Tomato Chutney

Tomayto-tomahto, tamahtar-timahtar. What a vegetable! Yes, yes, I know, technically it is a fruit, a berry. And a berry good one it is . So good that even Kashmiris have begun to include it into their traditional recipes, tamatar-baingan being among my Dad’s favourites. But there’s no Kashmiri recipe today. Let’s do another one for ‘the left-side’, the side reserved on the Maharashtrian thali for pickles, relishes, and chutneys.

There is this tomato chutney I make that uses just a few ingredients. I watched Sanjeev Kapoor make it many years ago on his very popular show Khaana Khazaana. I didn’t note down the recipe but since the ingredient list was short I was able to make a very decent chutney when I tried it soon after. I have made it many times since but always going by ‘feel’ as most of us who have been cooking for a considerable time tend to do. When you do that, it becomes hard to write recipes down. This blog is becoming a repository where I must commit to measurable units. Already, I check here for a couple of my own recipes! So, today I measured as I went about adding the ingredients.

Relishing the Radish

Here is another Kashmiri vegetarian recipe. It is special because it is one of the few accompanying dishes that make up Kashmiri cuisine. The rest of India has a mind boggling variety of things to be ‘served on the left side’ of the thali. Let me explain this. There is a specific sequence to serving food in Maharashtra. You start with a bit of salt on the left side. This is the side reserved for all accompaniments: chutneys, pickles, wedges of lemon, koshimbirs (salads) or raitas. Bhajjis (pakoras), if part of the meal, will also find room here. Next will be a katori of daal, and then to the right of the thali is the main subzi. Rice and roti are towards the lower centre of the thali. The sweet, somewhere in the middle, is always served along with the meal. Even for everyday meals you will have something served on the left, even if just a pickle, though chutneys are served frequently. It would sadden my MIL to serve just a pickle ‘daavi kade‘ (on the left side!).

I have no idea why the Northern most state of our country is so lacking in this category. Maharashtra, Gujarat and all the Southern states lay as much emphasis on this ’side’ to introduce a complexity of texture and flavour into their cuisine. It might have something to do with Kashmiris being obsessed with their meat or the harsh climate making cooking harder with women concentrating on getting the meat cooked in time for the unusually early meal times. Lunch, in most houses, would be ready and served before 10:00 in the morning. Everyone ate and went to work or school. Where was the time to sit and pound different things together in a pestle and mortar? The plentiful fresh fruits and vegetables such as radishes and cucumbers are perfect for snacking and getting the crunch that might have been missed at meal time.

Though there are just a few chutneys and raitas but these are much loved and used over and over. One loved vegetable is mooli (daikon radish). It is cooked with fish or nadur (lotus stem) to lip-smacking results. It is also the vegetable of choice for making our most popular raita – mujj chatin. For some reason it is called a chutney. Grated mooli added to thick salted dahi with chopped green chillies mixed in. Red chilli powder and a pinch of shah zeera (black cumin) is totally optional. This is the only Kashmiri dish in which I will use a garnish of coriander leaves. I love coriander, but it is not traditional to Kashmiri cuisine.

The Last Word on Kheer

Well, as I was saying (paraphrasing Ammini) “Much is made of rice in Kashmir.” It is the staple at meal times, naturally. For most ‘holy’ days and special days like birthdays, as also to mark new beginnings, we make taher (soft ta – her) – rice cooked with turmeric and mixed with salt and heated mustard oil as naveed (prasad); more delicious than you may think. Any function in the family - weddings, yagnopavit (the thread ceremony) - the bua or maasi (aunts) will make ver, a risotto like preparation in which rice is spiced with caraway seeds, heeng, and vari-masala, and creamed with the gradual addition of water and mustard oil (what else!), quite the olive oil to us. There will be walnuts added, or in the non-vegetarian avtar, chichir (bits of, ahem, intestine). While modur polav is usually served at weddings, the sweet at other less-extra-ordinary occasions is the Kheer.

Now, this is again where Kashmiris are at loggerheads with Maharashtrians. Maharashtrians serve rice kheer only for shraddha! And we think the(ir) sevian (vermicelli) kheer is nothing to write home about (no relation of the muslim seviyan, mind you, which is an altogether different delicious animal). We serve rice first on our thali which then receives all the gravied dishes – katori being used only to serve yoghurt. On a Maharashtrian thali, rice is served last; except, again, when observing a shraddha. If they serve the rice to the front of the thali, we serve it on the other end away from you, and you bring forward, a little at a time, mix it how you want and eat. They serve a dainty handful, we upturn an entire bowl-full. Yet the twain has met!

Travel Tips Anyone??

Sometime back Kamla (of The Kamla Bhatt Show) asked me if I would like to write a post (or two?) for a Travel Blog she was planning. I immediately agreed thinking here’s my chance to travel to new places! That is not what she had in mind. I was to write about places I had already visited.

Being a Delhi girl through and through, I thought let me see how well I can cover up for a city I hate to love. Just kidding. The Heat and Dust can get to us sometimes. But never forget that we are steeped in history too…

I wrote it and forgot. Then I saw this new link today! Check out what to do If You Go To….Delhi!

If You Go To is all set to be your one-stop resource for travel tips to places all over the world - travel tips from the travelers themselves!

Upcoming post: Kashmiri Dessert #2!

