Granny's Foodie Tales Archives

The Many Faces Of Pancakes

October 30, 2015/0 Comments/in Granny’s Foodie Tales /by Neighborhood Granny

It was the first solo meal I was cooking for my new family. As a new bride I should have been nervous especially since the house was teeming with relatives including grandparents, sundry aunts, uncles and cousins, but I was not. Having been considered a very good cook in my parental home, I was used to finger-licking appreciation for the dishes I turned out. It was therefore natural for me to be not only confident, but even smug about making a success of my endeavour. The menu included lauki with dal, crispy raw banana roast, a tangy tomato chutney and creamy rice kheer. I was smiling as I tipped in a piece of jaggery into my piece-de-resistance – a tamarind based onion dish, spiced with sambar powder and flavoured with curry leaves and sesame oil, sending out an inviting aroma. I could sense the anticipation building in the dining room.

To make a long story short, my new family loved all my dishes and waxed eloquent, but my ‘masterpiece’ just fell as flat as a pancake! They had been clearly expecting something else — a very spicy variation of the dish that my MIL was famous for! When I realised my faux pas at having spoilt the dish with jaggery, I explained that we added a little jaggery at home to enhance the spiciness — with my ears turning all shades of red!

Suffice to say that for years, my ‘jaggery dish’ as it came to be called, remained a family lore.

Over the next months as I learnt some, unlearnt some and experimented with my own version of various dishes, I realised that there is no one method of making a dish and that recipes vary from one region to another, one community to another and sometimes even from one family to another!

And that brings me to some of the dishes that seem to have a global presence, albeit with different names. Let’s take pancakes, for instance. There are hundreds of its variations the world over. They are typically cooked with fat on a hot griddle and that makes our own dosas and its variants — chillas, dhirade, appam, pesarattu and even crepes – pancakes too. Some of them even alike in appearance.

In fact, pancakes are believed to have been the first cereal based food item cooked by prehistoric people! I am sure we can find such references to the versatile flatbreads. Call them roti, pita, tortilla, or any one of the dozens of names they are known by and one can find that they are all close cousins if not actually siblings of each other, even separated by oceans and continents!

It is due to the regional and cultural variations and innovation that we have so many varieties of the same dish. Above all, our palate craves for variety and constantly seeks out new tastes even while hankering after the familiar dishes. Else how do we explain paneer achari pizza, Chinese bhel or chicken masala dosa, eh?

A word of caution though: In our quest to tweak a traditional dish to come up with our own creation, let us not forget the original version of any dish, for they are repositories of the culture and traditions of the place of their origin.

Ah, I seem to have meandered all over the globe starting with the first meal I had cooked! And all that rambling has made me hungry. Bring on the aloo parathas with the Chinese chutney and Mexican kachumber on the side, will you?

Don’t Waste Food!

October 23, 2015/0 Comments/in Granny’s Foodie Tales /by Neighborhood Granny

Have you ever thought about how much food we waste, especially at restaurants and those lavish dinners and weddings where there are a zillion dishes to choose from? One would think that a buffet would encourage eating wisely and not wasting food as one can pick and choose, but do we? We pile our plates with a little of everything in sight and end up with a huge mound of rich food, which we can scarcely finish. So where does it all go? Into the garbage bin, of course!

I wish we didn’t give up old customs, many of which made a lot of sense. Back when we were young, small children were fed by their mothers/aunts/grandmothers to the accompaniment of some interesting tale. The food would disappear in no time with the child staggering away with a full tummy and a happy smile. A reluctant child would be coaxed to eat one more bite with, ‘This bite for you, and this one for the crow.’ Usually the mouthful intended for the crow ended in the child’s mouth too without him realizing it! Whatever was left on the plate didn’t make it to the garbage bin, but ended up as a meal to a crow or a stray dog.

In days when refrigerators had not come into every home, limited quantities of food was cooked and consumed fresh, morning and evening. It made for healthy eating and prevented waste. When food was left over and could be preserved overnight, it was eaten the next day. Leftover rice soaked in water is still a refreshing, cooling and filling breakfast in the rural south. Far from saving food, I feel that refrigerators encourage wastage, as often we keep something for days and then finally chuck it out as being stale!

