Literary Safari

Being around my 7 month old daughter brings out the poetic force in me. I find myself speaking to her in riddles and rhymes and sometimes I feel like I’m living inside a musical because I burst into made up songs and show tunes so many times during the day. I wonder whether other parents feel that way?

Today, I was watching her roll around on her play blanket (which is decorated with stars), and was amazed at how everything around her went into her mouth. I had filled a brass bowl with bracelets for her to play with – silver, metallic, gold, plastic — and all she wanted to do was eat them.

Eating Bangles

She has a sophisticated appetite this little child
Stars, shiny and bright, at breakfast time
Golden bracelets, sparkling in a bunch, just in time for lunch
Pearls, smooth and inlaid in silver, for dinner
Will diamonds be next, I wonder?

It sounds a bit silly, I know, but these are the types of things that I find myself reciting out loud when I speak to her. I seldom write them down but today I just keep thinking about her licking the stars on the blanket, then one by one, picking up each of the bracelets in the bowl and sucking on them as though they were the most delicious thing in the world!

Original post at Sepia Mutiny.

A couple of weeks ago, I tuned in to the Food Network’s The Next Iron Chef to find a sophisticated, soft spoken, skinny desi chef cooking up a storm. His name is Jehangir Mehta and his delicate dishes in every episode and challenge have been distinguished by their creative use of fresh herbs, fruit, and spices and their aesthetic presentation.

Mehta is the owner and executive chef of Graffiti, a Lower East Side NYC restaurant that serves “international small plates that feature his trademark affinity for bold flavors and spices such as chillies, sambhar, turmeric, and star anise.” In cook off after cook off, Mehta—who trained as a pastry chef at the Culinary Institute of America, but who hails from a Parsi family in Bombay — has been impressing the judges with unusual and original dishes such as pickled ginger scallops, bitter melon fritters, and apple and soy caramel skewers. His preparations are like miniature paintings; each one a carefully choreographed mouthful of flavor.

Tonight at 9 PM EST is the season finale where Mehta will battle against the Philadelphia-based Chef Jose Garces. Two very qualified chefs from two ethnic backgrounds with rich culinary traditions; it’s bound to be a close match.

Below the fold is a brief Q&A with Chef Mehta, including his thoughts about reality TV, his take on a South Asian Thanksgiving, and his recipe for his favorite comfort food.

Will Mehta be the next Iron Chef? We’ll soon find out. (more…)

I was intrigued, but slightly skeptical when I signed up for a cooking class at the newly-opened Indian Culinary Center a few weeks ago. What could I, a vegetarian who has been cooking desi food pretty regularly for the past couple of years, learn that was new and interesting in an Indian Vegetarian Delights Class? A lot, it turns out.

The ICC is run by Geetika Khanna, a former psychologist and graduate of the French Culinary Institute who has been charting a path in the food industry for the past 10+ years. I really felt like I was walking into another world when I rang the buzzer of 131 W. 23rd St., which turned out to be the Chelsea Inn, a cosy bed and breakfast whose ground floor industrial kitchen turned out to be the cooking school of the now-defunct culinary arts program of The New School, where it turns out, Khanna used to be an instructor.

On this particular Tuesday night, nine of us had signed up to spend the evening learning how to cook with Khanna, a tall, relaxed, and skilled instructor who weaves anecdotes about her family in with technique tips and practical approaches on how to make Indian cooking a part of your culinary repertoire, instead of something exotic and inaccessible. For those like me, who generally cook at least one or two Indian meals a week, it was the practical tips like how to clean your spice grinder — run a piece of bread through it — and the ease and humor with which Khanna made cooking a six-course meal seem doable (from scratch, using mostly fresh ingredients) that was the tipping point. Plus, I enjoyed her running commentary on colonialism, the evolution of the Indian “curry,” and the Food Network —and she gave me the courage to fry my first pooris, a big deal for a gal who has always had a fear of deep frying. There were also a few surprises along the way, like the fact that she uses cayenne pepper in her masala dhaba. [Click on the narrated slideshow above for a walk-through of the class and a look at our full menu.]

The menu for that day’s class was what Khanna referred to as a typical Sunday breakfast meal that her North Indian-Punjabi household would eat in Delhi. In my Sindhi home, it would be dinner or lunch and there would be many more fried foods! So yes, the variation is incredible, but here in the US, there are common denominators to the term “Indian cuisine” and certain lines do, I think, get blurred. For example, when I first started cooking, I made dishes based on recipes I found online (because it’s easier than trying to get my mom to talk to me about measurements) and so, they were always slightly different than what I grew up eating. It’s only now that I’m starting to figure out how to adjust the spices and ingredients so that they taste more like my grandmother and mother’s food.

