Tiny little wontons

Almost twenty confidant eyes, nodded before I revealed the recipe foa a chinese menu. I was happy to start the cooking session after thirty long days. Everyone was happy with the menu, but the menu was not a balanced one, the color, cooking methods and the texture was almost same for all the five dishes. The briefing took sixty minutes and their confidant level grew higher and higher.Perhaps , their Six months Industrial exposure training which they finished a month ago must be the reason for their confidant level. I told them, its an experiment and never stick to the recipe, know the functions of the ingredients and apply accordingly.

Everyone took position on their respective tables, looking at their confidant level, i stopped monitoring them and started cooking tiny little wontons, the filing were mushrooms and the dip a spicy garlic sauce. I fried a few and steamed a few, everything went well with the spicy garlic sauce, after seventy minutes i went around to see what twenty chefs and chefies have prepared. Their confidance deceived me, their nodding was just a false impression, rather cooking everyone experimented with the dishes and damaged it as worse as possible.

Table number one fried the whole leg of chicken, rather deboning and cutting into dices for "Chicken in hot garlic sauce". I said to saute garlic with soy, tomato sauce and add stock and then to thicken it with cornflour paste, but table number three , thickened the stock itself with cornflour, the wierd scene went on and on with each and every table . The fried rice with diffrent color and diffrent texture and all possible shapes of wontons, all fried with and withour filling. I am suppose to taste all the dishes and comment on them, but i went back to my table only to eat the tiny little wontons which i prepared ( Sometimes food will lessen our stress /depression/sadness/guilt). I did not comment on any of the dishes nor i tasted any, because it was I who briefed the recipe of an unbalanced menu and I promised to do better next time.

Secret Recipe..

From next week its “Eat what you cook”, it doesn’t meat that I will stop dining out, twice a week its “Eat what others cook”. With inspirations from Amaravishy, I shifted to a new location, in real, there is nothing much to shift, I am learning purchasing.
Boiling milk on the first day is very auspicious, we all know that. I purchased a Stove where you have to pump for pressure and use kerosene as fuel. My first purchase was a real bad one, because if you stop pumping the flames goes down and the first day I pumped for continuous fifteen minutes to boil half liter milk.
Where do is start, the first day with and without any ingredients to cook, we managed with milk and biscuits and for brunch, a good restaurant (Annapoorna) nearby with wonderful sambar and slightly on the higher selling price is one which I chose for dinner, rather dining out I packed four masala dosas home. The waiter made me wait thirty minutes only to say that there were no more masala dosas, then why did he took the order?
His response was an alternative tomato masala dosa, without the potatoes, I didn’t mind, just drinking sambar for dinner would be enough. Everyone in Coimbatore knows about that popular sambar, one of my student who worked there, as supervisor couldn’t get the recipe, at last he gave up after six months. So what? It’s an assignment and an experiment for the next cooking session, where the students will prepare sambar similar to that of Annapoorna ‘s sambar. Experimenting with so many sambar recipes is a good teaching and learning experience, but soon will try to find and reveal the secret.

A sample recipe:

Ingredients

Sambar Thoor dhal- 1 cup Any Vegetable of your choice- 1 cup (drumstick, carrot, beans, raddish, kohl rabies) Onions- 2 (chopped) Tomatoes- 2 (chopped) Tamarind extract- 1/2 cup Sambar Powder- 1 tsp Red Chili Powder- 1 tsp Turmeric Powder- 1/4 tsp Asafetida Powder- 1/8 tsp Garlic- 3 flakes (crushed) Mustard Seeds- 1/2 tsp Urad Dhal- 1/2 tsp Salt Oil- 1 tablespoon Chopped coriander leaves (cilantro)

methodPressure cook thoor dhal with garlic and mash well. Steam the chopped vegetable with onions, tomatoes, turmeric powder and salt. Mix the cooked thoor dhal and steamed vegetables together. Add tamarind extract, red chili powder, asafetida and sambar powder. Boil this until the raw smell of tamarind vanishes. Heat oil in a small pan. Add mustard seed. When it starts to pop add urad dhal and fry until it becomes golden. Remove from fire. Pour this seasoning over the sambar mixture. Heat for 5 more minutes. Garnish with chopped coriander leaves .

neither soup nor stew

GOULASH:
A Hungarian beef soup named after the keepers of Magyar oxeb( gulyas). The origin of this dish, which is now made with onions and paprika and garnished with potatoes, dates back to the 9th century. At that time , it consisted of chunks of meat stewed slowely until the cooking liquid completely boiled away. The meat was then dried in the sun and could be used later to prepare a stew or a soup, by boiling up in water.