Back in our days, leftovers encouraged giving and sharing – with maids, night watchmen, beggars and even stray dogs and cattle. I remember, that around nine every night when most people had finished their dinners, beggars would make the rounds collecting food from the houses. Some were regulars and the lady of the house would sometimes keep aside some sweet or other treat made that day for them!

When food was served on plantain leaves, there would be some leftover at the end, not as a social grace, but for the animals that ate them – cows, dogs and crows. Today even if we serve food on plantain leaves, they are thrown in the bin, so there is no logic in leaving food behind. OK, so we don’t have night beggars, stray dogs or crows to eat leftover food, but what prevents us from buying carefully, cooking in limited quantities and avoiding piling our plates at buffets?

Here I am reminded of the time when my son complained that he didn’t want to eat a particular dish. I told him about all the hungry children in Somalia who would give anything for the food he was refusing to eat. ‘Ma, why don’t you give the food to those children? I really don’t want to eat it.’

He was too young to understand that the entire world is one inter-connected whole. What each one of us does, affects someone else across the globe — even the leftover food from one plate. Multiply it with all the food, cooked and raw, wasted around the world and it makes for a staggering figure. I found a bit of statistic that made my head spin: Every year, consumers in developed countries waste almost as much food as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa — nearly 225 million tons!

Our elders were right: Waste not, want not!

The author is your regular neighborhood granny. Loves cooking, feeding her friends and family, telling tales and reading children’s books among others — on her Kindle. She is comfortable with people her age, older than her and of course all youngsters right down to infants. And oh, she is in tune with the times too. She has seen the telegram transform into Twitter and telephone into WhatsApp. You could call her Gadget Granny Seeta, if you like. She loves saying that the tip of her tongue is in the fingers on her keyboard!

Fasting or feasting, Navratri is the best!

October 15, 2015/0 Comments/in Granny’s Foodie Tales /by Neighborhood Granny

Navratri is here! Nine days of worshipping the Goddess in her various forms, dancing away the nights with garba, visiting Durga Puja pandals, maybe even making a trip to see the magnificent Dushera festivities in Mysore, or going to look at the golu (which is somewhat like the jhanki one sees during Janmashtami) at our South Indian friends’ houses. But the best part is eating all those delicious offerings made to the Goddess, not to miss thelip-smacking vrat ka khana, whether you are fasting or not! Oh I love the kuttu pooris, the yam cutlets, the sabudana vadas, the green banana kababs….yum, yummier and yummiest!

Having lived in mixed neighbourhoods in many cities over the years, I have enjoyed the varied celebrations of this wonderful festival. But my best memories of Navratri are from my childhood.

Weeks before Dussehra, the city would reverberate with the sound of drums as men dressed as tigers danced on the roads and collected money for the Puja celebrations. It was a scary but fascinating sight to see them with their painted bodies and tiger masks and it used to be a challenge to try and avoid the streets they were on while we kids went to and from school. Sometimes our careful calculations would fail and we would be trapped in a street while the ‘tiger’ did its best to scare us silly!

And then there were the eats. We had a variety of them from neighbours and at home we had a different sweet, mixed rice dish and sundal every day, apart from other items that were offered to the Goddess. Just in case you don’t know what sundal is, it is a savory dish made from boiled chana, groundnuts, moong, chawli, white peas or any other whole pulse. Seasoned with a light tadka of mustard, red chillies, hing and curry leaves it is garnished with fresh grated coconut. This formed part of the haldi-kumkum ‘hamper’, along with betel leaves, supari and banana. Married women also got a coconut.

Dressed in our festive clothes, my sister and I made the haldi-kumkum rounds in the evenings, admiring critically the golu in the houses we visited.But it was not all fun. Visitors were expected to sing a song or two for the Goddess and not being great singers, we would be hard put to come up with a decent song at every house. This would invariably cause us to argue and bicker but the moment we entered a house we would declare an unspoken ceasefire,only to pick up where we left off once we left the house!

By the end of the evening, we would be dragging our feet through the streets on the way back home, tired and hungry. By then some of the bananas would have started getting quashed and my sister would declare that we would have to eat them up. And the sundal? That is another story altogether.

