A Homemade Life and a banana bread

I realize I have been absent from my favorite book club for a long time. It does not, however, mean that I haven’t been reading the books that are voted in as the club’s book of the month. I read Caliph’s house and even managed to write a few lines about it on my iPhone while sipping coffee at a McDonald’s and keeping an eye on Jr running around in the play area. This is what I wrote, if anyone doubts it:

If you pick up this book, expecting it to be along the lines of Under the Tuscan Sun, you will be sorely disappointed. While the Tuscan Sun was a loving albeit a laborious exercise in restoring a Tuscan villa, Caliph’s house is anything but. Fraught with jinns, superstitious guardians, unpredictable secretaries and a mobster for a neighbor, the project to restore a Caliph’s house, at the edge of a Casablanca slum, is destined for disaster…

I could have written more but I quickly lost interest in writing the review. Since the book never got better, how much can one write in the negative?

In contrast to TCH, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Molly Wizenberg’s A Homemade Life. Author of the blog Orangette, Molly writes with an old fashioned, homemade charm about food, family and friends. The book reads like a collection of her blog posts with one to two recipes at the end of each post. There are recipes for soups, stews, salads, cakes and pies, some perfected by her cousins, her dad, her husband and herself.

If you have ever wondered how to word a recipe, from ingredients to method, I highly recommend A Homemade Life. Molly has mastered the art of writing down the most complex of recipes into a simplified, you-can-do-it-style. Reading her recipes, related to the “food stories” that accompany it make you want to step in your kitchen and start making a big pot of soup or bake one of her decadent cakes.

For me, the most poignant of the posts were the ones about her father, his love of all things French that he passed on to her, and her deep connection with him. But there are moments of joy and serendipity and fortuitous connections made over food that will remind you that the common thread that binds us all is also the one that sustains us. That is the reason why so many bloggers blog about food and why there is an entire TV channel dedicated to food.

You may wonder why I have not chosen to cook anything from her book, after praising it so much. For one, after reading through the whole book all I wanted to make more than anything else was Molly’s chocolate cake that she made for her own wedding. This cake uses equal amounts of butter and chocolate, some sugar and just a tablespoon of flour. The recipe is one of those that lures you to make it right away and then consume the finished goods till there is none left.

However, when one day, towards the end of the year, you measure your waist and weight and almost swoon, it is no time to indulge in cakes made almost exclusively of butter, chocolate and sugar. Instead, you start driving towards a very hot Bikram yoga studio and sweat and stretch for 90 minutes until your body feels it has been through the wash, tumble and rinse cycle of the washing machine. After that you indulge yourself in the semi-sweet embrace of a 64% Cocoa Scharffenberger and call it a day.

Guernesy literary potato peel and pie society and

a dash of cilanto-mint chutney

It is 1946. World War II has ended. London is trying to resurrect itself from the ashes of destruction and Juliet is trying to get her writer’s mojo back. A successful columnist during the war, she is now on a publicity tour of her book, a compilation of her war-time columns.

Juliet is a liberated woman for her times, who dumps her fiancé the day before their wedding. His offense, you ask? Emptying her bookshelf and boxing up her books to make room for his hunting and sports trophies. So this then is our liberated heroine, a lover of books, who is searching for a subject that will inspire her to take up writing again.

Enter The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. A group of mismatched citizens of Chanel Island who inadvertently end up forming a book club and lifelong friendships in order to hide their roast pig dinner from the occupying Germans. Her interest piqued by a certain Mr. Dawsey Adams of the aforementioned club, Juliet starts corresponding with the various members of the club. Her correspondence with the literature loving simple folks inspires her to sail down to the island and find the inspiration for her book and a treasure trove of war time stories – of children separated from their parents for the duration of war, of famine and hunger, of the German’s cruelty and generosity, of the islanders’ struggle of survival in the midst of eating nothing but potatoes and turnips.

If this isn’t enough of a gist, savor the fact that this is Mary Ann Shaffer’s first and last book. Written as a series of sometimes witty, often times poignant and almost always revealing letters between Juliet and various characters in the book, it takes a few letters to grasp all the characters. Once you do, you can’t stop reading till you have read them all. It is almost like a guilty pleasure to read someone’s private letters but at the same time, the book makes you want to pick up a pen and paper and write a letter back home instead of shooting off an email.

