Kitchen Clown

I haven’t been blogging for a while I know. It’s usual same old excuse…..too much college work, no time to click pictures or update. Damn!!! I should start getting serious about this! Well….besides that, I have been craving for beef. I tasted this particular dish at a party and I had to get the recipe because it was sooooo good!!! This recipe belongs to one of my friend, more like a sister actually and she cooks amazing food! And yeah she shared her recipe with me. And ever since that, I have been eternally grateful to her. :)

To get started with, you’ll need:

• Half a kilogram of fresh beef minus the bones
• One large onion
• One bay leaf
• Two dried red chillies
• Six green chillies
• Two tablespoon ginger garlic paste
• Half a teaspoon cumin powder
• A huge bunch of mint leaves
• One teaspoon meat masala
• Cooking oil around two and a half tablespoon

How to go about it:

Pressure cook the beef along with some salt and water for about three whistles. Shred the beef into little pieces once done and set aside.

Now heat a pan with enough oil and fry the bay leaf, onions, ginger-garlic paste and dried red chillies.

When the onions become done, add the cumin powder and stir in well. Then add the shredded beef and fry till they get mixed properly.

Toss in the green chillies too. And add salt.

When the beef is almost done add the mint leaves.

 Let the leaves wilt before turning off the flame.

I had it with steamed rice and lots of sambal.

A playlist of Murakami inspired music/ Music that inspired Murakami. And it played on as I waltz through my kitchen making spaghetti with meatballs.

Yesterday, I thought I’d have a quiet evening to myself. Cloudy and dreary, the Night walked on and I felt like I was in a Murakami novel for at least a fraction of an hour. I found some spare spaghetti lying in the kitchen and that made me think of Toru Okada (the protagonist of Haruki Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle). I went all out to induce the surrealism into the home-alone situation that I was in. And so I spent another evening in the kitchen with Rossini’s Thieving Magpie playing in the background and cooking an all-time favourite, Spaghetti with Meatballs.

For this you’ll need:

• one large onion chopped
• three tomatoes (to be made into a puree)
• six cloves of garlic bashed up and chopped
• ten sprigs of fresh oregano chopped roughly
• five green chillies chopped
• meatballs (ashamed to admit that I used store bought ones this time)
• 3/4th tablespoon of butter
• one tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil
• ordinary cheese (adjust the amount according to your taste)
• spaghetti
• one cup of water
• salt to taste

How to go about it :

- Chop the onion.

- Bash the garlic cloves with the broad side of your knife. Chop them up roughly and untidily.

- Chop the oregano and the green chillies too.

- Cut the tomatoes into quarters.

- Use a food processor to destroy the living daylights out of them into a puree.

- Fry the meatballs in a broad pan in some oil. (I used lard, half a teaspoon, to fry the meatballs. You have to keep adjusting the flame from high to low, so that the meatballs don’t get burnt). Set aside after you’re done frying.

- Now in a pan, heat the olive oil and butter (using olive oil saves the butter from getting burnt).

- Throw in the garlic cloves and fry till they become golden brown.

- Now add the chopped onions and fry till golden brown.

- Add half the chopped oreganos and the entire green chillies. Mix them properly with the rest.

- Next, pour the tomato puree along with salt. Add the water and the rest of the oreganos. Let it boil and reduce. 

- Grate some cheese onto the sauce when it has reduced enough. Stir it in properly. Add the meatballs to the sauce and mix.

- Now in a pot, boil some water (around 3/4th of the pot) along with salt. Add the spaghetti to the boiling water. Make sure the water is boiling when you add the spaghetti or else the spaghetti will be sticky and ugly. Keep a close eye on the spaghetti adjusting the flame from time to time (boiling water may spill over otherwise). Also keep checking the spaghetti if it’s cooked or not. Once it’s cooked, drain the water out immediately with the help of a strainer.  

- Serve on a nice plate and add the sauce on top. You may garnish with fresh basil leaves, but I prefer mint, therefore mint.

Enjoy with some jazz music. 

This is the story of a broken cup, broken bowl and noodle soup. Yesterday, excited as I was on the prospect of a weekend despite the gloomy Dementor-ish weather in Bangalore, I decided to make noodle soup for me and my boyfriend. College ended at 1 o’clock in the afternoon with a light drizzle and heavy wind. Like two happy kids, we went to MG Road (Foodworld Gourmet) to buy ingredients for the dish and also to buy Japanese rice (although it was out of stock). And as usual I went insane, bedazzled by the array of wonderful vegetables and fish and meat and fruits and what not. But before hitting foodworld gourmet, we found a lovely crockery store called Indiana Crockery. And wonder oh wonder…..it has lovely cups, plates, wooden spoons, chopsticks, baking utensils, etc. So I indulged and bought 2 cups, 2 bowls, 2 wooden spoons, a chopstick, a wooden chopping board, a baking dish and one bowl. And it all came up to Rupees 510! Rejoice!!