The three and a half hour class cost $55, and was followed by a delicious six-course meal. A pretty good deal for an evening out in NYC where you’re learning, eating, and meeting a bunch of interesting people. (Other NYC cooking classes range from $100 to $200 per person).

At present, Khanna offers classes every month, and has plans to invite other chefs of Indian cuisine to teach at the ICC. With all the regional variations of Indian food plus diasporic foods such as Indian Chinese, West Indian, and Indo-French, as well as the wealth of Indian chefs in the New York area, I’m sure there are many more yummy lessons and treats to return to at the ICC. I’ll definitely be going back.

Oh, and if anyone is interested in interning with Khanna, she’s looking. Drop her a line.

Here’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while: indulge in a proper afternoon tea for two, complete with pretty little teapots, finger sandwiches, sweets, and great company. I finally did it, last night–for dinner!

My friend Maria and I found ourselves at Tea and Sympathy, a proper British tea room (their motto is “If you’re looking for anything British, you’re in the right place) in the West Village around supper time, and though I started out eyeing plates such as welsh rarebit and shepherd’s pie, my focus quickly shifted when the two ladies near us received their tea service for two. There’s something about the silver tower piled with sweet and savory tidbits …. it makes me feel like a prim and proper lady and a little kid all at once.

My teapot was short and stout, an olde world map laid out lovingly on her, a little panda in sunglasses sitting atop her lid. Steeping inside were white tea leaves and rose petals. And, on our tea tower were vanilla and chocolate cupcakes, scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam, and an array of bite-sized sandwiches. We got the vegetarian tea platter which came with cream cheese and cucumber, cheese and branston pickle sandwiches, egg salad with watercress, and tomato and cream cheese sandwiches, all on some type of amazing whole grain bread, except for the egg salad ones.

I’m not sure how delicious everything actually was or whether my imagination’s so enamored with the idea of this combination that anything served up on a dainty tower would taste just as wonderful.  Like many Indian children, I grew up on a steady diet of children’s books and adventures by Enid Blyton, all of which were replete with midnight feasts and picnic lunches that spoke of foods that were unfamiliar to my palate. My mouth would water as I read about ginger beer, bangers, smoked trout, scones, macaroons, cucumber sandwiches, crumpets, deviled eggs, and treacle pudding; all culinary possibilities that were far away from my reality (with the exception of cucumber sandwiches and deviled eggs!).

Last night, I was not only reminded of my love affair with the food in my favorite childhood stories, but also of a special little book I received not too long ago from one of my favorite food bloggers, The Gourmet Cartographer. The book, Cherry Cake and Ginger Beer, by British author Jane Brocket, is a treasury of memories and recipes of “foodstuffs and food occasions in children’s literature.” (A mini-review follows below the fold.) (more…)

On my first day in India, we stopped at a huge food court on the Mumbai-Pune expressway. There’s only one thing I ever get there: vada pav. A crunchy yet soft potato fritter encased in a fluffy bread roll and “kicked up a notch” with a sprinkling of lentil-infused chili powder.

When I went to pay the Rs. 28 for my two plates of vada pav, I handed over two Rs. 20 notes to the cashier. He rapidly slid a Rs. 10 note and two Cadbury Chocolate Eclairs to me over the counter.

“Yeh kyaa hein, bhaya?” I asked. What is this? Do I get dessert with my meal?

“Rupees two ka change,” he said seriously, moving on to the next customer.

During my early school days in Pune, I would have traded a week’s worth of lunch for a single Cadbury’s Chocolate Eclair. A toffee wrapped in a sparkly purple and gold wrapper, this popular Indian toffee has a chewy caramel exterior and a dairy milk chocolate in its center. How pallates change. Now I can’t even imagine popping one of these into my mouth. How much floss and brushing would it take to get those flecks of caramel out of my molars?

I tried to slide the candies back. “Mein toffee nahin khati,” I argued, trying to explain to the cashier that I don’t eat candy. There was no point. It was quickly obvious that this was a moot discussion. The customers behind me urged me along. “That is how it is,” one man grinned.

I moved forward, trying to wrap my brain around this barter system where I, the client, have no choice about what I can receive in the stead of money. If they’d asked me, I would have bought another vada pav or maybe a salted lassi.

After eating, I walked under a rainfilled canopy over to the STD/ISD/PCO booth, made a phone call to my husband in the US, and paid the two eclairs forward to the telephone operator.

“Yeh kyaa hein?” he stared at me in confusion when I doled out Rs. 40 and two eclairs.

“Two rupees,” I giggled. The telephone guy looked down at his palm and back up at me. He giggled too.

I wonder how far those two eclairs have traveled since then!

For your enjoyment, a Cadbury Chocolate Eclair (the crunchy version) ad. It’s a play on those old Bollywood movies of the 1980s where “hero and heroine” ran through fields of flowers!