The rava idlis that accompany the chutney were made from a box, and not from scratch.

For our book club, This Book Makes me Cook, I decided to go the way of our ancestors and tried to think up how they came up with green chutney made by grinding some abundantly growing cilantro and mint in their backyard. To be honest, I was stuck by the islander’s use of sea water in their cooking as a substitute to salt. This led me to think that maybe one of the older women pottering in the yard chanced upon some cilantro or mint and thought, “Hmm, this smells nice. Maybe if I grind it with some green chili and some garlic, it will spice up the bland rice?” In the same spirit of honesty I will also admit that the chutney is what I made in the morning and got a decent photo of it.

The recipe for this green cilantro-mint chutney is simple, really, but you can adjust it according to your taste. Increase the amount of mint to cilantro ratio or make it spicier by adding more chilies or creamier by increasing the crushed peanuts. This essential condiment in every North Indian kitchen requires the basic skill of pressing down the blender button. For this reason, the chutney goes to Aqua, who is hosting B2B this month for me. If you would like to host it for me for the coming months, send me an email here.

Cliantro-Mint Chutney

Ingredients
1 cup washed and clean cilantro/ coriander
1-2 sprigs of mint
1 green chili
1 clove of garlic
1 tsp of cumin seeds
1 tbsp of roasted, crushed peanuts
Salt to taste

Method:
Grind everything to a smooth paste, adding water as necessary.

Coming up in the next few posts: The roundup of Of Chalks and Chopsticks and the second part of my story, It takes two to err… marry.

Tales of a female Nomad

There is no greater irony or joy than to read tales of wanderlust and cooking when confined to bed. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, reading Rita G Gelman’s tales of travelling like a nomad transports you from the cozy comfort of your bed to the pulsating rhythm of a Zepotac village in South America. Not your idea of a vacation? Try renting in Mexico with its vibrant colors and stucco houses. It inspired Gelman to write a children’s book. It just might inspire you to paint or sing or may be wear a bright green blouse. Anything can happen when a nomad follows her instincts, trusts strangers and goes with the flow.

Did I mention, she is almost fifty years old when she embarks on her wanderlust, travelling from one country to another, visiting remote tribes untouched by modern civilization and cooking at communal fires with local women? The nomad falls in love with Bali, Indonesia, and settles down for four years. But the death of her spiritual father and master, prompts her to travel again. She settles again, for a year, in New Zealand, but a nomad isn’t a nomad unless she is moving.

As I write this review, Gelman is still out, travelling, making friends, connecting with locals and living the life of a nomad. Gelman receives kindness and friendship of strangers and gives back in her own unique way; teaching English, writing catalogues for an art gallery or reading her children’s books to kids all over the world.

Forget Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, which starts out as an adventure in self discovery and ends in an exercise in self-indulgence. Gelman’s Tales of a female nomad shows that self-discovery is about living in someone else’s shoes and discovering your $250 shoes are nothing better than leather and hide.

I wanted to cook the Thai red curry or the coconut fish mousse Gelman learns to make while living in Thailand. My confinement limits me to where I can’t even whip up a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers and onions that she makes for a visiting German couple. So I will leave you with our book club founder, Simran, who made Nasi Goreng.

Still not in a mood to read Tales of a Female Nomad, head on over to Sra's for the third edition roundup of Of Chalks and Chopsticks. It is still food fiction, but not as long as a novel and available online.

There are more book reviews at Food for Thought, hosted by Jain.

Garlic and sapphires, and Reichl’s chocolate cake

                                               
If you have ever wondered how you will be treated in a snooty, fancy restaurant, Ruth Reichl will tell you in Garlic and Sapphires. It is Reichl’s candid memoire of her stint as a restaurant critic for New York Times, which turns out is one of the most powerful positions a newspaper critic in New York could have.

Besides transitioning from the laidback LA Times to the more staid and rigidly structured NY Times, Reichl has to go through the pains of getting used to the wrath of readers faithful to her predecessor not to mention donning disguises to review restaurants incognito (apparently, every restaurant in NY has her photo tacked in the kitchen).

The disguises turn out to be the most fun part of her job till she finds herself competing with one of her assumed identities, an elegant blond named Chloe, with whom everyone including her husband and son seem taken with. She even gets hit on by a middle aged rich guy and agrees to a date with him at a restaurant she has to review.

