Walking down memory lane…

If you take a good look, you will find that the majority of the posts on this blog are around memories. Mostly memories about food. Yet, from the moment Manisha announced her IFR: Memories I seem to have been at a loss for words! Her deadline, extended, is looming and I can feel the pressure as she churns out post after daily post on IFR.

Many of my vivid memories are around food, which must be true for a lot of you. Despite nostalgia rendering most things pink, resurrecting food of our memories usually turns out well. Unless you are attempting to recreate your mother’s cooking. That one is hard to get spot on. Few can rival a mother’s prowess. Hopefully, our children will look at our cooking the same way, and we will have our spot in the limelight.

Just like this summer, before leaving for college, the son finally awarded me a 10-on-10 for my rogan josh. He also added that not only had I cooked a swell rogan josh, I now had my own secret ingredient for it! Which was true – I had tweaked my mother’s recipe a tad – I added a teeny weeny bit of ground mace. What was I to do – after trying in vain to match her rogan josh for ten years, I rebelled and made it better . Well, not really. By that time I had likely put in my time – the minimum requisite to get certification – behind cooking rogan josh to have finally got the art down. Yes, recipes evolve…in an effort to better your mom’s cooking when you can’t make it just like her. I bet my son’s food memories are starting to stack up.

Kanji on One Sunny Spring Day

Natural.  Home made. Brew with a (nonalcoholic) kick.  Lip smacking. Kanji.

Every winter I look at the black-purple carrots that appear in the vegetable markets of Delhi and the rest of Northern India, and make a mental note to track down a recipe for kanji. As far as I know, they are used only in the making of this fiery colourful end-of-winter drink. And every year passes just the same as the previous one.

Now, this blog has given me a lot of readers. Some of the readers have gone on to become good friends. Friends who share their views and opinions – and I am glad you are opinionated – share their likes and dislikes (of people, of colours and pictures on this blog and in general, punctuation and pronunciation, and of course, food related stuff). Some have been willing to risk sharing their blog… only to end up fuming later at some very persistent confusion regarding ‘the real owner of IFR’ as the movement spread! I wasn’t complaining about the unintentional link-love it brought. Especially, since I haven’t exactly been in the thick of it all this past year.

Caronde he Caronde

Please don’t mention Caronda* for some time…it is in every jar I had spare!  There is no room for any more pickles or preserves…As I mentioned last time, I made some caronda chutney a week ago, to use up part of my Dad’d harvest from a bush I planted about ten years ago in the front yard of their house.  I used the idea of a sweet-tangy Indian chutney such as saunth (sweet and sour tamarind chutney) or a mango chutney made with unripe mangoes.  The effort was much appreciated. Since it was a trial batch I got just enough to fill two tiny jars that I sent off to my mum and sister.  The next batch was a repeat of the recipe and this time the effort yielded a big jar – plenty, I thought.

There were still some carondas left which then went into a pickle, pits and all, along with some unripe mango, lotus root, and green chillies. I keep that stoneware jar in the sun, what little there is of it at this time, bring it in every evening, and give it a good stir.  It is looking good.

So far so good.  My mum liked the relish a lot.  She doesn’t eat too much pickle because of the high salt content.  I told her that pitting the fruit was a pain in the rear.  She pitted about a kilo with the help of her maid and presented it to me.  I had thought more like: ok, here’s a recipe you might like to try… But I came home and made my third batch of caronda chutney.  This batch had fewer ingredients – I had already used up my dates; no gur – I couldn’t be bothered; less sugar – I had used up a lot of sugar in the past couple of weeks between the caronda relish and the mango jam, and was making statements with big exclamatory marks regarding the sugar content of the chutney.  The fruit for this batch had ripened further on the plant, was a deeper pink, and there was a subtle change in texture too.  What a pretty pink it turned in the pan!  And the texture – why, it reminded me of sour cherries in syrup!  The slight crispness as you bite into one was so similar!  That made me Google for recipes using sour cherries and I found a bunch that hold promise for next year!  I make no promises…but there might even be Caronda Liqueur on these pages one day!

The Mangoes are Sour

A big chunk of my readers live outside India. And all of them will appreciate how I have tried not to rub salt on their mangoes wounds this year. There has been no talk of mangoes, whatsoever, on this blog so far this year; no debate on which mango is the King, or that mango is King.

