Cooking videos have revolutionized the way enthusiasts cook, definitely the way I cook. It has taken the mystery out of cooking. You can see the gurus cook up your favourite dish right in front of your eyes.
The three baking videos from vahchef that I use regularly are these lovely & super easy bread rolls, pizza (he even shows how to bake a thin crust base) and the banana bread. I have modified vahchef’s recipe by skipping the eggs altogether and used some malai (cream) instead to brush the dough before baking them in the oven, and got great bread rolls. Also I had a lot of fun making moulding the dough into knots, loops and buns.
For the exact recipe & directions in Chef Sanjay’s trademark style, watch this video:
Twitter’s caught my fancy these days so that’s my favourite place to kill time. Plus since last month or so I have been out socializing more than I did in my entire life. Which means I have tried out pretty much every dessert at Corner House. Weight loss can go take a flying f***. To top that, a close friend from school days has been visiting, so a great time has been had shopping together and having fun over endless cups of chai. Going with the nostalgic mood, I went and cooked Sev Usal the way it was made at home and we’ll get to that shortly.
Oh and I have also been dangerously overdosing on reruns of Project Runway Canada (anything yummier than Evan Biddell I haven’t seen), Iss jungle se mujhe bachao (need something to curse at) and Rakhi ka swayamwar (can’t decide who’s making me wanna pull my hair out – Rakhi or the dulhas) on youtube. Can anyone please tell me some good fun shows to watch on youtube?
To make Sev Usal, you’ll need
- 1.5 cups of dried green peas, soaked for 6-8 hours and pressure cooked
- 2 medium potatoes, pressure cooked, peeled and cubed
- 1 large onion, cubed
- 1 large tomato, cubed
- 1 inch piece of ginger, grated
- 5 pods of garlic, peeled and crushed
- A few sprigs of coriander leaves, finely chopped
- 1/2 tsp haldi (turmeric) powder
- 2 tsp mirchi (chilly) powder or to taste
- 2 tsp garam masala (I used MDH kitchen king) or to taste
- 5 to 6 lavang (cloves)
- 2 inch piece of dalchini (cinnamon)
- 2 pieces of tamalpatra (bay leaves)
- 2 tbsp oil
- Sev for garnishing
Method of preparation
Heat oil in a large thick bottomed pan/kadhai. Once hot add the whole garam masala (cloves, cinnamon, bay leaves), chopped onions, ginger, garlic, a pinch of salt & saute till the edges start to get some colour. Add the cooked green peas along with the liquid, chopped potatoes & tomatoes. Add the turmeric powder, chilly powder, garam masala & salt. Bring the usal to a boil & let it cook till the tomatoes become soft. The consistency should be ragda-like, so add water if required to get the desired consistency.
Serve it piping hot in a cereal bowl or a pasta dish and top it off with with lots of sev, a little bit of chopped onion(optional), chopped coriander, lemon juice, chutneys of your choice (garlic chutney, tamarind chutney, green chutney go very well)
We also sometimes eat toasted bread with sev usal and that makes it more fulfilling if you’ve been starving.
Psst.. here’s a secret. I loathe entering the kitchen sometimes on days together. In case all the food posts on ‘blink and miss’ made you think otherwise. The cooking I enjoy the most is of the fancy variety. Where the outcome is something yummy, restaurant-like and when there is no constraint of balancing out the nutrients, rotating the menu, caloric limitations and such like. I love scanning through recipes (youtube has spoilt me rotten), listing out and shopping for the new ingredients. When the dish is fancy, I bring out our one and only precious dinner set 7 fancy glasses and if I feel like it I even set the bloody table (which means I just throw the books, laptops and assorted kachara off the table). These are the meals that bring in the compliments.
Back to reality, very few of us (least of all me) can afford to eat meals with unlimited calories. Recently I started reading the nutrition information on some of the regular store bought stuff. A cream bun which costs just Rs 5 (making it seem like a light snack) contains more than 200 calories. This means that the 30 minute brisk walk that I squeeze in everyday god knows with how much difficulty is the amount of effort it takes to just undo the damage done by that pesky little cream bun. The fact as I have slowly realized is that it is the everyday routine cooking that requires some serious skills apart from patience and perseverance.
1. You need to have some kick ass inventory management skills to maintain an optimum level of stuff in your pantry. Too much rava and it’ll grow insects. No besan means can’t make those bhajias you JUST NEED TO HAVE on a rainy day. You need to replenish the stocks on time, turn your inventory into a curry before it wilts. All this on your fingertips!
