Mutton Curry

It is very difficult to get good mutton in U.S if you don’t know the right places. The difficulty being most Americans does not eat mutton. Usually Middle-Eastern, or Hyderabadi shops or Muslim shop owners carry good fresh mutton.

Remember the Seinfeld episode where his girl friend feeds him mutton and he chews and puts them into his coat pocket and Elaine being chased by the street dogs?

Mutton is a little harder, chewier and so most Americans dislike them. So you don’t find them in the grocery stores normally and available only at the ethnic stores. Mutton is not Lamb. Lamb is what you normally get here. But once if you are accustomed to mutton, it is a tiny chance you would like lamb and vice versa. Lamb is from the sheep and mutton is from goat – both very different animals.

However there has been an increase in mutton production in U.S, as there has been an increase in immigrant population who prefers mutton. Maybe the stores will start to carry them and you don’t have to go in search of this meat at ethnic stores.

We have goat farms here and we can even choose the goat and they would kill and prepare it for us. So we are lucky to get the freshest of the fresh. I usually buy one whole goat and divide the meat and store it in my freezer.

If you have a choice, buy the leg part of the mutton.

For 4 cups of cleaned mutton, mix 1 cup of coarsely chopped onion, ¼ cup of ginger garlic crushed, 1 sprig of curry leaves, 1 coarsely chopped tomato, 2 tsp of coriander powder, 2 tsp of meat masala powder, 1 tsp of chili powder, ½ tsp of turmeric, enough salt.

Mix well and marinate and keep aside for half an hour and then cook them in a pressure cooker or in a pot. If using pressure cooker, you need to know mutton in U.S takes more time to cook than beef. Usually in India it is the other way, beef takes time to cook. This is what I have normally seen in U.S. It takes the time to cook toor dal in a pressure cooker. Do not add water. The water from the meat will cook the mutton.

Heat 1 tbsp of oil, sauté 1 sprig of curry leaves, sauté and brown 1 cup thinly diced onion, add the cooked mutton and mix and boil in medium heat until the curry thickens to your preferred consistency.

Serve with rice or roti.

Country Style Ribs Fry

Haven’t you seen the country style pork ribs at stores in U.S? Ever bought them? I love them more than the spareribs. They are an easy party dish, cheaper and fattier, more pieces and a party favorite.

Buy country style ribs with the bone and divide each piece into three.

Marinate them in a paste of curd, chili powder, ginger garlic paste, curry leaves, onion, salt, turmeric powder and a little bit of sugar.

Deep fry them in hot vegetable oil. It takes a little extra time to fry them. So make sure you start frying them early.

Serve as an appetizer or side dish.

Chicken Wings Appetizer

This is easily a party favorite both for the cook and the guests. It is so easy to make and delicious to munch on during a conversation.

Cut the end part of the wings. Leave the skin on. Marinate in red chili powder, salt, turmeric powder, and curd for two hours.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place on a cooling grid on a baking pan and bake on the top rack of the oven for 15 minutes on one side, turn over and then bake for another 15 minutes.

That’s it. Serve with white sauce as an appetizer.

Koorkka Parade

Just 1500 square miles, blessed with the greenest green, richest soil, lushest rains. A semi-metropolitan culture that soaks in everything and integrates like weaving a beautiful saree of different color threads. No matter how many picturesque pictures you see, no matter how much coconut you add to your curries, no matter how much you try to recreate it, you have to live and feel Kerala. Kerala is a country on it's own with every mile giving you a different history and culture. It is not something you can export it to other countries and create a gathering and celebrate. Not even in Dubai where you can find the most number of Malayalee expatriates, you will get the real essence of Kerala.

This is one state where you will find the disparity of income among the rich and poor very low. This is one state where you will find the infant death rate almost nil, where you will find the poorest of the poor has a voice, know their rights, know how to read and write. This is one state where you will rarely see poverty in villages, but pristine villages roads and excellent infrastructure, with the newest home theater systems blasting and resonating on the slanting teak wooden roofs of old quaint houses. A state in a third world country living like a first world country not in luxury, but in thought process. This is why were are called Devils own people in Gods own country. We are known to be devils advocates questioning everything, be it governments, political process or a coke plant.