Traditionally, goulash is made in a special cauldron(bogracs). There are number of regional variants according to the cut of beef and the cooking fat used( pork fat or lard) , but purists agree that goulash should not include flour or wine, nor should soured cream added just before serving. Hungarians regard Viennese goulash as a flout- thickened version of genuine goulash soup: in Hungary the latter is sometimes served with potatoes and csipetke( small quennells of egg pasta, poached in stock)

RECIPE:

Peel 250 gm onions and slice them , Cut 1 kg beef in to large pieces( 80gm each) . Melt 100gm fat in a large casserole. when it is hot, put the meat and onions and brown them. Add 500 gm of quartered tomatotes , crushed clove of garlic, mixed herbs , salt pepper and finally 1 tbsp of paprika .Add enough stock to cover the meat, bring to the boil,then reduce the heat, cover and cook for 30 mins.Add quatered potatoes and boil till the meat is cooked. Adjust the seasoning.

Paprika: a spicy seasoning ground from a variety of sweet red pepper.

In the Soup

The Larousse Gastronomique defines soup as a liquid food served at the beginning of meal or for lunch, a snack, etc. Like this there are so many definitions, and we too order soup at the beginning of a meal, thinking the purpose of soup, that is to increase the appetite, but many times the purpose deceive us.
I would call the soup as our first food, when humans invented cooking some nine thousand years ago, they wouldn’t have thrown away the water in which the meats/vegetables were cooked. So consuming both the liquid and meat/vegetable comprise the definition soup.
Unlike today where bread and bread rolls were served alongside, traditionally the soup was poured in a bowl with slices of bread in it, which makes the bread soft by the time one consumes it. Is bread an accompaniment for soup or the soup a tenderizer for bread, whichever way it is, soup and bread always marry well.
Another definition say ‘Soup is a food that is made by combining ingredients such as meat, vegetables in stock or hot boiling water, until the flavor is extracted forming a broth’. A wonderful definition. Only when it is flavorful it will increase your hunger. But, Gazpacho a cold soup is prepared by grinding all the ingredients and emulsifies with oil, it is not only flavorful but also avoids the boiling procedure.
Both the definitions of soup has the presence of meat/vegetable or any solid food, but again the soup Consommé is a highly flavored clear soup without any meat or vegetables in it, why Consommé. Our own Rasam have all the features of a soup and is an excellent appetizer.
For a long time the evening meal in France consisted solely of soup, so one drinks the liquid, chew the meat/vegetable, with or without breads. The stomach is full and no further courses; today the same heavy soups still occupy the place under Appetizer. Once I mistook tomato soup for sauce and started spreading it on the sliced bread, the soup was so heavy and thick which makes you to dip some snacks into it.
Rather finding fault with soup it is better to know what one order, because soup always goes in first and not to forget that our stomach needs some space for the remaining courses. The classification of soup is myriad and will confuse you more on that next time. By the time you can say what is your favorite soup.
HAPPY SOUP!

What is for dinner ?

What would you like to have? Often many people dine out with specific dishes in their mind and whatever the dish in mind was ordered first and then come the three main courses – the rice, roti, some pastas or noodles. (Forget not the starter before and the dessert afterwards) Everyone is used to it, when our mind is filled with chicken or mushroom, we just do not order chicken or mushroom alone, a rice, roti or some farinaceous course will also end up in our table. These three courses have become a habit when we order from the menu.
I tried eating mangoes with chill powder and salt, a plateful of bhel poories and a glass of sweet limejuice for dinner. Everything was good, with my heart and stomach full; I enjoyed eating with hundred pair of eyes watching me on the street. Eventually, when I reached home I couldn’t stop tasting some reheated biryani before entering my sleep. (Is that a habit?)
My father, always have ragi porridge after dinner and my granny drink lot of butter milk after her dinner, for them the meal is incomplete without the ragi porridge or the buttermilk. And at the same time they cannot have only the ragi porridge or buttermilk for their dinner. I ask them what happen if they couldn’t get neither porridge nor buttermilk after their dinner, and my question was always unanswered.

How often do we waste the food? even if its a laste bite, does everyone leave the plate without a single grain of rice /food, my mother used to tell if we waste the laste mouth we wont grow tall, with that fear in mind i eat the plate clean, and today everyone call me chintu.

When it comes to eating it is we who frame the rules, the courses and their accompaniments, when you are happy with the meal, why worry about a la care and table d hote. so what would you like to have a proper menu with diffrent course or whatever your taste buds needs?

HAPPY EATING

How do i teach?

