Tomato Rice with a Kerala touch

I have had tomato rice at hostels and I hated it. Even if they were good, hostel food reminds how far you are from your mother and everything tastes painful. Thus I disliked tomato rice. But then occasional visits at tamilian friend's house and I knew I was missing something. Then one fine day my son told me he loves tomato rice and he wanted to have it badly.

There I go searching frantically for recipes and recipes and didn’t know which one would be good. Then I timidly asked dear Bee who was posting an authentic lime rice recipe and she was kind enough to get hold of a wonderful tomato rice recipe.

None of us at home would eat plain white rice unless it is biriyani rice and that too made it in biriyani way. And If I was going to introduce a different kind of cooked rice at home, then I had to make sure I don’t upset the Kerala rice-immersed- in-gravy combinations. Also, none of us entertain the idea of having a little dry rice. Dry rice preparations like pulav are eaten at home laden with yogurt, curries and what not. But then to get the real flavor of tomato rice, I wanted to introduce it as it is but with a few changes.

I just took the risk of making it with Kerala rice and made it a little bit more on the mushy side so that people at the dinner table won’t scream, ‘where is the curry’.

I also added hot black pepper instead of red chili pepper.

Loved the result. Everybody loved it.

Thank you Bee.

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.

Guar Beans Thoran

I was so happy today. I finally found a seed I was looking for. I didn’t know the name of the beans since my mom called it sambaar payar, just because she puts it in sambaar. I knew that can’t be the name and then somehow like other things I never could find the name and even I missed blogs posts on other blogs that mentioned the name.

And finally I knew it was called Guar beans. I searched and searched but didn’t think anyone would carry the seeds, since it was too indianish. But yippee, I found it here and right I went and ordered those. The best part is it is an upright plant, unlike other varieties and you could grow it in a pot too without any trellis. That’s neat for apartment people with patios.

There is a tinge of bitterness in these beans, but not like bittergourd. The slight tinge of bitterness gives it an edge when you make thoran.

String the beans, dice them very thin so you just need to steam them.

For 3 cups diced beans, heat 2 tsp pf oil, splutter ¼ tsp mustard seeds, sauté 2 whole red chilies, 1 sprig of curry leaves, 5 diced green chilies, 1 pod of garlic diced and ¼ cup shallots. Add the beans, sprinkle 1 tsp of water, add ¼ tsp if turmeric powder and enough salt. Cover tightly and steam in low flame until done.

Then add ¼ cup of shredded coconut, mix and sauté dry for 4 minutes.

Serve with rice. Serving size – 3.

Guess?

a little sour/sweet on the left, a little sour/sweet on the right. Who am I in the middle?

Ambazhanga Chammanthi

Just like sour mango chammanthi, you came make a delicious chammanthi with ambazhanga.

At home, we kids use to pray for certain vegetable plant to stop producing. Since my mom would put that in everything, in breakfast, lunch and dinner. Similarly everybody at my home is praying to stop the shower of ambazhanga and korkka, since I am getting quite innovative these days. ;-) . Maybe next time I would have a garage sale on my blog.

Ambazhanga washed and cut. I didn’t peel of the skin. If you want you can. - 1 cup
Lime – 1. Squeeze the juice.
1 small shallot
1 tsp of ginger
5 green chillies

Grind to a coarse paste.

Then add 1 cup of coconut and grind for one minute.

Serve with kanji.

Mulberries

These are fruits you never get to buy outside, these are fruits you have to pluck right from the tree, hanging onto one of its branches, with cousins and nephews and nieces, your mouth exploding in violet and red. There are fruits like these that take you back to nature, to mothers. From the long winding verandha of the old house, my grandma would be watching us hanging like little bats from the tree. One of us would fall down and she would just hold us with her eyes, for she knnew we were safe. She would place huge sandbags around trees before each vacation, trees she knew we kids will cling onto like life, like life we just would want to climb and savor them and never think of a fall. But she knew better.

Sometimes

Sometimes you just don't want to be stared at, searched for, praised, hugged, loved ! :)

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 :)