Mutsch: Kashmiri Meatballs

Naani’s much talked-about mutsch!

It’s time we talked Kashmiri food. Kashmiri cuisine derives its unique flavouring from regular Indian spices used somewhat differently. Fennel and ginger powder are used in most of the preparations. The colouring is important to the presentation; turmeric for yellow curries, and red chillies for the red ones, and there are the white curries that derive their colour from the use of milk and yoghurt. The word ‘curry’, incidentally, is not a part of our vocabulary.

An interesting feature of Kashmiri Hindus is the complete lack of caste hierarchy. That’s correct – we are all Brahmins. Garlic and onions may have been taboo, but please give us our daily serving of meat.

Just like the Bengali Brahmins we salivate over our fish and goat-meat, cook everything in the wonderfully fragrant mustard oil, favour rice, and worship mother Goddesses with fervour. And like them, we also have the loochi, maida pooris fried in mustard oil. Oooh, they taste super with Kahva, and are intertwined with my memories of visits to the Kheer Bhavani shrine, many kilometers outside of Srinagar city. A tiny temple inside a water tank (a natural spring), it sits in a large paved area shaded by giant Chinar trees (Oriental Plane trees). A typical visit to the temple would involve an early morning rise, a head-bath (this is Indianese for washing hair as part of the bathing process; most of us women keep long hair, or used to, and daily shampooing is neither practical nor necessary), trekking to the bus-adda to take the bus into the countryside. The mothers, grandmothers and aunts would have gotten up even earlier to prepare a packed lunch of rajma, dum aloo, and such delicacies, to be had later under those magnificent Chinars in true picnic fashion.

The bus would wind through the most beautiful (the word - beautiful - being very inadequate here) landscape of paddy fields and rustling (Lombardy) Poplars. There is hardly a stretch on that picturesque narrow road where you are too far from a brook or a stream to not hear its gurgle. The droopy willows by the brooks add to the idyllic picture.

Flower Fest and Do I have the Flower for You

So I’m late. But nobody will mind when I arrive with a flower such as this one!!

We came across the thistle-like Morina longifolia in the Valley of Flowers. I was the lone one in the group to walk this far and take pictures of the spent flower heads and tall spikes that looked very sculptural. I wondered how they must have looked a couple of weeks earlier…

New Chocolate Chip Cookies

Time to get back to some cooking business. My son seconds the thought. He is presently in the middle of his X Board Exams. Two down, three to go. And I had promised to bake his favourite chocolate chip cookies during his preparatory holidays. He reminded that if I continued like this his exams would soon be over, with no cookies whatsoever.

Tomorrow is his Sanskrit paper and I could see it was getting harder to make him stay in his room. So we made a deal: I’ll bake the cookies, and he’ll try to keep his butt in his room. Moms are allowed to bribe a little when they think prudent. It is more like an incentive. And he has been good (he just might have aced the Math paper!! Yay! He got a hug for that! ).

I started the preparation just before lunch time. Bad idea. The lunch needed to be fixed as well. In my rush, I didn’t look at the recipe carefully enough. It called for rolled oats which I never have. So I had to resort to the recipe on the Nestle semi-sweet morsel package. I was still not paying close attention. That called for oats too! Before I knew it I had a huge batch of dough and a new recipe. Less fat. I wasn’t about to dump my month’s ration of butter into the cookies, no way. So I replaced it partly with vegetable oil. These turned out really great. And I wrote down the ingredients right away before I could forget.

Yahoo! India Content Thieves

I write to support Ingi Pennu’s campaign against plagiarism. Plagiarism is a serious violation. Violation of our trust in each other. And violation of laws as well.

But, first I had to get the full story. Since the portal in question is in Malyalam, a language I do not know, it took a bit longer to find the beginning of the thread. But I like to get to the bottom of things. I used the Web. I Googled -”Yahoo! India Content Theft.” One thing led to another - Global Voices, DesiPundit, PlagiarismToday…Well Copyright Violations had a lot of posts on this, starting at the start. With screenshots.

It seems Yahoo!India, to provide easy content, looked for the easy way. But easy is often not the right way. Good things take time. Good wine takes time. Good Scotch takes time. Good writing takes a lot of time. It don’t come easy.

Yahoo! India (through Webduniya or not) decided to simply lift content from Surya Gayathri’s Malayalam blog (and a few non Malayalam ones as well!), rearrange few sentences, change a few photographs (more about this in a minute!), and viola, they had ‘new’ content.

But they forgot who the ‘Person of the Year’ was! I am. Before they could sit back and revel in their new ‘expansion’, the cat was out. The content was stolen! Oops. After knowing how quickly Kavya Vishwanathan was found out for a few stolen paragraphs that were in printed books! Its On The Web, Stupid! Big OOPS.

And those pictures - well methinks those are lifted as well. I should know. One of them is mine, from my much cherished early posts - A Simple Potato Curry from the Fields of Uttar Pradesh! Try it, it’s really worth ‘copying’! But seriously, plagiarism is no laughing matter.

I have the power. If you like easy, you must be willing to pay for it. With bad publicity. Ill will. The buck stops with Yahoo!

We all make mistakes. It takes greatness to say sorry. Say you are sorry, Yahoo, and all will be forgiven. We have been friends for too long.