Reichl narrates her adventures with a sense of humor and total honesty that makes you want to befriend her. She is generous in her praise and brutally honest with her criticism. Like the time she gets treated differently at a high end restaurant when she dines dressed as a middle class housewife (longer wait, bad table and horrible service) and later as the critic of NYTimes (the King of Spain waits in the bar but her table is ready even when she shows up early!).

However, all good things must end as they do for Reichl when she realizes she no longer likes the person she is disguised as, a bitter, sarcastic *itch. With the realization comes the offer to edit Gourmet, where she has continued to break culinary ground with the same enthusiasm for good food that etched her name as one of the finest food critics of NYTimes. Check out her new PBS series, Gourmet Adventures with Ruth that she sums it up in these words: There’s no better way to experience a culture than to stand at the stove with a wonderful cook.

A Red Bird Christmas and Peter Reinhardt’s Cornbread

Confession: I had never read Fannie Flagg till Simran picked her up for our book club’s second anniversary. I had seen the movie Fried Green Tomatoes based on her book by the same name but had no idea at the time that it was based on Flagg’s book. The movie won an academy award nomination for best screenplay in 1991, so I can imagine how good the book must be.

Flagg is an accomplished writer who sets her book in the small Southern town of Lost River, population: 80. Think RK Narayan's Malgudi, except set in a small southern town along a meandering river with fabulous sunsets. Instead of the dusty roads of Malgudi, imagine pretty little bungalows with neatly tended lawns and streets lined with trees so old they form a canopy overhead. The weather is pleasant even in the peak of winter and the flora and fauna are bountiful.

The residents are friendly and welcome the arrival of an elderly bachelor, as an opportunity to get one of the seven unhitched (three single, four widows) women hitched. Oswald T Campbell, named after a can of soup he was found with on the steps of the orphanage, is a retired army man with emphysema, a limited pension and an even limited time left to live. He comes to the little town to recuperate and falls in love with the slow pace of the town, its residents and by the end of it not only gets a new lease on life but a new bride.

Flagg weaves a beautiful tapestry of friendship between Campbell, an abandoned six year old girl Patsy, a flightless redbird named Jack who lives in the town’s only store, owned by Roy. She embroiders the details of the town’s secret society that goes by the name the Mystic Order of the Royal Polka Dots Secret Society and weaves in the history of Roy’s broken love affair with his childhood sweetheart with the skill and artistry of one of Oswald’s nature paintings.

Potatoes with tomatoes (Bazar jaisey aloo)

The unassuming name hides a simple but delicious combination of potatoes cooked with tomatoes and ginger. A recipe similar to the north Indian aloo ka jhol (potatoes cooked in a watery gravy), this one is from Madhur Jaffery’s book, Climbing the Mango Trees, our book club pick for the month of January.
If you have ever wondered what the true definition of a ‘Foodie’ is, read Madhur Jaffrey’s Climbing the Mango Trees. A childhood memoir of growing up in a privileged, upper middle class family surrounded by uncles and aunts and numerous cousins, not to mention a retinue of servants who cooked for the extended joint family, tended trees and vegetable gardens surrounding the house and in general fetched and ran errands.

However, Jaffrey’s memoir narrates more than anecdotes of a privileged life spent eating meals that consisted of pheasants shot down by her hunt-loving family and seekh kababs from Delhi’s famous Chandani Chowk. The book also gives an insight to her lifelong love for Indian food and makes you appreciate her relentless passion for introducing and promoting the Indian cuisine to the world through her countless cookbooks and TV appearances with the likes of Juila Child and Ming Tsai.
When every sad, happy, angry or joyful memory is associated with food, a foodie of the first order is formed. And there in a nutshell is Jaffrey’s ‘Climbing the Mango Trees’.
Is it then sacrilegious to admit that till now, I had never cooked from any of her cookbooks, or to say that I found most of her recipes, especially the meat ones, a bit complex to prepare? Or was it that I was just too lazy to make boondi (which my mom made on a regular basis) from scratch when it was readily available in the store? Whatever the reason, I steered clear of Jaffrey till our book club choose ‘Climbing the Mango Trees’.

I added turmeric out of force of habit and ended up with a yellow curry instead of red!

