Moog Dal Chora diye Lau -- Lauki complemented with roasted Moog Dal

Today is not really a day to write about Lau. I have my sniffles. The temperature is more like Fall than Summer. There is no way that I need a vegetable to cool me down. I am cold already. But this recipe had been cooked and written way back in the heat of summer. With the surfeit of Lau in my blog around that time, I probably gave this a miss.I better post it I thought before the temperature drops further and eating bowlfuls of hot soup in warm jackets make much more sense than eating a lauki.

The lauly thoughts that both my daughters are having these days also pushed me to be done with all lau recipes for this year.

Couple days back, I was home with LS. The big sis was in school and we were supposed to go and drop off something at her school.

On the way to school LS said : Ami Didi ke shobcheye bhalobashi(I love Didi most)
Me, with a flutter in my heart: Ar amake ? (And Me?)
LS confidently : Tomake Medium !!

I did not dare to ask her to elaborate on this further. It was only a month back that she suggested that I live in a separate house and she would come and visit me only in the evenings. She had tried to assure me that it would be just fine and she would play hide and seek when she came by. You might be wondering about my maternal traits and what I do to that child but trust me I am okay and not really all that bad.
Honestly reading a lot of Mom blogs I often have futile hopes that the girls will spout niceties about me  which I can put on proud display here. That apparently is not happening.

But I will keep at it for looks like there is hope lurking somewhere.

Big Sis did have something nice to say about me by the way. For their Back to School night they were to write an autobiography. And on that night, we, the parents, were supposed to read it. Big Sis had "smart, nice and hard working" for her Dad and for me the adjectives were "nice" and "luminous". Now clearly I had expected something more than just plain nice; I love words like fabulous, awesome etc. as adjectives.But it was the luminous that actually threw me off.

Me: Why do you think I am luminous ?
BS: Errr...because you are bright.
Ahem. With the scarcity of compliments around here I will grab anything that comes my way.

Now to the Moog Dal Chora diye Lau which is very different from Lau diye Moog Dal.

Confused ? Con-foo-sed ?

Well in the latter, that is in Lau diye Moog dal, the dal plays the main role and the bottle gourd is just an add on. The recipe for that kind of dal is almost similar to the Tetor Dal , yellow moong dal cooked with bitter gourd and lauki, in our home.

In the former it is the bottlegourd--the lauki--which makes the dish with the dal complementing it. The Moog Dal er Chora means a sprinkle of Moog Dal which accentuates the dish but you can really call it by any other name and increase or decrease the proportion of lentils. Some homes use very little moog dal, literally a sprinkle and cook it along with the gourd while my Mother makes it this way. My Ma makes both of these very often and we like the Moog Dal Chora diye Lau a lot around our home.

Soma Chowdhury's Jhinge Motor Daaler Borar Jhol --- Guest post

This post is a first in many respects.

First, it is a dish which I have never tasted before. I love Motor Daaler Bora and I have done Borar Jhaal but never have I had a Jhinge Motor Daaler Borar Jhol.

Second, this is the first time I have a guest post by a reader on my blog. Usually when a reader sends me a recipe, I try to cook the dish and only then do I post it. Other than that it is only my Mother's and my close friend's recipe(Aditi's Biryani, K's Dal Gosht, T's Tiramisu)  which have been posted as is without any intervention from me. So when Soma sent me this recipe last week I was not sure what I should do.

I definitely wanted to cook it but with my current schedule, I was sure that a "Jhinge" or "Daaler Bora" wasn't going to happen to me soon. The pictures of the jhol attached to the mail were also fabulous and a whisper in my heart or maybe my ears or somewhere said that many a Bangali Poribar, aka Bong Phamily would benefit much with a recipe like this. So I asked Soma if she could write down the recipe post ready for me and sure she send me a doc with a perfect writeup.

So handing over this post to Soma Chowdhury, a reader of this blog,  for her and her only Jhinge Motor Daaler Borar Jhol. She sent me this recipe last week and I have posted it in her exact words.. Do welcome her and remember that all the delicious pictures here are Soma's and copyrighted.

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Last week it was my husband’s birthday and he asked me to make some of his favorites. Jhinge (aka ridge gourd), which was on the list, is unfortunately not one of my most beloved vegetables (although I love most others except this one and kakrol (teasle gourd)). I have tried many times to acquire a taste for these but have failed. As it was, the jhinge-motor daaler borar jhol was on his list and as it was his birthday, I couldn’t refuse.

