Onion Sambar is ready for dinner!

It often happens that you find a song so catchy that the tune just settles in your head refusing to budge. I’m presently latched on to one. This song is not only catchy, but extremely cute.
Why am I talking music in a food blog? Well, because the song in the spotlight is actually a recipe. Imagine that.
I bought my son the Karadi Rhymes CD this January- and yeah, we’re so in love with it, the both of us: 2 ½ year old Samit, and __ year old me!
This CD (it is a must-buy!) has songs rendered by the adorable and spunky Usha Uthup and covers various contextual ‘Indian’ situations: trains, kites, monkeys, temples, monsoons, onion sambar and more.
Yeah, Onion Sambar!

The rhyme goes something like this:

Peel the Onion, Dice them small
Soak tamarind in water that’s warm
Cook some dal and mash it soft
Add some salt and turmeric strong…………..

Coconut and red chillies
Roast and grind them ever so fine
Add the paste to the dal to simmer…..

Onion Sambar is ready for dinner!
Ready for dinner, ready for dinner………

(I didn’t take help from the CD at all; told you I’ve been humming this!)

So while we hum this day and night, it got me thinking about the perfect onion sambar recipe.
Bubbling hot, thick, and bursting with the fragrance of onions, this sambar makes a riotous combination with rice, idlis, or even better, with ragi mudde.
And the best onions are the small ones. These little warriors so endorse the old saying, ‘good things come in small packages’. They are pungent, sharp in flavor and a perfect fit for South Indian cuisine. My mother-in-law chops them fine, fries them in coconut oil with mustard, garlic and bay leaves, and uses them as tadka (or seasoning) in most of her curries. It is a dash of super flavor!

Ok, here’s a version pulled out from my mom’s kitchen!

Ingredients

1 cup toor dal
200 gm small onions peeled
1tsp turmeric
Water for boiling the dal
A small ball of tamarind soaked in warm water
Salt to taste
Two pinches of asafetida
½ teaspoon jaggery
A spring of curry leaves
Mustard for seasoning
Ghee for seasoning

Roast and grind into a paste:
2 tbps fresh coconut (grated)
½ teaspoon jeera
½ teaspoon coriander seeds
4 red chillies

Method

Pressure-cook the dal. Steam the onions till they are soft (don’t pressure cook, as they will simply disintegrate into the dal. Add the turmeric, salt, jaggery, and tamarind into the dal and simmer on open medium heat. Add the coconut paste and continue to simmer for another 6 minutes. By this time the sambar would bubble on the surface and give out a lovely aroma.
In a separate pan, heat the ghee (clarified butter) till it melts, add the mustard seeds and when it splutters, add the asafetida and the curry leaves. Turn off the heat.

Transfer the dal into the serving bowl and pour the ghee seasoning over it. Onion Sambar is ready for dinner!

Gorge on it. Enjoy.

Chutney Tricks

For me (and I presume for most south Indians) a good meal must have: rice, ghee, one nice chutney, one vegetable maybe, spicy and piping hot rasam, well-set curd and a tangy pickle. The pickle definitely adds zing to the meal, but a good chutney is like a magic wand – SWOOSH and it sets your meal chugging merrily on the right track.

My mom’s treasure chest of chutneys is pretty deep. She can create chutney with the regular tomato; the unyielding ridge gourd; the acerbic radish; the quirky, piquant gongura; and why even with the plain old cucumber. Oh these chutneys are intrinsic to an Andhra meal-can do without sambar and rasam, but chutney, no way! These chutneys, with hot rice and ghee, catalyze the entire meal making it that much more exciting!

The one chutney that I absolutely vouch for is the coarse, raw tomato chutney. It leaves you absolutely delighted! And for this, the slippery, shiny green tomato is a must. So just head to your local vegetable bazaar and ask the vendor for these fresh, little things, they come with stalks intact and look absolutely wonderful!
Bring them home and dish up this chutney like zip, zap zoom–it won’t take you more than 15-20 min.

The flip side: This is fresh chutney that must be consumed preferably, the same day—maximum 2-3 days if you refrigerate it.

Go-on, this one in particular is fun to do!

Ingredients

½ kg green tomatoes, remove the stalks, wash, clean and quarter
2 onions (medium-sized), chopped
4 red chillies broken into pieces
½ teaspoon chopped ginger
1 teaspoon jaggery
Salt to taste
2 pinches of asafetida
½ teaspoon mustard
A sprig of bay leaves
2 teaspoons chopped coriander
1 tbps oil

Method

Heat oil in a kadhai. Add the mustard seeds and when they hiss and splutter add the broken red chillies, the chopped ginger, the bay leaves and stir well. Now add the chopped onions and stir again until it is pink and soft.
Throw in the chopped green tomatoes and mix well. Add the asafetida, jaggery and the salt and mix until it spreads well. Keep the heat on till the tomatoes wilt and turn soft.

