think that restaurants make all their ingredients and sauces themselves?

Peri Peri Chicken

• The key ingredient was Nando's Hot Peri Peri sauce. I got this at Pali Market, Bandra and it should be there in most malls. It's made with lemon, garlic, chillies and sun dried tomatoes. It's on the tangy side and costs Rs 165 (3.25 USD). It's made in South Africa. It should last 3 meals for two
• I took 6 chicken drumsticks. Made cuts in them for the marinade to go in.
• Marinated these with about 3 table spoons of the sauce and half a tea spoon of salt.
• Kept this for an hour in the fridge
• Took these out and put them on the grilling plate of the micro and switched on the 'tandoori chicken' cycle. This is a prefixed cycle which lasts 30 minutes and alternates between microwave and grill automatically. It beeps half way through when you take out the whole grill plate carefully and turn the drumsticks around so that they grill evenly. You can use an oven too if you have one
• With the final beep your grilled, oil free, peri peri chicken is ready

I wanted to have these with some potato chips but didn't want to deep fry them. So this is what I did:

• Sliced three potatoes into wedges
• Boiled these wedges in the micro for seven minutes. They became a bit soft and cooked. You need less oil this way
• Heated a table spoon of olive oil in a pan
• Tossed in the potatoes.
• Sprinkled some salt and chilly flakes and oregano from pizza delivery sachets.
• Stirred them gently for a while
• The result was a nice, slightly braised (crisp outside, soft inside) potato fries

Had this exotic meal with some chopped pao (local bread).

So there you have grilled peri peri chicken and herbed potato fries... impressive and yet can be cooked in one's sleep.

And the best thing, is no one will know :)

P S got a very interesting question from Scarlett... how do you grill in the micro without the mess? My solution - put a flat plate on the micro grill plate. Then put the micro grill plate on it and the stuff to grill on the plate. The juices will fall and collect on the plate. You can later spoon a bit of this on the food when you are serving it.

The sauce that broke the Knife's back... very easy meat sauce

You have heard me moan about by back pain.

Well here's the story of what set it off this time. The recipe of a sauce and noble intentions to please the little woman.

Deepti, who is the only person I know who puts more Facebook updates on food than me, recently made a meat sauce. I asked her what the recipe was. It seemed (and is) so simple that I decided to go home and make it for Kainaz after work. I felt that the dish would be right up my Continental loving Bawi's (Parsi woman) street. To complete the evening I picked up a very girly movie, He's Just Not That Into You.

I went to Pali Market next door, picked up the ingredients, and provisions like juices and Chicken Maggi (which I am suddenly addicted to) and the DVD from Movie Empire. Drove back, took the four bags out of the car, my laptop bag and brolly in one hand, opened the lift door with another... and ping!

Well I strapped up the belt around my waist and hit the pans. That's how easy the recipe was.

So here's the recipe, which is essentially Deepti's:

Ingredients:

• Chicken kheema (mince): 250 g (I am sure she would use red meat)


• 3 finely chopped tomatoes


• A handful of finely chopped basil


• 3 red chillies, finely chopped


• A spoon of crushed garlic


• A table spoon of olive oil


• A pack of chopped button mushrooms (my contribution)


• Salt


• 1.5 cup of milk1 table spoon of corn flour ( I needed this as the sauce curdled. Doesn't happen with Deepti though)


• And her secret ingredient - 2 small blocks/ pieces of dark chocolate. This was a new discovery for me but added a fantastic body, aroma and taste to the dish

Method:

• Heat the oil in a pan (1 min)


• Add the tomato and gently pat them with a ladle till they become soft (3 min)


• Add the meat, basil, crushed garlic, chillies and salt and stir till the meat cooks (5 min)


• Add the milk and let it boil


• This is where it begun to curdle. I added a bit of corn flour dissolved in a spoon of milk to stabilise it


• When it's done (5 minutes later) add the chocolate and see the dish magically transfer from a pale face to rich ebony. The aroma is sensuous and the taste is magical. A whole new world.


• Deepti suggests eating this with herb rice (rice tossed in a bit of olive oil, oregano and chilly flakes). We had it with a baguette from Candies. You could toss it over some boiled spaghetti too.