This might be the only place where students and people came out in support of Mandela or for America's attack on Iraq. Yes, we gather and protest not only for our state and country, but for World affairs. We are not just educated, but aware. You will find instant-intellectuals in the shack tea stalls, talking passionately about Global pollution to Benazir’s death. Do you know even though this is such a small state, yet it has the maximum newspaper readership among people, compared not with just India but with World? 70% subscribe to newspapers. Any surprise we are socially conscious?

Kerala is like tender coconut, you cannot package it. Drink it instantly pure and fresh.

Put aside all that and there is one thing she is best at.
She has one of the tastiest cuisines I have come across and they are so vibrant and rich. She has the choicest vegetable and meat dishes. Her cuisine even has Spanish, Arabic and European influences. The only thing she lacks is in desserts, but we sweet people make up for it :)


To celebrate her, a koorkka parade for RCI Kerala by Jyothsna.

Koorkka in Dal

Cook 2 cups of cleaned and washed koorkka with 1 cup of toordal with a sprig of curry leaves in 3 cups of water

Grind ½ cup of coconut, 3 pods of garlic, ½ tsp cumin seeds, 5 green chilies, ¼ tsp of turmeric powder and enough salt to a fine watery paste.

Add to the cooked dal and koorka. Boil and simmer for 10 minutes.

Sauté 2 tsp of coconut oil, splutter mustard seeds, red chili split, and 1 sprig of curry leaves and add to the dish.

Serve with rice or roti. Recipe Courtesty: Daly

Koorkka with Sardines

Koorkka Stir Fry

Koorkka with Beef


Koorkka from the Garden

Koorkka with meat

You can cook koorkka with any meat as a dry dish or as gravy. Koorkka has a unique taste somewhere between potato and yam. It gives the meat a different flavor altogether when cooked with it.

1 pound meat (beef, pork or any hard meat) diced.
3 table spoon meat masala
1 onion diced
1 tomato diced
8 garlic pods ad 2 inch ginger crushed
1 spring of curry leaves
2 tsp chili powder
5 green chilies slit
1 tsp turmeric
Salt as needed.

Mix all these with the meat and cook thoroughly with ¼ cup water in a pressure
cooker.

Now sauté half a diced onion, add the boiled koorkka and the meat and keep in low flame until koorkka soaks the gravy.

If you want you can add 1 cup of coconut milk. Do not boil.

OR

Roast ¼ cup of coconut and when almost brown add1 tsp meat masala and sauté for one more minute. Grind this to a fine paste, sauté it after the onion and later add koorkka and the cooked meat. Boil in low flame until done.

Serve with rice or roti. Yummy!

Small is better. Koorkka!

Have you ever felt that that something so tasty is just your imagination? That your taste buds are tricking you and such a thing can't exist? Well, that’s exactly what happens when you eat koorkka.

Malayalees love koorkka. There might be some who dislike Kerala’s favorite food kappa, but koorkka we all love from north to south, from east to west. What?! You mean to say, I said the same about kappa too? ;)

Well, last vacation I got three small sized tuber,planted it in three small cups and made them sprout. Summer I re-planted them into a big cow manure pit and yesterday it just rained koorkka. I got a sack full, yes a sack full of koorkka. Almost 5 pounds of koorkka. Can you believe it?

Koorkka is known as Chinese potato in U.S. This information comes from visiting Indian stores. I don’t have a clue what it is really called. I don’t even know whether this is available in any other place other than Kerala.

But if you haven’t tasted this tuber, then you haven’t tasted bliss.

Koorkka can be just stir fried like a potato or put in meat curries. I made beef curry with koorkka. You can use it like a potato.

Since they are small in size, it will take time for you to peel them. Back home, I have seen my mom cover them in a muslin cloth and hit on the ground to get their skin off. What I did was boiling them until tender and scraped the skin. Or if you have a lot of patience, you can just scrape them raw. I think boiling makes it a little, a pinch less tasty.

Koorkka unlike potato takes time to cook and won’t get mashed easily like potato. So cook them a little longer than potato.