The jhol (gravy with watery consistency) is very light and delicate and mostly eaten at my in-law’s place during summer months to alleviate the scorching Calcutta heat. The jhinge/ridge gourd supposedly has cooling properties and is easily digestible. It is hard to tolerate spicy and rich food during summer, so people come up with lighter recipes with fewer spices which are easier on the stomach. When I was in India I never thought that I would grow to love cooking, but I do. As I live far away from home, I miss the comfort food cooked by my mom and my mom-in-law. I try to learn the recipes which are very special to both the families. Whenever we eat something which they used to cook, my husband and I share the memories at our dinner table. Day before yesterday when I served the jhinger jhol, he became nostalgic and said “if I close my eyes now, I can feel the dinner table, the summer heat and all of us eating together”. To me that’s a big achievement.

I never thought of sharing this recipe because I do not write a blog. But when I made it, I felt like I should share it with Sandeepa. Being a Bong myself, I like her blog and how she writes about the food, the history behind it, the simple, clean recipes and her sweet sense of humour. I thought she would appreciate such subtle delicacies, and I was right. The moment I emailed her, I got a positive reply. To my surprise, she asked me to write down the recipe with a little story behind it to post it on her blog. I was overjoyed.

As I do not follow exact measurement while cooking, I had to think hard to write down the tea spoon and table spoon measurements. I took the picture in a hurry this morning before coming to work.

So here is the recipe and hope you all will like it.

Jhinge ar motor daaler jhol: ( Ridge gourd with lentil fritters)

Ingredients:

    Split pea lentils/motor daal -- 1& 1/2 cup

    Cornstarch 1tbsp.
    Three medium sized ridge gourd. Peel and cut into 1/12” pieces (cylinder).
    Potato two medium sized (optional), cubed.
    Kalojeere/black cumin seed/kalonji ¼  tsp.
    Green chili 5-7 nos.
    Turmeric ¼ tsp
    Salt to taste
    Mustard oil 1&1/2 tbsp.
    Vegetable oil for deep frying the fritters.


Cooking procedure: 

Soak the washed lentils overnight or minimum 4-6 hours. Grind it to a coarse paste.

Add cornstarch, salt to taste and chopped green chilis. Mix well.

Heat up the vegetable oil, make small balls (a little smaller than a regular lime) with the lentils and deep fry them. Remove the fried balls or bora and soak the excess oil in a paper towel or any absorbent paper.

Heat up the mustard oil. It should be smoking hot. Lower the temperature and then add the kalonji (if the oil is too hot, the kalonji will burn and give a bitter taste). Sauté for few seconds and then add two slit green chilis. Sauté until you can smell the nice aroma of the kalonji and green chilis.

Add the potatoes (if you are using them), sauté for few minutes (don’t fry them) and then add the gourd pieces. Add turmeric, sauté for 2-3 mns. more and then add water.

Cover the pot and let it boil. Cook it on medium flame for several minutes. Uncover and add three more slit green chilis and salt to taste. Let it boil on medium flame for few more minutes until the vegetables are completely cooked. Check the consistency of the jhol (gravy) and taste for salt. It should be a very thin watery consistency but the raw taste of water should be gone by now.

Add the bora/fritters and boil for two more minutes and then turn off the flame. Let it sit for 5-10 minutes and then serve with plain hot rice.

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Similar Recipes:

Borar Jhaal -- A spicy gravy with the lentil fritters

Daal er Bora -- My recipe of Daaler Bora made with Motor + Masoor Dal. Also I have done the bora in an abelskeiver pan with no deep frying

Chicken Varuval V1.0 -- one more spicy chicken fry

Summer is over.

Days of the sandal is now numbered. I feel like grabbing a shoulder, any shoulder and crying but I will not. Instead I will act brave and welcome Fall and think of moving to the Bahamas.

Summer is over also means start of school which is not all that bad.

BigSis started fourth grade in a new school this year. This new school has a lot of her old friends and so she settled in happily. But in a month she will be moving to another new school. That new school will be a totally *new* school.Yes, we are weird parents taking weirder decisions all the time. All these changes can be real intimidating for a 8 year old but apart from some minor whining she has done good so far.

I,myself, have changed schools every 3-4 years as a child and do understand it is not the most exciting thing to look forward to even though it comes with its own advantages. Strangely in spite of my past experience I am more jittery than her about the *new* new school but am trying to act as if it is something one does every other day. "Oh today is a nice sunny Tuesday. Let me go to school# 2 today", seems to be my motto.

