Technical Glitch and Repost

Sincere apologies to all subscribers of Cuisine Virtuelle. Due to a technical glitch associated with template change, I had to delete all my old posts and repost them. Your inbox must have been spammed today with old recipes. I have sorted it now and there will be no more repeat posts. Thank you for your patience and support.

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Rava Badam Laddoos

It's sacrilegious for a Bengali to confess that she likes another sweetmeat more than rasogola, pantua and the likes but I do. I used to stay in a primarily Kannadiga hostel during my first year in Bangalore. Of course, the cook there tried her best to put me off Kanada food for life and she did quite well till Diwali. Most of the in-state girls went home for the festival and came back with jars and steel dabbas of home made sweetmeats and desserts to share with friends in the true Diwali spirit. Note I say most!

A couple of days, after Diwali my neighbor who had been visiting her parents in north Karnataka knocked my door hard uncharacteristically early in the morning. Groggy, concerned and angry all at the same time, I opened the door only to have something shoved into my mouth. Jaggery, coconut, dal and ghee exploded in my mouth. Voila, so happened my quick induction to the legion of Kannada sweet lovers!

If you haven't guessed yet, she had fed me a piece of obbattu. Over the years, I have relished much green payasa, huggi ,Dharwad pedas and kajayas.

Couple of Diwalis back, stuck in rural Indiana, I was craving for Kannada sweets. Well aware of my shortcomings and in the absence of recipes, I went about recreating from my remembrance of taste, Rava Laddoos and Besan Burfi. Why I picked them? I figured they would be the easiest and I wasn't wrong! They turned out exactly like a friend's mother and the batch of 20 was soon finished by N and I. However, me being me, was not satisfied with just recreating; I had to add my own. So the next time I made Rava Badam Laddoos and Besan Pista Burfis which have since been established as N and my Diwali tradition.

Rava Badam Laddoos

Ingredients:

1 cup fine wheat sooji/rava

3/4 cup fine sugar or 1 cup crystal sugar

3 cloves

3 tsp raisins

1/2 tsp cardamom powder

3/4 cup water

2 tbsp ghee for frying + 1/2 cup for badam coat

Few strands of saffron (optional)

1/2 cup almond slivers

Method:

For Laddoo -

• Slightly crush cloves.
• Heat ghee in a heavy bottom pan and add cloves and raisins. Fry for 20 seconds or till the cloves and raisins don't puff. Take care not to burn them.
• Add sooji and keep frying over medium heat. Cook till sooji turns red and emits a delicious aroma. Transfer the fried sooji onto a dish.
• In another pan heat water,sugar and saffron(if using) to a rolling boil.Remove from heat.
• Mix sooji and cardamom powder into the sugar syrup. The mixture will be very watery at this stage. Cover and let stand for 30 minutes. The sooji should have absorbed the syrup by then and reached a dry halwa like consistency.
• Apply some ghee on your palms and make balls out of the mixture.

For Badam Coat-

• Dry roast the almond slivers and coarse grind them to crumbs.
• Add the almond crumbs to 1/2 cup of ghee and mix well into a slightly runny paste.
• Dip the laddoos in the paste and allow them to cool on a dish. The ladoos should have a thin layer of badam paste. Wipe off excess paste.
• Once cooled, store in air tight jars. They stay good for a fortnight that is if they last that long.

Makes 16-18 laddoos.

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Chingri Maacher Malai Curry - Coconut Shrimp Curry

At four, when all other kids wanted to be doctors, I wanted to grow up to fry and eat fish in my parents' kitchen. Yes my first ambition was to be a fish fryer! Many dreams and aspirations have since come and gone but none as dear as the first. Of course with age my ambition has been trimmed to fish eater. The exhilarating anticipation I experience standing in my parents' kitchen as ma puts a turmeric-stained hilsa steak in hissing mustard oil is tantamount to a virgin's before the first time.

I loved my fish and rice and my parents grateful to have at least one kid who inherited the true bengali love heartily indulged my piscine appetite. So much so, that during season the pricey hilsa was a staple at my parents’. During the months when hilsa was unavailable or supposedly didn't taste as well, we ate koi, tangra, pabda and the likes. Another fish, which though not a fish, that often found itself on our dinner table was the prawn; its distinction being the only marine life my sister obliged to consume.