Recipes will follow this whole week. Watch this space for koorkka glory!

Chicken in a lot of gravy!

I used to often take long night journeys to reach Banglore in ‘Video Coach Buses’*.
Rash drivers, treacherous routes, air horns every other second and a grainy video with the wickedest songs – oh ma…Painful journeys! They would stop for dinner at around midnight at small offbeat dinner places called dhabas in Hindi where the drivers would get free dinners for coming in with a bus load of hungry starving people.

At these places I would always order porotta and chicken curry pooh-poohing my mother’s advice not to eat non-veg at shady offbeat places. I used to crave for the gravy than the chicken. The mesmerizing flavor and color soaking the porottas, separating each carefully folded porotta layers to a mushy sponge and I soak my fingers playfully in the fragrant gravy just to remember the feel against my skin…drool…wait a minute, I am writing about chicken curry, right?

This is a delicious chicken curry if you love gravy than the pieces.

5 cups of cleaned, skinned, bite size chicken pieces with one cup of onion, one tomato, 3 tsp red chill powder, enough salt and ½ tsp turmeric.

Dry roast lightly 5 tea spoons of whole coriander, 10 cloves, 5 cardamom, ½ tsp mace, 2 tsp big cumin, 1 cinnamon stick and grind to a powder.

Mix in everything with the chicken pieces. While cooking chicken, do not add much water. Close and cook in medium flame.

When cooked, sauté ½ cup onion to brown, 3 sprigs of curry leaves, add chicken and then add one and two cups of thick coconut milk to this curry. Simmer for 5 minutes only. Do not boil it again.

Serve with rice or porottas…mmm…your fingers wet and soaked…okiez okiez… stop…stop!

* They were called Video Coach Buses A/C – It would be written in big bold letters. I have no idea why. It had a video player, maybe that’s why.

Bacon wrapped scallops

It is summer time here in U.S and schools are closed for three months. Daily It is almost some kind of outing and partying. I am tired, tired, tired. Kids are having a great time demanding attention and making every parent fervently pray for school reopening.

Whenever it was big summer vacation, everyday my Mom would scold and curse the Government and the entire school system. She would be fed up of us making the house a mess, jumping up and down from the sunshades and trees like little monkeys, running like little mice inside and out, destroying everything on our way.

Whenever I host a party, I make sure I make 4 or 5 appetizers. Kids love appetizers and even the fuzziest kid would be happy and would eat something. Grown ups always love appetizers to nibble on while making a conversation.
This is the recipe for bacon wrapped scallops. It is very easy and simple to make.

Buy fresh bacon, toothpicks, and scallops. If you get fresh large scallops it would be good. But if you get frozen ones also, it is okay. Make sure they are large scallops not the baby ones.

Marinate scallops in ginger + garlic + chili powder paste. Don’t add salt, since bacon is very salty. This time I made a different marinade. I made a paste of cilantro and mint and green chilies to make a green marinade.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. On a baking tray, keep a wire rack and arrange the bacons like as shown in picture. Roll the bacon around the scallops and insert a wet tooth pick(place the toothpicks in water for sometime) to hold it together. You can also add a garlic pod if you want on top.
Now bake them for 10 minutes. Serve hot. Tasty!

Mutton Stew

Most Malayalee Christian families make Stew as an accompaniment with the soft and lacy paalappam. Kerala Mutton Stew without any doubt is a completely Western dish changed to adapt to the Malayalee palate. I don’t need to check any history but the basic method and soul of this dish screams foreign. Hence, Stew is spice-less according to Indian standards.

I was not a big fan of this watery version of a mutton curry as I called it ealier. My mom too hated it and I don't remember her cooking it ever. Though I didn’t mind eating it, I never had any interest in cooking it. Which Malayalee wants to cook something where you don’t have to fry some spices which will burn your nose, grind some spices which will burn your hands while mixing it to the dish? Whenever I checked the recipe it had an ingredient ‘flour’ or maida (as we call it). Nah! I am not going to put flour into a Kerala dish.

Then one day I was bullied. “You cook mutton stew!” shouted the indispensable potluck 'head' one fine day in an obscure meeting of housewives.