LittleSis has also moved on to Pre-K and has finally gotten over all kind of school related anxieties. She has finally realized that "School e porashuno hoyna. Shudhu Khela ar khela"(There is no studying in school. Only play and play). Once that realization hit her, she took to school with much more excitement and is kind of okay happy to be there. Fingers Crossed, you never know with that girl.

Writing this right now it also hit me how the two girls have grown. Only three years ago I was writing about BS's first grade and a year back it was dealing with LS starting pre-school and now they are in fourth and pre-k and happy to be there. However unlike most sane Mothers I am not at all senti about them growing up. I am happy that BS gets ready for school with almost zero help from me and even LS dresses herself on her own. The only thing I am worried about is I might not have much to blog about once they grow up. I mean it is much more fun writing that LS has changed her future vocation to "Nothing" and that there is a monster living on top of "Beamstalk" than my own PMS. So you see other than blog related stuff I am perfectly happy about my babies getting older.

Now on to the recipe which I made specially for BS since she refuses to eat chicken unless it is a spicy, dry dish. We recently had Chicken Varuval at a restuarnt and liked it. No, it had nothing to with Falafel. It was a dry, spicy preparation with South Indian flavors.Incidentally we all love dry, spicy chicken booming with South Indian flavors and so once I realized there was one more chicken fry out there in the world, I had to make it. Of course if it was a difficult thing to do I would have just gone back to the restaurant.

I saw many recipes on the net which I liked but I decided on an unison of this one from Savitha's Kitchen and this one from Sig's Live to Eat. Now both these recipes say Kozhi Varuval which basically means chicken fry but I guess one recipe is from Andhra and the other from Tamil Nadu. I liked the use of fennel seeds in Sig's recipe and I already had the onion paste so there. I also made it less spicy and used only Kasmiri Mirch but BS said she could have handled more heat that that.

Finally I am making no claims on the authenticity of my dish which is a mix of the two regions but it tasted very good, almost like the one at the restaurant and it was a Chicken Fry-- a varuval. To know more about the original dish also check Srivalli's recipe which I later saw had the cumin-peppercorn powder, a flavor which was present in the varuval I had tasted.

Cooking traditional recipes off the net can be tricky as you never know which is which.The problem is triple folds if you are new to the cuisine. Recently at a Food Forum I had an awkward experience where a contributor posted a recipe of prawns with mustard and coconut and labeled it as Prawn Malai Curry. The dish looked perfect and the recipe was great. Only. Only it was NOT prawn malai curry. When I voiced my opinion, of course no one liked it and declared that some regions of Bengal cook Malai curry that way. Now honestly I know a lot of Bengalis and not a single person cooks Malai Curry with mustard paste. There are small variations with a ginger here, a garlic not there but definitely NO mustard or poppy seed paste. It would be a situation where one made Alfredo Sauce with tomato base.

Now I am not a stickler for authentic recipes and most of my cooking has variations but totally messing up the central ingredient or spicing of a traditional recipe and yet sticking to that name is what makes me queasy. Also I feel when one does their own take on a traditional recipe, it is best to give references to the authentic one and then clearly specify the variations one has made. What do you say ?

Chicken Varuval -- a spicy Chicken Fry  

Make paste of
Half of a small red onion + 3 fat cloves of garlic 

Marinate 3/4th lb of chicken with
salt 
little lime juice 
Turmeric powder 
1 tsp Kashmiri Mirch (or Red Chili Powder)
above paste 
I used boneless chicken thigh pieces cut in bite size and marinated for almost an hour.

Next heat Oil for frying the chicken pieces.

Temper the Oil with
1 tsp of Fennel Seeds 
5-6 Dry Red Chili(I used Byadagi for less heat) 

To the oil add
half of a small red onion finely chopped. Ideally you should also add few green chilies at this point.

Once the onion is soft and pink add the chicken pieces along with the marinade.

Add few curry leaves, around 1 more tsp Kashmiri Mirch and salt.

Toss everything together and fry the chicken pieces. The way I do is, I cover the fry pan to let the chicken pieces cook and then I remove cover every few secs and give a good stir. The chicken will release water. Let the water dry up and the chicken get fully cooked. Break up the chicken into smaller pieces if you have not done it before and then fry. You might also need to sprinkle some water in between.

Saute till chicken is fried and browned on all sides. Add more curry leaves and serve hot.