Once upon a time, I have criticize the use of OHP( Over Head Projector) in teaching, the real fault is not with the OHP but with the OHP sheet/transparancy sheet, because many just copy the content from the book into the OHP sheet. Once it is projected overhead, the students just copy the content blindly into their note books, where the words from the teachers mouth just fades away. When i started teaching, the black board and the diffrent colored crayons came to mind, fortunately in my school they had white board with black marker.

I was very happy with the white board and the black marker, untill the day my colleague Ann experienced a very bad incident in the class. she forget the black marker in an instance of hurrying to the class and used a green marker given by her class representative, after drawing a wierd layout of a medium size hotel for fourty minutes with her green pen on the white board, she found that the layout couldn't be erased. We tried all possible solutions and chemicals to erase it, and finally the white board turned into a green, black, grey color, which ended up in our useless storage room.

The fear of permanent marker, made Ann and many other teachers to use OHP , but still i was not convinced and went to class with neither marker nor OHP. The topic for that day was cuts of meat and i started with chicken, then with pork, lamb and beef. I was literally acting as a chicken in the class room using both my hands for the wings of chicken, i bended down to teach cuts of pork and other meats, exposing my thighs for ham and belly for bacon. i do not know how many understood and After solid fourty minutes , i was happy , that there were no cuts of frog in the syllabi.

Hardly very few learned to cut, so the next week i purchased a couple of chicken, and a demonstration even helped Subramaniya Iyer to enjoy cutting a chicken and then things concerned with the cuts of chicken became very clear to the students. But, with the pork, beef and other meats, i was not able to find any slaughtering house in the town. The alternative - a vedio about the cuts of meat, unlike the live demonstration, the video can be rewined as many times as possible till the students understands the concept.

Even now i hate the copy cat OHP/transparancy sheet or the one Mr.XXX use which is twelve years old( Don't he feel like updating? Or Is he lazy to the core?). and today with all the modern technology available ,with the use of ICT in education, the virtual learning and many.Its worth trying all possible methods . It is very much easy to criticize, in the end, how far you are able to make the students to understand the concept is all that matter.

HAPPY TEACHING AND HAPPY LEARNING.

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.

Alcohol Part 1

I know many people who have lived and died because of Alcohol. Yes, my neighbour a fourty three year old farmer cannot live a single day without alcohol, and my grand father who passed away a year before beacause of consuming too much of home made local alcohol. All his life he has lived In an Absolut world. the picture on the left is not entirely true, its " Alcohol - the cause of - and solution to - all of life's problems"

Once upon a time,many villages in Nilgiris prepares Alcohol, for any happy or sad occasions, where every village with its standard recipe.But Manjitha is out of all these. Its maybe because of the nearby factory. I'll tell you how. For many in Manjitha, the source of income for food and booze is from the factory, almost every single house has one or the other working in factory..........

now the Alocohol part.... You get pure alcohol inside the factory, and many employees will try it whenever there is a chance, and for them there is always a chance. When all the money goes into alcohol, what do they do for living?

My grandfather got countless memo for consuming Alcohol during working hours and many knows that he has consumed more Alcohol than water in his life time. Like my grand father there are many who just drink, drink and drink,. Everyone in pink of health till the last day of their life, all beacuse of their food habit,and many is verymuch intrested in this (Link)

Today , the same old drinking continues, but the eating habits ???? I'm not against drinking, i'll tell everyone to Drink but not to get drunk. Once a student asked me what Drink Responsibly mean? I said its without troubling others and without troubling yourself, but whatever it is, there is no problem in drinking when you stick to this (Link)

There are lot of excuses than reasons for one to drink, once my friend Ashok said, i just drink two days in a year, the day when it rains and and the day when it is not raining. When will he end his bachelor life? Because in our community girls are verymuch concerned about Alcohol, they dont want to spoil their life by marrying someone who drowns his life in Alcohol.

Once, I along with my friends went to a tasmac party, we tasted fried chicken (i.e)before the drink and fired the waiter for its salty taste...... Too much of salt, but, after a couple of drinks, my friends were happy with the chicken.What happen to the saltiness? then i tought all food taste good when its with Alcohol, but again my taste buds got that salt , salt taste. the solution - another extra large. Does alcohol really kills the taste buds? how many questions in this post and too many questions arises when i talk about alcohol, i like everything about alcohol except this......

and before you post your comments , i would like to say that there is nothing wrong in drinking, but getting DRUNK??? there are many reasons, but the top ten are here (link)

Cotton like

Biryani with any meat is always good, let it be with chicken, mutton, beef or sea foods. But mutton biryani is more flavourful compare to other meats. To me, there are best and worst part in mutton biryani, the worst part is, when the meat is not cooked/raw and the best part is, when the meat is cooked to soft, tender and cotton like consistency.Yes, cotton like consistency, thats what my chef said in our school fest when preparing Hyderabadi Biryani.Since then i have been trying to taste one such biryani.