Kainaz love the film. And the sauce.

So love's labour wasn't lost.

Busy Bee ... New Sardar

The ingenuity and enterprise of New Sardar , the restaurant close to my office at Chinchpokli, continues to amaze me.

I was quite fed up with the cold dosas which my office canteen served. They claimed that it would get cold while getting it from the first floor to the second. So I ordered an idli from New Sardar which is actually down the road. They delivered this puny (Rs 18/ 20 cent US) order in five minutes. Piping hot. This morning I missed breakfast at home and felt like having the Maharashtrian dish of Misal Pao. This is a slightly messy thing to order in, specially if you don't have plates or bowls, as it consists of a pulse (matki in Marathi and Moth beans in English as Manasi tells us) and gravy, farsan (gram flour fritters) and bread. I called Sardar who had won an award for the best Misal Pao in Mumbai. They sent it in five minutes, piping hot, in a tiffin carrier with individual carriers for the components AND a spoon. And took it back when I was done.

Now that's what I call customer service.

Frankly, I shouldn't be surprised though. I happened to meet the owner, Vivek Prabhu, one day at the restaurant. Vivek is a C A by training who took up the responsibility of running his family business. Vivek spoke to me at length on his efforts to contemporarise his restaurant. He caters to a mix of up heeled executives to daily wage earners and needs to have a range which appeals to both. So you will have a nice, refreshing ice tea co-existing with an ethnic butter milk or chhas.

Vivek is a South Indian but Sardar is known for its Maharashtrian food. However it is located in a locality, Chinchpokli, which has an increasingly non Maharashtrian clientele. Vivek tries to keep up with this trend by innovating and introducing fancy sandwiches and garlic bread and fasting food. He is particularly proud of his garlic dosa which he claims to be the only garlic dosa in the world. I have tasted it and found it to be pleasantly buttery with a subtle garlic taste. Vivek pointed out that most other fusion dosas fuses the South Indian dosa with other cuisines - spring dosa (Chinese), Palak dosa (Punjabi). Garlic dosa is the only one which uses a predominantly South Indian ingredient - garlic.

Well as you see Vivek is proud of his restaurant which is named after a title, Sardar, which his grandfather got in his village years back. He loves to talk and you have to keep some time aside if you happen to chat him up. But I would strongly recommend that if you like men of food.

The fare at my office canteen seems quite unappetising today. So I have ordered a masala dosa from Sardar.

Back Burner

There are tons of things i want to write about. But I aggravated my back again while shopping to make meat sauce on thu evening. I love blogging and terribly miss writing. At least the meat sauce turned out great. Thanks for the recipe Deepti and for introducing me to bitter chocolate in sauces. I made a lovely grilled peri peri chicken in the micro yesterday with sauted potatoes. Also want to write about the lack of bengali and parsi joints in bandra and about the buffet in the hyatt. But cant use the comp and mobile blogging sucks (i cant see the end of the screen and hence the strange ending) and makes me use swear words. Thankfully i can read good old books and buy kaatla at kharwrite no.

Introducing the Mango Shrikhand Sundae

As you probably know by now, I was at Goa this weekend!!!!

Kainaz and I were in this dreamlike hotel in secluded side of South Goa. The weather was wet and romantic. The sea was tempestuous. It was green and serene all around.

And my thoughts turned to food.

So I first conjured Calcutta's phuchkas at Goa and then created the mango shreekhand sundae.

I first had shreehand at a Gujarati friend's house at Calcutta. The next time was at a Maharashtrian friend's house at Calcutta. I won't start a civil war by attributing it to either Maharashtrians or Gujaratis. I think that both communities are fond of shreekhand and make it very well.

I fell in love with this sweet, clammy, sourish, yogurt based dish from right from the first bite. And have always asked for seconds and fourths since. Shreekhand is very viscous and one can take a spoonful and let it melt in one's mouth over half an hour. All right, that's an exaggeration but I am taking of some seriously sweet stuff here. While it is made from yogurt, it is a lot thicker than the Bengali mishti doi.

