Rice and Quinoa Salad

 There can never be enough salads when you are entertaining for Christmas. Here in Australia we have hot Decembers - and hence the need for cool and cold salads. Recently we met at a friend's house for a pre - Christmas get together and everyone brought something to share. I was tasked with getting a rice salad to share and I researched to get a perfect one.

I found a salad on line and added my own twist to it. Having recently returned from Turkey, I had with me a couple of bottles of precious Nar eksisi - or pomegranate molasses. Pomegranate Molasses is dark burgundy in colour and is sour with a slight hint of sweetness. It is the equivalent of tamarind in my South Indian cooking. 

It pairs well with roasts and makes a great salad dressing. You dont need to add too much of it, a tablespoon of it gives life to the flavours on your plate.

Seafood Risotto

Comfort food, but also loaded with calories! I went all ahead with this one for my children with the butter and cream, but if I made this for myself, it would probably be just with olive oil and chunks of fish.  We are having a dry February, so there was no wine to drink with this beautiful risotto; but I did have left over wine from before that I used for cooking the rice. This could be a quick mid week dinner too as it is easy to prepare and quick to cook.  All up, it took me just about an hour including prep. I adapted the Recipe Tin Eats recipe to suit my taste.  I served it with a simple salad of shredded beetroot, cucumber, salad leaves and a feta cheese dressing.

Basic Chicken Biriyani - Rajam's recipe

 For most Indians, biriyani is an emotion. There are so many different varieties of biriyani in India and the one you had growing up generally ends up being the winner. The reason is obviously it brings back so many fun memories, and secondly, it is a taste that gets embedded in the ridges and grooves of your brain. Nothing anyone makes is even remotely close to that taste that you know is possible and you strive hard to find it everywhere. I found many Indian restaurants in Melbourne cook the rice and the meat seperately and then layer it in and call it biriyani. Of course it made me mad because for me the meat and rice must be cooked together for it to have the status of biriyani.  Yes, biriyani definitely has a status, if the meat and rice are cooked together in a delicious conglomeration, then the status is definitely at the top.

The trick to getting a perfectly cooked rice and meat dish is 1) excellent quality biriyani rice, 2) infinite patience and 3) careful measuring.  I use India Gate "classic basmati rice extra long" because it never fails me. India Gate basmati rice cooks into a fine long grain, fluffy and beautiful and I know the ratio is 1 cup of rice means two cups of liquid. 

My mother used to make biriyani at home for special occassions and that is what I have tried to create today for you. This is not a very hot dish, but by all means reduce the number of green chillies if you feel it might be too hot for you.  The red chilli powder I have used is Kashmiri chilli powder  which is not hot. 

Also, my mother never used to marinate and seal the chicken when she made chicken biriyani.  However, the chicken she used were organic and small sized where as the ones I see here are huge and have very little flavour - even if they are supposedly organic.  So that is a variation that helps with increasing the flavours of this dish. 

Lets get to the recipe without further ado!  This recipe calls for marination of the chicken and I do it the day before I am planning to make the biriyani.

Venn Pongal - Savoury Rice with Dal

 It was the 80s and I was in a hostel along with about 500 students.  we were slogging to get through our examinations. And every other day, breakfast used to be Venn Pongal. I cannot begin to tell you how much I had come to hate this dish! Every semester break I would rush home and eat my mother's home cooked food - especially the breakfast items and complain to her about how bad this venn pongal was!

The cook in my hostel, bless her, was known as Narayana amma - no one knew her real name.  She was just Narayana's mother.  And Narayana who must have been in his early 20s used to help get grocery and generally help his mother in the kitchen, It was not Narayana amma's fault of course, but she negotiated the best deal for herself and making venn pongal was one of the simplest breakfast things.  She also didn't use ghee as it was too expensive, and cashew nuts were far and few. 

Fast forward 35 years - and I find myself thinking of Narayana amma, Narayana, the patti (grandmother) whose job it was to help grind the dal to make the vadas. I found this amazing recipe by chef Dinu on instagram and decided to wake up early, motivate myself to make a Kings Breakfast on this long weekend and get the recipe  out.  So here I am!!!!  I am extremely pleased with my decision and my belly is thanking me too - :-D

Onion Uthappam

 I make this dish only when I have left over dosa batter. Not because I don't enjoy it - it is just that the batter needs to be a bit more fermented and a bit more sour than normal dosa batter and usually we run out of dosa batter and I do not have enough to make uthappam. 

Dosa is made from sour/ fermented batter consisting of a rice and lentil mix. If left in the fridge for over a week, I then make it into uthappam - which is distinctively more sour than normal dosa.

I like the simple onion uthappam, but you can add grated carrots or other vegetables that catch your fancy to make this delicious dish.