In days when ziplock bags had not been invented, it was wrapped in bits of newspaper or pieces of banana leaves, both of which would unravel in our bags and spill their contents, mixing up the different varieties. So what did we do? We ate up the contents that were threatening to spill out, of course! Soon with a full tummy, the fights of the evening were forgotten and we would be giggling away.

But back home there would be a Mahabharat with our brothers who were eagerly waiting for the ‘loot’ to be brought by their sisters. What did they find but very thin pickings and two fully stuffed girls!

Oh, those were the days!

Wish you all a wonderful Navratras/Navratri/Dussehra/Durga Puja!

Going bananas!

October 9, 2015/0 Comments/in Granny’s Foodie Tales /by Neighborhood Granny

We say someone is going bananas when they act strange. Bananas also bring to mind monkeys. What a lot of negative association for a wonderfully versatile and nutrient-packed fruit that is accessible even to the poorest. A banana easily makes a complete meal. Grab one and eat it on the go but be careful not to throw the peel on the sidewalk lest someone slips on it! Perhaps you can save it and make a tasty stir-fry.

Every part of the banana plant (it remains a plant, no matter how big it grows!), including the flowers and soft inner stem is edible, either raw or cooked. From chips to pakodas to stir-fries to masala roasts, you can make a variety of dishes out of the various products of the banana plant. Food is traditionally served on banana leaves in the south. They are also used to steam and pack foods. It is the best eco-friendly, bio-degradable material there is.

We use young banana plants to decorate the shrine at home during auspicious occasions and festivals. Larger plants with the flower and fruit still intact adorn the entrance of wedding halls as they are considered a symbol of prosperity.

The banana plant itself is a beauty with a smooth jade-green stem and large leaves fanning out gracefully, and it has no wood. Harry Belafonte sings of banana bunches that are six, seven and eight foot in his famous Banana Boat song, but the average bunch I have seen has not been bigger than maybe two or three feet. The dark maroon flower hangs down and the rows of bananas point upwards. It is such a glorious sight, believe me. The plant yields only one bunch of fruits in its lifetime and once the fruit is harvested, the mother plant is cut down to allow the sapling growing out of its roots to grow.

Raw and ripe bananas are produced and eaten in many tropical regions of the world. In India, the southern states are the major consumers where not just the bananas but the flowers and stem are also eaten. The flower has dozens of layers each with rows of tiny florets. There is one hard stamen in each floret, which defies the sharpest knife and has to be weeded out before cooking. In Tamil we call it kallan, meaning thief. Perhaps it was named thus because a thief is eventually caught?

The flower has a slightly bitter and astringent taste and needs to be tempered with fresh coconut to balance it. My mother used to add a spoonful of sugar to soften the taste. The soft pith after peeling off the layers of the stem is eaten. Full of fibre, it has great medicinal value and its juice is known to dissolve even kidney stones! Chopped fine after removing the fibre, it can be made into a raw raita, or with moong dal and a ground paste of coconut, jeera and green chillies as kootu or into a simple stir fry.

Hundreds of banana varieties are grown in India, and is the largest producer of bananas with a share of 23% of the world production. One can see many varieties in fruit shops in the south, ranging from the finger-sized poovan to the half foot or even longer red bananas of Kerala.

Before closing, here’s an interesting banana trivia for you: Did you know that a bunch of bananas is known as a hand and a single banana is a finger?

Home Cooked Food Is The Best Food

October 2, 2015/1 Comment/in Granny’s Foodie Tales /by Neighborhood Granny

When it comes to food we are all creatures of habit. For instance, if we are on a long vacation or have gone to a new city or country for work, we might be adventurous and try our new cuisines, but after a while we begin hunting for a restaurant that serves the familiar food of our region. Or hope desperately that the distant cousin or even the casual acquaintance from back home who lives in that city would invite us home for a meal!

We might train our palates to get used to the food of the place we live in, but we can’t get the craving for familiar food out of our system. There was this maid from rural Tamil Nadu who came to work for us. When she sat for her first meal at our place, she began sobbing into her plate scaring me badly. I thought she was homesick, but it turned out that she was eating rice and sambar and after weeks of parathas, subzis, kadhis and toasts at her earlier employer’s, she was overcome with emotion when she tasted the food from her own state!