The buffet at the Park Hyatt at Goa had a mango (flavoured) shreekhand one day. I decided to add some chocolate sauce, chopped peanuts and crushed cookies which they had kept in the ice cream counter at the spur of the moment.

The result was quite divine. Shreekhand is very sweet and yet tangy. The chocolate sauce got in a sense of reason in it and broke the sweetness. The peanuts gave a nice crunch to the combination. The crushed milk cookies added a more sobre, milky sweetness in comparison to the wild taste shreekhand and seemed to hold the whole dish together.

I love shreekhand and can have it by the spoon till I explode. And you don't need too many spoons for that. But I found the Sundae version to give many more layers and character to Shreekhand.

"Worth repeating" as my Mom in Law says when she likes something.

Shreekhand, chocolate sauce, milk cookies, peanuts are easily available in Mumbai and you could try this as a dessert option when you have guests.

By the way, any idea whether Shreekhand belongs to either Maharashtrians or Gujaratis?

The dish in the back ground in the photo is a muffin pudding. This was an interesting bready pudding with layers of preserved tangerines at the base. I guess someone at the Hyatt kitchen had a hyperactive imagination too.

Lindsay Street Phuchkas at Goa... Park Hyatt

Whenever I think of Goa, which is very often, I think of the pork chilly fry of Infantaria, the prawn baffad of Brittos , the water buffalo baguette of Lila Cafe, and the mussels chilly fry of Love Shack.


Phuchkas, from the streets of Kolkata, definitely don't feature here.


Phuchkas are first cousins twice removed of Delhi's golgappas and Mumbai's paanipuris. What makes phuchkas different is that these are stuffed with mashed potatoes unlike boondi (tiny, hollow gram flour paste balls), tomato, sprouted moong or onion which are stuffed into its cousins. And the water in phuchkas is hot and sour (tamarind based) and doesn't have the sweet chutney which the other versions have.


My favourite phuchka seller is the guy at Lindsay street at Kolkata, near New Empire Cinema and New Market. What makes his phuchkas distinctive is the hint of pudina that he puts in his tamarind water which forms a lovely cooling relief to the sour spice of the regular chilly powder doused tamarind water.




So how did I get Lindsay Street phuchkas in a five star in South Goa at the other end of the country?


We stayed at the Park Hyatt, Goa this weekend for a long aspired to South Goa monsoon luxury holiday after dipping into my pension.


Well, the Park Hyatt had quite a good buffet spread. It was quite different from the insipid, faceless fare in usual five star meal packages.


They had a live counter at night where they served lovely Goan prawn chilly fries the first night. The next night they had a vegetable kathi roll counter which we ran away from.


That's when I went to the chaat counter. They had everything - paapri chaat, daahi chaat, paanipuri and what have you. But my eyes lit up when I saw the ingredients. I saw the paani puri shells, same as phuchkas. I saw spiced mashed potato. I saw chopped green chillies. I saw regular sour water (khatta paani) of chaats made with tamarind water, chilly powder AND pudina like the Lindsay Street guy!!!!


I walked up to the counter and told them to put a bit of mashed potatoes and green chillies in the phuchka shells and to give them to me with a bowl of the tamarind and mint water.



I dunked the stuffed phuchkas into the tamarind water and took a bite. And I reached busy New Market in Calcutta in two seconds.

The phuchkas tasted perfect - crisp, spicy, sour, cool. You took a bite into the delicate flour shell and the heady mix of cherubic mashed potato, flirtatious sour and minty water and devilish green chillies just poured into your mouth and said, "hello old friend".


I had about ten phuchkas. Interspersed between succulent grilled chicken, lovely lamb vindaloo and some excellent rabri for dessert.


As they say, you can take the Bengali out of Calcutta but you can't take phuchka out of the Bengali!




More on the Park Hyatt buffet, and why it was different from the standard hotel package fare, later...