Thanks to Amaravishy, after fourteen long months i'm tasting one such biryani at venu's coimbatore. The portion is adequate, more accompaniments, the deep fried meat balls, a kheer after the meal is perfect, a perfect lunch. The mutton in the biryani is soo soft and like my chef said its cotton like. Twice i have been to venu's , only to taste the unique mutton biryani. The more of mutton, dosen't mean that i'm against other meat, i love meat in any cooked form, sometimes when it is overcooked , i'm just tired of chewing, but that is what you suppose to do when it is overcooked.( get tired/ keep chewing)

All the meats looks good , when its in the dining table. But in real - a wild boar, a mongoose , a frog? how many will imagine all these? but whenever i see a deer , a rich - red , delicious gravy comes to my mind, thats how i tasted my first game dish. Not very often we get a chance to eat game, when a chance arise, don't stop and don't miss to grab some. from the frog meat, which i tasted in goa to the liver and blood porial in madurai, all meat is good and delicious. When it is cooked to correct consitency and and cotton like, its more good and more delicious.

How fast can you.......

I have to learn the art of slow walking. I'm not a good walker, the step i take, the way my body moves, the short swinging hands, the dancing legs. Its wierd, for anyone who see's me walking. Its a short wierd scene. Because i walk really fast and funny, but its hard sometimes to compete with my head.

Yesterday my eyes were glued to my colleuges walking steps, the even pace, slow and steady, Oh! they enjoy walking.I couldnt remove my eyes from that scene.I wonder wheater is it the heavy lunch, or the hot summer....for that slow slow....slow walk.

The same quickness i have adopted for eating & cutting. Yes, I'm a quick eater, i remembered once having lunch with a school principal, a slow eater indeed. me being a quick eater, ate - five ,six, five , bhaturas to his two bhaturas , from that day i'm trying to eat slow.When it comes to cutting, i am verymuch happy with my speed. Accidents happens only when i experiment with my speed limit.

My first interview, after my graduation, the additional director asked me how fast can i cut a carrot? My answer - a little slower than chopping a bunch of spinach, sometimes questions may be more stupid than the answer.

Many times, the style of cutting the vegetables/meat and its speedness for mis en place, creates a good impression on the person who cuts the vegetables/meat.but will he create the same impression in the food what he preapares? I have had many studens who cooks well, with a slow mis en place, All one need is, start from scratch, know the functions of ingredients and above all love what you do. If the result turns out bad, remember to learn from mistakes.

HAPPY COOKING!

From Manjitha

From Manjitha ..... with Love..

What comes below, is one of the traditional food of Badugas community, almost all the villages in Nilgiris have seen this.But today, its hard to see those grains which we use for preparing the dish. The grains we call Bathha and the dish Atchikke, the grains can be stored for as many years as possible, as today hardly anyone cultivates it, we get it from Hasanoor( a place near Sathy).

My granny says Nilgiris Grain(Bathha) is the best for making Atchikke and she has fifty years old grains in her storage( does grains keep sooo long?) the grains can also be used for making porridge and Bathha Hittu ( Grain Cakes/dumplings). Whatever the varities are, my all time favourit is Atchikke - a delicious sweet, at home many have asked me what on earth makes me to eat Atchikke, when I'm in Manjitha, i tought not to trouble my granny for Atchikke, but my tongue couldn't stop asking my granny for those sweet , delicious Atchikke.


Pounding the Bathha and Removing the husk

The dish may look simple, Ironic is its method of peperation. The grains after sun drying has to be washed twice and then pan broiled, Oh! Those tiny green grains spluttering on the pan, its a real joy pan broiling it, then comes the pounding process. Its long, its hard and its tiring, where the pounding process doubled or tripled depending on the size of grains, after pounding the outer skin is removed, and then the process is verymuch simple.

Yes, the process after pounding is as simple as eating. Soaking those pounded grains in hot water and mixing with sugar and with grated coconuts and onto the serving plate. Before, spooning everything into the mouth, a final finish goes in, which is a mixture of powdered cardamom, fried grams, poppy seeds and some chopped bananas.Its a warm food, tough its summer in Manjitha, i couldnt stop with a single plate, and my grannies storage contains more grains ( Bathha) for the days to come. My palate is curious to taste many traditonal foods from the badugas cuisine, and Manjitha has it all.