Home cooked sambhar

Talking of simple and familiar foods, there are the comfort foods, which miraculously lift our spirits when we are feeling blue or down with the sniffles and looking for some TLC! Anything — dal-chawal, khichdi, rasam-rice, a hot cup of Horlicks, aloo parathas or even the now discredited Maggi — can do the trick. More than even the taste, it is the memories associated with them that release positive serums in our brains, giving us the much needed spirit-boost.

Sometimes too much of rich food can also make us crave for simple home-cooked food. This had come home to me early in life.

I must have been eight or nine then. Our annual trip down south had involved attending two weddings and visiting lots of relatives. The wedding food of course was grand and most enjoyable but festive meals followed us even at our relatives’ places. It was good for a few days but soon our palates began begging for a simple meal, please!

Then we went to our village. We walked the one kilometer distance from the station and by the time we reached the house of my father’s elderly aunt, it was nearly eight in the evening. Since there were no phones, and it had been an impromptu visit, we had not been able to inform her of our coming. She had finished dinner when we entered the small house. (Doors in the village closed only when the inmates retired for the night!)

It speaks of her love for us that she didn’t think that cooking a meal for five at that time of the night was a big deal. She bustled about, lighting the small coal fired stove and then a kerosene stove. While she put rice to boil on the stove and made other preparations, all the while chatting with us. Soon the smell of the brinjals roasting on coal wafted into our nostrils increasing our hunger pangs. When she served us the wonderful food, we fell upon it like a pack of hungry wolves and polished off the last morsel!

Decades later, I can still taste that lovely meal of rasam and curd rice with baingan bharta, roasted papad and pickles – but typically don’t remember any of the grand meals we had had before that. Was it the tasty food? Was it her love? I think it is a bit of both that had made it a memorable meal. Ah, that was comfort food at its best – simple, wholesome and entirely satisfying.

Is it any wonder then that while ordering food out, we look for home-style food?

Tasty Chutney Recipe Made of Vegetable Peels

September 25, 2015/0 Comments/in Granny’s Foodie Tales /by Neighborhood Granny

Of Peels and Chutneys

It was the day of the home science practical exam. We had to make a cucumber and tomato sandwich. Easy-peasy, I thought. I took the slices of bread, spread butter over them, thinly sliced the cucumber and tomatoes, arranged them carefully on the slices; then I sprinkled salt and pepper and a dash of lemon juice. I made a small collage of cucumber slices and tomatoes and a sprig of coriander to round it off. The other girls were still at work, cleaning their work tops and discarding lots of stuff — what stuff? I shrugged.

The examiner took one look at my sandwich and lifted the top slice and set it back slowly. Then she looked at me. She was kind enough to commend the presentation and pass me – just about.

My mistake? I had not peeled the cucumbers and trimmed the edges of the bread! So that was what the girls were throwing out in the bin! But did I deserve the low marks? I thought no.

Now, I come from a household where no food was wasted. We rarely had bread in the house and when we did, we ate every scrap, even the edges of bread. And vegetables were eaten with their peels – cucumbers, carrots, even potatoes. Of course they were thoroughly scrubbed and washed several times to remove all dirt and mud first and also pesticides were not as rampant back then. The hard peels of vegetables like pumpkins, ridge gourd and ash gourd were made into tasty chutneys. The peel of ash gourd is used for making uradbadis both by north and south Indians even today. We ate some varieties of mango with their peel and mother made a tangy sweet and sour chutney with orange peel.

Coming back to my practicals, you can understand why I was clueless about the peeling of cucumber, especially since we had not been taught the recipe in class.

Peels have the most nutrients and vitamins that are lost when they are discarded. So now we hanker after organically grown vegetables which can be eaten – peel and all. We are told by chefs to thoroughly clean vegetable peels and then boil them to make stock out of it. And we are re-learning the lessons we had discarded not too long ago. Peels are tasty and healthy without a single doubt.

And now for a quick recipe of Peel Chutney:

Ingredients:

Vegetable peel: 2 cups thoroughly washed and chopped fine.