Goa again

Hi, am at Goa for a sudden two day break and surprise gift to the little woman. Surprises don't work well in the rat race, but here we are after cutting my initial plan by a day and manic cancellations and reschedulings at my end to fit her work schedule. But thats a distant memory in paradise. We are in south goa, a paradise. Very different from our Baga. So no visits to our favourite infanteria and brittos. Though i must say that the food had been fairly good for resort buffet. And nothing beat listening to the roar of the sea and seeing it grey and mighty, while keying this from our balcony. and the missus loves the bathroom t

Babe... Thai Brinjals

Have you ever come across brinjals (egg plants/ aubergines) with an identity crisis?

Well Thai brinjals are a bit like Babe the piglet who thought that he was a sheep dog.

In fact I used to think they were little chillies. I was wrong!

My orientation into Thai food happened when I was new to Mumbai and we used to hang out at a place called Thai Baan at Pali Naka. I remember that pronouncing the names of the dishes were an even bigger draw for us than the food. It's been ten years and fifteen kilos since then, most of my friends from those days have moved out, but some of the staff from Thai Baan still smile and wave at me when I pass by.

I fell in love with Thai food and curries during a trip there in 2005. That's when I first experienced the sea salt magic of chopped fiery, red chillies in fish oil dips which accompanied the food. And these angry little green balls which came in the green curries. They were scrunchy to bite and were tantalisingly hot. I though they were chillies. I was mesmerised by them.

I had Thai green curries in Mumbai at quite a few place since the trip. These inexplicably had cauliflowers, beans, carrots and broccoli with meat ... but there no sign of the little green devils in Thai curries in Mumbai.

Then I spotted it at our local bhaaji waali (vegetable seller) at the Pali Market, Bandra. That's when I found out that these 'chillies' were actually brinjals! In fact the pack label described them as 'pungent'. These are grown by Trikaya here and cost around Rs 30 (0.6 USD) a pack.

In fact Pali Market at Bandra is a treasure trove of 'exotic' produce. Basil, thyme, oregano, asparagus, dill, bird chillies, shitake mushroom, avocados, parsley and, of course, Thai Brinjals, you name it and you will get it here. The names sound a bit funny rolling off the tongue of the thin, sprightly, vegetable lady in a sari who sells ... but she sure knows her stuff.

I used the Thai Brinjals when I made a Thai style hakka wok which I called Sukhumvit Wok. They gave a nice, fiery bite to the noodles.

You can't have too many of them so I experimented with the remaining brinjals in the pack. I once tossed some chopped pumpkin with the brinjals, basil and bird chillies. It turned out be a nice sandwich filler. I added some Thai Brinjals to a Bengali spinach dish another time.

My take is that they give a sharp relief to the dish, breaks the taste and can even give a new take to an existing dish (like the spinach one). All you have to do is toss in a few of the Babe Brinjals while you are cooking a dish.

The best thing is that they seem to go with all cuisines - Oriental, Coninental and even Indian.

I wonder why local restaurants don't add it to their Thai curries. I must write to the President about this.

Bad hair day ... Basilico, Pali naka

I normally wouldn't like to berate one of my favourite joints. But Basilico at Pali Naka did badly let me down last Friday night. And it's not funny when you have paid a good Thousand Rupees (20 USD) or so for two.

Actually I was supposed to make bhapa eelish (steamed hilsa) after work. But both Kainaz reached home very late as we had meetings which ran well into the evening. To top it, my car's battery died as I left the headlights on and we managed to get is started after half an hour's help from my boss, his driver and some of our colleagues.

K and I were quite tired by the time we returned home and decided to go out for dinner.

I suggested Basilico. We sat in the open section, with the large plants strewn around, which was quite scenic in the rain. The rain sounded lovely too and I looked forward to a great dinner.

We shared a black current soda which was nice - sharp, not too sweet. We had a mezze platter with it. The aubergine mint dip was sweetish and nice and the cream cheese dip was to die for. The range was a bit limited in comparison to Out Of The Blue. The lavash and soup sticks were a bit monotonous and some pita bread would be nice.

Still, so far good.

We were still enjoying the appetisers when the waiter came with the main course. I sent him back and asked him to get them when we were ready.

The food, when it came, was quite disappointing.

