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!

An Italian Job!

When you want to really eat some pizza near Pisa, where do you go? Fly to Italy. Yes! Italy has always tugged at my heartstrings with her beautiful Murano glass, with her renaissance art paintings, with her Catholic hymns and songs, with her Sicilian gang stories, and mostly with her food.

(This was the first thing I shot on my first day. The only marketing gimmick I saw in the whole of Italy. Yeah, authentic 'Roman' water ;). We do that a lot in Kerala. hehehe.)

As I had written earlier, after Indian food, I love Italian food. It is not because they both start with an 'I' but it is because it is 'I' as in love. I have this nice warm image of their food cooked with much passion, pots stirred by the chubby little Italian mothers and grand moms. The sauces, the breads, the pasta, the 'ooo ma olive oil'. She reminds me of Kerala with her oil fanaticism. Just like a Malayalee would swear by the coconut oil, Italians would kill for Olive oil.

All we ate was street food and skipped the restaurants. This made our food costs much lower, got the real local flavor and could move between places much faster. So here are some quick shots I found interesting.

(Italy is dotted with small coffee shops like these, where you can get a quick drink or a bite to phonecards. They are called Tabacchi.)

(The rich fruit cake to the many Italian desserts)

(Pizza, Pasta, Rice, Panini, Sandwiches. Choice is unlimited even for a quick bite)

(Italian Gelato. I asked the shop owner whether what he served was the real authentic Italian gelato and he got mad at me. hehe. Maybe he is the Gelato Nazi there.)

(Sicilian fried rice balls)

I was in a small shop in a quaint little town in Florence, Italy and asked the shop owner whether I could take some freshly pressed olive oil in a plastic bottle. And that pleasant sweet man frowned at me. No, he threw up his hands in horror.

"You Americans, don't respect Olive oil", he said. "Never store olive oil in plastic bottle". Ha! I wanted to show him the Olive oil in plastic bottle that lines up in Wal-mart to Costco. He told me I could take some Chianti wine in a plastic bottle, but not olive oil.

--These olives are from November, you know we had a bad season for olives. So the price is little bit up. This will be very bitter. As olive oil ages the bitterness goes away. But we Italians love the bitterness. Only in Tuscany you get the best olives. Up North it is too cold and down south, it is hot.

(This is the shop where I bought some freshly pressed olive oil. All those barrels are wine.)

He was excited to explain to me in his broken Italian accented English. Being so used to pushy cunning salesmen, Italian shop owners were a surprise. They were sweet and kind, telling me what I shouldn't buy and sometimes even telling me the shop I should really explore and not waste time at their shop. You could just stand and talk to them for hours and they would never ask you to buy anything. It was like good old times where you never 'buy' but you build a relationship with the store.

(Roasted Water chestnuts on the streets. I was reminded of Indira. This is the first time I am having them and guess what does it taste like? Roasted jackfruit seeds. Jeez! I am too much of a Malayalee as I always try to find parallels with Kerala food. But really it tasted like roasted jackfruit seeds. If not, I would tell so, right? :) )

(Where else to have the famous Tiramisu other than in Italy?)

(Look at that Salami! - It was perfect)

(All this for nine Euros. Didnt I tell you street food was cheap?)

(Italian Olive trees dot their parks and their streets are dotted with orange trees. Even their tiniest homes have grape vines hanging on small trellis. They are passionate. Aren't they?)

Italians buy their wine, oil, cheese locally. They have not yet embraced the supermarket-everything-made-in-some-far-flung-place-colorfully-packeted-and-marketed system. They bring their old bottles to buy wine, or else if you want a new bottle you are charged one Euro more. Life looks much simpler there reminding me of India a lot.

(Well, Isint that coconut? Do they eat coconut slices? Didnt I tell you Italians are from Kerala? :-). This is a small fruit shop)

As we know, slow food movement started in Italy and it clearly showed when you visit restaurants and small coffee shops. They really eat, not shove it down the throat with a large coke.

My biggest surprise was the less or minimal use of plastic while serving food. Even at the smallest quick coffee shops, we got everything in china. No plastic plates, no plastic spoons and no plastic mugs.
--Wow! So, you mean you really clean the plates and don't throw them away? Really? We do that in U.S only at organic stores.
--Organic?
--Oh that's the new fad in U.S, never mind
(Well, pizza it is and pizza it will be. Tuna toppings. Pizza tastes heavenly in Italy. I have heard this a hundred times while in U.S and yes I do agree. After this the Pizza here tastes like cardboard)

After the daily travel and being a tourist for weeks, back in the plane to U.S all I could think of was having a plate of kuthari rice with some fish curry and I was repeating this recurring dream to my husband dear. When I travel, I am on full alert and hardly get any sleep and I can do this for weeks, but when I am really home I hit the bed for a deep slumber. I slept straight for fourteen hours and what do I find when I wake up? He had prepared some fish curry and rice. He, who rarely enters the kitchen except for an occasional coffee and still gets confused by salt and sugar, Well, that was the best part of my vacation.

