Prawns and Ambazhanga Gravy

When mangoes are not in season and you want some fish curry with mangoes, what do you do? You are not the British Queen to feast on fruits that are not in season. What you got to do is have a June Plum tree in your yard.

I am not sure whether June Plum is the real Ambazhanga in Malayalam grown in Kerala. There is another variety similar in shape, size and texture and taste to June Plum known as Hog Plum with a bigger seed and I think that’s the original ambazhanga. This is an excellent substitute for sour mangoes in fish curries.

Actually I have seen ambazhanga only once or twice in Kerala mostly at monasteries. Yeah, we Keralites are good at cutting down good trees like these! I am not sure whether the current generation even knows about ambazhanga.

Anyway we have a June Plum tree in our yard and the best thing about it is it bears fruit through out the year. The tree is only 4 feet or so in height, but the fruits cover the tree.
This link says, Very prolific, it can fruit itself to death. I vouch for that.

I made some prawns gravy with ambazhanga.

3 cups of shelled, cleaned small prawns.
1 cup of ambazhanga cut into bite sizes
1 small piece of kudampuli (depends on the variety of ambazhanga. Ours is not that sour and so I add one small piece of kudampuli as a backup)
1 sprig of curry leaves

3 tablespoons of Corainder powder, 2 tsp of chili powder, ¼ tsp of turmeric powder. Make it a paste

1 tbsp ginger diced, 6 pods of garlic diced, ¼ cup of shallots or onion diced.

Add everything mix well with salt and add 2 cups of thin coconut milk.

Boil and simmer for 10 minutes. Then just before taking off from fire, add ½ cup of thick coconut milk. Take off from heat.

Heat 2 tsp of oil, sauté 1 tsp of thinly diced shallots, 1 sprig of curry leaves, 2 red chili split. Add to the curry.

Serve hot with rice. For curries with coconut milk, storing and reheating destroys the real flavour. So always make them in small batches.

Guess?

Who is this pretty lady? No clues this time.

My second cake!

This is my second cake from the second course at Wilton. I am just rolling in icing and cake flour. Jolly Good! Jolly Good! I am a big show off, ain't I? :D



I tell you girls, you don’t need a creative bone. I can do it. So could you.

Don’t wait. Go and join and have some fun.

This post I want to dedicate to Indira dear and I think she needs a big applause for all the things she has been doing to the food blogging world. She has inspired me and I have no shame to tell you I copy everything and follow her every move religiously. I am her biggest fan. She has set a stellar example for Indian food blogs and If you see all this flood of Indian food blogs today, it is due to her inspiration which she does by her wonderful posts. Thank you Indira once again!

Black Channa in Coconut Milk Gravy

The other day a friend of mine from Kerala asked me what I was having for lunch and I told her, kadala curry. How you can eat kadalacurry with rice, she exclaimed. Is that a good combination? , she wondered.

Oh honey, this is U.S.A. Anything goes with anything. Actually you can eat kadala curry as breakfast with oats too. All combination looks good when one is hungry, juggling between jobs, kids, school, work, laundry, house cleaning. Jeez! People in Kerala have been spoiled a lot, I say.

This is that “combination” kadalacurry in coconut milk.
Black channa dal comes dry and you have to soak it twelve hours in water before cooking. So you see you got to think ahead these days. :-) After soaking, wash it thoroughly and drain. When you soak, small insects etc come out from the dried channa if any and so it is a must you wash it after soaking.

For 3 cups of soaked black channa, add 1 cup of thinly diced onion, 1 tablespoon of diced ginger, 6 pods of garlic diced, 2 tomatoes diced, 2 sprig of curry leaves, 2 teaspoon of chili powder, ¼ teaspoon of turmeric powder and enough salt.

Microwave for one minute, 4 table spoon of coriander seeds, 3 cardamom, 1 cinnamon, 3 cloves, 2 tsp pepper, 2 cashew nuts, 1 bay leaf, 2 tsp mace. Then grind it in your coffee grinder and add to the mix.

Add water 2 cups of water to this mixture. Pressure cook for double the time you use for toor dal.

Now heat two tablespoon of oil, splutter ¼ tsp mustard seeds, sauté ½ diced onion, 1 sprig of curry leaves and add the cooked black channa. When it starts to boil, add 1 cup of coconut milk. As soon as it starts to boil, take off from heat.

Oh yes, serve it with anything. As long as you are hungry, anything goes.

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 in Sardines Gravy

You thought you can’t add a vegetable to sardines or any other fish, right? Yes! That’s exactly what I thought too. But you can add koorkka to fish. What is the end product? Yummy koorka and you can chuck the fish.

Let alone taste it, I have never even heard about it. So my friend Daly, a fellow Malayalam blogger who is a koorkka fanatic, conducts secret koorkka rituals, told me about this recipe, I surely wanted to give it a try. The only thing I have seen her really passionate about is koorkka and she has testified discreetly she is in love. So she can’t probably go wrong with a recipe that has koorkka in it.

Koorkka holds its shapes and absorbs other flavors and sits tight unlike a potato where if you add a small piece of potato the whole curry would taste like potato. With fish curry, it absorbs all the flavors of the fish and the gravy and you get an exceptional taste of koorkka.

This is supposed to be a Trichur regional specialty.

Sardines are medium sized fatty fish and is easily available and liked all over the World. Clean the fish,thoroughly, make a big slit on the side. Make red fish curry like I had explained before and add koorkka before adding the fish. Cook the koorka until tender and then add fish and cook until done. This actually tasted so good after I refrigerated the fish curry for one day.