Transfer this entire mixture into a blender, and send it whirring not more than 5 seconds. This chutney is meant to be coarse (if you like it fine instead of chunky, blend it for another 5 seconds). Add the chopped coriander, mix well and transfer into a serving bowl.

I can’t help but repeat myself like a parrot; but this tastes its absolute best with rice and ghee. Enjoy…

Grandma’s Rasayana

I remember grandma scurrying into the kitchen displeased that there was not enough on the evening snack menu for her four sons, when they returned from work. This comprised of my father and my three dear uncles, all younger than dad.
She wouldn’t say anything to her daughters-in-law, she would instead amble into the dingy, cool corner in the store room and take the basket full of bananas perched on the topmost shelf.

She would then in a brusque, business-like fashion march back into the main kitchen and start chopping them into thick discs, and in the same breath, order my aunt to quickly grate some fresh coconut. I remember being called in to discard all the peels into the dustbin outside. I’d always ask if I could chop the bananas or grate the jaggery maybe, but grandma would flatly refuse—her way of minimizing mistakes in her culinary preparation.

The banana slices would inadvertently all be of the same thickness, and covered with a plate to prevent them from forming a brown surface. And she would tell me how even the simple act of chopping fruits and vegetables is an art in itself. My aunt would then start grating jaggery, into light, textured flakes that would melt immediately when in contact with the bananas. Ground cardamom powder would be prepared next.

All this culminates into the mixing-which really was the climax of this lovely food episode. Grandma would first add the jaggery and toss the bananas with a spoon. She would then throw in the grated coconut, and toss the banana once again, so you see a bowlful of beautiful, sunny-yellow discs coated with molten jaggery and fresh, white strands of coconut flesh. Finally, the black flecks of cardamom would be sprinkled and the bananas tossed one final time. And me, I would savor all the drama until I dribbled on to my clothes.

But, I would be sent back to get four bowls of uniform size, washed and cleaned till they sparkle and she would dole out large spoonfuls of fruit into them. I remember handing out the bowls to the four of them in various parts of the house, and rushing back into the kitchen for my share. As grandma would say-we had to eat it all before the bananas browned.

I don’t know about my father and uncles, but I thought this treat was simply kick-ass!

Ingredients
4 big bananas, ripe but firm
3 tbsp grated jaggery (buy the soft jaggery oval-shaped lumps that give into the grater easily, not the hard cubes which are tough to grate)
1 tbsp freshly grated coconut
½ tsp cardamom powder

Method
Grate the coconut first. Grate the jaggery as well and keep the measured amount handy. Keep aside the cardamom powder. And finally, go for the bananas. Peel and chop them into medium-thick discs into a serving bowl (preferably glass so you can see it from all sides). Sprinkle the jaggery liberally and toss. Add the coconut and toss once more. Finally add the cardamom powder and give it one final swirl so it spreads. Eat immediately.

P.S. I recently tried replacing a tablespoon of jaggery with two teaspoons of date syrup. It turned out great! You could even warm this for 30 seconds in the microwave and serve it warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. This makes amazing dessert.

Tuck-in. Enjoy.

Guthi Vankaya-the way my mom makes it...

Stuffed brinjal or Guthi Vankaya, as it is called in Telugu, is one of those ambrosial dishes an egg plant/brinjal will yield itself into amazingly well. For us, when we were much smaller, it was a rare treat, something my brother and I were really fond of— a dish we would have liked at mealtimes everyday, but it was not to be. Succulent well-cooked baby brinjals in their entirety: waiting to be mixed with rice and ghee—oh so fragrant and delicious!

My mom’s version is extremely simple and basic in terms of ingredients, but it calls for some amount of skill, and presence-of-mind, a quality that completely fails me sometimes! Okay, there are two sutras that do the trick:

a) Buy purple baby brinjals, and not the ones that are slightly bigger. It is seasonal, so try finding them in the big vegetable markets or ask your local vegetable seller to source them for you.
b) Forget about using your non-stick kadhai for this one. You need a heavy-duty, thick, fat, wok or a similar shallow-fry pan to cook these. If you don’t have it, it really makes sense to buy one. You’ll be amazed at its versatility in the kitchen. A tip: if you have a thick-bottom pressure pan, try using it without the lid.

Try this out, and serve it with simple sona masuri rice and a nice big spoonful of ghee (that goes right on top of the rice mound and melts along its way downhill). To eat, use your hands and mix the brinjal with the rice, crushing the soft vegetable to mix evenly with the rice and ghee. And the taste…tell me about it!