You can use ash gourd (white pumpkin), yellow pumpkin, bottle gourd (lauki), ridge gourd, the seeds of snake gourd, etc.

Mustard – ½ tsp

Urad dal – 1 tbsp

Chana dal – 1 tbsp

Tamarind – gooseberry sized ball

Green chillies – 2-3 (or as per taste)

Ginger – 1” piece

Salt to taste

1½ tsp oil for sautéing.

Method:

Heat ½ tsp oil in a kadhai and add mustard. After it splutters, add the dals and saute till they turn golden. Add chilles and fry a little. Remove and cool. Now add the remaining oil and the peel. Saute well till the raw smell goes. Take care not to burn the peel. In a mixer jar, take the tamarind, salt, ginger and the fried dal mixture and grind to a coarse powder. Add the peels and grind well, but not superfine. This chutney can be eaten with rice, roti or even dosa.

*You can substitute tomatoes for tamarind, but saute it a little before grinding. A tbsp of coconut or a couple of cloves of garlic can be added if you like. Go ahead and experiment!

Next time you peel a vegetable think twice before doing it.

Assembly Line Papad-Making

September 18, 2015/0 Comments/in Granny’s Foodie Tales /by Neighborhood Granny

Like many of my generation, I have grown up with large Britannia biscuit tins filled with papads, huge ceramic jars full of spicy pickles and big bins filled with grains and flour among other things. The masalas were all ground at home or at the neighbourhood chakki (flour-mill). The bins and jars have all but vanished due to our changing eating habits and paucity of space in city apartments, not to speak of the lack of terraces and yards to dry the spices and papads.

The annual papad making event coincided with our summer holidays and were usually family affairs. When there was a wedding or function, the entire neighbourhood pitched in to help. Such activities fostered so much community spirit in daily life, don’t you think?

For the children, it was like a carnival as we also formed the major ‘work-force, the main task being to guard the stuff from crows and other birds. But we didn’t mind it at all, as we got to eat the spicy batter/dough in return for our efforts! The dal vadis were the tastiest of the lot. I remember even father joining the papad making as he loved the dough made of urad dal. While rolling them out, he would surreptitiously pop some into his mouth and bribe us to keep quiet. As if mother didn’t know!

It was a labour intensive job. The urad dal flour was first kneaded with spices and then pounded with an iron crowbar on a slab of stone, till the dough became elastic. It would be like an assembly line with the papad passing through the hands of the least experienced through the more experienced, increasing a centimeter or so in diameter as it passed each hand. When it reached either mother or another experienced adult she would correct the shape and roll it out into the final papad. Those of us at the lower end of the ‘assembly line’ would chafe because we never got to make a full papad. In hindsight though, it was a very efficient and quick method of making papads on a large scale.

I remember two curious ingredients that went into the dough. I call them curious because one of them caused severe itching in the throat if eaten raw and the other was used as a purgative! The first one was a stick like herb called Hardjod (Pirandai in Tamil), which grows wild on fences and the second was castor oil which was used as a leavening agent.

Now why would our ancestors add such unlikely ingredients in papad? Urad dal has the tendency to aggravate joint problems and one of the many curative properties of hardjod is alleviating joint pains and aiding digestion. And castor oil, apart from clearing constipation, is also effective in treating inflammatory disorders like arthritis. Above all, it inhibits the growth of mould which can shorten the shelf life of papads. Now you know why homemade papads never got mould. Isn’t it amazing that our elders were wise enough to know about the curative powers of these ingredients?

And that brings to mind an incident relating to pirandai. One year during the papad making event, a small goat gobbled up the vegetable waste from our house which had some pirandai bits. Soon the herb did its work on its mouth and it began scratching its tongue on a rock nearby, bleating piteously. We watched anxiously lest something happened to it and the owner descended on us, but fortunately someone got the bright idea of giving it some water to drink. Soon it went on its way and we heaved a sigh of relief!