Serve with rice or roti.

Note: You get cleaned and frozen koorkka in U.S with the name Chinese potato. They take a little longer to cook. So use a pressure cooker.

A personal note on blogging

When I started blogging it was mainly because I couldn't find the simple Kerala recipes. If you have at least read three or more posts on Ginger and Mango, you know I am enchanted by the multitude of simple Kerala recipes.

I want to record them in English and when someone searches for kanji, I am ecstatic one of my blog pages show up on search. Someone once wrote to me, she was having fever and that she was in a foreign country and wanted badly to have some kanji and searched and she hit on my blog. Yes, thank you reader, that's exactly what I want too. Especially I love it when a non-Keralite says they tried the Kerala kuthari or the rice gruel. Ummaah!

To me blogs especially food blogs should be less sophisticated and should reflect one's own kitchen. I love to see pictures in the commonly used steel utensils and kadai than on pretty bowls. I don't think it should be about excellent dramatic photographs or professional writing or precise recipes. We have fantastic cook books for all that. To me, it is about individuality, love, passion and stories behind them. Cooking to me is all about expression of love. And who else can bring it forth to the blogs than us women?

To write a food blog, it is good to have a camera. Well, I didn't have one but when I switched to DSL, my service provider send me a small 3MB web camera with no flash. One couldn't even put a memory card in that thing and could take only 7 pictures with the internal memory. You could just click and take a digital photo. That's it. So I had to cook early and take a picture in the afternoon when I had full light. I rarely saved a post in the draft and what I would eat for lunch, I liked to immediately share it with you. It was like from the stove to the table to the blog.

Could I buy a decent camera? Of course I could, but I didn't want to. I had an old SLR with me and had given it to my brother. When I traveled or I needed one as a must, I borrowed one from my cousin. I was thinking I should be able to survive with this good for nothing camera too. I could write if I couldn’t put good pictures. I could excite you with a new ingredient for lack of good pictures. I could tell you stories. And that’s what I did.

Then, one fine day I saw Google Adsense. I thought If I put that on my blog and If I could get some money and If I buy a camera with that for my food blog, wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't that be the thing to do? Wouldn't that inspire someone? And yes, that's exactly what I did. Though as an Indian syndrome, I was hesitant and shy at first to put ads. But I put them this year and I made money. Yes, I got my first Google check last month and was unimaginably happy. It was like how you would sell old newspapers back home, how you would sell fish from your fish tank to friends and make some extra change. I bought a Nikon L14 for the money I got. I have no excuse now for not having a good picture on my blog.

It was fun watching the piggy bank slowly getting filled up, sometimes as low as .02 cents, but I was patient like making koya by stirring milk on the stove for hours. If I had regularly posted it would have been much faster, but hey I got a life too right?

Thank you my wonderful readers!

Koorkka Upperi

This is the simple stir fry version of koorkka loved by all.

Skin Scraped Koorka, washed and cleaned thoroughly, boiled with little salt and ¼ tsp turmeric powder – 3 cups
Shallots or small onions – 1 cup diced thick and crushed
Crushed red chili flakes – 2 table spoon
Curry leaves – 2 sprigs.

Heat 2 tablespoons of oil; add shallots, chili flakes, curry leaves and sauté them until light brown. Add the boiled koorkka and in low flame sauté for 5 minutes.

Serve as snack, with rice or with roti. Mostly everyone likes this in this form. Simple preparation but it brings out the real taste of koorkka.

Wait, Wait! Read about koorkka before you leave with a mouthful.

I was searching for koorkka on Google and was surprised to find not many details on this delicious food. I somehow had a hunch that the name Chinese potato is just a quickly thought out name by some Mallu moyalaali (owner) who is exporting all this cleaned and washed koorkka to his koorkka crazy malayalalee counterparts in Gulf and U.S. Everybody loves this but what is the purpose if Google doesn’t have it? I asked my South American friends, my Chinese friends all to get the original name of this and none other than a fellow malayalee blogger friend helped me in finding koorkka. He, who blogs as Devaragam really took pains and wrote to me,

(verbatim)

Inji,

Alright I went to central tuber crop research institute and found this research paper. From there to bihrmann and from there to wiki.

This stuff has a thousand names. Koorka in central to North Kerala, Tamilnadu & Srilanka, cheevakizhangu @ TVM/kollam, Hausa Potato, Chinese Potato, Country Potato, Fra-Fra-Salanga, Pesa, Fabirama ratala, Hausa potato, frafra potato, Sudan potato, coleus potato, Zulu potato, and Zulu round potato, hausakartoffel, innala etc. in various other parts of world in different languages.

That’s why we go for binomial nomenclature. It rarely happens, but unfortunately it has two scientific names too! Plectranthus rotundifolius & Germanea rotundifolia :)

It is believed to be native of Mauritius. Nobody is sure. its highly popular in Sudan & south India (may be we took it with us when we migrated from Africa 1.75 lakh years ago :)

Pictures are here. She belongs to the mint family Lamiaceae (same as panikkoorka and pudina)

In India we call it Chinese potato in English. Strangely, they don’t grow this in China :)

(end)

This post is for dear friend Devaragam. Thank you so much! On Behalf of me, the Koorkka fans association of North America, All Kerala Koorkka Society of India, and www.koorkkaWorld.com :)

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.