Ranga Alur Mishti with Chocolate and War in the Kitchen

There has been no posts in this blog for a long time and I wish there was good enough reason for it. Something like "Ta Da, I have been busy publishing my second book and third, so the blog has been given a period of rest". Or even better, something like "I have been on a world tour and that is taking up all my time you know, so things on the blog have been a bit slow". At least anything better than "It has been cold and I have been lazy to even wiggle my fingers out of the throw, wrapped in which I sit at the corner of my couch, and watch back-to-back episodes of Big Bang Theory".

But that is the truth.The last bit. I have been lazy. And it has been cold. Bitter cold and plenty of snow.What else do you expect January to be at 40.0000° N, 74.5000° W anyway ? To top it all the husband-man had kind of taken over the kitchen in the last couple of months. If you have known me for some time via blog, book or real life you surely know the brilliance of husband-man around the kitchen. He was the one who started early in the culinary department, is a better cook than me and has far better knife skills. Now all of this is really great things to have in a spouse until that is some 8-9 years back I myself found some interest in cooking. Initially the husband-man took my pottering around the kitchen mildly. He has a high faluting standard and a lot of the time I fell far short of it. That did not deter me though. I was finding cooking very enjoyable and tried to take away the ladle and spoon from him. I know, I know, you would think of it as the most un-feministic stance but hey, a girl gotta do what she wants.

Now, you would also say, why couldn't we cook together in there ? A valid question and it works fine when I can bark orders and he acts as merely the sous chef. But  when he is in charge, let me tell you it is not easy to cook with someone who thinks your onions are not sliced the right thin and who judges you for charring the all-clad stainless steel saucier. Given that I was the one one guilty of those acts, you can well imagine, why I wanted to be left to cook in peace and asymmetric onion slices. 

At this point, I have to take a breather and say, my heart goes out to a lot of the husbands who beat a quick retreat from the kitchen under such remarks. Guys, I am with you. Learn from me. Stand your own ground. If you are passionate about cooking, your time will come.

So anyway, what with his long days at work and such related travels, I could eventually redeem my place in the kitchen and write this blog and then the book and so forth. He cooked occasionally, worked as a sous-chef(which was a good thing), but mostly I was in control. You would think that would secure my place by the stove and kitchen island ? Right ? But nope. Did not happen.

In the last couple of months, the husband-man found himself with some extra time and his passion was rekindled in full force. There he was wielding the frying pan, whipping up one delicious dish after the other and looking wearily anytime I tried to chop a potato. 

"Why don't you relax while I whip up dinner?", he suggested sweetly on most evenings. 
"Remember, it is the tempering of jeera in hot oil that is supposed to help me relax", I tried to remind him.
He paid no heed to my relaxation technique and with an edge of steel in his voice declared, "I am making posto. Your favorite."
"Heck, I want to make posto", I would try to put up a losing war.
He would then aim the final arrow in a war that he had almost won, "No one makes better posto. Than me".

And there was no denying it. I would sulk a bit and finally find my spot in the couch and watch television. Anything from Peppa Pig to Modern Family. I even learned to operate the DVR and found that "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" can be quite entertaining. And then of course there is Big Bang Theory and this channel which plays re-runs of BBT for two hours almost every day. At the end of which there is a sumptuous meal without my lifting a finger. Things weren't too bad after all. I soon got sucked into this vortex of comfort and though the heart often missed the excitement over creation of a kasundi murgi, Howard and Raj more than made up for it.

So now that you know why posts have been so few and far in between do you understand my plight? If you are a married female reader, do you understand how your excruciatingly detailed knowledge as to how the luchi should puff can turn away your partner from the kitchen for ever ? Unless of course the other half is a passionate foodie too and then there is a war in the kitchen over how much "puffing" is the right puffing.

This Ranga Aloor Mishti or Sweet Potato something was made when I could snatch a huge sweet potato and some sole time in the kitchen. I had started out wanting to make Ranga Aloor Puli Pithe since it was Sankranti. But since laziness now sat permanently in my bones, I found that to be too much work. So I settled for a Ranga Alur Pantua instead. But then again didn't want to make the syrup as I myself am not very fond of  Ranga Alur Pantua. 

Incidentally in between all the BBTs, I had also watched several episodes of "Chopped" on Food Network and realized that innovation is the key to cooking. If you can pair Japanese mayo with khejur gur, you win!