Use of Jaggery As A Sweetener in India

September 11, 2015/1 Comment/in Granny’s Foodie Tales /by Neighborhood Granny

Sweetener Fit for Gods

With the festival season is full swing, we are all making and feeding/eating a lot of goodies. Some are traditional and others modern versions of the traditional. Whatever, we make the offerings to the deities in tuck in to the yummy treats.

Modak, sweet pongal, til gud, revdi, payasam, chikki…..There is one common ingredient linking all these delicious offerings. Yes – jaggery!

If you think about it, most traditional offerings are made not of sugar, but of jaggery. Take for instance the most important offering of all during Ganesh Chaturthi – modak. The filling is traditionally made of coconut and jaggery flavoured with cardamom, though today it has made its avatar in a hundred forms including dry fruits and chocolate filled ones. Likewise the feel-good tilgud which is shared on Sankranti. The payasam made by Keralites is truly fit for the gods. Of similar divine taste is the sweet pongal made with rice, moong dal and jaggery on the Tamil harvest festival of Pongal. The sweet appam, made with rice flour, coconut and jaggery is a must for Janamashtami in the south. The list goes on.

In the north, jaggery or bhura shakkar, was used for sweets before refined sugar made its appearance. Revdi, gajak, (made with sesame and jaggery) halwas and peanut toffees (chikkis and pattis) are commonly eaten during winter. We also use honey and palm jaggery (Khajur Gud). Have you eaten the delicious sandesh and misthi doi sweetened ever so lightly with palm jaggery? If you are drooling by now, maybe you could raid the kitchen and find yourself a large piece of jaggery to suck on!

It is supposed to be good for digestion especially after a heavy meal. During the war years in the early 1960s, sugar was so rationed that my family drank tea and coffee with jaggery. It had a different flavour, but was quite good, actually. And mother routinely substituted it for sugar in many sweets.

Funnily, jaggery is considered the poor counterpart of sugar, whereas, it should be winning hands down with its wealth of nutrients and iron content.

If you happen to go on the national highway from Delhi to Chandigarh during the winter months, you can see these small shacks where homemade contraptions are used to make jaggery and you can buy it in the form of small cakes often flavoured with dry ginger, saunf (fennel) and cardamom. It is nothing short of a delicious sweet by itself and very good to combat the cold.

If sugar is bypassed for festival offerings, salt is given up during fasts.

I remember mother eating completely salt free uncooked food on certain days of the year. Others go on a salt-free fast every Thursday. What a great idea as too much salt causes and aggravates a host of health issues. What’s more, neither salt nor sugar are necessary for our health. We do require salt in our diets, but not more than 3-5 gms per day, which we get in ample measure from the vegetables and fruits that we eat. But in addition to salt in our foods, we overload with pickles, papad, crisps, sauces and ketchup and namkeens. Not for nothing are sugar and salt called white poisons by practitioners of naturopathy.

Go ahead. This festive season try substituting jaggery for sugar. It is a sweetener fit for the Gods, believe me! And if you have eaten one helping too many of the festive spread, maybe you could go on a salt-free fast the next day.

Just one dosa, please!

September 4, 2015/0 Comments/in Granny’s Foodie Tales /by Neighborhood Granny

How many kinds of dosas do you reckon there are? No, not the various kinds of masala dosas, but the actual varieties of dosas. Ok so you know uthappam, ravadosa, and the now popular ‘set dosa’ too. These are but the tip of the dosaberg, so to say. If you were to dig deeper…..well, ginte reh jaaoge, there are those many kinds of dosas made in the different regions of the south.

Today I am going to tell you about the tavaladosa, thathad almost given my sister a heart attack and has since become family lore. This dosa was traditionally made in a tavalai, a bell metal utensil used for filling water and hence the name. Many Vishnu temples in the south have this as prasad even today.

Now to the story: It had all begun when mother asked my sister how many dosas she wanted in her lunch box.

‘Just one dosa please,’ she replied since she didn’t much like dosas. When mother kept insisting that see the dosa first, she went in reluctantly….and screamed for it was no ordinary dosa, but an enormous one measuring at least 10” in diameter and 2” thick!

Thavaladosa Traditional Recipe

I am sharing the traditional recipe here. It might not be possible to make huge dosas, but even when scaled down, they taste divine.

