Falsetto Risotto

I recently dished out what I would call a ‘falsetto risotto’ because it wasn’t a real risotto where the rice had been cooked in the juices of the sauce. It was more an Indian style, mix everything together and eat, sort of risotto. Here’s what happened.

A friend was visiting, and I cooked more rice than I should have, being nervous about running out. The mound of leftover rice confronted me as I stepped into the kitchen to cook dinner. What to do? Out came a handful of button mushrooms, an onion, a couple of tomatoes, a kilo of shelled peas, and voila! I had dreamed up a risotto that I even dare call one because the said visiting friend insisted on naming it such, which was very kind of him considering it could have just as easily been called a mish-mash!

Here’s how to do it, the next time you have some boiled rice lying around:

Ingredients:

Button mushrooms – 100 gms, diced

Peas – 1 kg, shelled

Onion – 1, finely sliced

Tomatoes – 2 medium, diced

Whole red chillies – 3 or 4

Rosemary – 1 tbsp

Whole pepper corns – to taste

Leftover cooked rice

Olive oil to cook

Pour some olive oil into a pan, allow it warm up, then add the rosemary, red chillies torn into halves, and the pepper corns. After a couple of seconds, put in the onions and sauté until they soften a little. Add the mushrooms and stir for another minute or so. As soon as the mushrooms release their aroma, which will be pretty soon, put in the tomatoes and the peas. Now, sprinkle some salt, cover, and allow to cook. Check after a few minutes – if the peas are fresh, they will become moist and will easily cook in their own moisture without your needing to add extra water. However, since we are making a risotto, it might work well to add just a bit of water to make a light curry.

Once all the ingredients are well cooked, add in the cooked rice and stir well. I did not heat the rice separately, and it all just blended well in the pan. Do make sure that the pan you cook in is large enough to hold the rice, because you will want everything to simmer together for a couple of minutes before taking it off the fire.

A heroic cook-out

This morning, I saw the woman who is my absolute kitchen heroine deftly roll out the most amazing parathas. Here’s a confession — I’ve tried to make parathas, which are really rotis stuffed with stuff and fried on the griddle, with varying degrees of success. Rather, it would be more accurate to say, varying degrees of failure.

The process requires a level of skill that in my opinion comes from actually doing it for upward of 20 years. All champion paratha makers I have come across fit this bill. The younger ‘uns, not so good. Unless you are a professional chef and have already rolled out 20 years worth of parathas in a couple of years. Yes, there I’d concede you the point. But, there’s no substitute for sheer experience when it comes to coaxing gooey dough into crisp, even, no-stuffing-peeking-out, yummy parathas.

How did my heroine do it this morning? I can share the process, not the expertise.

Pull out balls of dough kneaded out of coarsely ground wheat flour and water until it is spongy if you poke it with your finger. Take one ball and roll it into a flat circle, using dry flour if it sticks to the rolling surface. Now, fill it right in the centre with a mixture of mashed potatoes, finely chopped onions and chillies, and salt, and any other spices you might find interesting. Draw up the sides of the rolled out circle so that they bunch up like a pouch with the filling inside.

Now comes the tricky part. Pat the fattened ball down and use the rolling pin to again roll it out into a circle. I can never get this step right, because the filling starts to leak out the moment the rolling pin presses down on the ball, and everything becomes a mash. The way my heroine did this was to put lots of dry flour on the board, and basically take enough dough right at the beginning so it doesn’t develop a very thin skin by the time the second roll occurs. And then, of course, there’s the 20-year-old-skill and chutzpah — you basically don’t care if some of the stuffing breaks through the skin, and just put it on the griddle with large amounts of ghee, and get the sizzle going!

FYI: If you are crazy enough to try this (without the 20 years of experience in already doing this — I know, I know, it’s a vicious circle — how do you get the experience without trying it and being bad at it), you can vary this primarily potatoes filling with crumbled cottage cheese, or finely grated cauliflower or radish, or even just onions. Serve hot with yoghurt, pickles and chutneys of your choice.

Comfort food

So, what’s the deal with comfort food? I get that it’s supposed to be stuff that makes you feel good upon consuming, for reasons other than purely merits of taste or nutrition. Mother’s cooking you grew up on would come the closest to being a comfort food for a lot of us, certainly me. But, I’m not so sure that I would like to make food the source of comfort. There are dangers in doing that.

When you get into a relationship with food that has to do with emotional fulfillment, you are laying the ground for food dependence. You are giving over control to another, in this case, food. You will reach out for it every time you feel sad or unfulfilled, or frustrated, or lonely. You will try to fill emotional yearnings with food. You will crave food whenever you need a pick-me-up. Sounds familiar? Most addictions do.

This might be an extremity of the concept of ‘comfort food’. But it’s better to become aware of the relationship one has with one’s food. And it can be done quite easily, by asking oneself a few simple questions:

· Do I crave food when I am sad? Or lonely, depressed, etc?

· Does eating make me feel happy, and do I use food to become happy?

· Is my unconscious, for-comfort eating making me unhealthy?

· Do I sometimes overeat without realizing it, which basically means I am eating without being conscious of what I am eating?

True comfort food, in my opinion, is what I eat mindfully, consciously. It fills me, nourishes me, and creates a deep feeling of well-being.