But ’tis the season and you all have access to reasonably good unripe sour mangoes. Sour mangoes are loved all over Asia, cooked with dal, with vegetables (it is the perfect foil for bittergourd), or enjoyed as a relish such as Pel’s nam prik wan kap mamuang khiew. And when you don’t want to fuss, just slice them up, dip in salt, and taste nirvana. Not as much fun today when my teeth sour much too quick, but a favourite summer activity when we were kids.

Green Chilli Pickle

Almost every region of India boasts a chilli variety with its own unique qualities in terms of flavour, colour, and heat. Kashmiri chillies have a deep red colour but are otherwise mild; Andhra chillies with their bright colour and fiery heat are shown off to great advantage in their pickles; and now we’ve all heard about the bhut jolokia from Assam that holds the world record for the hottest chilli.

Athana in Rajasthan is also famous for its chillies. The long and fleshy Athana mirch is pickled whole and is favoured by the Marwari community. The chillies are slit and stuffed with a mix of spices that include fennel, coriander, mustard, methi seeds, turmeric, and amchoor. A similar large chilli, much like the Bhavnagri mirch, is made into the most delicious mirchi vadas the best of which are to be found in Jodhpur.

Mango Jam

Nothing compares to the taste of organically grown fresh produce from your own garden. It is seasonal, it has ripened naturally, and made it to your table with the smallest ecological footprint possible.

But if the bounty is large you may be left with a lot even after you have shared it with friends, family, neighbours, and house help. That is when you fall back on the age old methods for preserving fresh produce. Sun-drying, and freezing are the easiest.

A Rose is a Rose is a Rose!

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” spake the great Bard, though he may not have been alluding to the flower at all. And there are many magnificent rose hybrids today that are a lot of show, but hardly any legendary fragrance.

R is for Rosa. The Indian desi Gulab or musk rose (Rosa moschata), a very fragrant rose variety, is closely related to the Damascus rose (Rosa damascena) that originated in Persia. It produces small flowers (2 to 3 inch across) with red or pink petals. The petals retain their delicate fragrance long after drying, which makes them an ideal ingredient for potpourris. The desi gulab is grown on a large scale for the ayurveda and cosmetic industries.

Rose oil is an essential ingredient in itr, oil-based Indian perfumes. Rose water is used in the preparation of many Indian and middle-eastern dishes. A hint of fresh roses is what makes the rasgulla taste so refreshing. Gulab ark (rose extract) is also a key ingredient in Hamdard’s ever-popular summer drink Rooh Afza. Milk shakes made with Rooh Afza are part of my childhood memories – what a deliciously pretty pink that milk shake is!

Gulab, along with the fragrant mogra (Jasminum sambac), is (was?) the flower of choice, to decorate a newly-wed couple’s room (a bed of roses?). Some of the rose petals strewn on our bed got into the gaps of the mattresses and delicately perfumed the bed for months!

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.

Refrigerator Pickles

Fibre, over at 28 cooks, wrote about vegetable pickles. I bookmarked it and then let it slide (going back to drool on the picture now and then). And then Tea at Tea and Cookies wrote about her version of radish pickles and I thought I absolutely must make these. And then she posted about them again. What was I to do?

You may have had all kinds of pickles (and there is no limit to the variety in Indian pickles!) but, as far as I know, these are the best looking pickles. Ever. One look and you will not be able to keep yourselves from making them for very long.

Even that blog-her friend of mine who is on a diet plan . This is no oil-based Indian pickle, but more like a salad just waiting in a jar.

I looked at the other links from the above blogs and then tweaked the basic recipe to suit the ingredients I had at hand. Without further ado, let me get to the recipe. The pictures sell the pickle! It sits in my fridge like a glowing ruby, getting deeper every day.

Lime Marmalade

I was trying to think of a good house warming gift for a client who has everything and more. And I had been wanting to make my Lemon Lime Marmalade again. So I said, “I must make my marmalade!” But as used to happen with a lot of my experimental cooking, I would never note it down and next time around, still need to search. Now I have this blog.

Search I did but no recipe came close to what I had tried the last time (there were no blogs then!). So I did what I always do: look at a number of recipes, make up my mind about the substitutions and eliminations, and then go ahead.

I remembered using sliced lemons limes last time. But all the recipes I found this time (there weren’t too many, I’m afraid–bloggers don’t make Lime jams it seems) wanted me to follow tedious pulp removals or squeeze the juice. I checked the fruit to sugar ratio (and promptly reduced it!) and went from there…