Brinjal Gojju

THIS quick and easy wonderful brinjal gojju* recipe was shared with me by a friend and I've found that it's a hit with even those finicky types who otherwise detest the humble brinjal. It's goes great with chapathis. The toasted, crushed peanuts add a crunchy, nutritive element to the dish while a wee bit of jaggery balances out the flavours of brinjal, tomato, onion and spices.

Brinjal Gojju 

What you need:

500 gm brinjal, diced
1 cup diced tomato
1 cup diced onion
1 cup peanuts, roasted,
skinned & crushed
1 cup green coriander, chopped
3 tsps red chilli powder
1/2 tsp turmeric powder
1 tbsp jaggery, grated
1/2 cup cooking oil
Salt to taste

Tip all the above ingredients into a pressure cooker and cook under pressure (with weight on) for three minutes. Allow the pressure to drop completely before opening. Serve with chapathis.

*A gojju is typically part of Karnataka cuisine. It's essentially any vegetable, sometimes even a fruit like a pineapple, cooked with condiments that give it a balance of sweet, sour and spice. In the above recipe, tomatoes substitute for the usual tamarind as a souring agent.  

Modaks aka Kozhakattai

Modaks (Pic by June Carvalho)

MODAKS are a sweet treat (and I have an incurable sweet tooth) to celebrate Ganesh Chaturthi in India.

It's a little round potli (a little parcel) made of rice flour with a sweet filling of jaggery, coconut and cardamom for flavour.

Modaks ready to be steamed (Pic by June Carvalho)

I was inspired to try them out for the first time on Sept 19, Ganesha festival day, thanks to my good friends, Shobha and Chitra, who specialise in vegetarian cuisine. 

I'm yet to perfect the art of shaping them beautifully, but taste-wise, they were excellent. 


Do check both my friends' website / blog for the recipe:

www.cookingwithshobha.com and www.chittiskitchen.blogspot.com 

Baking cookies is comforting, and cookies are the sweetest little bit of comfort food. They are very bite-sized and personal. 
                                                                                                                               Sandra Lee 

Cashewnut Cookies

Cashewnut Cookies (Pic by June Carvalho)

I BAKED these cashewnut cookies on the weekend and they turned out really good. Crisp and crunchy. Not too sweet. Above all, uncomplicated and easy to mix, roll out and cut to shape.

Bake a few batches of assorted cookies and pack them to make lovely gifts for occasions like the birthdays of your dear friends. (I put these together with coconut cookies and chocolate and almond swirls).  Don't forget to add lots of love as the special ingredient. No store-bought gift can match the love and personal touch lent by the creation of your own hands.

Gift Assortment (Pic by June Carvalho)

What you need:
250 gm flour
150 gm butter
150 gm sugar
50 gm cashewnuts
A tbsp of milk, if required

Powder the nuts in a small blender. Cream the butter and sugar. Fold in the flour and powdered cashewnuts and knead lightly to a smooth dough. Sprinkle a little milk if required. Roll out to 1/8" thickness and cut out shapes with a biscuit cutter. Place on greased trays and bake in a pre-heated oven at 170 degrees C till light brown around the edges. About 10 - 15 minutes.
   

Dessicated Coconut Cookies

Dessicated Coconut Cookies (Pic by June Carvalho)

THESE pretty cookies are simple to mix and bake....try them out for yourself. Pack them along with a few other types of cookies, and you have your own beautiful gift assortment...

The proportions given in the recipe below yield 20 cookies.

What you need:

120 gm flour

60 gm castor sugar

120 gm butter

60 gm dessicated coconut

Glazed cherries to decorate

Cream the butter and sugar. Add sifted flour and the coconut. Knead lightly till smooth. Form walnut-sized balls and place a little apart from each other on greased trays. Top with cut cherries. Bake at 160 degrees C until light brown, about 15 to 20 minutes. 

Flowering Onion Stalk Palya

Flowering Onion Stalk Palya (pic by June Carvalho)

I'VE often wondered about the use of green flowering onion stalks found in the market once or twice a year. Thanks to my domestic help Ratna, I learnt how to transform them into a tasty dish using a few basic ingredients. Also, instead of coconut, roasted and crushed peanuts are used, which impart a slightly nutty and sweetish flavour to the dish. It goes well as a side with rice and curry and is particularly excellent with rotis. In Kannada, which is the language spoken in Karnataka, any preparation from vegetables, dry or semi-dry, is termed as a palya. 

Flowering Onion Stalks (pic by June Carvalho)

What you need:

A small bunch of flowering onion stalks
1 onion, chopped
3 flakes of garlic, chopped fine
1 sprig curry leaves
2 tbsps groundnuts, roasted and skinned
1 tbsp cooking oil
Salt to taste

Snip off the flowers from the onion stalks and discard them. Chop the onion stalks fine, as you might do for a beans foogath. Crush the roasted and skinned groundnuts.

Heat oil in a utensil and add the curry leaves, onion and garlic and cook till soft. Add the chopped onion stalks and the crushed groundnuts. Sprinkle salt and a little water. Stir, cover and cook till done.

Prawns Jeeraen Meeri

Prawns Jeeraen Meeri Curry (Pic by June Carvalho)

JEERAEN Meeri in Konkani literally means cumin (jeera)-pepper, so there are no prizes for guessing that the masala for this prawn curry employs both these spices alongside red chillies. However, I cannot fathom for the life of me as to why this curry is named after jeera and pepper, considering the minuscule quantities of both in comparison to the red chillies, but that's how it has been and no one seems to have felt the need to question that.

