I sugared the salt...

... and then I salted the tea. True story!

My aaji's gift of love

I was making dal for the kid and realized I was running low on salt. Like any normal person I have five different kinds of salts in my pantry but I use a mix of kosher and iodized table salt for day to day cooking. I replenished the salt in the container and went about my business. Read: unloaded the dishwasher, chopped some veggies and washed some dishes. By then the dal was ready except it needed some salt. So I added some and tasted. It tasted the same. So I kept adding the salt by pinches so as not to over salt. I added a pinch and tasted. No difference. I  added some more and tasted. No difference again. This went on for a few minutes and I started doubting my taste buds.

 
I decided to taste the salt to check if I could taste it in the raw. You get where I am going. I had added sugar to the salt dabba. Now, a sensible person would have chucked the sugar at this time which is what I was about to do. But then, I tasted the sugared salt a bit more and it just tasted sugary to me. I figured it would be ok to add it to the sugar dabba instead of wasting all that sugar.

In the evening, we all sat down around the table for left over pizza and tea. You get where I am going by now, right? The sugar in my tea was heavily salted!

 

And yes, I chucked the whole mix. That is my mishap in the kitchen for the week. What was your most recent kitchen mishap?

 

Garlic and sapphires, and Reichl’s chocolate cake

                                               
If you have ever wondered how you will be treated in a snooty, fancy restaurant, Ruth Reichl will tell you in Garlic and Sapphires. It is Reichl’s candid memoire of her stint as a restaurant critic for New York Times, which turns out is one of the most powerful positions a newspaper critic in New York could have.

Besides transitioning from the laidback LA Times to the more staid and rigidly structured NY Times, Reichl has to go through the pains of getting used to the wrath of readers faithful to her predecessor not to mention donning disguises to review restaurants incognito (apparently, every restaurant in NY has her photo tacked in the kitchen).

The disguises turn out to be the most fun part of her job till she finds herself competing with one of her assumed identities, an elegant blond named Chloe, with whom everyone including her husband and son seem taken with. She even gets hit on by a middle aged rich guy and agrees to a date with him at a restaurant she has to review.

Reichl narrates her adventures with a sense of humor and total honesty that makes you want to befriend her. She is generous in her praise and brutally honest with her criticism. Like the time she gets treated differently at a high end restaurant when she dines dressed as a middle class housewife (longer wait, bad table and horrible service) and later as the critic of NYTimes (the King of Spain waits in the bar but her table is ready even when she shows up early!).

However, all good things must end as they do for Reichl when she realizes she no longer likes the person she is disguised as, a bitter, sarcastic *itch. With the realization comes the offer to edit Gourmet, where she has continued to break culinary ground with the same enthusiasm for good food that etched her name as one of the finest food critics of NYTimes. Check out her new PBS series, Gourmet Adventures with Ruth that she sums it up in these words: There’s no better way to experience a culture than to stand at the stove with a wonderful cook.

A Red Bird Christmas and Peter Reinhardt’s Cornbread

Confession: I had never read Fannie Flagg till Simran picked her up for our book club’s second anniversary. I had seen the movie Fried Green Tomatoes based on her book by the same name but had no idea at the time that it was based on Flagg’s book. The movie won an academy award nomination for best screenplay in 1991, so I can imagine how good the book must be.

Flagg is an accomplished writer who sets her book in the small Southern town of Lost River, population: 80. Think RK Narayan's Malgudi, except set in a small southern town along a meandering river with fabulous sunsets. Instead of the dusty roads of Malgudi, imagine pretty little bungalows with neatly tended lawns and streets lined with trees so old they form a canopy overhead. The weather is pleasant even in the peak of winter and the flora and fauna are bountiful.

The residents are friendly and welcome the arrival of an elderly bachelor, as an opportunity to get one of the seven unhitched (three single, four widows) women hitched. Oswald T Campbell, named after a can of soup he was found with on the steps of the orphanage, is a retired army man with emphysema, a limited pension and an even limited time left to live. He comes to the little town to recuperate and falls in love with the slow pace of the town, its residents and by the end of it not only gets a new lease on life but a new bride.

Flagg weaves a beautiful tapestry of friendship between Campbell, an abandoned six year old girl Patsy, a flightless redbird named Jack who lives in the town’s only store, owned by Roy. She embroiders the details of the town’s secret society that goes by the name the Mystic Order of the Royal Polka Dots Secret Society and weaves in the history of Roy’s broken love affair with his childhood sweetheart with the skill and artistry of one of Oswald’s nature paintings.

Homemade double chocolate ice cream and pantry check

                   
When Nupur of One Hot Stove asks you to check what is lurking in your pantry, you don’t dally. You head straight for the pantry, throw open the door and stare at the mess that greets you. The pantry along with the rest of the house had been neglected for the last three months due to someone’s studies. There were packets of lentils, flour, some sprouting onions, a funky smell from some potatoes that got left at the bottom of the basket.

Ladies and gentlemen, don’t judge me. I am not always like this and I usually clean my pantry every couple of months. I was running a month behind, no big deal. Besides, the first step to solving a problem is acknowledging it, no less on a public blog.

Keep in mind all my kitchen essentials, except my masala dabba, are stored in the twenty square foot space which my dad calls a small kirana store (corner grocery store). Ok, my plates and bowls and glasses and kitchen utensils are also not in there.