2. You need serious capacity allocation skills to allot the right sized container to keep your stuff safe. You need to keep the sugar stocked in a large dubba, but a small handy one for everyday chai. Armed with dubbas in stainless steel, plastic and ceramic, you’re in for a battle. If you’re a novice you’ll need to transfer the oil to the sugar container, sugar to the dal, dal to the snacks dubba just to be able to fit in the two kilos of freshly bought rice. Do not forget that with each replenishment or transfer comes the mandatory cleaning and sunning of the said containers. Basically you have a very complex allocation problem at hand with no much computing resources, except your brain at your disposal.
3. You need to be exceptionally creative to work in an environment limited by availability of ingredients, no more than an hour at hand. You’re supposed to work your magic and turn the same old vegetables and the same old dals into something new every single day. What’s more you need to take care of the preparations being in talking terms to each other at least. Like you just can not make fried rice and kadhi like I did one day, by the simple but incorrect logic that if I want kadhi and husband wants fried rice => kadhi + fried rice will make everyone happy. We ordered in that day, by the way.
Seriously all this ranting was triggered by the trailer of the movie Food Inc.
It is information like this that really scares the crap out of me. Apparently the secret behind gorgeous red looking tomatoes that we see flooding our markets is that they are plucked when they are still green and ripened using ethylene gas. When on one hand people are lapping up microwave ovens in India, there are some serious health risks with the microwave method of cooking. Ditto about nonstick pans and artificial sweetners.This is what drives me to cook. I try to cook healthy as much as possible, but even when I don’t and indulge once in a while, I know what has gone into my food. Serious contamination has creeped into basic things like milk and vegetables too, I am aware. And ideally I would like to grow the vegetables I eat and so on. But then I would even like to be superwoman.
I now appreciate people who cook everyday, including my mother who managed to feed us freshly cooked meals at least two times a day, along with a full time job. It is probably due to the high standards set during childhood that I don’t believe in living on leftovers or freezing and reheating. I mean if you can’t afford the luxury of eating a freshly prepared meal, what is the point of working so hard for a fat pay cheque? We do order in and eat at restaurants, more so during weekends, but I hate the dependence on someone else – a cook, a restaurant to take care of my diet. One of these days I may just give in and hire a cook, but till then chew this.
Popsicle –> PepsiCola – so much cooler than popsicle no? Time please –> Thupplis (is what regular junta called it). Thames (is what the hep crowd called it). Zigzagzee –> Jeejaajee (hold your breath for the rest of the song).. kabhi upar, kabhi neeche, kabhi aage, kabhi peeche.. can’t remember the rest of the stuff. No wonder the elders shooed us every time we sang that one.
“I have to do something before I turn into Adnan Sami”.
This was my favourite line while discussing my fitness plans (that never saw the light of the day) with all and sundry. Till one day, when on a whim, I went and bought a weighing machine. And as per the damned machine, I am ALREADY an Adnan Sami. So after a few sleepless nights with nightmares of me having a heart attack, I finally started doing something about it.
I now have a fitness regime and I have started eating sensibly. Even though I really want to, I can not tell you what the regime is, ’cause I don’t want to jinx it like the jinked the packetless diet (didn’t last a week even). So its been 5 days of hard work, sweat and too much climbing on the weight scale, and the weight has NOT budged by even half a kilo. I have weighed myself at dawn, before a meal, after a meal, before potty, after potty, with shoes on, with minimum clothes on, all to no avail. Someone please tell me all this effort is not going waste. I think its PMS. After all, when all else fails, it has got to be PMS.
When one wants to read, the other wants to catch some sleep.
When one is getting ideas, the other is fast asleep.
When one buys a furry blanket, the other has an allergy.
When one is sweating like a pig, the other is cozy in a quilt.
When one wants the lights off, the other has to have them on.
When one wants a soft bed, the other gets a backache.
Whene one wants a fan on highest speed, the other is getting chills.
When one loves cotton bedsheets, the other swears by satin.
When one prefers the windows closed and curtains drawn, the other says “I can’t breathe”.
And if that is not enough, we now have a baby who really has a mind of his own. It is really a wonder how we – all three of us, manage to sleep in the same room, really. How do you manage?
Pesarattu is a breakfast dish from Andhra Pradesh – a healthy dosa made from whole moong and rice. I tried it out of curiousity from vahchef’s youtube channel and it has slowly and steadily making it’s way in our regular breakfast menu. I love making it when we have friends of family arriving in the morning. It is a filling breakfast perfect for occasions when you’ve not had proper dinner the night before.
To make pesarattus (for 2 hungry people), you’ll need -
1 cup whole moong (whole green gram)
1/2 cup raw rice
Ginger, grated- 1 tbsp
3 green chillies
1 large onion, chopped finely
1 tsp jeera seeds (cumin)
A few drops of oil(optional)
Soak the moong and rice together in plenty of water, overnight or for 6-8 hours. Drain out the excess water. Add 1 tsp jeera, 2 chopped green chillies, 1/2 tbsp of grated ginger, optionally 1 tbsp of chopped onions and grind in a blender to a smooth consistency.