(Back home with the real olive oil and some crisp Sicilian bread)

(I hate it when someone gives wrong information about India or her food, so please go ahead and correct me If I have given any wrong information)

Why I celebrate Christmas!

Christmas is almost over and this post is late, very late at least by two days. But that is okay since I was celebrating the season with full glee. Baking cakes sending them to friends, arranging parties, thinking about finger food, decorating the house, going around houses for Christmas carols, Christmas shopping and what not.

This is exactly why I celebrate. I love festivities and their tradition and I like to celebrate every occasion. Celebrating Christmas is all about sharing. So as Eid or Onam or Diwali. It is sharingthe human spirit. A normal life is mundane. We need some color and we need it often. We need some joy and laughter. We need togetherness. It is not about having turkey or ham or Christmas food. It is about coming together to celebrate with others. It just shows we exist in this World as humans, the peaceful kind, the sharing kind, the smiling kind, the hugging kind.

The best part about all celebrations is being a woman. We make sure we keep the flame of tradition and pass it along. We are there teaching the World to share and to be kind. If it were left only to men, there would have been only one celebration -- the keg parties. I would even stretch it to say, these traditions is celebrating motherhood or womanhood over and over again.

“He was alive for last Christmas”
“It was three days before last Christmas we thought of moving back home”
“That was the best Christmas. I was with him and we held hands.”

Don’t we timeline our sad and happy memories with festivities? They surely keep us going. So Celebrate and create new traditions and LIVE!

Now on to a good Christmas spirit story.

I was completely busy at my work for the past two months sleeping only few hours. I always wanted to go for the cake decoration classes as our dear Archana at spicyana was constantly inspiring and urging all of us with her fabulous creations. Only because of her I knew that it is not fairies that decorate with icing, but it is the little elves like me and you. Due to my wonderful procrastination, It took me almost one year to finally signup for a class. And when I was the busiest of all at work and home, I went and joined. :-)

Though I always reached a ten minute late for each class, carried the cake open through the store running for the class, had icing all over my face, I loved every second of it. This is the best thing I have done in years. Love you my dear Archana for this. It is only because of her. It is because of blogs and it is because of her kind sharing.
Here it is. I made my first decorated cake. Ummmaaah!

Merry Christmas and a Wonderful New Year 2008 to all you, my lovely blogmates!

Guess Me!

Brides blush with me. Who am I?

Shrimp and Drumstick in coconut milk

There is a giant drumstick tree at our relative’s place nearby and it is a feast for the eyes to see the bunch of drumsticks hanging from each small branch. Drumstick trees are so brittle; the trees often break due to the strong winds here. Yet, they are resilient and they grow back again from the branch with much vigor. It is amazing to see the tree growing around 6 feet in a year.

We all raid the tree, scrape the drumsticks, cut them into bite size pieces and freeze them until it starts to fruit again.

A very delicious curry is made with drumsticks and shrimp. There are many versions of it and mine is a very simple version as usual.

Drumstick pieces scraped and cut and split into two – 2 cups
Shrimp cleaned and deveined - 2 cups

Coriander powder – 2 table spoon
Crushed black pepper – 1 tsp
Red chili powder – 1 table spoon
Green chilies slit – 4
Onion – ½ cup
Curry leaves – 1 sprig
Ginger scraped and crushed – 1 tsp
Garlic pods – 7 diced thin
Kudampuli - 4
Turmeric powder – 1 tsp
Salt enough

Coconut milk thick – 2 cups

Cook drumsticks with all of the above adding salt in 1.5 cup coconut milk and 2 cups of water. When drumsticks are almost cooked, add the cleaned shrimp and cook for 5 or 6 minutes. Turn off heat and stir in the rest of the coconut milk. Adjust salt.

Heat 1 tsp oil, sauté thinly diced 2 tsp shallots (can use onion too). When the shallots turn brown, add two whole red chili (broken into two) and a sprig of curry leaves. Add to the dish.

Serve with rice.