I had ordered a canaloni tube pasta with goat cheese and mushroom. I had visions on tubes of pasta filled with lovely, crumbly goat cheese like I had in Turkey. What we got were three pyramids of a tough pasta casing, stuffed with lame chopped mushroom with a bit of cheese coating on the top. Very tough and disappointing.

As I told K later, evolved pasta seems to be an acquired taste which we haven't acquired. I remember that we diddn't like the ravioli at Mariott or the 'hand made' pasta at Mia Cuccini. Good old penne, fusilli and farafelle work for us.

We had a rosemary braised chicken too. Presentation was nice. Meat was very tough and harder than a soldier's shoe. The sauce was fairly uninspiring.

We left both dishes unfinished. Which says it all

So net score, presentation was good, food sucked... as did the service. I left a comment on their feedback form about the importance of serving the main course AFTER folks have finished their starters.

I maintain that Basilico is a nice place but I must order more carefully the next time. Plus I have found their service to be a bit limp and uninformed in the past too.

Some sure shot things there are their pastas, Moroccon broths, beef roulade and just about any dessert.

And you now know what not to call for!

Off with his head ... Persian Darbar, Byculla

It was Friday and one's always in a playful mood with the weekend coming up.

We didn't feel like eating the canteen food. So four of us headed to Persian Darbar at Byculla.

Persian Darbar (P D) encapsulated all the values of secular India. It is run by Muslims. And is located just before a majestic Catholic Church and a Parsi Colony. I got excited when I saw the place as the layout - non air conditioned section at the ground floor with a little, air conditioned, 'family' section above it - reminded me of the legendary Muslim restaurants of Calcutta. Nizams, Zeeshan, Shiraz, Aminia. The joints in Calcutta were famous for their ethereal biriyanis.

P D raised visions of these in mind as the four of us went up to the, marginally more expensive, air conditioned section.

We started with a crispy chilly chicken. Frankly I don't know why we ordered Chinese in a Muslim joint. But strangely enough, that was the only good thing that we ate. After all, how wrong can you go with chicken doused in ajino moto, chilly sauce, painted red, doused in batter and deep fried?



We then had butter chicken with roomali roti. The roti was nice and soft. The thing about Butter Chicken is that it tastes different in every restaurant. The best ones that I have had are at Delhi where the chicken is juicy, the gravy is in the sweeter side and is redolent with wicked ghee and butter.

And the butter chicken at Persian Darbar?

The picture below does full justice to the gruesome butter chicken in P D. It was salty as hell. Redder than the gaudiest polyester. The sauce reminded me of the debris of all the construction work going on nearby. It had thin strips of chicken which were harder to find than a road without traffic in Mumbai.


Chicken tikka biriyani followed. Biriyani in the Muslim joints of Calcutta is a delicate, subtle affair, coy as a celestial virgin... those of us who are from Calcutta cherish the memory of its biryani.

The briryani at P D was deceptive and my hopes soared as I saw the beautiful rice an top of the dish ... it looked angel white and tantalising. Then I took a bite and realised that under the rice was the same angry, red chicken goop that passed off earlier as butter chicken ... salty, gaudy with pebble like pieces of stale chicken. Paradise lost and how.


We shared a caramel custard and a regular custard, which were passable but not up to Noorani standards, and ran like hell.

I doubt whether I will ever go back to Persian Darbar.

And I can't see any Persian Emperor tolerating such barbaric food.

Damages? About Rs 200 (4 USD) per head for four of us - 1 starter, 2 butter chcikens, a few rotis, 2 biriyanis, a few soft drinks and two desserts. We all felt that it was money down the drain.

Sukhumvit Wok ... Thai green curry paste goes hakka

Don't you love it when you get an idea for a dish, improvise on the way and end up with something lip smacking at the end of it?

Well here's the story of Sukhumvit Wok, which I named after the busy central district of Bangkok where we had a lovely holiday a few years back. And some great food.

I bought a pack of green Thai curry the other day from Pali Market at Bandra (Rs 30, 0.6 USD). Both K and I are big fans of Thai green curry. I toyed with the idea of something different with it rather than adding coconut milk and make a curry out of it. I toyed with the idea of making a hakka style noodle out of it. A different take and good for those who, for some strange reason, don't like the nectar of the Gods, coconut milk.