Reading the book was like eating through a culinary feast of simple Indian greens and hearty meat curries cooked to perfection and served with phulkas, “chapati’s more refined, upper class cousin.” Some 32 odd recipes at the end of the book, from kheema samosas, to green chutney and fenugreek greens with carrots cover maybe 10% of the feast served in the book.
The recipes are to keep, especially if you are a vegetarian looking to make non-vegetarian dishes or vice-versa. I decided to stick to my mostly vegetarian meal and made Potatoes with Tomatoes (Bazar Jaisay Aloo), the go-to-meal for Jaffery family’s picnics and Sunday breakfast. The meal cooks in a jiffy if the potatoes are boiled and ready. I served them with ‘Phulka’s’ for a change instead of its ‘coarse, lower-class cousin’ and our standard bread, Chapati.

Potatoes with Tomatoes
Serves 4-6

Ingredients:
6 medium sized potatoes
3 tablespoons olive oil
Pinch of asafetida
1 ½ tsps whole cumin seeds
1/2 tsp whole fennel seeds (I used a tsp and crushed it coarse)
1/4 tsp whole fenugreek seeds
3 whole dried red chilies
3 medium tomatoes, grated on the largest hole of the grater
1 ½ tsp finely grated fresh ginger
Salt to taste

Method:
Boil the potatoes in their jackets until tender and allow them to cool. Peel.
Pour the oil into a wide, medium sized pan, and set it over medium-high heat. When it is hot, put in first the asafetida, then the cumin, and finally the fennel, fenugreek and chilies.
Two seconds later, add the grated tomatoes and ginger. Stir-fry until the tomatoes turn a deep red and the oil begins to show, turning down the heat as the cooking progresses so nothing burns. Add 1 ½ cups of water.
Now, break the potatoes by hand into pieces that are, very roughly, ½ inch cubes. They will be different shapes, but that is the charm of the dish. Add the potato cubes to the pan together with salt, then stir and bring to a boil.
Cover the pan, turn the heat to low, and cook gently for 12-15 minutes, stirring now and again.

Other members of our book club reviewed and were inspired to make:
Simran made Phirni
Curry Leaf made  Roz Ki Gobi
Sheba made Cauliflower with cheese
Janaki made Palak Gosht
Aqua made Tahiri

Ladies Coupe and a couple of idlis

So this then is Akhila. Forty five years old. San rose-colored spectacles. Sans husband, children, home and family. Dreaming of escape and space. Hungary for life and experience. Aching to connect.
In a paragraph, this is the heroin of Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupe. She is a spinster who since the age of 19 has taken care of her three sibling and widowed mother. At 45 she finally wants to be free of her responsibilities and find herself. But her family and her fears weigh her down. Not sure if an educated, financially independent woman can live by herself (really Ms. Nair?), she decides to consult five other women travelling with her in the now extinct Ladies Coupe of the Kanyakumari Express.
Akhila finds out that these women, from a sixteen year old girl to a 60 year old married woman, are not all that different from her despite their varied social and economic background.
They all find themselves bound by duty, tradition and family to put the needs of others before them. Nair reduces these strong women to sniveling, docile, weak women who either wallow in self pity or eat their way through bars of chocolate to curb their anger and hatred.

Thankfully, their stories end on a positive note when they realize that all their sacrifice comes to a naught unless they take charge of their lives and find happiness.
Whether it was Prabha who rediscovers her spontaneity with self taught swimming lessons or Sheela who is perceptive at a young age of the hidden intentions and thoughts of adults.
The plucky Margaret who finally realizes that drowning her husband’s obnoxious nature in sinfully rich food was the only way for her to find happiness. Whoever said the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, eat crow. Today’s women know how to turn the tables on you!
It takes forty years for Janaki to realize that though she will be able to survive without her husband, it just wouldn’t be same.
I was left wondering if it was Mari with whom Akhila bonds with at the end. Their life paths are so different yet so similar. Both have to shoulder the burden of their families at a young age and both are shunned by their families in the end.
And yet, while Akhila lives her life like a martyr, I couldn’t help but admire Mari who rebels against the conventions of a society that expects her to behave a certain way. Her rebellion comes at a price though and only when she accepts her past does her future starts to look good.
So it is with Akhila, who has to seduce a younger man to absolve her from her sense of duty and insecurity.
Nair weaves a deft tale of the six women, ties up all the loose ends and leaves us questioning our intents, desires and relationships. However, there was not a lot of sympathy I could muster for Akhila’s martyr like behavior or her bold yet sneaky move to travel to Kanyakumari. But then again, we wouldn’t have a Ladies Coupe without Akhila’s journey of self discovery, would we?