Ingredients

½ kg baby brinjals (the purple ones)
1 cup gram flour (besan)
2-3 teaspoons chilli powder
Salt to taste
¼ teaspoon turmeric
¼ teaspoon asafetida
Oil to cook

Method

Clean the brinjals thoroughly with water, and after this wipe them dry. Slice away the stalk portion, such that the brinjal now has a base and can sit straight in the pan. Cut the brinjal through the length, just till the end, but not fully that the pieces separate. Cut it once more so that the two cuts form a ‘cross’. Or the brinjal now has four parts but all still joined at the base.

Mix gram flour, chilli powder, salt, turmeric and asafetida and sift into even flour. Stuff the brinjals with this and place it in the wok gently, so they all sit pretty, next to each another. Once all brinjals are stuffed, dust the top with the remaining flour mix. Pour a spoonful of oil over each brinjal. And just swish a last spoonful of oil deftly across the pan, like a good luck charm.

Now cook the brinjals on low flame, with a plate gently placed on top of the wok/kadhai.
Check on them occasionally, talk to them as well… Cook until the brinjals are tender and done.

Eat. Enjoy.

Draakshi Gojju

Sweet, plump grapes are best eaten off the bunch, spitting out the cumbersome seeds. If they're seedless, even better. The only time grapes were brought home in my mom’s place was prior to a festival. The bunch would adorn the fruit plate kept as an offering to the god. And since festival season is not necessarily the season of the grape, the bunch was purely for decorative purposes.

But we didn’t throw the sour grapes out. There is this old recipe my grandma fished out, that could kill two birds in one stone—make use of the sour grapes, and also make a piquant, spicy-sweet curry for the next meal. Hah!

Here it goes.

1 medium size bunch of grapes-either the green or the wine-red variety is as good (about 150 gm)
1 teaspoon chilly powder
1 and ½ teaspoon jaggery if the grapes are too sour... Reduce the jaggery if the grape has some sweetness in it
Salt to taste
A pinch of asafetida

Grind well (adding very little water):
1tablespoon grated coconut
½ teaspoon jeera
2 teaspoon til seeds
¼ teaspoon fenugreek seeds

½ teaspoon mustard seeds
2 broken red chillies
A sprig of curry leaves
1 teaspoon of oil

Method

Chop the grapes into halves, and discard seeds if any. Take a kadhai and add the grapes, plus the pulp and liquid that oozes out while chopping. Add chilly powder, salt, jaggery and asafetida and cook on a low flame.
As the grape mash starts to cook with the spices, it becomes a pulp of nice consistency. When the mixture starts bubbling, add the ground coconut-jeera-til-fenugreek mixture to this.

Cook for another five minutes.

Now in a smaller kadhai, heat oil, add mustard seeds and wait for them to splutter, and now add the curry leaves and red chillies. Pour this hot oil mix straight into the curry and listen to that beautiful hissing sound.

Draakshi Gojju is now absolutely ready to eat! Serve hot with rice and a dollop of ghee.

Ashtalakshmis and Ashtabhojanam!

The Varamahalakshmi Pooja is celebrated with aplomb in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh. Worshipping the powerful Ashta Lakshmis on the last Friday of ashada is said to invoke the blessings of the goddesses.

The festival is in the air almost a week before. Aromas of the offerings for the goddess linger around, as my mother and my three aunts toil in the kitchen with my grandma supervising from her sofa just outside. Eight different sweets and eight savories comprise the offerings to the deity. Obattu, Coconut Burfi, Rava Laddoo, Besan Laddoo, Chimli, Challbindi, Mysore Pak, and Kadubu hit the sweet plate while chakli, muchoru, kodbale, and nipattu adorn the snack plate. These are made in fresh oil or ghee and stacked up in steel or aluminum containers which then go sit on the top-most shelf of the kitchen. A white powder that wards off ants is sprinkled around the containers and they rest there till the morning of the pooja.

I recall my mind wandering into my home kitchen as I sat in school, completely missing my Civics and Geography lessons. By the time we cousins got back home, the kitchen was completely normal, showing no signs of the hectic, frenzy cooking that took place a couple of hours ago. The only proof was the extra containers perched on top, and my grandma sensing the greed on our minds would promptly shoo us away with a smirk on her face. We could not touch or even think about it, until the goddess had her share.

On the festival day, you wake up to see the ladies in colorful silks, with jasmine in their hair and glass and gold bangles clinking against each other on their hands. The previous evening is spent decorating the entrance with fragrant mango leaves and bright marigold flowers, and a nice rangoli to welcome the goddess. The lack of rangoli-drawing skills at home is made up for by Saroja, our domestic help, who gladly does the needful.