I then decided to go the whole hog and went to the market and picked up Thai ingredient such as Thai Brinjals (very pungent and I earlier though they were chillies), bird chillies and basil.

It all came to me as I began cooking. I merged Thai ingredients with the Chinese hakka genre of cooking. The end result was another Karmakar Original.

Ingredients:

• 250 g finely chopped boneless chicken (leg cut). Could be substituted with prawns, tofu or mushrooms
• Thai Green Curry paste (its ingredients include shrimp paste so vegetarians excuse)

• A pack of noodles - boiled and strained in thrice the amount of water. Put the noodles in boiling water and take it out in two minutes the moment it begun to soften a wee bit. Hold it under running cold water to ensure that the noodles stay separate. It's important that this doesn't become soft as we wouldn't be using too much of oil. Plus a girl once walked out on me because my noodles turned out soft. I got it right after that and she has not stormed out since then
• An egg
• A handful of Thai Brinjals, plucked from the stems and 4,5 finely chopped basil leaves and 6 bird (red) chillies slit into half. Thai brinjals are tiny little green balls available in most malls in Mumbai and local markets such as Pali Market. For some reason, local restaurants or even five stars, don't add it to their green curries, though it is de rigeur in Thailand

• Two tea spoons of vinegar, lime juice
• Salt and pepper
• 3 table spoons olive oil

Process: ten - fifteen minutes

• Heat the olive oil in a non stick pan
• Add the curry paste. It could splatter, take care
• Once it darkens, add the chicken and stir
• Once the chicken cooks (turns from pink to yellow, about 5 minutes), break the egg and drop it on the chicken. Stir as the egg coats the chicken and hardens
• Add the brinjal, chillies and basil leave, stir
• Add the noodles on top of the meat and then slowly tuck the noodles into the meat so that the dry paste and meat permeates the boiled noodles
• Add salt and pepper and lime juice, stir and garnish with some chopped basil leaves and split bird chillies
• A bit of fish oil would be a lovely finishing touch but we were out of it

I loved it !!!!

One could argue that the Thai curry paste was not home made but thinking of the mix counts for something I am sure

Granny diaries ... Didu's chide bhaaja

Warning: Long, rambling piece of nostalgia with a recipe tucked in somewhere

It rained heavily at Mumbai through Saturday.

After breakfast at Candies (what lovely chicken sausages, juicy, nice and salty, with the occasional amazing bite of gristle) Kainaz suddenly felt like a spontaneous drive down the Bandra Worli Sea Link. Problem is so did nine million other Mumbaikars. So we headed back after I spent a few teeth gritting moments behind the steering wheel trying to get out of Bandra.

Woke up in the evening after a nice lunch and snooze. The rain was still on. We have a few big trees surrounding our place and there is no track more divine than the sound of rain falling on leaves. Took me miles away from muggy Mumbai. A bit like the monsoon scenes in those Africa films we grew up on - Born Free, I dream of Africa and the ilk.

Very romantic no doubt. I felt like a hot coffee and something to munch on. Problem was that there was nothing to munch at home!!! And it was raining too heavily to head back to Candies.

I racked my brains - no dalmut or chips (Kainaz tries to make our house a trans fat free zone), nothing that I wanted to order home, in desperation I even thought of Maggi noodles.

Then I suddenly remembered a snack which Didu, my Mom's Mom, used to make for us. This is called chide bhaaja (fried rice flakes)... but more on that later.

Grandparents are the coolest folks in the world. This is a universal truth. They are far more chilled out than one's own parents. I guess they are immune to all shocks after raising their own children. So freedom, liberty and justice is what you get when you go to your grand parents with any problem or anything that you want.

Universal truth number two is that in most cases you are that much closer to your mother's parents and therefore your maternal grand mom. The story is the same whether it was about Kainaz's Mamma or my Didu. If you want to be spoilt, indulged and pampered ... head to granny!

Didu is a commonly used Bengali kiddie abbreviation for didima which is what you call your mom's mom. And I guess that it is fine to use it even you are in your mid thirties.