For those who don't like coconut in their food for health or taste reasons, this is a good option. The onion, garlic and tamarind ground together with the spices yield a fairly thick gravy.

When cooking prawns in a red curry, we generally use them in combination with any one vegetable such as diced vegetable marrow (called Mangalore cucumber or vellarikai), potatoes, bhindi (okra), or bottle gourd (lauki). Here I have used bhindi. Peas, potatoes and cauliflower team up well with prawns when cooked in a yellow or green curry.

What you need for 1/2 kg prawns:

12 Byadgi (dry red) chillies
1 tsp cumin seed
6 peppercorns
1 onions
1/2 tsp turmeric powder
A lime-sized ball of tamarind
12 bhindi
2 onions, sliced and fried golden
1 tbsp  oil 

Wash well, shell and devein prawns. Wash and wipe dry the bhindi and cut into 2" pieces. Lightly fry in a tablespoon of oil till they're no longer sticky.

Grind the first six ingredients (colour-coded red) with a little water to a fine paste. Put the paste into a cooking pan with two cups of water. Add salt to taste and drop the lightly fried bhindi in. Cook for about two minutes, then slide in the prawns. Bring to a boil and when the prawns are cooked, sprinkle the golden fried onion. Stir. Allow to simmer on slow flame for 5 minutes before serving with rice.

Mackerel Curry

Mackerel Curry (Pic by June Carvalho)

NOTHING fishy about this spicy-sour fish curry from Mangalore, which is like everyday fare for the people of the Karavali region of coastal Karnataka. Here I have used mackerel, but the gravy is the same for other oil-rich fish like sardines. Other varieties of fish like ladyfish (kane), silver fish (bili meen), mullet, shetka etc., call for a slight twist in the masala and occasionally the use of coconut milk, finished off with onion golden fried in coconut oil.

Once upon a time, in the not-so-distant past, the masala used to be manually ground to a smooth, fine paste in a huge, round grinding stone (called vaan in Konkani), a very necessary piece of equipment in all kitchens before convenient electrical grinders rendered them nearly obsolete. 

In both my grandmothers' smoke-blackened traditional kitchens, fish curry was always made in a well-seasoned clay pot or chatti (called kundlen in Konkani) on a wood-fired stove. The taste of the curry cooked thus, was unbeatable, with a certain smoky and earthy flavour that's hard to describe or replicate in modern kitchens.

The following day, the left-over curry if any, was called kalchi kadi meaning "yesterday's curry". Kalchi kadi was a simple delicacy in its own right after it was thickened in the pot over a wood fire. Only those who have savoured it along with a plateful of red boiled rice porridge (kanji) as a mid-morning filler will know what it means to relish kalchi kadi. Kanji with kalchi kadi might sound like poor man's fare, but was eaten across the board.  As children, though, we cooked up all sorts of excuses to avoid eating it at 11 am, having already had breakfast at 8 am and knowing that lunch would follow on the dot of 1 pm, the eagerly awaited tea and snacks at 4 pm, not to mention dinner at 8 pm...but that's exactly how leisurely and languid life was some 40 years ago, centred mainly around food...and fresh fish.

When I had temporarily moved to Sharjah to work for a couple of years, I had made it a point to carry a couple of those clay pots exclusively for cooking fish curry and maintained and handled them with the level of care normally reserved for fine porcelain! The clay pot seen in the picture, however, is the type used in Kerala.

This curry is best had with red boiled rice, with a piece of fried fish and a vegetable on the side. Mackerel curry always tastes better the day after it's prepared.

My spouse, known for his simple but wholesome food tastes, will easily forgo the most lavish five-star banquet just for a plateful of rice and fish curry. He feels like a fish out of water if he hasn't had seafood once in a couple of days...for him, seafood everyday would be the equivalent of sheer bliss!

What you need

for 4 big mackerel:

1/2 a coconut grated
8 Byadgi red chillis
1 tbsp coriander seeds
A small pinch of cumin seed
4 peppercorns
1/4 tsp turmeric powder
1 onion
2 flakes garlic
A lime sized ball of tamarind

3 green chillis, slit lengthwise
1/2-inch piece of ginger chopped
Salt to taste


Clean and cut each mackerel into three pieces - the head, the middle and the tail.

Grind the first nine ingredients to a fine paste using a little water. In a cooking pot, pour half a cup of water and add the slit green chillies and chopped ginger. Put the paste and salt to taste, adding enough water to make a gravy of medium thick consistency. Bring to a boil and drop the fish in. Bring to another rolling boil and switch off heat.

Lakshadweep Laddoo

Lakshadweep Laddoo (Pic by June Carvalho)

IT was the packaging in thick brown paper, tied neatly with twine that caught my attention at the billing counter of the friendly neighbourhood supermarket.

Intrigued, I picked up two...the yellow strip around it read Lakshadweep Laddoo....now I've heard of and tasted a hundred different types of laddoos, but had never come across something called a Lakshadweep Laddoo. Lakshadweep, an island in the Arabian Sea, off the coast of Kerala conjures up images of swaying palms, beach resorts, scuba diving, fresh seafood and dry fish...least of all a sticky laddoo made from dry fruit and nuts! Tasty though.

Upon closer scrutiny of the label it was apparent that the laddoo was not in fact made in Lakshadweep (!), but in the little town of Kasargod in north Kerala, bordering Mangalore...wonder why it was called thus...marketing gimmick maybe?