According to family lore, as a child I supposedly couldn't distinguish between prawns and roaches. Though I don't want to believe that hackneyed tale, I can sense the rationale. I often watched the domestic help kill live prawns in our kitchen by holding them under boiling water. In the process, some crustaceans frequently escaped her and went crawling and fluttering their antennae all around.

When I met N, I was aghast at his lack of knowledge of fish and seafood. That man only ate rohu, an Indian carp! Realizing that most freshwater fish would be too bony for him, I first introduced him to pomfret and then to shrimp, keeping my fingers crossed all the while. After he had enjoyed his first shrimp fried rice, I cooked chingri maacher malai curry, the reluctant Bengali delicacy for him and with that, I won him over, across murky waters to the side of fish lovers.

The first time I made malai curry, ma instructed me over phone on how to devein prawns, milk a coconut and cook the crustacean. Due to inevitable miscommunication, I cooked the curry little different from her, which I actually liked more. Of course, I have never told her that! I always used bagda chingri (tiger prawns) like ma but after moving to the States, I never found them at the stores. I suspect even if I do, I won't be able to afford them. Hence like many Indian recipes, I substituted - this time with shrimp. However, here I find canned coconut milk, so that kind of evens out the absence of tiger prawns.

Ma cooks them with the heads on. She sincerely believes eating crustacean brains increases the abilities of the eater's own! Myths aside, if you are brave enough go ahead and suck the brain off a prawn - you just might enjoy the gooey, salty cerebral fluid as much as I did. N however, is squeamish around animal heads, so I buy decapitated ones.

Chingri Maacher Malai Curry

Ingredients:

Fresh shrimp/ prawn - 1/2 lb (if using non-decapitated prawns use 3/4 lb)

Coconut Milk - 8 fl. oz or 1/2 can (not the thickened or sweetened kind)

Onion paste - 2 tbsp

Garlic - 1 large clove coarsely chopped and crushed

Ginger - 1 tsp

Slit Green Chillies - 4

Bay Leaves - 3 small

Red Chilli Powder - 1 tsp or to taste

Turmeric Powder - 1/2 tsp for marinade and 1/4 tsp for curry

Salt - to taste

Water - 1/2 cup plus more if required

Ground Masala:

Green Cardamom - 2

Cloves - 3

Cinnamon - 2 small sticks

Dried red chillies - 3 large

Black Peppercorns - 10

Mustard Oil - 2tbps (I use canola)

Method:

Prepping the shrimps/prawns - Wash the shrimp. Remove the hard shell; be careful not to remove the tail or the head(if using) . Check if the shrimp has been deveined, if not slit the back a little and remove the black thread. Marinate the shrimp in salt and turmeric powder for half hour.

Prepping the ground masala - While the shrimp marinates dry roast the whole spices and grind to a coarse powder. N eats particularly hot food and I, being the vegetarian heeds to his taste when cooking non vegetarian food. If you like curry mild, omit the dried red chillies and peppercorns like ma.

Cooking -

• Heat 2tbsp of oil in a heavy bottom skillet. Put the marinated shrimp to the hot oil and let them fry till they turn reddish. Remove from oil. Be careful not to fry the shrimp crisp as fish.
• Add the crushed garlic to the same oil and fry till golden brown and remove.
• To this same oil add bayleaves. After 10 seconds, add the ground masala. (Ma doesn't roast and grind the whole garam masala but I don't like chewing on whole cloves and cardamom while enjoying my curry.)
• When the garam masala starts giving off their aroma, add the onion paste and fry till golden brown.
• Add ginger paste and chillies and fry for another 30 seconds.
• Now add the coconut milk and 1/2 cup of water.
• Immediately add red chili powder, turmeric and salt.
• Bring the curry to a boil. Add the fried shrimp. You can add more water now if you curry has already become very thick.
• Let it simmer for another 5 minutes or till the curry reaches a creamy consistency.
• Remove from heat and enjoy with steamed white rice. Though I usually eat brown rice, I have never tried malai curry with it.

Serves - 2

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