So I thought I would make sweet potato fritters and instead of sugar syrup, drizzle it with Maple Syrup . Eventually I found more inspiration in Mahanadi's brilliant recipe and instead of making the coconut kheer stuffing I used a chocolate chips stuffing. Innovation, here I come.

This is how I made the Ranga Alur Mishti or Sweet Potato Fritters with Chocolate stuffing:

First, boil the sweet potato until just tender. Pressure cooker is your best friend in this case. You can also boil it any other way deemed fit.
Once that thing is cooked, cool, peel and then mash it up smoothly.

Take 1 cup of mashed sweet potato. If the mashed potato looks a little watery dry it in the microwave.
To it add 1/2 cup of grated coconut. Use the frozen one or freshly grated. Don't use the dry grated coconut.
Then add 2-3 tbsp of grated khejur gur. Substitute with sugar in absence of gur.
A sprinkle of little salt  and a teeny bit of black pepper powder.
Mix well.

Now add to it about 4 tbsp of AP Flour/Maida. Mix everything well so that you get a dough like mixture.

Leave it covered in the refrigerator for an hour.

Now take out the sweet potato dough and make about 18-20 marble sized balls. Flatten the balls on the palm of your hand and press a chocolate chip at the center. If you have really small ones put more than one. Cover the center with dough from all sides and make small rounds. Repeat the process for all the dough balls.

Heat enough oil in kadhai for deep frying.

To test if oil is hot enough, put a teeny piece of the dough and see if it bubbles and rises in the oil. If yes, the oil is ready. Now drop in the sweet potato balls in the hot oil and fry both sides brown. At medium heat, it takes about 4-5 minutes to get brown after which you flip and do the other side. Medium heat ensures that the dough is cooked through.

Take out the fried balls and drain excess oil on a paper towel.

Ideally the fried balls should be dunked in syrup now. But since I had skipped the syrup making, I drizzled the fried balls with Maple Syrup.

Now honestly, I am not a fan of ranga aloor puli but I liked this sweet. I thought it was a pretty good as innovation goes. The husband-man however took the oozing chocolate to be a sign of  things gone wrong. "Poche geche" he declared confidently. He clearly did not like it as much as I did. I have no idea if he would have liked it dunked in syrup. I usually tend to cook things, I feel I will like and so I ate up most of this sweet potato balls. BigSis said she liked them too. I say, why don't you try to see how it goes with you ? You can also dunk them in sugar syrup if  you so wish.

And the good news is, I am slowly gaining more time in the kitchen as the husband-man's vacation time is almost over. So keep your fingers crossed, you will see more posts here soon. Yippee.


Desserts from previous Sankranti:

Poush Parbon er Pati Shapta

Pati Shapta Original 

Gokul Pithe

RoshBora

Alton Brown's Fruit cake -- for Christmas and New Year

This is my last post for 2013. As per the "last-post-of-the-year" norm, this should be a post looking back, evaluating the days past and making resolutions for the coming year. But I will do none of that.I don't take stock and no longer make resolutions at the start of a new year. All I do is hang a fresh new calendar on my wall.

As I grow in age I have realized that I no longer bound my life by the beginning and end of a single year. The end and beginning are fluid with days merely spilling into each other. As months, days and hours, march in to fill the empty year ahead, I know that some days will follow the same pattern as in the past years, some a little worse, many a little better and only a few with a streak of rebel in them. Those are the ones that will be different. And for both you and me I wish that those days bloom into something good to remember them by.

Like this fruitcake which I had made for Christmas and then again not for Christmas. Sweet, rich, and filled with plump drunken fruits. The kind you look back on the next year and say "Oh, remember that fruit cake last year, the Alton Brown Fruit Cake ? It was so good". May most of your days in the coming year be just like that. Sweet, rich, and good enough to fondly look back at. And if you want to fill them with drunken fruits, so be it.

Most of you have rich, moist, raisin and nuts studded memories of the Christmas cake. At least from the way, everyone on my FB timeline waxed nostalgic about the Fruit Cake, it looks like it was a family tradition for many.

Not so in my home though. I mean we did have a cake on Christmas for how can you celebrate a birthday without a cake. But my mother did not soak dry fruits in rum for weeks to make that cake. Actually she did not even make that cake. We lived in the suburbs and on most winter holidays we visited my grandparents who lived in North Calcutta. Nahoum, the famous New Market bakery, was not  known to them and Flury's was a long distance away.