After the book review, which regrettably is longer than Nair’s prologue, I leave you with pictures of Idlis I made in the morning. I do make them from scratch at home but with idli rava instead of the urad dal recipe in the book. The ones above were made from store bought batter and so no recipe, just pictures. Enjoy! And Ann, you got my permission to take points off for no recipes.

Other members of our book club who not only posted the reviews but were inspired to cook from it, with the exception of Sheba of Forks, Boots and a Pallette who followed her review with some pictures of hideous cakes (her words, not mine), were:
Ann of Split Pear Personality who made Counterfeit Appams.

Simran of Bombay Foodie made Lacy Appams.

Sweatha of Curry Leaf made Cutlets.

Bhagyasrie of Taste Buds made aubergine fritters.

Hindi Bindi Club and delayed kheer

Towards the end of Monica Pradhan’s The Hindi-Bindi Club, Meenal Deshpande shows her daughter Kiran her list of ‘Things I want to do before I die’. One of the things on the list is her wish to write a novel. Her daughter requests her not to write a “Life’s-a-Bitch-and-Then-You-Die” novel. Meenal assures her daughter she will write a story that’s ultimately uplifting, about survivors of hardships and of resilience of the human spirit.

Pradhan attempts to write just such a novel and it is easy to see where she draws her inspiration from -- The Joy Luck Club and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. But it is fair to say these books were just inspirations and Pradhan thankfully tries to make the story her own or about the three set of mothers and daughters.

The story of the six women is told in first person and first half of the book draws the reader into their personal lives in a very reality-TV-like way. And even though they are from the same country, the cultural diversity of the three (Bengali, Maharashtrian and Punjabi) is well narrated and explained for the non-Indian reader. But then, like the average reality show, these stories too start to falter, stumble and fall apart at the seams; especially, that of Saroj and her daughter Preity and Uma and her daughter Rani. It is not hard to see why.

When you are attempting to voice six strong women and their mother-daughter bond, not to mention their past and present and future, it can become daunting not to mention challenging. Ms. Pradhan’s easy way out was to chop the stories just when they got interesting.

For example, suddenly out of nowhere we find out Saroj is having an extramarital affair with her old flame. Except for her husband’s less than satisfying performance in bed, we get no hint of why, when or how she started her affair.

We know everything about her daughter Preity’s first love affair and her desire to find closure in the face of an abruptly ended affair. But the built up is deflated just as suddenly with a hand delivered letter and a few tears.

Recipe for how plain vegeis are transformed into delicous side dishes 

Uma’s estrangement from her father and her special bond with her daughter is poignant and touching. Her attempt to translate her mother’s diaries gives us a glimpse into the archaic customs and prejudices of Indian families but it is just that, a glimpse. I would have loved to read more translations of her mother’s diaries and how it helped her decipher her daughter’s asthma as just misaligned chakras.

Her daughter Rani, struggling with an artist’s block and a husband dealing with the loss of his start up, in a matter of few pages, has suddenly everything working out for the best for her.

Meenal Deshpande's chicken curry

But more than the choppy stories and abrupt endings, it was the pontification that bothered me the most. It was out of place to the point of being ridiculous and unbelievable at best. I mean, seriously, who launches into a discussion with first time guests over how women should be put in charge of Indo Pak diplomacy and how politicians are to blame for all the world’s problems (True) and regular citizens do not hate people from other countries. Or when Meenal lectures Kiran, a family physian, on the hazards of smoking!

May be Ms. Pradhan should have worried more about fleshing out the story and less about Indo Pak relations or statutory warnings.

That being said, the characters are totally relatable and the mother daughter father bond/tension spot on. The lament of Indian parents at the loss of culture, language and respect for elders is reminiscent of discussion I have at Indian parties in the US. The recipes are as authentic as can be. I loved the reminder “Under no circumstance use curry powder’.