This dish is a small and spongy savoury pancake - you can see the texture in the picture below - which is eaten for breakfast or dinner along with chutney and/or sambar. Today I have made this for breakfast with some coconut chutney for a fulfilling weekend breakfast.

Tamarind Rice

 My children love their sour lollies.  Little hard jellies in the shape of worms covered in sugar crystals. So sour it would make my brain go numb. To be honest, I am not a fan of it at all. Now, the sour fix we used to get when we were kids was from the fruit called tamarind. All natural, bean shaped, with seeds inside, green when unripe and dark reddish brown when ripe. Sweet, sour, tangy, making my mouth water even as I write about it - that is the unique quality of the tamarind.  Every South Indian home has a stash of tamarind in the pantry. My grandmother used to place fresh picked tamarind into large jars of concentrated palm toddy syrup.  Eventually, the natural crystals of brown sugar would form and cling on to the fibres of the tamarind. One of those, with a bit of syrup on the side - by God, it was a heavenly treat that nothing else can beat!

I have not had them in decades.  In fact, I do not even know if anyone makes it in their homes any more. Whether or not they make it, the tamarind is as important as the chilli in the South Indian cuisine.

One of my childhood favourites and now my children's favourite is the tamarind rice.  This rice can be made a couple of days ahead and stored in the fridge.  It doesn't go off easily.  The reason is the tamarind acts as a preservative. When we went for picnics, tamarind rice packed into little parcels inside banana leaves were a must have item.

Neichoru - Kerala Ghee Rice

 "Grief is nothing but another form of love", said an acquaintance. How so, Purnima, I asked. "Well, when you love someone a lot, you spend time with them, you talk to them, hug them, kiss them, buy them gifts, and so on. What happens after they pass?  This enormous love that is stored within you for that person is pushing to come out and it can't because  the person you loved has passed.  Therefore, it takes other forms - that lump in your throat, that sudden burst of salty tears, the crack in your voice, that pain in your chest..... yes, that is my theory anyway", she said. Since I spoke to her I haven't been able to get rid of the thought that is Purnima's theory. So profound. And it made so much sense. 

Today's unrequited love has taken the form of this ghee rice and chicken curry amma used to make usually on a Sunday. I just wanted to eat it and pretend like she has made this special meal for me again.

I made this ghee rice with a special rice from Kerala called Jeerakasala rice. It is small grained and  fragrant. This rice is cultivated in Northern Kerala and is used for all special occasions due to its fragrance. It is available in Indian grocery stores in Melbourne. If you are unable to find it, you can use Basmati rice for this preparation.

Pakistani Chilli Rice

 I wanted something exotic to go with my Yakhni Lamb so I experimented with this random recipe from You tube. It was demonstrated by a Pakistani Chef in Urdu, and it was easy enough to follow. Thank you Chef Afzaal Arshad for this super easy rice dish.

The key is to have good quality long grained rice and to soak it for 30 minutes prior to cooking.

You could make this with capsicum, but since my lamb dish was not hot, I chose to go with chillies.

Fermented Rice - Pazhaya Choru

 Pazhaya Choru - literally translates to old rice. Essentially, after a day's cooking and eating is done, the left over rice is placed in an earthenware pot and drinking water added so that the rice is just immersed in the water.  Close the lid and leave the rice and the bacteria to do its magic.  What you have after 8 to 14 hours is fermented rice.  This is frequently eaten in the South of India as breakfast. As a young girl I have turned my nose up at this breakfast many a time. I have seen my uncle who used to be a footballer and body builder have it for breakfast and wondered how he could eat this insipid dish.

Well, fast forward 30 years and here I am reading about the wonderful health benefits of fermented foods and how it is good for the guts and how the process of fermentation increases the protein, fibre and mineral content of the food.

There is a fine line between spoilt food and fermented food, though.  So be cautious and learn how to do it and the smells / taste before you do it yourself. I ferment milk to make yogurt quite regularly and I just left my pot of rice in the oven at 25 degrees C, exactly like how I ferment milk.

In the 80's wandering through the fields behind our University, I have often seen farming families bringing in their "lunch boxes" - with fermented rice, mango pickle, buttermilk or yogurt, fried yogurt chilli, coconut chutney, pappadam, fried fish, raw green chilli and shallots and enjoying their meal in the shade of a tree at lunch time.  Most often, the baby would also be there, in a cotton sling tied to the tree branches - rocking in the breeze and sleeping happily while mum and dad worked in the field.

This post is dedicated to our hard working farmers back home - who knew how to eat the heathiest of foods from the cheapest of ingredients available. 

