thecookscottage

Would this happen in any other restaurant in the World?

You're the critic.Pay what you wish at an Ahmedabad Restaurant.

Forget KFC- here comes TGKF

Colonializing taste buds  eh? - well take that.

Greenhouse to end farming blues?

Yes and  and hybrid rice ended poverty (and biodiversity ) and promoted the use of fertilisers and pesticides.And now I suppose the poor will eat "exotic " vegetables. Sceptical..I am!

For the Sake of Wine

Good Rice Wine is likely to be on our tables sooner than the grape variety.

Cookbooks for Children

For years I have looked for a colourful, attractive cookbook for children in India, with easy to follow recipes that any child from about 7 years up could follow. Without luck.

I just came across a little book published by Puffin in India called, simply, "Cookbook". and it is an example of all that is wrong with a kids cookbook. Written by Sonia Mansata and published in 2003 , it is illustrated by Sudeepa Ghosh. Strangely enough it has very few Indian recipes. You have Lassi, Aloo Chaat, how to make cumin powder, and a glossary of a few ingredients in Hindi. For the rest most of the recipes are standard chocolate cake, gazpacho soup and such. The illustrations should be larger and should be perfectly clear in their purpose. The ones in the book are more for decorative reasons, looking cute without clarifying any of the steps . The writing can do with an editor ....can you imagine telling a beginner cook to 'slice the eggs neatly"? Puts you off the whole enterprise pretty quickly.
I'm not sure what age group this book is intended for. Several instructions need an adult to interpret them and an adult's help with other fiddly things. The point of a cookbook for children is that they can produce something edible and attractive with  minimum intervention by an adult.

This book by Mary Alden was my very first cook book. It was perfect. I could follow it without referring to any adult. It opened my eyes to the magic of baking and I spent many a happy afternoon making delicious corn bread which, with the addition of lashings of butter, was polished off at teatime by my hungry siblings. Thanks for the photo Hillary. I remember the book with fondness. Published in 1955...yes!...it was a gift from my mother who knew how valuable it was to me. Books for children were not thick on the ground in the India of my childhood.
Meanwhile  the search for a good cookbook for children  in India continues. Any cook book writer listening?

Has Indian Street Food become history?

Would India be the same without the sights and smells of the street vendor ? A photographic journey winding through the  culinary food pavements (not courts) of the nation seems to suggest they are going, going, gone!

Sonar Lemony Cake

One of the difficulties encountered while using lime to flavour baked goods, is that the taste tends to dissipate the moment it is exposed to heat. When I received a precious batch of Gandh Raj, (pronounced Gondho Raj) a fragrant lime from Bengal, I was determined to capture its essence in a cake. A simple yellow cake seemed the right thing but I find many sponge cakes either greasy and dense, or dry and dusty, in short a bit sick making. It was a question of tweaking the amounts of those basics- flour, sugar and butter, to get the right texture while preserving the tang of the lime.

The secret lies in using buttermilk instead of milk and in adding limejuice to the icing. Now Gandh Raj may not be within your reach but don’t let that stop you from trying out this recipe as ordinary lime will do just fine. Maybe not as "Sonar".

Ingredients:

3 cups of flour

2 tsps baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

200 gms butter (at room temperature)

325 gms or 1 ½ cups sugar (preferably ground into a powder)

3 eggs and 1 egg yolk

3 tbsp limejuice

1 tbsp grated zest of lime. ( Mix the zest with the juice and set aside)

¾ cup buttermilk

1 tsp vanilla essence

Mix the four ingredients above .

Icing:

1 cup confectioners sugar (use powdered sugar if you don’t have confectioners sugar)

1 1/2 tbsp limejuice

1 tbsp buttermilk

Heat oven to 175 degrees C. Butter cake tin lightly. Sift the flour baking soda, baking powder and salt together twice. Beat eggs with the yolk in a small bowl till well mixed. In a large bowl cream the butter and sugar well by beating with a hand mixie for at least 6 minutes, first at high speed and then at medium speed. The mixture should really look like cream.