Here’s my reminder, “Under no circumstance buy the book if you can rent.”

This book review is for our monthly book club – This book makes me cook, started by Simran. Other members who reviewed the book are Ann, Simran, Aqua and Aparna. If you would like to join out book club, drop a line to Simran and she will get back to you with details.

My version of Meenal's vermicelli kheer

I made Meenal’s vermicelli kheer (porridge) with pistachios and golden raisins and delicately flavored with cardamom pods. However, this post has run long enough for the purpose of this blog so kheer recipe in the next post, promise.

Ann, don’t take any points off like the last time. It counts if I made and ate the kheer and post it a day later.

Eat Cake and make merry

Jeanne Ray’s Eat Cake opens with Ruth, the heroine of the novel, imagining herself enveloped between the walls of a giant Bundt cake. She is attending a seminar on reducing stress and as she explains, it is not the act of eating cake that calms her down, but the smell and the texture of the cake and in her words “being part of something that I find profoundly comforting”. She feels, correctly so in my humble opinion, that cake has got a bad rap and there is nothing wrong with eating a piece of cake once in a while. “A slice of cake never made anybody fat.”
Raised by her mother, a high school music teacher and an absentee father, Ruth has come to value her stable family life – Sam, her faithful husband and her teenage kids, Wyatt and Camille. She has even adjusted to her now retired mother, Hollis, living with her family.

Ruth has simple cares and concerns of a housewife, shopping for groceries, cooking for her family and trying to bond with her teenage daughter going through a vegetarian phase. Her mundane world is turned upside down when Sam loses his job as a hospital administrator and her father, after breaking his wrists, has to move in with her for lack of any health insurance or a house to call his own.

Faced with a self centered, pouting teenager, forever quibbling parents and an out of job husband exploring the possibility of renovating yachts, Ruth takes refuge in baking cakes for her family. She finds an unexpected friend and advisor in the volunteer physical therapist, Florence, who occasionally visits to check on her father.

Eat Cake is the story of how baking cakes saves her sanity, her family and helps her discover the potential in a hobby she loved. Jeanne Ray’s tale of the neighbor next door rings true on many levels, the characters are easy to relate to and the language is self deprecating and funny. It is an easy read at 225 pages with additional pages for cake recipes.

I found the recipes elaborate and sometimes complicated, which is not to say the cakes don’t turn out good. I just do not have the patience that Ruth’s selfless character has (the reason why I did not bake a cake for this review). She tolerates her teenage daughter’s insolence, her mother’s nagging, her husband’s laziness and her father’s nocturnal routines with a fortitude that defies logic. I was waiting in every chapter for her to break down and yell at her husband or argue with her mother or just smash some plates on the kitchen floor. Only once does she break down, for a brief moment, in front of Florence. She immediately buckles up and trudges on, more as a martyr than a trooper.

It all ends well for Ruth in the end though, with the whole family pitching in to help out her expanding cake business. Like one of her cakes, perhaps too delicious an ending. If only things turned out so well in real life and cakes never deflated in the oven.
Check out other reviews from our This Book Makes me Cook foodies -- Simran,  Ann, Aqua and Curry Leaf.

Read Pomegranate Soup and slurp red lentil soup

It is hard to believe Pomegranate Soup is Marsha Mehran’s first novel. It is not so hard to believe her love affair with food. It comes across through the novel’s heroine Marjan who cooks everything in her restaurant with the utmost care and attention. The oldest of the three sisters, she is thrust into the role of a parent and caretaker to Bahar and Layla at an early age. The novel moves deftly between Khomani revolution era Iran and the present day Irish village of Ballinacroagh (Ba-li-na-crow).