But tragedy strikes at Bangalore Ham Shop. It so happened that while in the midst of paying the butcher and the admiring the perfect pork ribs….we managed to slip in a regrettable moment of utter clumsiness and Horror Horror!!! We accidentally dropped the bag which contains the precious cups and bowls. Yes, one cup broke and one bowl is martyred. Rest in Peace. 

Of course I tried my luck at blaming my boyfriend for his clumsiness and the whole argument continued half-way home. The blame game went on for ages….almost like petty politicians. But then, the boyfriend decided to close the matter by buying me cheese and two cups of delicious sweetened yogurt from a milk parlour at National Dairy Research Institute. I admit I am a sell-out when it comes to food. Cheese rewires my moodiness into excessive joy. 

So yes, we did make noodle soup and watched a good movie, all under a cold cloudy Bangalore sky.

This recipe originally belongs to my sister, but I have tweaked it a bit according to my taste.

Here’s the recipe.

You’ll need:

• one large onion diced
• four green chillies (halved)
• two ngaari (fermented fish)
• a small bowl of ngaphak (roasted fish)
• four leaves of cabbage (torn roughly)
• half inch ginger chopped
• a handful of chives chopped
• noodles
• two tablespoons of mustard oil 
• water
• salt to taste

How to go about it:

-Dice the onions

- Cut the green chillies into halves, like this.

- Roast the ngaari on the gas so that it develops a smoky flavour.

- Set aside the ngaphak and ngaari together in a bowl.

- Tear the cabbage leaves by hand into small pieces and soak them in water after washing them thoroughly.

- Chop up the ginger.

- Aslo roughly chop the chives and set aside.

- Now in a pot, heat the oil. When it starts smoking add the ngaari and onions. Fry them on a medium heat till the onions becomes golden brown.

- Add the ngaphak and green chillies to the pot. Fry them for some time.

- Now throw in the cabbage leaves.

- And stir in till the leaves get slightly burnt.

- Add salt to the vegetables.

- Now add water. You could add around 4 cups of water and add some more later as you have to keep the flame at high and so the water will reduce. Throw in the chives and ginger. Let it boil for some time.

- Add the noodles. The quantity depends on how much noodles-to-soup ratio you want it to be. So you can add just a handful or noodles or an entire packet of it.

- Mix in the noodles with the soup well. Let it boil till the noodles get cooked.

And yes, serve.

It was very fulfilling.

So I am back to blogging. Actually I thought of making kimbap today but ended up being utterly drained of copious iotas of energy. Now that I think of it, I was hyper in college, thanks to three cups of coffee in a span of one hour. And yes, because of exhaustion, I dilly-dallied going to Foodworld Gourmet in MG Road to buy the Japanese rice required for making kimbap. Wonder Oh Wonder…..I thought of all the possible simple dishes that I could think of making tonight. Baingan Bharta? Nah….that involves going down the road to buy eggplant and then of course roasting it on the gas-stove. Finally I found some paneer (cottage cheese) lying in the fridge, so I decided to make this paneer subzi. The recipe actually belongs to my roommate’s household back in Delhi. She always gets this paneer subzi with good ol’ paranthas whenever she makes a trip back home. Of course I’ve made some of my own adjustments to the recipe. 

Here it goes,

You’ll need:

• one onion
• one tomato
• three green chillies
• 100 gms of paneer (cottage cheese)
• a pinch of asafoetida
• half a teaspoon of coriander powder
• half a teaspoon of garam masala
• half a teaspoon of red chilli powder
• oil for frying
• salt to taste

How to go about it:

- Heat the oil and add the pinch of asafoetida first. Add the chopped onions.

- Fry the onions till golden brown.

- Add the tomatoes and the green chillies. After they become a little soft, add coriander powder, red chilli powder and salt. Mix well with the vegetables.

- Now add the paneer.

- Mix it properly so that the flavours seep in. Fry it for some time.

- Add half a cup of water to the pan.

- Let the water boil and evaporate.

- Stir the paneer and make sure the all the water evaporates. Finally add the garam masala.

- Serve with some mint leaves and have it with hot chapatis.