Appam - Hoppers - Rice bread from Kerala

 The appam is a common breakfast food in Kerala.  It is gluten free and you can pair it with a lot of curries, or have it with a sweetened coconut milk.  This is a repeat recipe; I posted this along with the commonly served stew in an older post.  

You do need to get an appam wok with a tight fitting lid to make this dish.  I have not tried making it in a normal wok. With the appam wok, the non stick version is not my favourite.  This is because the batter doesn't stick to the sides and tends to lump together in the middle spoiling the aesthetics.

Ideally, it should be like a spongy bun in the middle and a lacy edging around it.

Potli Biriyani - Biriyani in a bag

 A potli is a drawstring bag used by a lot of Indians to carry their cash /spices / medicines since ancient times.  The cash is placed in the bag, the strings pulled tight and the bag tucked into the pleats of the sari or the dhoti. There are lots of different types of potlis.  They are made to match the colour of your sari and usually they are well decorated too.  As kids, we used to have little potlis to carry our spending money and we used to carry them to the fairs in our street and but lollies, icy poles, toys and dolls.  The potlis have  kept evolving with the times and the current day potlis come equipped with pockets for mobile phones - which has become the most important accessory for most people.  These days potlis have become more of a fashion statement and you can expect to pay a lot for them if you happen to pick one up from a boutique. They are also heavily embellished - with pearls, crystals, mirrors or exquisite hand embroidery.

Today we are going to check out how to make a potli for carrying food - in this case, biriyani!  This was trending on instagram and so this post is more about making the actual potli rather than the biriyani itself.

You can make the potli to hold pulao rice or vegetable biriyani too. The best part is you can eat the potli later with your favourite curry once you have eaten the rice.

Appam with sweetened coconut milk - Rice pancake with sweetened coconut milk

 My children love to have pancakes with maple syrup. My first taste of maple syrup was in the 1990s after I came to Australia. What I had as a child with my rice pancakes was sweet coconut milk.  Freshly grated coconut, blended with water and the milk squeezed out of the coconut, sweetened with sugar or jaggery is the "syrup" I grew up with.

Today's recipe is a rice appam - that I made the cheat's way to test out the pancake mixes available in the Indian store. I was pleasantly surprised to get a good result.  The wait time is about 2 hours - and there is practically no clean up afterwards.

Normally, when I make it the traditional way, I have to soak the rice, grind it along with the other ingredients and then clean up my grinder - which is a lot of work. Fermenting time is the same which ever way you do it.  Recipe for traditional appam is here: http://kitchenanugraha.blogspot.com/2018/12/appam-and-stew.html 

Of Puttu and Old Fish curry - a tale of lost traditions

You know that fish curry tastes best after a couple of days - for that matter most curries taste better the next day.  But with fish curry, the older it gets the tastier it gets. I have spent last couple of weekends with the family painting our back fence and I am exhausted.  I made a pot of curry on Friday night and today I had it with puttu on my ever silver platter.  

Have you ever heard of the word "ever silver"? Back in the 20's or 30's most of the women who got married in my community started off life with a whole bunch of brass, copper and silver utensils.

As they were used, these utensils used to oxidise and get blackened with the wood fire stoves and coal fires that the women used as well. They subsequently spent a lot of time cleaning these utensils with tamarind and lime - which are naturally acidic and dissolved away the Verdigris and black stuff.  It was a lot of hard work and scrubbing, to keep them shiny and nice.

With the progress of the stainless steel industry and the arrival of new shiny utensils that did not need so much of scrubbing to keep clean and bright, my grandmother and many of my grand aunties and relatives traded in their copper, brass and silver utensils and even silver jari saris for stainless steel.  

I remember watching the hawkers come in with their scales and weights and exchanging utensils and all the haggling that happened in patti's home.

The stainless steel utensils got a new name - "Ever Silver" - they remained forever silver and bright!

Today's meal is old fish curry and fresh puttu served up in an ever silver plate with an ever silver bowl.

"Very pedestrian" - as Matt Preston would proclaim, adjusting his cravat and speaking in his English accent. "Very very tasty" - I would reply in my very Indian accent.....

Today's post is about old lost traditions and respect for my forefathers. Old fish curry is something that is available in most Nagercoil or Kerala households.  And puttu can be whipped up in under 10 minutes.  Together it is a marriage of flavours made in heaven.

Crispy Fried Asian Beef Mince with Brown Rice

Thank you to Sugar Salt Magic https://www.sugarsaltmagic.com/ for this recipe that I have improvised and made into a quick lunch for the family.  I love Asian food and flavours and every now and again have a craving to eat Asian food.

I love Asian food for the ease of cooking, the variety of vegetables used and how healthy it feels and the vibrancy and colour of the food itself.

It is all in the prep for this recipe - once you have your ingredients prepped and ready, it is very quick.