Guavas are believed to have originated in Mexico or Brazil. They’re one of my favorite fruits and here in Brazil, goiaba is mixed into everything–drinks, ice-creams, cakes, and breads.

When the Portugese came, they brought their tradition of marmalade making with them. Indigenous guavas were used to make the omnipresent jam that is called goiabada. A slice of this jam with queijo de minas (a kind of cheese) is a perfect combination, and named Romeu e Julieta, after one of literature’s most perfect loves.

I’ve been having many amazing guava-based foods here in Brazil, but Luis’s mom Sylvia’s baked guava souffle was otherworldly. (O, tempt not a desperate man!)

It arrived at the lunch table last Saturday all fluffy and puffy, a pale pink cloud of warm, swirly delight that melted in my mouth. Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast. It was all I could do to not dive into this heavenly pillow.

Sylvia drizzled it with creme de cassis, and served it with vanilla ice-cream. Delicioso! (The ingredients are simple, I’m told: egg whites, fresh guava, cream (and maybe sweet condensed milk?). Whip it all together (a lot) and bake.)

Note: I just returned from three weeks in India. Though I originally started out wanting to make time to blog about my travels, it took very little time for me to decide to just take a break from all things electronic. So, here now is a completely non-sequential travel log, purely based on what I feel like writing about at this particular time. Read more here.

Since my mother and her immediate family grew up in French-speaking Morocco, cheese is one of their true culinary loves. As a kid growing up in Pune with my Meme (maternal grandmother) and Massi (maternal aunt), on a typical day, making a cheese sandwich meant opening a can of Amul processed cheese. When family came to visit from Casablanca, however, life got exciting because we knew that deep inside their suitcases would be wrapped a big, 2 kilo ball of Edam cheese, the kind with the bright red wax rind! The arrival of the “red cheese” as I called it, heralded a few weeks of unabashed cheesy adventures — Meme’s homemade pizza, grilled cheese sandwiches, and even fondue!

On special occasions, we would also make trips to Pune’s very own A.B.C. Farms which has been producing 60 varieties of cheese using their own cultures since 1976. When my parents came to visit from Ghana, we would attend their annual cheese exhibition (i.e. a tasting) and drool over the extensive range of cheeses, especially the gruyere.

I can say with certainty that back in those days the demand for specialty cheeses was limited to restaurants and foreigners, not the Indian palate. Things have certainly changed. Cheese has come a long way in India. You can find at least a dozen varieties of cheese in a standard supermarket like Reliance Fresh. Now, even Amul has a line that features Emmental, Pizza Mozzarrella (shredded), and Gouda, all “100% vegetarian” (i.e. no rennett).

The Cheese Highlight of My Trip

All that said, the cheese that got me most excited during my recent trip to India was the line of handmade cheese produced by Auroville, the “township devoted to an experiment in human unity” which was founded in 1968 by the “mother,” a devotee of Sri Aurobindo. Auroville is located in the South Indian town of Pondicherry (now officially Puducheri, alas yet another city whose name India’s nationalistic politicians have sought to Hindufy in recent times). (more…)

Good times = good food.

I couldn’t have described my purple meal at Cendrillon, a Filipino restaurant in Soho, any better than Trader Janki. Read it and drool. Seriously.

And, I was at Popover Cafe for one of these last night. A steaming popover with strawberry butter. Need I say more?

Update (late Friday) : The roundup is on its way. I’m compiling all the gems!

It’s my honor to be hosting Poetry Friday for the first time. Welcome to Literary Safari. I haven’t been as regular about participating as I would like, BUT I have noticed that I’ve actually started paying much more attention to verse in my everyday life. Most days, I feel like I’m walking around with a poem in my pocket!

I’m baking blueberry muffins on this rainy Friday in New York, and the cold apartment smells so sweet and yummy. So, my poem for the day is “Blueberries,” by Robert Frost:

“You ought to have seen what I saw on my way
To the village, through Mortenson’s pasture to-day:
Blueberries as big as the end of your thumb,
Real sky-blue, and heavy, and ready to drum
In the cavernous pail of the first one to come!
And all ripe together, not some of them green
And some of them ripe! You ought to have seen!”

It’s a long and funny poem in dialogue that begged me to read it out aloud – which is a nice way to start a day, actually. You can read it in its entirety here.

Now, down to business. Please use Mister Linky to submit your poem/url so that I can successfully execute my Poetry Friday roundup duties at the end of the day.

