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.

Cheesy simplicity

The simplest thing I know how to make, with the exception of tea, coffee and toast.

Serves two hungry people, or three less hungry people. Or an army of Kate Moss (“nothing tastes as good as thin looks”) wannabes.

Ingredients:

Cottage cheese – 100 g

Onions – 2 large

Tomatoes – 2-3 medium, depending on how sour you want it to be

Green chillies – to taste

Oregano – 1 to 2 tsp

Olive oil – 1 tbsp

Salt and pepper – to taste

Chop onions and tomatoes, and cube the cottage cheese. Heat olive oil in a pan. Introduce the chopped onions and sauté until soft. Sprinkle oregano, add tomatoes and green chillies. Stir until tomatoes look cooked. Add cottage cheese cubes and salt. If you have a pepper mill, sprinkle freshly ground pepper over the dish before serving.

Delicious when eaten with toasted brown bread, or rotis hot off the griddle.

Kohl cook

I think I’m the first woman in my family, the first generation, to not cook their kohl. I buy mine. It’s not messy to use, the fine tip gliding over the tips and edges of my eyes effortlessly. It doesn’t smudge so much. And in the 40 degree celsius heat of the Delhi summer, it doesn’t melt quite so easily. This is what I tell myself whenever I feel less of a woman for having bought my kohl. Instead of cooking it.

My grandmother, and my mother when she was interested in it, cooked their kohl on one particular night every year. It was the night of the festival of lights, Deepavali, which used to be celebrated with clay lamps until made-in-China electric lights flooded our markets and took over the business.

Celebrated on a moonless night, Deepavali was perfect for making your kohl. One, you already had the clay lamps for the deed. Second, the temperatures had turned decisively away from the mugginess of the end of the monsoon, and so your kohl had better chances of ‘setting’. And three, well, I suppose the auspiciousness of Deepavali might have played on their minds too.

So, here’s what my ancestresses did every Deepavali night of their lives, once they were grown up and kohl had become sufficiently important in their scheme of things. They filled a clay lamp with pure ghee, dipped a clean cotton wick in it, and engineered some way of placing a vessel over the mouth of the flame without putting it off. At regular intervals, they peeked into the vessel and wiped away the soot that had collected in it, carefully storing it in a jar. I guess that’s why it’s called lampblack too. How much kohl you made depended on your perseverance, and how much time you got to yourself on a big festival night when the family and its relatives expected to be fed an elaborate, extensive meal by you, the woman of the home.

I’m sure women made their kohl on other nights as well, and that my mother was indulging my need for the dramatic with her once-in-a-year-we-made-it story. She did make it for me once, on a moonfull night, the ghee aromatically melting away as the wick warmed it, steadily transforming its pristine, transparent self into a sooty, dark-as-Krishna one.

When I dipped my finger into the kaajal, as we call kohl, pulled my lower lid down and tried to put it in, it made huge smears around my eyes, making me look like a raccoon.  Clearly, I had lost the art of applying homemade kaajal, along with cooking it.

Desert dal

Writing about dal reminded me of one of the most spectacular versions of the dish I have ever eaten. Sand entangled in my hair, hot desert wind in my face, thighs turned to jelly by an enthusiastic camel ride.

No, it wasn’t romantic at all.

I was deep in the Thar desert, one of the border outposts manned by the Indian border security force. It was nothing like the pretty comfort of Jaisalmer or Jaipur, and there weren’t any ‘royals’ lurking about either, ready to help you sample the delights of their erstwhile palaces converted into ‘heritage hotels’. Just tough, leather-faced men, their skin stroked into deep ravines by the hot desert wind. And bright-smiled, multi-bangled village women who so generously offered to feed the strange woman with short, men’s hair and her gracious, graceful mother.

What they turned out was a traditional meal – dalbatichurma – actually dal, bati and churma, but often spoken all together, unpunctuated, with no breaks for breath. Dal was hot, as in chilly-hot, a kind of level of chilly until then I imagined foreigners falsely accused Indian food of having. Bati were flour dumplings, insanely tasty, and churma was a kind of flour cooked in ghee. Ghee. Loads of it. The entire meal was a feast of ghee. No wonder the dal tastes so great, my mother remarked. Even lauki will taste awesome if you put so much ghee in it, she continued, forgetting that I no longer detested the watery gourd. And had travelled quite far from the childhood dislike.

We stuffed ourselves with enough dalbatichurma that would have stood a camel in good stead for at least a month, I wildly hoping I wouldn’t store the ghee in unfortunate bulges. Later, as we lay with the wind quietening around us and the stars glittering cold and hard, reflecting on life I suddenly hit upon the reason for all the ghee – all the chillies! Of course, it is believed that the ghee helps the chillies go down smoothly, and the chillies wouldn’t taste so good without the ghee. Having worked out this vicious circle, I went to sleep with satisfaction, the sand creeping into the crevices of my eyes and tinting my dreams golden.

No dal, no love

Two days in a row, I cooked two dals most Indians cannot buy any longer. Arhar or tur, and moong. Simple, easy to cook, nutritious, and delicious, these dals now sell at more than Rs 100/kg in my city.

This morning, it was reported that the finance minister flew into a rage in parliament when some members alleged that the government is not serious about the rise in food prices. How does he suppose the homemaker feels, with steadily diminishing options of what she could put on the table for her family, that would not just fill their stomachs but nourish them as well?

Dals are the most easily available source of proteins for millions of Indians. In a diet that is usually richer in carbs than anything else, dals provide a crucial balance. Those of us who can afford it, liven it up with a tempering of ghee in which we fry some simple spices, like cumin and asafoetida, that help digestion. Even without this tempering, or tadka, just plain salted, dals are often quite tasty. The split moong dal is part of another staple — khichdi — the one dish wonder that combines dal with rice that I have cooked on many a lean day when nothing else stocked my fridge.

If there are no dals in the market, what can I do? Or something to that effect the beleagured finance minister is reported to have said.

Where are the dals? Where did they go? And please don’t give us the b-s about hoarders or blackmarketeers — that ’70s lore won’t work any more. In any case, things become lucrative for hoarders to hoard if they are in short supply to begin with.