Coming back to the sprouting onions and rotting potatoes, which promptly went on a date with the waste basket, the pantry was not as much a mess as it looked at first glance. The big cereal box from Costco was put on the top shelf, dwindling grains and lentils were transferred to cleaned, washed and saved up jam and salsa jars. The larger packets got their due space in bigger containers and canned goods were arranged with smaller ones on top of the larger ones.

Before you think I try to arrange my pantry like Ms. Martha Stewart, let me clarify. I grew up in a house where my mom cooked in a tiny kitchen. The first apartment I lived in after marriage had a galley kitchen so small I could touch the sink and stove with my arms extended. Six years later, when we bought our house, I was excited to have a pantry big enough to keep everything within easy reach.

Brewing Memories

Given the amount of tea Indian families consume, the ubiquitous chai shakkar ke dabbe (covered jars of tea leaves and sugar) hold a special place in every Indian kitchen. Typically, the tea jar is smaller than the sugar jar, probably because in preparing tea, the amount of sugar used is more than that of the tea leaves. For the ancient Indian cuisine, tea is a relatively new phenomenon, introduced about 200 years ago by the British. That by itself should make the tea making process an heirloom recipe, if it weren’t for the Chinese drinking it thousands of years before that. By that standard, we are merely toddlers chugging tea first thing in the morning and some every few hours after that.

Making tea, like thousands of other Indian recipes, is unique to every household and every chai dhabba
(roadside tea stall) that dots the busy cross streets and highways of India. What makes the tea unique is the blend of tea leaves, the amount of sugar, water and milk used, not to mention how long it is boiled to bring out the color of the tea leaves. If that does not give enough permutations and combinations of tea to come up with, cardamom, ginger or a blend of spices (chai masala) is sometimes used to give the chai a kick.

Tea is offered to every guest as a courtesy and served with another ubiquitous cookie – The Parle G or Glucose biscuits.

In the dhabbas, one can buy khari (a savory puff pastry cookie), aloo bonda (potato dumplings, dipped in chickpea batter and deep fried) or samosas. The bhabbawallas know the art of stretching/ boiling their tea leaves to the maximum. The leaves are usually tied in a linen or cotton cloth and immersed, bouquet style, in the milk, water and sugar solution boiling in a big aluminum pot.

Photo Courtsey: Jhinuk Chowdhary, a talented photographer and one of our good friends. On his recent India trip he took this picture of a lady selling tea in Kolkatta.

Growing up, I would watch my aaji (maternal grandmother) make tea every few hours. Her lidded jars of tea and sugar are made of brass and were a permanent fixture above the ledge of her gas stove. She always kept them polished and even as a kid I loved the two fat little jars, presiding over my aaji’s tiny little kitchen, sniffing the aromas of her simple cooking and my grandfather’s occasional mutton curry.

Her four daughters, including my mother, with their families, live in the same city and close enough to visit almost every day. As a result my grandparents have always had a steady flow of uncles, aunts and cousins, who come over to visit if they are in the vicinity. Nowadays, one of my aunts or cousins will put the tea on the stove to boil. But for the longest time I can remember, my aaji liked to make tea her way.

She would pour some water in a pot and put it on the stove to boil. She carefully measured some sugar to add to the water. A little bit of milk was put in a small pan and heated up on the smaller burner. When the sugar had all but dissolved and the water was about to come to a boil, she measured the tea leaves and threw them in the water. A little boiling later, the heat was turned off and the pot covered with a plate. This helped the tea leaves seep in the hot water and release their flavor. When the leaves had settled to the bottom of the pan, warm milk was added to the now dark water, the concoction strained with a sieve and poured into china tea cups and saucers. It was accompanied by Marie biscuits, which are a crispier, sweeter, round version of Graham Crackers.

My entry for Jugalbandi's Click: Heirloom Event

In all of my thirty something years, my aaji has been a major influence on me. My cousin and I lived with her as a five year old for a couple of years and though I do not have a lot of clear memories, one stands out the most. We were not allowed to play outside after sunset. My cousin and I had to wash up and then perched on three legged stools, in front of her little pooja corner, we recited our evening prayers and repeated the multiplication tables.

As I grew older, I learnt that she and her two sisters had lost their parents at an early age and had been brought up by an unmarried maternal uncle and a strict grandfather. She managed to graduate in an age when women were lucky to study past eighth grade. She eloped with my grandfather because his family opposed the union and managed to earn a master’s degree while taking care of two girls and pregnant with another. She was a high school English language teacher for 40 years before retiring at the age of 70.

In the three decades, I have been fortunate enough to know her, she has not changed much. Since moving to the US, I get to visit her every two years and each time she looks older and frailer but her spirit is as strong as ever. She does yoga and pranayam (breathing exercises) every morning, still cooks twice a day, goes for a walk and travels once in a while. Her cooking is as good as it was when I used to live with her and her sweet and sour varan (dal or lentil soup) and batata rassa (potatoes in onion gravy) taste the same as it did when I was growing up.

Her brass tea and sugar pots have been another constant in her kitchen. For the first time this year I did not see them by her gas stove. She had put them away for a pair of shiny, steel ones. But on asking, she graciously passed them on to me. All banged up and dented with years of use, with the original knobs on the lid missing, I still cherish them. They have travelled thousands of miles to occupy a permanent place on my kitchen counter, next to my stove, smelling the aromas of my cooking. Through them I draw on my aaji's gentle strength and her love for her family.

Sending the sweet and strong nostaligia of my aaji's pots to Manisha's IFR: Memories.