I want to cook something complicated, I pleaded. But they were adamant.

So I checked the recipes books and liked one written by the old faithful Mrs. K.M Mathew.

I am not gloating here, but seriously I liked what I made. It is not watery if you cook it properly. It is not spice less if you follow the instructions and sneak in a little more pepper. Viola! I love stew. I now make it regularly as an accompaniment to appam. My husband and his whole family love gravies. So he loves stew since he can make his fingers swim in the gravy unlike any other dishes. Stew is technically supposed to have lot of gravy than any other curry.

Mutton – Cut into bite sized pieces. Yes, bones are welcome. – 3 cups
Cinnamon sticks – 1 inch length as whole – 2
Clove – 10
Green Cardamom whole – 8
Whole black pepper – ¼ cup crushed. Do not grind, just crush.

Onion diced – ½ cup
Green chilies slit – 6
Ginger diced very thin – 1 table spoon
Garlic – 20 pods
Curry leaves – 1 sprig
Potato – 1 cup

Unbleached All purpose flour – 1 table spoon
Vinegar – 1.5 teaspoon

Fresh Thick Coconut milk Cream – ½ cup
Coconut milk thinner – 3 cups
(If using canned coconut milk, take out the crème from the top without shaking the tin. This will be the thick coconut milk)

Heat 5 tsp oil, in low flame sauté the Cinnamon sticks, cardamom, clove and black pepper. Sauté onion, green chilies, ginger and garlic diced, and curry leaves. Keep aside this whole spice mix.

Heat 2 tsp oil, add flour and sauté again for two minutes in low flame. Add the mutton and sauté again. Add vinegar and enough salt and cook this meat in thin coconut milk. Cook in medium flame. Stews are supposed to be cooked slowly, but if the mutton is too hard, cook it for ten minutes in a pot and then cook it in the pressure cooker.

When meat is 3/4th done, add the sautéed whole spice mix and the potatoes. Add 1.5 teaspoon of vinegar again into this and add salt again. Cook covered until meat is well done. Lower the flame completely, add the thick coconut milk and add 15 count whole black pepper. Keep for one minute and remove from heat.

Whenever thick coconut milk is added to any dish, make sure the milk gets only lightly warm. It shouldn’t be boiled. This you should make sure depending on the type of stove you use. If you use a heating coil, make sure you pot doesn’t sit on the coil after switched off.

Serve with rice or appam or any other rice based dishes. Since this dish is very mild in spices, you can turn up the heat by increasing the crushed pepper.

Recipe source: Mrs. K.M Mathew Cook books.

Also read:
Shynees Mutton Ishtu
Bee's Vegetable Ishtu

Duck gravy Kerala style

While we were living in Singapore I have had the fortune to savor the famous Pekin duck. A whole duck, basted with lot of spices, slowly roasted to perfection. Carved duck meat is then rolled into paperthin rice papers and served. It is worth a visit to Singapore or China only for this. Please don’t try Pekin Duck at P F Chang’s in U.S. They have no clue how to make Pekin duck.

Duck meat is a delicacy mainly due to its scarcity. Fresh duck meat is available here in U.S, a little expensive, but we get them extremely fresh from duck farms out here. We point to a whole live duck gobbling around and they would kill and clean it for us. That fresh!

Duck meat is harder, so you would have to cook it longer. While cutting or cleaning the duck, you will realize how hard the meat is than chicken. Accordingly, use more time in cooking duck meat. Check Asian or other specialty stores for duck meat.

Here is a Kerala style recipe for preparing duck. (You can use this method for any poultry)Cut and clean into bite sized pieces. Keeping or removing the skin is up to you and depending on the duck you get. If duck is fatty, don’t keep the skin. If not fatty, keep the skin.

For 3 cups of duck,

3 tsp of garlic and 3tsp of ginger grated and made to a paste
1 cup of onion

Heat oil, Saute onion and when translucent, add ginger garlic paste, 4 green chilies diced, 2 sprigs of curry leaves. Add ½ tsp of turmeric powder and salt. Sauté well.