So on 25th December, my grandfather, who was a believer in everything from Poush Sankranti to Christmas, that is everything that involved good food and cheer, would get us a cake from the local bajaar. In those crisp Christmas mornings, the best kind of mornings in Kolkata, the air would be a delicious cold and the egg yolk watery sun, just the right kind of warm. A hand-knit full sweater would be too warm and prickly but had to be worn anyway. My Mother or grandmother would have knit it sometime in November, carefully selecting patterns of knits and purls from a magazine called Manorama and then spending many a afternoon in the comforting sound of clickety-clack of the needles, creating cardigans and turtlenecks right in time for December.I was lucky enough that my Mother didn't force me to wear a monkey cap or wrapped a scarf around my throat .We were used to more severe winters where we lived and so she took winter in Kolkata much less seriously than most Bengalis did.

I loved going to that local bajaar with my grandfather when I was the same age as my youngest. Later however, I would feel embarrassed as my grandfather had the tendency to stop each and every person there and strike up a conversation, every time mentioning my visit and my report card which he thought was stellar.

On Christmas day, however, the mundane bajaar donned a festive look.People in bright colorful woolens spilled from its various alley ways and the air smelled of  sweet "notun gur" -- date palm jaggery. The local bakeries who supplied the daily loaves of bread and buns dressed up in festive buntings. Yellow, red and green cellophane wrapped pyramids bedazzled their front counter. Wrapped in those colored cellophanes were deep brown fruit cakes, dense and speckled with tutti-frutties, currants and nuts. They weren't as rich or moist as the best and I didn't really like them a lot. I liked the fluffy Britannia cakes much more. But those store bought, yellow cellophane wrapped, brown fruit cakes were a Christmas tradition and my grandfather always brought one home.

Strangely those fruitcakes never made much of an impression on me. I remember the cellophane wrapping of the cake more vividly than the taste of the cake itself.

Naturally in all these years I have never really craved a Christmas Fruit cake. This year, however I remembered that dense taste on my tongue, the sweetness of raisins, the crunch of red-green tutti frutties. That is how memory plays its tricks as one grows older. The taste was so strong that I had no choice but to bake myself a fruit cake. But before that I needed to find a recipe. An easy one. For as you know any baking recipe that says "beat butter and sugar" or "separate egg white", numbs my brain and makes my heart grow cold.

So when I found Alton Brown's recipe for Fruit Cake, I looked no further. Well I watched the video and read the reviews on that cake, but that's it. No further than that. Alton Brown is the husband-man's cooking guru and after the great success he had with his Thanksgiving Turkey following Brown Saheb's recipe, I knew that even if the  cake turned out less than right, it would all be devoured just in the name of Mr.Brown.

The cake in fact turned out to be delicious. Just like I think fruit cakes should be.Sweet, rich, and filled with plump drunken fruits.

Since the original recipe and video are good enough, I will not re-write the recipe again. However I took many pics so I will share a photo tutorial of the cake as we made it at home.

The most important part of this cake is the dry fruits. Raisins, Currants, Cranberries, Cherries, Blueberries, Apricot, Candied ginger -- all of which lends its own special taste to the cake

4 Cups of dry fruits is needed in all. I did not have the dry blueberries and so used 1 cup of chopped apricot

Freshly ground spices work better and instead of a tsp of dry ginger powder I used 1 tsp grated ginger

Remember to keep a tray of warm water in the lower rack of the oven. That keeps the cake moist. The cake will bake for an hour. Do not, and I repeat, do not open the oven in between. After an hour do the toothpick test i.e. insert a clean toothpick in the cake and see if it comes out clean. If it does not come out clean, leave the cake in the oven for 5 -10 more minutes until done.

Once the cake is done, take it out of the oven and cool on a wire rack. Then spritz or baste the cake with brandy and keep in an air-tight container. Every three days take it out and spritz with brandy to keep it moist. The cake tastes better as it ages.

Now honestly it is very hard to keep your hands off this cake for two weeks, the recommended time for aging.I suggest you eat a thin slice every time your spritz it. That will keep you in good spirits and make you feel far better. With a slice of it by your side, you will forget all your resolutions.

Happy New year to all of You See you again on the other side.

Chicken Keema in Mint-Coriander Paste

 
I have had this recipe in my draft for more than two months now. Almost since summer when the sun was warm and the backyard bereft of snow. For the last two months, I have been thinking of sharing it with you. It deserves sharing for it is really good and it has found its way in our home because someone I barely know had shared it with me.

But all these days I have had nothing to say fitting with the recipe. Seriously I have to learn to post without going "yadda yadda yadda" every time.