The sisters escape the increasingly volatile Iran with their lives and a few treasured possessions and manage to find a life in England for a few years before they have to flee Bahar’s dark past once more. They try to make a new life for themselves in the little Irish village by opening The Babylon Café that serves Persian fare. With its rich aromas of spices and herbs it attracts an eclectic mix of villagers, from the local priest to the town hairdresser and the church social ladies to teenagers and children who come to eat the elephant ears Marjan cooks every day.
The sisters quickly discover that all is not well when the town bully Thomas McGuire finds out that the Italian café he had coveted for years has been converted into the Babylon Café. He starts a campaign to run the sisters run out of business by every means possible and they find themselves fighting a different enemy altogether. This time around their weapons are the cherished recipes Marjan took with her as they fled Iran and their shield the few patrons who find their lives changed when they eat her delicious food.
Mehran cooks a sweat and spicy tale of the three sisters and the bond they share. They are not unlike a pomegranate with its seeds sticking together under a hard shell. But once the shell is broken, the sisters give up their sweetness for the world to enjoy.
For the recipe inspired by the book I wanted to make the elephant ears that Marjan makes every day by rolling out the dough, deep frying in oil and sprinkling with sugar. But since I am on calorie count I decided to go with the red lentil soup. Red lentils or split masoor dal do not take long to cook on the stove top. However, you can cook these in the pressure cooker. This is my shortcut recipe adapted from the book’s original recipe.
Red Lentil Soup (Masoor dal)
I am sending this click off to Jugalbandi's CLICK - ALLIUM.
Ingredients:
1 cup dry red lentils
1 medium onion, chopped
2 tomatoes, chopped
4-6 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tsp ground turmeric
4 tsp ground cumin
3 cups water / chicken or vegetable broth
Salt to taste
2 tsp ground black pepper

For garnish:
1 small onion, chopped in half moons
2 tsps olive oil

Method:
Wash the lentils thrice in water and keep aside.
In a pot heat a tablespoon of oil and fry the chopped onions, garlic, turmeric and cumin until soft and fragrant. Add the chopped tomatoes and cook till soft. Add the lentils, broth and water to the pot. Add salt and black pepper and bring the soup to a boil. Lower heat, cover and simmer for 20 minutes or till the lentils are cooked through.
Fry the onion for the garnish in olive oil until crisp but not blackened. Add as a garnish over individual bowls of soup.

I am sending this off to Susan’s MLLA – 14 and to Sireesha's Soup and Juice event.

The space between us and mint chai

I was on hold for a while for Thrity Umrigar's The Space Between Us and got the book yesterday. Since I was already past the deadline to submit this review I stayed up late to finish off the book. Well, the delayed deadline was not the only thing that kept me up. The book grips you with the trials and tribulations of two women from different strata of society.
Sera Dubash, a Parsi upper middle class housewife, is haunted by the demons of her tumultuous marriage with a physically and mentally abusive husband and an equally "monster" of a mother-in-law. The aging Bhima, has worked for the Dubash's for a long time and is not only trusted with cooking and cleaning the house but is also a confidant of Sera.

The two women live in worlds as apart from each other as a silk sari and a torn, faded cotton one. But they share an inexplicable bond over cups of mint tea which Sera likes light and milky and Bhima prefers strong and sugary.
Thrity weaves a beautiful tale of the two women who have been betrayed by the men in their lives and their only hope and reason for living is their progeny. For Sera it is the promise of a grandson her daughter, Dinaz, is carrying inside her. Bhima's light at the end of the tunnel is her intelligent college going grand daughter, Maya, who, hopefully, will escape the squalor of the slums.

The story comes to a head when 17 year old Maya gets pregnant with the handsome but callous Feroz, Dinaz's husband. Bhima's and Sera's loyalties towards each other and their families are tested when the secret comes out in the open.

Thrity shines a bright light on the arrogance of the rich, the tenacity of the poor, the sense of entitlement that comes with money and the desperation of having no money.

Is it any wonder the book kept me up till I finished reading it? A couple of cups of mint tea helped along the way. Now, if only I had the batata vada with chutney on the side to go with them. Hmmm...

I had never made mint tea before but gave it a try and here's the recipe.

Ingredients:

2 cups water

1/4 cup milk

4 tsp sugar (or to taste)

2 tsp tea leaves (i used a mix of Vagh Bakri and Brook Bond Red Label)

4-5 mint leaves

Method:

Combine all the ingredients except the mint leaves. Boil till the sugar dissolves and the bubbling liquid turns a reddish brown color.

Add the mint leaves and boil for another minute. Turn off the heat and strain into tea cups.

Sip the minty goodness.

PS: I would like to nitpick just one tiny point. For a talented writer like Thrity I did not expect to read the word 'unconscious thought' when she meant 'subconscious thought'. There is a huge difference between the two words. The former means comatose or passed out while the latter means intuitive. And she used the phrase not once but twice.