We stayed with my grand parents for about a year after my father passed away. And it was during one of those evenings that she made chide bhaaja. I liked it so much that I made her a do a couple encores that evening itself. I was a chubby nine year old and could pack in quite a bit even then.

Didu was, and is, my favourite cook. I was quite fussy when I came to India and wouldn't touch Indian food. But her luchi (Bengali fluffy puris) and chholar daal (gram pulses) were dishes that I would eat by the bushel. As were her parathas (fried rotis) where I would pack in around ten at a go with a bowl of ketchup (child is the father of man anyone?). I remember her making pantuas (gulab jamuns) during my first visit to India when I was five. I refused to eat those suspicious looking black dumplings at first. Then I had one. And she had to make it three to four more times for me during that trip as I couldn't stop having them. No wonder that I wanted marry her when I was eight!

Didu is hurtling towards her eighties now. With every possible ache and ailment. But like Kainaz's granny used to, Didu keeps asking us about our health (!) when I call her to ask about her health.

And she still rustles some invisible reservoirs of strength to make luchi and chholar daal for Kainaz and me when we go to Calcutta. And these aren't easy dishes to make.

Now for those of you who wanted to know about chide bhaaja and were patiently travelling with me on a nostalgia trip... I had no idea what the recipe was! But that never stops me.

In fact I had seen a similar recipe in a blog on Oriya Food. Now I don't know if this a right time to say that I rarely read recipes. But I like the Oriya blog a lot as I have discovered that there is a lot of similarities in the food of Bengal and that of the neighbouring state of Orissa. It's just that the names are slightly different. For example Chide bhaaja versus chuda bhaaja.

If I had read the recipe there, which I just did, I would have seen that it is quite similar to Didu's.

But since I didn't here's how I made this very very easy dish and I think it turned our pretty well. In fact Kainaz who wasn't hungry and abhors chide agreed to and had quite a few spoons.

Naati's (Bengali for grandson's) chide bhaaja recipe (seven minutes cooking time)

Ingredients:

• A handful of Chide (Bengali) aka chuda (Oriya) aka Poha (Marathi) -- these are dry rice flakes
• A table spoon of finely chopped onion
• A tea spoon of kalo jeere (Bengali) AKA kalonji (Hindi ?) AKA onion seeds (English)
• One finely chopped green Indian chilly
• 2 table spoons of Olive oil ( we live in a generation where is oil is a four letter world unlike in Didu's time)
• A bit of salt and black pepper powder

Process

• Heat a tea spoon of olive oil
• Add the kalo jeere and let it crackle
• Add onion and chillies and let them fry (I love fried onions and fried chillies)
• Add the chide, stir
• Add a bit more oil and you will see the chide puff in glory
• Add salt, pepper, stir, end of story

A fantastic evening snack to have with tea or coffee, especially when it is raining, and takes less than ten minutes to make.

I got very excited and called Didu up in Calcutta after I had the chide bhaaja. These calls are not easy to make. It is very difficult to hear this superwoman, who had raised all of us without a single complain, talk about her ailments. Right now she is recovereing from jaundice, is weary of stomach stones, has a very bad knee pain, has to run the house, shop, cook, make the bed, put up the mosquito net, and look after my Dadu (my grandpa). Dadu, who is well into his eighties, has his set of illnesses, is hard of hearing and pines to go to Puri on a holiday. One feels very helpless since all one can do from another city across the country is to make the odd phone call. It is difficult to picturise her using a stick.

Anyway I told her about my making chide bhaaja. Suddenly a new life came into her weary voice as she begun telling me about how one has to fry the chide FIRST in a lot of oil till the chide swells up like flowers, then add onions, chillies, peanuts (which she asked me to keep at home) and green peas in winter. She said she used to often make it in Delhi.

Actually the order of chide first and then everything is similar to what was there in the Oriya food blog. But hey, that's me, I stumble upon recipes, I don't read and follow them.

Something tells me that Didu forgot her paining knees for a few minutes during the call as she narrated the chide bhaaja recipe to me.

What are your favourite granny stories?