Now add the egg mixture in two halves, beating well on low speed after each addition. Add one cup of the flour mixture and beat till just incorporated into the mixture. Now add the buttermilk and lime juice mix alternating with the flour mixture. Each time you make an addition mix the batter for just about 10 seconds.

Spoon the batter into the prepared baking tin and bake for 35- 40 minutes till golden brown on top. Insert a skewer or fork to check that the inside is cooked (the fork should come out clean without any attached crumbs or batter.)

Mix the caster sugar, buttermilk and lime juice to make the icing and drip a bit on top while the cake is hot. Wait till it has cooled before dribbling the rest of the icing on. The icing gives it a nice tartness and distills the lemon essence while dressing up the cake for presentation.

In spite of my temperamental oven this turned out pretty darn good !!

An interview with Jiggs Kalra

An insight into the heart of a great chef.

Anjali Wagle's Tomato Lonche

Meeting Anjali is a delight. At sixty she is just as enthusiatic about cooking as she was when she began many years ago.
Anjali Wagle's interest in cooking began in childhood. She helped her aunts in the preparation of food for the joint family in which she was brought up.  They would all work together from early in the morning to get the meals ready for ten families! Anjali insisted on helping, even though it was not expected of the  children. In spite of many remonstrations to be careful, as the cooking was done on coal fired  'chulahs' and could be dangerous for an inexperienced young person, she hung around the kitchen picking up her culinary skills along the way.
She was married at the age of 18 and came to settle in Pune. Her mother in law was a doctor and had no time to attend to the kitchen, relying on several bai's to produce the meals for the forty family members. Anjali insisted on taking on the kitchen and managed the cooking for her huge, new family.To their amazement, she did this with relative ease. Her in laws insisted that she finish her education and enrolled her in classes which she was initially reluctant to attend as she was not used to moving about freely with strangers in institutions where women and men studied in the same class.. But she did study and learned to become used to her new world. She remembers her mother and father in law gratefully for all their encouragement.
She tells me she has won innumerable prizes for her cookery and has taken part in many events. At a recent cooking competition she attended, where the chief guest was Sanjeev Kapoor, he gave her a lot of credit for sharing her recipes so generously with him. She had refused to take any payment for the many recipes he has used in several of his books. He said, she quotes " You are unusual. Most people today are after money. And you refuse even when it is offered to you.
" What use do I have for money", she says to me "its here today and gone tomorrow. If people remember me with gratitude or treat me like a mother, as Sanjeev does, that is far more valuable to me."
Anjali is known for her tried and tested recipes which appear in several Marathi magazines. She loves to experiment and  has adapted an amazing  number of Indian recipes to  microwave cooking. She gave me several wonderful pickle recipes to try and was happy to allow me to post them here.

 

Tomato Lonche/ Pickle

Ingredients:

15-16 firm, large, red tomatoes
1/4 cup red chilli powder
1/2 cup mohri / black mustard seeds
100 gms lasun /garlic
100 gms adrak/ ginger
100 gms green chillies
2 spoons jeera / cumin seeds
1 spoon methi / fenugreek seeds
1 cup salt
2 cups dark vinegar
1 handful of karipatta / curry leaves
1 1/2 cups vegetable oil

Wash tomatoes and cut into large pieces. Mince the kari leaves. Chop the ginger, garlic and green chillies into fine bits.Put the chopped, ginger, garlic and chillies into 1 cup vinegar and blend ito a paste n a mixie . Heat oil in a large pan and add all the garlic, ginger and chill including the minced curry leaves. Add the cup of masalas. Stir well . Now add the tomato pieces, salt and the rest of the vinegar. Cook the achar on a low fire for some time. Keep stirring till the oil seperates from the rest of the mixture. This pickle keeps for a long time.

If you like these recipes do give me your feedback which I would love to share with Anjali.

Bottled water-Tapping into our water resources

Sunita Narain on the cost of water for rich and poor, for east and west.