Dry roast 6 tsp coriander seeds, 4 cardamom, 10 cloves, 1 tsp mace, 2 stick of cinnamon and grind dry. Add this and 2 tsp of red chili powder to the onions and mix and saute for one minute. Add the cleaned duck and mix well and add 3 tbsp of water and enough salt cook well. Cook until the meat is very soft.

Now, Roast 1 cup of coconut, 3 pods of garlic and 1 sprig of curry leaves until light brown. Grind this to a paste.

Heat oil, sauté ½ cup diced onion until brown, and then add ½ cup diced tomatoes and ½ cup potatoes and add the ground coconut mixture with 1 cup of water. When it boils, add the cooked duck and cook with lid open until the gravy is thick.Serve with rice or roti.

Shredded Chicken

My dear friend ‘I’ who was actually a very novice cook taught me this wonderful recipe.

Shredded Chicken. This is exceptionally good and I love chicken made this way. People love this with wine or alcohol as an appetizer.

4 cups of chicken breasts (trim any fat) diced into two inch pieces, boiled in ¼ cup water with salt and 1 tbsp of vinegar. Cook covered for first ten minutes, then cook open and let the water completely evaporate.
When cooled, shred the chicken with your hand into strips. This is very easy. Do not use a food processor.

2 cups of Onion diced thin. 2 springs of curry leave, 7 green chilies, 2 tbsp of peppercorns. That’s it. It is so simple but delicious!

Heat 1/8 of olive oil, sauté the onions and green chilies slit well until light brown. Add the shredded chicken. Add the crushed peppercorn and mix. Now, keep in medium flame, sprinkle some oil around 2 tsp and sauté this again. Sauté well for around ten minutes until the shredded strips looks a little brownish.Serve with rice or roti or as an appetizer.

Bombay Beef Fry

I don’t know why it is always referred as lazy Sundays. Back home, it was always hectic Sundays. We had to get up at 7 and get ready for Church at 9 a.m. Oh! How we hated it. Since we had to receive the Holy Quarbana, we had to have our breakfast two hours before church and then brush again to cleanse our mouths.

During those days, when the T.V Serial ‘Ramayana’ aired at 9.30 a.m., lot of people started skipping the morning mass for the evening one. My mother was one among them when my Dad was not at home. But the problem was morning Sunday Mass held a lot of ‘traditions’ like meeting people after the Mass, then walking back from Church and stopping at some of my mom's friend’s house on the way to discuss what their Sunday special was. Last stop would be at the meat shop of Hassanikka for a ½ k. g. of beef.

During the weekdays we never ate meat. Sunday was our meat day. Those days meat was quite expensive, so meat was a precious commodity and getting a chicken leg was like winning a lottery. Maybe because it was served not very often and when served, the quantity was so less, it tasted so good unlike now when I don’t like to eat meat that much and I crave for vegetarian meals. Also, I do think the meat we got back home was not ‘glorified’ Organic, but it did eat grass and did not have antibiotic treatments.Outside Kerala, I think it is very hard to find good beef.

Hindus regard Cow as sacred and you would get stares if you even said you eat beef. But in Kerala, even most Hindus eat beef.

This special and quick beef fry is from my Late Uncle. He used to call this Bombay Beef Fry only because he used to make it regularly during his bachelor days in Bombay, now called as Mumbai.Shallot is the main ingredient.

For 2 cups of beef, 1 cup of shallot diced.

First dice the beef to bite sized pieces and cook the beef with enough salt, ¼ tsp turmeric powder and 2 tsp chili powder.

Then heat ¼ cup of oil, splutter 1 tsp of mustard seeds, 3 sprigs of curry leaves. Now sauté the diced shallots until it is about to turn brown. Keep the flame to medium and add the cooked beef and sauté well. You should make it real dry. The beef should be sautéed well until the beef turns a brown color. It will take a good amount of time to get the beef dry. The actual thing is to sauté it until it will burn.This dish doesn’t have any garam or meat masala. Shallots sautéed with the beef give it a completely different taste and flavor. Serve with rice or roti.