Anyway, what with winter and the first snow of the season, there is something to chat about today.

With the early morning call from the school announcing a snow day today, I had an inkling of how the day would roll out and fill up the 14 hours which lay ahead; hours bare of any per-destined activity or schedule or gathering. I had a hunch that the girls might want to make a snowman or at least a snow angel or if nothing have a snow ball fight. I usually stay far from such activities as snow is definitely not on my favorite list and I would much rather stay inside and click pictures than wear mittens and jackets and indulge in making snowmen.

As predicted, they started on that chant way before lunch, soon after we had the upma I made. And finally when the snow had trickled down, they went out on the deck to make a snow man. The girls showed a lot of interest initially as is their wont but eventually the grunt work was done all by Dad. The snowman was made toothless and looked kind of cute, but then with a brilliant stroke of creativity, the husband-man decided to make its teeth out of dried amla and boom it became a snow goon. Or a "deranged mutant killer monster snow goon" as Calvin would have said.

We also put up the Christmas Tree, a fake affair which looks gorgeous when the lights and shiny trinkets are on. And then the husband-man fried crispy pakoras which we gulped down with tea and with friends who could drop by once the roads were clear.

Now though technically I am not a big fan of cold winter, there is something about staying home on winter evenings that I enjoy.

A cup of tea.

The flicker of flames in the fireplace.

The Christmas tree.

The special movies on for Christmas.

It seems like a time to put away your worries and dust away the mundane to put up shiny baubles and bask in small pleasures of glittery tchotchke.

And to share one's favorite recipe for a Keema made with Mint Coriander paste. A recipe that was inspired by Rini's (who blogs on non-food topics ) recipe in a Facebook Group many months ago. A recipe whose taste lingers on though I last made it about a month ago. Peppery with a hint of mint and fresh coriander. A spicy after note. A silent thank you for people who are generous enough to share their recipes and make your dinner that much special.

That is the spirit of the season.

Keema in a Mint Coriander Paste

Start off with 2lb of Chicken keema.  You can of course use lamb/mutton keema and the result will be better but I went with the leaner option.

Put the keema in a bowl. To it add
1/4th cup of thick yogurt
1 tbsp loosley packed Cumin powder
1 tbsp loosley packed Coriander powder
1 tsp Kashmiri Mirch
salt to taste
Mix well and keep aside for an hour.

Meanwhile make the mint-coriander paste:
Add the following to the blender jar and make a smooth paste
Coriander Leaves -- 1 cup chopped
Mint leaves -- 1/2 cup chopped (If you don't have fresh, use the dried mint but use only 2 tbsp)
Garlic -- 4 fat clove
Ginger -- 1" peeled and chopped
Hot Indian green chilli -- 4
Whole Black Peppercorns -- 1 tbsp
This greenish paste can be stored for future use and as base for many other curries.

Now start making the Keema Curry

Heat 2tsp of Vegetable oil in a frying pan/kadhai. Start with a frying pan or kadhai with a wide base.

Fry about 3 tbsp of cashew and 1 tbsp of golden raisins until the cashew turns brown. Remove and keep aside.

To the same pan, now add 2 tbsp of Mustard Oil

When the Oil is sufficiently hot, temper the oil with
2 Tej Patta
one 2" stick of cinnamon
2 Big Black Cardamom lightly bruised

To the flavored oil add
1 medium sized onion thinly sliced

Fry the onion until they are soft and light brown and then follow with
2tsp of garlic paste.

Add about 1 tbsp of Tomato paste(substitute with Ketchup) and the green paste that you have made. At medium heat, fry the masala till oil separetes.

Now add the keema. 
Sprinkle on it about 1/2 tbsp of Bhaja Masla. You can also use Garam masala or some Meat masala but this particular Bhaja Masla gives a very nice taste.

Keep stirring the keema, breaking up any lumps until the keema loses its raw color. The keema will also release water, keep on frying until the water dries up and the keema is cooked and crumbled. Once the keema is done, taste and adjust for spices.

In a separate pan, heat some more mustard oil, say 2tsp. When the oil is hot, add 1 tbsp of black pepper powder. Add this pepper flavored oil to the keema in the other pan.

Now add about 1/2 cup of warm water for gravy, salt to taste and let the gravy simmer for 5 minutes at low heat.

Add the fried kaju-kismish to the keema and mix well. Add some more chpped mint. Switch off heat and cover the fry pan.Let it sit for half an hour before serving.