Hoi Pulao

What’s your most favourite Italian dish? After the pizza, I mean. If you're not a food snob and wont to drop names like “Zabaglione” (which is quite a sublime dessert, by the way) or “Saltimbocca alla Romana” (a delectable veal concoction), likely as not, you will say it’s spaghetti Bolognese. It’s simple, it’s hearty, and it’s available everywhere — which also accounts for its popularity. Unfortunately, in India at least, the spaghetti Bolognese is a much abused dish. It often tastes a lot like spaghetti with keema curry, or spaghetti with minced meat groaning under an overwhelmingly sour tomato sauce. I can tell you about a horrendous spaghetti Bolognese I had at Calcutta’s Bengal Club a few years ago. The so-called Italian restaurant there was being managed by an outfit called Don Giovanni at that time. It was an oily, spicy, minced meat sauce served with tough, underdone pasta. It was nothing short of an abomination.  So anyway. Here’s my recipe of spaghetti Bologn...

It was Saraswati Puja yesterday — my first since I moved to Delhi. In between setting up house, settling down and finding my feet at work in a new city, I haven’t managed to do much cooking for pleasure lately. Saraswati Puja is a special day, however, a day redolent with childhood memories. Memories of the Puja at my aunt’s house, of my mother draping me in a small-sized “ basanti ” (yellow) saree, which invariably came unstuck after a couple of hours. Of murmuring “Jaya Jaya Devi Charaachara Shaare…” before the resplendent idol. And most of all, of the glorious food that was to be had after the puja was done. There was khichuri and begun bhaja , luchi , kheer , kuler aumbol , murir moa , khoiyer moa … Since my Mom’s family came from east Bengal, there was also the delightful ritual of jora ileesher biye , followed by lots of dishes featuring the peerless fish. The chilly winter morning in Delhi yesterday brought back those memories sharply. I longed for the airy luchis , ...

I bought some mutton yesterday. This morning I was all set to cook a nice, spicy, archetypal Sunday-lunch-mutton-curry. But the weather made me indolent. The day was cool and rainy and I longed to finish the business of cooking quickly and curl up with a book. I simply didn’t relish the idea of spending a long time in the kitchen frying masalas. And putting in the hard labour of frying the mutton in it.   So I settled for a mutton stew. Serendipitously, some rajma was soaking overnight. I also jettisoned last evening's plan to cook a rajma dish and instead, bunged the stuff into the mutton. This one’s dead simple to do and absolutely delicious to taste – a lovely, fragrant mutton broth that comes out tops on wholesomeness too. Mutton Stew with Rajma Ingredients 750g mutton pieces 200g rajma beans soaked overnight 2 onions roughly chopped 1 tomato chopped 3 cups mutton or chicken stock 1 inch piece of ginger cut in juliennes A few cloves o...

I always look upon the passing of peas with sadness. I mean, when winter ends, spring is also on the wane and peas -- so sweet and tender in season – take on that hard, grassy, rather woeful, taste. Fresh green peas do lend an extra dimension to the winter table. I tend to put them in virtually everything – have them with other veggies like cabbage, cauliflower, potatoes… Make a pea soup, put them in a veg au gratin… Then there are the staples like matar paneer and keema matar – wonderfully familiar and superbly tasty when made with fresh seasonal peas. But the most glamorous dish made with peas has got to be karaishutir kochuri – Bengal’s brand of puris stuffed with peas. It takes me back to my childhood in a trice. The yummy high points of winter were always my Mom’s karaishutir kochuri and gajorer halua (that’s gajar ka halwa  to all you non-Bongs). I loved the colours – the green of the kochuri and the red of the halwa – the one savoury, the othe...

If you ask me what’s my most favourite food in the world, I shall reply: fish. Really, there’s no fish that I don’t like. Fish and seafood. Happily, Bengal’s culinary tradition is replete with a fantastic array of fish preparations. Not so happily, seafood, with the exception of prawns, tends to get short shrift in our cuisine. There’s the kankra jhal (spicy crab curry), yes, but look for dishes that feature clams or mussels or squid, and you’ll draw a complete blank. What’s worse is that you won’t find these things in the supermarkets or even the big markets here. So when I want to cook a seafood chowder – a dish I love because it’s so tasty and wholesome and is in fact a complete meal – I am forced to leave out the clams and mussels and resort to good old prawn. I add some fresh white fish too – preferably, bekti. This is not the classic seafood chowder, no, but what the heck, it tastes great even without them clams and other bits of seafood. Indeed, it's on...

I love curd. I like it on its own, I like it as a dip, or a raita , I like it on chaat … And I love it when it’s used in cooking. It’s tangy, it’s creamy, and it can turn most anything into food that’s rich and delicious. Meat, fish, veggies, even pulses ( dahi vada, kadhi ) are rendered finger-lickin' good when they come laced with this magic ingredient. One of my favourite dishes with dahi (or doi , as we call it in Bengal) is Doi Maachh – fish cooked in curd. There are variations in the recipe and the more commonly used one calls for the addition of onion and ginger paste to the sauce. That can be quite divine too (I promise another post on that), but the one I make more often does away with such additives. Its USP lies in methi phoron (seasoning with fenugreek seeds). Somehow – I know not by what magic -- the methi and the dahi combine to produce a mellow pungency that makes this fish dish pretty hard to resist.   We call this one Chhotoner Doi Maachh at h...

I rarely get a craving for sweets. But this evening was an exception to the rule. I wanted something for dessert, which I almost never want if I am at home. Good for health, good for figure, don’t you know. Anyway, I decided to make myself some mishti , as we Bongs call it. Nothing elaborate, of course. Because a) I had virtually nothing in the house with which I could confect a fancy dessert, and b) it was way too hot for a protracted toiling in the kitchen. I did some fast thinking and hit upon the idea of making sweet crepes. Hadn’t made them in a while, and they seemed like the perfect way to finish off a sultry, listless day -- easy to prepare, light, and seriously delicious with some honey, maple syrup or just a dusting of caster sugar. So here’s the recipe. You do need some skill in flipping the crepes over and making sure that they come out thin and with lacy edges – the hallmark of crepes with cred. But that’ll come with practice. Or, if you’re a born co...