Quail Fry (Kaada erachi varuthathu)

Some years ago, a newly married friend (one of my best friends) of mine shot me an email with the Subject, “Help, I am depressed”. She wrote in the mail,
“L.G. I like my husband and all…but I don’t think he is a good person. He even eats tiny birds. I don’t know how my marriage is going to be.”

I haven’t laughed like that in my life. I told everyone whom I could get hold of and it became the joke of the year at our office. My friend is a 100% vegan! I mean, she considers people who eat mushrooms in non-veg category. She married (yes, arranged marriage) a non-vegan, a 100% one.

Life is full of ironies, isn’t it? Before marriage she asked him everything – Smoke? No. Drink? No. Non-veg? Oh-no! Never. Well after marriage he said to her, “Oh I was just kidding to all the three. Did you take it seriously?"

Well, as any newly wed wife, eager to impress her husband, she even asked me for non-veg recipes. I think she covered her nose, mouth and eyes while cooking non-veg. And one day, her husband brought home Quail Meat or called as ‘kaada erachi’ in Malayalam. Thats how I got the email.

It is considered to be medicinal food and not easily available and hence a sought-after delicacy.

You get it here in U.S in specialty Organic stores like Wild Oats, Whole Foods etc.
Recipe:I didn’t take out the skin, since there is very minimal fat. For 4 quails (cut into 4), mix together 1 diced onion, 12 garlic cloves, 4 inch piece ginger, 4 springs of curry leaves, 10 green chilies slit, 1 tomato, 3 tsp meat masaala, 1 tsp pepper corns crushed, 1 tsp red chilipoweder, salt, ½ tsp turmeric, all crushed coarsely in a food processor.

Mix everything into the quail and keep aside for an hour. Dice 1 small potato.

Heat ½ cup of frying oil, add the potatoes and roast them for 3 minutes. Then add the quail and the mixture and in low heat, fry them. Cover and cook for 10 minutes and then turn the quail pieces and then open cover cook until done.Serve hot with rice or roti. It tastes almost like chicken but it has a different flavour, a little wild meat flavour.

She is living happily ever after with her two wonderful kids and her still-quail-eating husband :). But look who got in trouble for quail hunting.

3 whistles for Pork

Whenever I cook pork, I am reminded of my mom's warning, “cook pork well until the pressure cooker gives you 3 whistles". Well, I didn’t know how to cook back then, but my mom would ask us to switch off the stove after 3 whistles.

Pork is a delicacy back home eaten very rarely during special occasions. It should be cooked thoroughly since its diet is (or was) very unhygienic at least in India. But the taste of pork fry is so yummy; nothing can hold you back from this once you have tasted.

In U.S grocery stores, you get very lean pork and it tastes like paper to me. All the fat is trimmed out. The fat is what makes the pork so delicious. So you would have to search around in Chinese food stores. Ask for pork belly in Chinese stores. This looks and tastes similar to the pork we get back home. My uncle is the one who shared this "pork belly is the real pork" snippet with me.When cut up into square cubes, the pork belly has 3 layers of fat, and one layer of meat. Looks like layered crème cake ;-)(Raw pork)Wash the pork thoroughly and squeeze and strain the water from the meat. For one and half cup of pork, add 3/4 cup of diced onions, 6 crushed garlic, 2 tsp of ginger diced and crushed, 3 sprigs of curry leaves, 1/4 tsp of turmeric powder,1 and half tsp of meat masala powder (I grind my own meat masala, will post that later), 2 tsp of red chili powder, green chilies 4, 1 small tomato diced. Add salt. Mix everything with the cut pork and cook it in a pressure cooker in medium flame for 1 whistle (only in india I think the pork needs 3 whistles).(Pork ready to cook)Cut coconut pieces in to 1cm length.If the cooked pork has water, open the pressure cooker and cook it until the water is completely gone. This is a semi dry dish. Now heat two tsp of oil (instead of adding oil again, you can strain the pork fat from the cooked pork), add curry leaves, add one small shallot, add 1 tsp of meat masala powder, add the coconut pieces and sauté well in low flame. Add the cooked pork to this and sauté well again and make it dry on high flame. Once you taste this dish, there is no looking back.