Combine the remaining 1 tbsp grated ginger, finely chopped onions, 1 finely chopped green chilly in a cup and keep aside. Heat a non-stick tava and spread the batter to make a dosa, using a flat steel katori and spreading the batter in a spiral motion, starting from the centre. Since pesarattu batter is slightly thicker than that of the dosa, the katori helps the batter spread evenly. Sprinkle the ginger-onion-green chilly mixture that was kept aside. Once the dosa is golden brown, gently peel it off the tava and serve. Ideal accompaniments are ginger chutney or coconut chutney. Though I usually serve with my all time favourite tomato chutney.
Yaiy!! I have been tagged by lostonthestreet to do a tag about books. I am very impatient with questions, but I have tried. Also, I am big on books but not necessarily big on books with literary value. I read all sorts of books that I enjoy. Of late, I have developed an allergy towards pure fiction and books that overdose on big words fail to hold my interest any more. Like one of the recent books I read – You are here. It is a breezy, chick lit sort of book that I did read end to end. But I am done with my fair share of chick lit and entire books dedicated to crushes and breakups and boyfriends. Okay that’s all. Here’s the tag.
1) What author do you own the most books by?
Rohinton Mistry
2) What book do you own the most copies of?
Freakonomics (I bought the second one just a few days after I bought the first one, cause I had forgotten about the first one by then)
3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
No.
4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
None right now.
5) What book have you read the most times in your life?
The Dilbert Omnibus and my entire C&H collection. I am being honest here.
6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
Guessing that it would’ve been Gijubhai Badheka ni balvartao series.
7) What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?
Eleven minutes and The Alchemist (and everything else by Paulo Coelho)
8) What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?
Waiter rant: Confessions of a cynical waiter by Steve Dublanica. Also, Grains, greens and grated coconuts by Ammini Ramachandran. This year I have been ODing on good quality recipe books that provide cultural and historical context and not just plain recipes.
9) If you could force everyone to read one book, what would it be?
Any of the Calvin and Hobbes. Come on, it’s a book!
10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for literature?
Rohinton Mistry
11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
None. By the end of a good book, I usually have my own idea of how the characters walk, talk, look, smell like and the movie director’s view of the world is usually completely different from mine.
12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
Read point 11.
13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
Don’t quite remember though I do get a lot of weird dreams where I transform into one of the characters or start living with them or something.
14) What is the most lowbrow book you’ve read as an adult?
One night at the call centre by Chetan Bhagat. More recently, You are here by Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan
15) What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?
None after I graduated. Thank God for that!
16) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
None.
17) Austen or Eliot?
None.
18) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
Oh lots. But I don’t even intend to read Shakespeare or anything that I am not going to enjoy but is supposed to be high quality literature just for the sake of it.
19) What is your favorite novel?
None.
20) Play?
It’s been really long since I read one actually. Recommendations anyone?
21) Short story?
Same as point 20.
22) Work of non-fiction?
To sir with love by E R Braithwaite. Not without my daughter by Betty Mahmoody.
23) Who is your favorite writer?
How many more times are you going to ask this? It is ROHINTON MISTRY, okay?
The banana walnut bread is one thing I absolutely love to bake, because not only does it taste moist and divine, it also leaves the house smelling sweet like a bakery. I have baked quite a few banana walnut breads, but the recipes I like the most is this one by Medha.
It takes just a few minutes to assemble the batter if you have the ingredients ready in your pantry. Also, there are no fancy ingredients so it is quite likely you’ll find everything you need for the banana walnut bread lying in your pantry right now!
To make banana walnut bread you’ll need:
1½ cups of maida (plain flour)
1 cup sugar
3 bananas (I used elakkais – lovely small bananas available in Bangalore. If you’re using regular bananas, you can use just 2)
1/2 cup chopped walnuts (akhrot)
6 tbsp butter at room temperature (Original recipe calls for 4 tbsp unsalted butter. I used 6 tbsp of salted butter, cause that’s what was available at home)
2 tbsp curd
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla essence
Preheat the oven for. Mash the bananas using a blender. Add the sugar, curd and whirr in the blender once more. Add the butter, salt, flour and baking soda and mix well. Add the milk, vanilla essence and finally add the walnuts. Grease a bread pan with butter, especially the corners and edges of the pan. I used a basic aluminium bread baking pan. Dust it with a little flour and pour in the batter. Bake it for 50 mins at 170 degrees C. Check by poking the bread with a toothpick to see if it comes out clean. Invert the bread on a wire rack for 10-15 minutes. Once the bread is at room temperature, slice it and enjoy. :)
The banana walnut bread is one thing I absolutely love to bake, because not only does it taste moist and divine, it also leaves the house smelling sweet like a bakery. I have baked quite a few banana walnut breads, but the recipes I like the most is 