Fried Rice

At school I would peek at my friend Arya’s lunch box and would wish we could switch mommies. Arya’s lunchbox always had food packed in aluminum foil in a plastic box that had cute stickers on it and her food looked as if she got a share of what the real fairy pretty people would eat. Her lunchbox was not runny or messy and would look like her, short haired and trim, very proper and polite, saying the right words with a soft node. She would always have some fried rice and a fruit with the right amount of flavors and color, everything subtle like pretty pink lace on her handkerchief that was pinned on to her shirt. Oh! How I wish my mom would be that sophisticated to prepare my lunch boxes like those that looked straight from a story book.

Mine was packed in a steel lunchbox up to the brim with rice and fish curry that would run a little outside which was wrapped in a check kitchen towel and it always contained a shocking colored vegetable thoran instead of an expensive fruit. At our house, food was always prepared during the early wee hours of the morning. Momma would fill the lunchbox with steaming hot food and I have seen her blowing away the steam in a hurry so that it doesn’t condense when she closes the lid. There was no need of reheating the food since it would still be piping hot during our lunch time.

We would get ready in frenzy for school and she would run behind us to give us the lunchbox that always looked like a baton exchange in a 400m relay. She would have her saree in a mess, her hair frizzed up and a dirty kitchen towel on her shoulder and would hold the hot lunch box with her saree pallu and would stuff it into our school bags while we were running and then would hold me tight and kiss me when the whole school bus was watching and would say, you should eat the rice completely without brining a morsel back, and I would be so embarrassed and would instantly wipe away the kiss and wished badly I had Arya’s mommie. I always saw Arya’s mommie in a starched crisp house-coat just waving at her, pretty and calm, no frenzy there, and Arya was always ready when our school bus stopped in front of her house.

Arya’s mom would prepare the lunch the previous day and would re-heat it and give it the next morning. It was always fried rice since it was so easy to make and it won’t run and it looks good in a lunchbox.

My mom never cared about those pretty and polite things in life. She wanted her child to have the freshest food and no fried rice but her signature fish curry and vegetables. Now years later, I will die for my mother to kiss me everyday, leaving the wetness on my cheeks before rushing off to office and get that steel lunch box and to do that baton exchange. If wishes were horses…

This is Arya’s fried rice recipe. This is very simple to make. Fried rice is Chinese, but somehow it ends up looking like a little Indian whenever I make it.

White rice. In fact it is better to use previous day's cooked rice. Fried rice was invented so you could dress up the old rice and make it look good. – 2 cups cooked and refrigerated.

Green Onion stalks chopped – ½ cup
Cucumber with skin chopped into thin strips. Steamed – 1/4 cup
Beans cooked – ¼ cup
Green Peas cooked - ¼ cup

You can use a mix of any kind of vegetables that you have. Don’t use vegetables that would seep out color into the rice. I normally use watery kind of fast cooking vegetables.

Mix ¼ cup soy sauce and ¼ cup chili sauce and keep aside. If you want it hotter, I add crushed red chili flakes to this.

Heat a wok or a frying pan, add 1 tsp of vegetable oil and fry the cooked rice for two minutes, then add the vegetables and the sauce mix and sauté everything quickly and coat the rice in this.

Now lower the heat and move rice to the sides of the wok away from the center and to the center of the wok or the pan, break an egg and scramble it quickly and incorporate into the rice. Sprinkle salt. Soy sauce is salty so make sure you adjust salt accordingly.

Serve with soy sauce or some fried meat or fish.

Guess?

Who am I? You dont eat my leaves. I am so shy I dont grow above the ground. I am so tasty I have a fan club in Kerala. I dont look like my big brother at all. Tell me tell me, who am I?

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.

Pindi Thoran

My writing has gone rusty. I stare at a Word document for minutes and nothing comes to my head. Too much of a break from blogging makes you so out of league from everything. There are great food events going here and there and there is a big event FAHC, yet I feel completely disconnected. Not that I used to write great stuff earlier, but something which took me a maximum of 15 minutes to write a post is now a humongous job for me.

I am sure that’s what has happened to a lot of other bloggers too who were regulars, their blogs now look abandoned and lonely. Their mamas are having starting trouble to write something. So this is a warning dears, do not go out of league and take a long break….

You might find this post squeaky squeaky with all that rust, but I know all you darlings out there is worried only about the food. :)

Kerala has this big fascination for banana stems. We use all portions of a banana plant. The fruit is used in cooking and eating, leaves as organic throw away plates and the stem and the flower after a fruit is matured in cooking. After the fruit is matured, you cut the fruit from the plant and hang it in a warm place for ripening. A single banana plant has only onetime fruiting capacity and should be removed. When you cut off the stem, you peel away the greenish layers and there you get a creamy white round part. This is known as unnippindi.