(more…)

The New Yorker this week is … all about food! Yay! There are a series of first-person essays  titled “Family Dinner.” Contributors include David Sedaris and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I’m not even half-way through  all of them, but  really enjoyed this one:
Grandmother’s House, by Nell Freudenberger
On a flight to visit her grandmother, Nell Freudenberger. is reading Amitav Ghosh’s THE HUNGRY TIDE, which takes place in the Sunderbans region of Bangladesh or East Bengal. Farah, the woman sitting next to her, is coincidentally from the Sunderbans. The two strike up a friendship, and a couple of years later, Nell ends up visiting Farah’s family . This is a mouth-watering essay about a home-cooked meal that the author experiences. Since it takes place on the Indian subcontinent, no family meal is ever complete without a stream of relatives – aunties, uncles, and endless helpings.

I can’t wait to read more of these essays tonight.

K. and I were up in the Catskills last weekend. We spent Saturday tootling around Kingston’s (the first capital of New York) waterfront, then headed to our favorite restaurant – Ric Orlando’s New World Home Cooking.

We try to eat here at least once every six months, and every time we go, we’re amazed at how it just pops out of Rt. 212 in Saugerties, and takes you by surprise. And, we just can’t get enough of their Pan Blackened String Beans.

Now, before you dismiss this statement, let me tell you that these are not your ordinary string beans stirred around in a pan. They are delectable – the perfect balance of cooked and crunchy, of smoky and spicy … served with a sauce … don’t even get me started on the sauce! Its ingredients include paprika, Tabasco sauce, Worcestershire sauce, celery salt, two types of mustard, gumbo filÈ powder, and a whole bunch of nifty spices.

Sigh, once you take a bite of the first bean, you’ll be lickin’ your fingers and reaching out for … more, more, more! [Here's the recipe from the New World site.]

I wish there was a restaurant in NY that had this on their menu. It just doesn’t seem fair to have to drive that far for stringbeans. (Hey, Candle Cafe chefs – have you ever considered how good this would be for your business?)

As with many good things, this dish (it turns out to be the most-ordered on NWHC’s menu) came about quite by accident. Ric Orlando writes:

One hectic night I came up three orders short of vegetables while plating up a large table. In a moment of panic, I tossed a handful of stringbeans in the boiling pasta water to cook them lightly. Well, I re-moved them from the water a little too soon. In my rush to get them cooked and finish plating those last three dinners, I dumped the beans into the hottest skillet on handäa white-hot blackening pan laden with residual blackening seasoning. I moved them around to finish them and put them on the plate with the rest of the entrees. Nine people eating dinneränine different dishes and one topic ofconversationäthose stringbeans! The table ordered three side orders so everyone could taste them. The server exclaimed that if I didn’t put these on the menu, I was nuts! Well, there’s no changing that.

At New World this time, I also ordered a beautiful Organic Arugula and Sunflower Sprout Salad with toasted sunflower seeds, roasted red peppers, Idiazabal cheese and black mission fig vinaigrette. My salad was topped with a roasted mushroom trio. Beautiful. K. got a blackened tofu sandwich, which was pretty good too.

We pretty much rolled out of the restaurant by 3:30, full and wishing for a siesta spot. We searched for a rolling field or patch of grass on which to lie down, but couldn’t find one. So, we drove to Woodstock, in hope of making it up to the Buddhist monastery. We didn’t quite make it. Along the way, K. found a chair-hammock on the porch of a store and snuck into it for a 40-minute siesta.

Which brings me to the point of this rambling narrative. I watched a piece on tonight’s BBC News [listen to the story] about a new scheme in the hotels in the town of Sevilla, in the South of Spain, which allows tourists to rent hotel rooms for an afternoon siesta. What a brilliant idea! Especially after lunch at New World Home Cooking … or really, any place in the Hudson Valley. (Take note, Ric Orlando. There’s a barn next door to the restaurant that would have made for a perfect napping spot!)

The following ranks amongst one of the top e-mailed articles in the NYTimes today: In India, Grandma Cooks, They Deliver, by Sarita Rai.

The article examines and pays subtle tribute to the clockwork lunch delivery system orchestrated by dabbawallas in Mumbai. I always thought that dabba literally means box, but Rai tells us it is also a reference to the colonial “tiffin dabba ” which a light meal. Walla means something along the lines of “the one who carries.” She writes,

The precision and efficiency of the dabbawallas have been likened to the Internet, where packets identified by unique markers are ferried to their destination by means of a complex network.

“There is a service called FedEx that is similar to ours — but they don’t deliver lunch,” said one dabbawalla, Dhondu Kondaji Chowdhury.

What a quote. I love it.

There are tiffin services in New York (soon?), the San Fran Bay area, and Philadelphia. And, at sepia, there’s a number of a dude in NYC who already delivers.

I can’t wait for the day when I can pick up the phone and call in an order for two fresh chappatis, a steaming bowl of dal, a spicy gawar cooked like this, homemade yogurt, and of course, a piping hot gulab jamun. Only question: Would I be able to stay awake and work after my meal?!