Soak and grind:

Raw rice -1 cup

toor dal -1/4 cup

urad dal -1 ½ tsp

Pepper – ½ tsp

Jeera – ½ tsp

Salt to taste

For tempering:

Mustard -½ tsp

Urad dal -½ tsp

Chana dal -½ tsp

Ginger – 1 inch piece, chopped.

Dried red chilly – 1 (broken into 2-3 pieces)

Curry leaves – a few

Asafetida (hing) – A large pinch

Oil for tempering and for the dosa.

Method:

Grind the soaked items coarsely (like rawa) and leave to ferment overnight. The consistency should be thick and not runny. Before making the dosa, make a tempering of all items given in the list for tempering and add to the batter. Give it a good stir.

Tip: You can also make this without fermenting, if you add a cup of sour curd to the batter.

Use a concave cast iron dosa tawa (if you have one), or a heavy bottomed aluminum kadhai or pressure pan. Non-stick utensils are useless for this one.

Heat 2-3 tsp of oil in the kadhai and swish it around to coat the surface. Depending upon the size of your utensil you can make one/two or several dosas with the batter. Don’t spread the batter as the dosa needs to be thick. Cook covered with a lid at the lowest heat and wait…..The longer the wait, the crisper the dosa.

Thavaladosa Traditional Recipe

When the edges are brown and crisp, and the top looks half-cooked, flip over and cook the other side adding a little oil to the sides. Don’t cover the pan when you cook the second side. Insert a fork and if it comes out clean, it is done. Cut into wedges and serve. It can be eaten by itself, but if you like, you can serve it with coconut chutney, milagai podi or just some curd.

Do try and tell me how you liked it.

Grandma’s Foodie Tales – Picnic on Wheels

August 27, 2015/0 Comments/in Granny’s Foodie Tales /by Neighborhood Granny

Have you noticed how food tastes wonderful when shared? That is because, while eating together, we not only share the food but also the love, camaraderie and joy. One of the best places to share food was during train travel in days gone by. Oh, the joys of dozens of food hampers being opened and food being passed back and forth among the passengers during meal times! It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call it as much a gastronomical,as of travel adventure especially for us children, as new friendships were made and games discovered.

Usually it was an annual trip to one’s native place to fulfil some religious vow, visit relatives or attend a wedding. Most of it was done in the baking, broiling summer months of May/June. We used to travel by third class (yes, those still existed back then!), which had 3-tier slatted wooden berths!

By contrast, today travel means simply getting from one place to another and the faster and more comfortable the means, the better. Even train travel is functional with hardly any interaction between co-passengers, leave alone sharing home food.

Trains did not have pantry cars back then and whatever food we needed had to be packed and taken along or bought at the food stalls of big stations. Tamarind rice, curd rice, pooris and the milagai-podi covered idlis, were usually the staples as they would keep for a day or more even in the heat. An assortment of namkeens and mother’s delicious homemade biscuits completed the hamper. It would be like a great picnic on wheels and we kids got hungry almost as soon as the train left the station and picked up speed!

While all journeys were enjoyable one in particular was truly memorable. That year we were a big group of seven peopleincluding two children of a neighbour we were escorting.

As usual hunger pangs hit us even before the train halted at the first station. Mother began looking for the food basket. It was nowhere to be found! If mother looked worried, father looked even more so.He certainly couldn’t have afforded to buy food for such a large group at the station food stalls. Fortunately the children’s mother had packed a large hamper of food – probably keeping us kids in mind. But there was no way it would have sufficed for the journey.

As word quickly spread about our predicament through our compartment and the next, fellow passengers rose gloriously to the occasion and food of all kinds appeared at meal times as if by magic! It was the best journey as far as food was concerned. We had such a variety of food — khakhras, curd rice, parathas, pooris and pickles and loads of idlis! One family sent us some dosas and another some dry fruit kachoris! It was a big party and mother’s biscuits, which she was taking for our relatives in Chennai, was freely shared with our wonderful train friends.

As for the forgotten bag of food, my elder brother, who had stayed behind, saw it when he got home after seeing us off. He had a picnic of his own with friends and neighbours!

Of Peels and Chutneys

Sweetener Fit for Gods

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