Poets describe a woman’s hands as round and slim and smooth like an unnipindi where unni means small. It is also known as vaazhappindi, where vaazha means banana. Essentially pindi is the name without any metaphors added.

I shake my head and grin when I hear about all the fiber talks in television and health magazines. They talk as if this is the new invention. Hello, this was there long existing...this fiber thingie in vegetables and you missed it all this while is what I want to say to them.

Pindi is fiber. Simple! You can get all the vegetables that claim to have fiber, add them up but a small piece of pindi can shame them all.

What does it mean? That it is a little hard to cut and clean it. First wash it and cut into round thin pieces. From each round, brush over a small stick to catch all the fiber. Yeah don’t be surprised, I was talking about fiber right? Do this to all pieces and discard the fiber ball.

Cut into small pieces; immerse it in water with a little turmeric added to prevent discoloration. This actually will feel like sugarcane pieces. Wash and strain

Splutter mustard seeds, one sprig of curry leaves and split red chilies. Sauté ¼ cup onion then add the cut pindi(1 cup), add little salt, add 1 tsp red chili powder, ¼ tsp turmeric powder and cover and cook in low flame. When half done, add grated coconut if needed, mix well and cook until done.

Serve with rice or roti. It tastes so good!

There it is, I have finally written a post and not bad took me only 20 minutes. :-)

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!

Guess?

I like it, you like it. World goes crazy over it especially a dose of this in the morning is a must. The flower turns into a fruit. Whats it?

(This is specially for sweet Sig for asking me to put at least a guessing game. ) :-)

Ridge Gourd Theeyal / Peechinga Theeyal

I remember once a colleague of mine tasted theeyal from my lunchbox and she was hooked. She was not a Malayalee and fell in love with the Theeyal. In her description, Pulikulambu went to school and university and graduated to become Theeyal.

Theeyal is a very tasty flavorful dish from Kerala. Theeyal I think would roughly translate it into ‘in fire’ or “brunt”. Though the dish is not hot, it is made with browning the coconut. Thus the name?

You can make theeyal with any type of vegetables, or you can even mix all vegetables. You can make it even with Shrimp. Making of theeyal has to be very specific, following the exact instructions to get the right taste.

I made Peeching Theeyal or Ridge gourd Theeyal. Growing up, I never even saw this vegetable among our vendors. I think Ridgegourd is not a preferred Kerala vegetable. But once I started cooking with them, I started to like them.

I scrape the sharp edges and take off the inside seeds if the seeds are thick.

Cut them into pieces, wash – 3 cups

1.5 cup grated coconut and 2 shallots fried to a light brown color. Keep aside.

Dry roast ½ cup coriander seeds, 1 tsp fenugreek seeds, 1 tsp of whole black pepper for two minutes. Add 6 dry red chilies and roast them. Please make sure not to burn them. Add 1 tsp cumin seeds and roast them again for a few more seconds. Grind with coconut mixture and ½ tsp turmeric and salt adding only two tsp of water to a very smooth paste.

Tamarind paste – 2 tsp or 2 inch size tamarind in warm water, squeezed and strained.

Heat 1/4 cup oil, lightly fry the ridge gourd pieces and keep aside. Now in the same oil, splutter mustard seeds, saute whole red chilies two split into two, sauté 1 sprig of curry leaves and add the ground coconut paste. Add tamarind water and the ridge gourd piece and slow cook for ten minutes. Prepare this dish ahead and make sure it sits one or two hours before serving.

The flavor and taste is exquisite. Serve with rice or roti or even idli or dosa.

Green Mango Chammanthi - GBP

Wondering what a chammanthi is? Read this and RP's.

This time for GBP Summer 2007 Entry( my second entry), I don’t have anything to write for this post. Let the pictures speak.







3 Green Chilies, 2 Shallots, Salt, 1 cup Sour Green Mango slices peeled – Crush them first, then add 1 cup of coconut and crush them again. I use a wet grinder for making Chammanthi.

Note: If you are buying store bought mangoes in U.S, it might not be that sour, so add 1 tsp of vinegar to the mango slices to get the right sourness.

Guess?

Now, all you smartie pants out there, guess this.

(Warning: Any more threats, verbal abuse towards this poor me for putting pictures of my backyard will not be taken lightly. Will be forced to put more :-))