Edgar the Magnificent ... India Jones, Trident

It's raining right now. I can't begin to describe how wonderful it feels to listen to the sound of rain while one writes. Specially after a lovely dinner of paloker chochcori (A sort of mashed vegetable dish with spinach, pumpkin, brinjal, potato, bitter gourd which I picked from Sharmila's blog), rui kalia and rice. Heavenly!


I normally don't do the five star circuit too often. In fact as a friend pointed out, you often get much nicer meals at small, standalone restaurants. Still I feel that a five star helps add to an occasion. We had one five star occasion recently and I piled on K to treat me at one .


So Kainaz and I headed for India Jones at the Trident (earlier Oberoi) at Nariman Point. This was a last minute choice based on a suggestion from Serendipity.


India Jones is a concept restaurant where the theme is Far Eastern. It has food from nine countries and the menu is based around the travels of a character called Bharat (Hindi for India) Junes (I think). The idea is good as it give folks a chance to try out different cuisines.


The ambience was very peaceful and quiet and understated. In fact the odd SMS beep was quite irritating and broke the mood for me. The head of one of India's largest private banks was having dinner a few table s from us. A Japanese lady was tucking into some sushi in the table beside us with a fairly contented look on her face.


The food was nice. Not earth shattering. I have had had better Oriental food at the Global Fusion hog fest or the more serene Royal China.


But what I will remember most from the evening was Edgar who was looking after our table. Edgar, had a big round smile at all times, took our order with a lot of interest and care and ivolvement. I asked him to help us out as their was a wide array of dishes. My brief was 'something different'. He earnestly put us onto a snapper and prawns cooked in a Singaporean chilly paste and a noodles cooked in basil with prawn and chicken. The latter came with flat noodles which we aren't fond of so he promptly changed to regular noodles. Then he giggled and told us about how the chefs often got angry with him as he asked them to customise dishes for guests (e.g rendange made with vegetables instead of beef for Gujaratis) . We then chatted for a while on food as he told me about the concept of the restaurant while I told him about my food experiences in the far east. His love for food was apparent. As was his love for, and pride in, India Jones. He told me about his dreams to open a restaurant in his native Goa. Which is my dream too. Though I doubt if he plans to open a Bengali restaurant in Goa!



The food was really good. The snapper tasted great and was healthier than the usual pork or prawns that I would have gone for. The sauce was slightly sweetish and a bit tangy. It did meet my brief of 'something different'. The prawns and snapper had a slight buttery bite to it. The noodles went pretty well with it.



I was in a dilemma for what to have for dessert. Edgar suggested that I have the chocolate pecan dome with blueberry sorbet and green tea shot. He said that the pecan dome was his favourite. I generally tend to go with the flow if someone passionately recommends a dish. The pecan dome was exquisite. The texture was lovely, mashed ecstacy with the odd pecan nut and gave in dutifully and obediently with each bite. The chocolate was dark with a pretty high cocoa content I am sure.


I didn't like it!


I don't like bitter chocolate. I believe that desserts should be sweet. So this was not up my street. But I am quite sure that chocolate lovers will lap it up.


I saved the blueberry sorbet to have after the dome and that was just what I wanted. Sweet, tangy and cold. The green tea shooter was nice too, it had the texture and sweetness of a banana shake with a delicate flavour of green tea.



I had a bitter orange juice which was nice and had fruit pieces in it. I didn't drink as I was driving back. Kainaz had an apple ice tea which tasted like Tropicana apple. I guess non alcoholic drinks are quite lame and not worth the prices that restaurants charge.


Two soft drinks, a main course and a noodles and a dessert came to all of Rupees two thousand five hundred or so (50 USD) which I thought was fantastic for a five star. You could easily run up a higher bill there BUT you also have the option of having an affordable meal which is great if you are young, want to have a classy dinner, but don't have a rich uncle.


Trident was one of the two hotels attacked by the terrorists on 2611. The day we went, the Trident was shining like a princess, a fitting rejoinder to those who tried to attack it. A lot of innocent blood was spilt by the terrorists that day. But as Edgar's smiling face will tell you, they did not win.