I am angrily stared at by grandma- I get the point, “Go bathe and dress up before the priest comes in”, I comply. The priest arrives and after hemming and hawing about traffic and expressing unhappiness about the youngsters today, he begins…..The coconut in a silver kalasha is smeared with kumkum and turmeric and painted with eyes, nose, mouth like a woman’s face. This face is adorned with gold, and the kalasha represents the goddess.

Flowers, milk, honey, curd, fragrant leaves are all offered to the goddess amidst holy chanting. By the end of the pooja, the ladies tie yellow threads on each other’s wrists signifying that the rituals are done. The offering is now made to the goddess. On a fresh banana leaf, all the sixteen dishes are presented along with rice, ghee and payasam. Grandma says, simple rice and sweet milk work just as well as offering. The men come in to take blessings and go back to debate politics, or read the newspaper-whichever.

Pooja done, we swoop down on the goodies. It’s a tough one deciding what to eat now and what later, just so every delicacy is given a fair chance to be savored and appreciated. Obattu, which is surprisingly warm just melts in the mouth, crunchy coconut burfi with plump raisins and snappy cashews entice you, huge kadubus with the jaggery and coconut mixture is divine, and the muchoru is just the same as last year and the year before-perfect!

Festivals are beyond connecting with the divine, it is a time to renew and discover family ties, pause from the mad rush and cacophony, and a time to eat delicious food fit for the gods!

But alas, not any more… Family ties now seem cumbersome and food fit for the gods are calorific and unfit for consumption. God save us, really!

Damrote when in Distress

I remember my first day at school, rather, what I did that evening. I hated school, and I proved my unhappiness by wailing to my mother and puking all that I ate at lunch, as additional proof. But my mom knew better, “Wash up and come inside, your grandpa has got some damrote”, she said. That did it—I meekly did as told, and any hatred for my new school was forgotten.

And sure enough, the rich, sinful preparation was handed to me in a cup, as I tucked in carefully, not letting even a little crumb go waste. In fact damrote was not meant to be shared nor eaten while talking with others on the table-it commanded respect. I would run upstairs and hop on to the ledge over the window and sit and eat it, quiet, savoring every morsel- sometimes even speak to it.

That was the kind of power that damrote yielded over my childhood, not ice cream, not chocolate. It was available in only one place: Gundappa Hotel, and people would come from far and wide just to buy 100 grams or two of this sweetmeat-it was expensive. My grandpa was a connoisseur of sorts when it came to good food- he bought the best ingredients from the best places, and sweet for a special occasion meant damrote.

I was obese through childhood, and I suspect my grandpa’s indulgence and my fondness for food was the catalyst. I still am on the heavier side (tsk, tsk) and although my grandpa is no more, I seem to have inherited this whole eye/nose/mouth-for-good-food thingy. The only difference is grandpa wouldn’t eat, he would bring them for us, and I am different that way!

Giving out the recipe for damrote is impossible, first it is a secret guarded by the Gundappa Hotel Kitchens and second, somehow I just can’t believe anyone can make it like them. Oh, there are several sweetmeat stores professing to make this: but trust me, I know how the original tastes since 30 years!

Describing damrote is a challenge-one needs to taste it. Made of grated pumpkin, khova, ghee and sugar, the mixture is cooked on ‘dum’, in a sealed copper vessel. By the end of three-four hours, the result is a sizzling golden-brown damrote with a crunchy-gooey exterior and a sweet, soft, succulent inside. The taste is out-of-the-world. I felt privileged when Mr. Srikanth—one of the brothers who run the sweetshop now—showed me the old copper oven it is cooked in. The huge plate with 10-kg of the delicacy just sings and sizzles in the oven- it is pure joy to watch.

Of course growing up, I discovered a whole lot of other favorite desserts: warm chocolate cake, coconut burfi, kesaribath and more recently paal ada pradhaman from my mother-in-law’s kitchen, but damrote holds a very special place in my heart, almost like a friend who helped me forget the little sorrows of childhood, and gave me moments of pure ‘foodie’ joy! This is just a very, very small tribute.

(About Gundappa’s Hotel: You get lovely sweets at this sweet shop. And in my experience the Vimurti and Chandrahara rock! And I love the mixture they sell because it has chunks of pakodas in it—like little surprises hiding in nooks and corners of the packet. Gundappa’s Hotel has also forayed into ready-to-eat mixes: Rava Idli, Rasam and Sambar and Vangibath powders and Chutney podi. Among them, I think the Vangibath powder was amazing and the Sambar and Rasam powders are just like what mom makes at home. If you want to try any of these, call them on 080-22222055. The shop is nestled in a nook on OTC Road, Nagrathpet, in old Bangalore, India.)