This dish serves 4.

Thayir Saadam - Yogurt Rice

 Yogurt and rice in the same breath!  Really?  If you thought that, then you must try this dish because you will never doubt the wisdom of these ingredients again.

From the South of India, where hot and humid weather calls for a cooling, filling meal, the yogurt rice ticks all the boxes. Yogurt is a natural food full of probiotics and a staple in most kitchens.  As the weather warms up in Melbourne, why not give this recipe a go and let me know if you liked it!

This dish can be had for lunch or dinner and to add a bit of colour and texture to it, you can mix the rice with chopped cucumber, shredded carrots, pomegranate arils or segments of mandarin.  The fried lentils can be replaced with nuts of your choice – toasted cashew nuts, peanuts and pistachios work well.

This dish is vegetarian and gluten free and is served at room temperature. 

Rajam's Fried Rice

 Whenever amma made fried rice, it was quite dramatic.  There was hustle and bustle - scraping of coconut, getting the wood stove ready for the hot coals and so on. 

The rice was soaked, drained and laid out to dry. Then it was cooked in the coconut milk that was freshly squeezed out of the scraped coconut.  While cooking, the rice was carefully monitored to make sure it was taken off the stove when it was about 3/4 done.  It was then covered with a wet porous cloth - almost like chux but 100% cotton and meant just for this.  The hot rice was covered with the cloth on the top, then the lid placed over it and sealed with dough. Once the lid was sealed then you placed the hot coals on top and let it cook at its own pace for another half an hour or so.

We kids would hop around waiting for the rice to be out of that pot that looked scary and irresistible at the same time.  This method of cooking is called "dum" - and sealing the container with dough meant that no steam would escape from the pot.  The result was fragrant, fluffy rice which was then garnished with cashew nuts and sultanas and served hot with amma's chicken kurma. Afterwards it would be a food coma - and now when I think of these times, they are my sweetest memories.

The original recipe has been re-written by me to suit a time pressed person who is going to use modern equipment to cook this dish.

Vegetable Biriyani

This recipe is for my colleague who complained to me one day saying that they ordered vegetable biriyani at an Indian restaurant and it was obviously rice mixed with some vegetable curry!

It is very unfortunate that she was served this dish in the said manner - because when you make a biriyani right, it is impossible to fool even novices.  The whole dish is very fragrant and succulent and I hope you make this at home, Ali, so that you do not feel disappointed next time!

It is an easy dish to make - we make it in parts, assemble it in a cast iron pot and then finish the cooking process.

Do not be put off by the long list of spices - they are all easily available at your local Indian Grocery store!

Puttu - Steamed Rice Cakes with Coconut

Go to any place in Kerala and invariably you will stumble across the puttu.  It was even featured in one of The Ellen Shows by a 6 year old chef!  In other words, there is no escaping the puttu if you are in Kerala!

It is a dish made with just 3 ingredients - rice flour,  freshly scraped coconut and half a teaspoon of salt.

The dish is made in a vertical steamer that is traditionally made out of hollowed out bamboo. My steamer is a gift from my mother and is made of brass.  You can get stainless steel ones in the Indian or Sri Lankan grocery stores in Melbourne.  

Puttu can be eaten with a fruits like bananas, jack fruit or mangoes and it can be eaten with savory meat curries like chicken, pork or beef curry.  The most commonly served combination in Kerala is puttu with chick pea curry the recipe for which you can find here: 

https://kitchenanugraha.blogspot.com/2020/07/chickpeas-curry-south-indian.html

My family loves puttu with juicy mangoes and in Summer we make a lot of it when we get the Kensington mangoes.

Fried Rice with Coconut Milk

In our household, we pretty much eat rice everyday.  Once in a while, if it is a birthday or someone has got a promotion or there is some reason to celebrate, we make fried rice - the Indian way, with coconut milk, cashew nuts and sultanas.  It is very easy to make and it is celebratory - and the simple rice is elevated to a celebrity status - especially when served with a rich curry on the side.  In this recipe, rice is cooked using the absorption method.  Always use good quality Basmati rice and remember the ratio of rice to water is 1:2.  That is 1 cup of rice and 2 cups liquid.

Chinese Fried Rice

Chinese fried rice or as I like to call it - jewelled rice.  This is the best way to get your children eat all the vegetables - even nasty ones like mushroom (nasty because it is my sons hated vegetable!) 

My aunty Prema used to make this quite often - she used to whip it up in a few minutes, it felt like - and dinner was ready.

There is a bit of prep involved but once that is done, this is a very quick dish to prepare.  You do not have to use all the vegetables, I only used them since I had them in the fridge. Use whatever you feel like - and I have added more vegetables precisely to get the children to eat more veggies.