Cheating My Way to a Quicker Stir Fry

The bike gave me monsoon grief and I ended up pushing my Enfield through the traffic throng of Saki Naka and Kurla. I missed gym and reached home and felt like just going off to sleep. My tummy had other plans and protested growling in hunger. I felt like a hot bowl of stir fry but balked at the time I would need to stir... I was feeling that tired...

I hauled myself to the kitchen and pulled out bell peppers, remains of a little tofu and spinach, and half a zucchini and chopped them into a bowl from my attempts at pottery and nuked everything for a couple of minutes.

I think Minminay and Digdigay catties associate the microwave with foody goodies, so they meowled around expecting grub. I got them some milk and got Yellow Bean paste from the fridge.


By now the veggies were par cooked and tofu too had softened, so I let the mix cool for while while I put a teaspoon of oil  in the non-stick pan and threw in some ground garlic.


While the garlic started browning I turned the veggies around in the bowl.

By now the garlic was just about to get about burnt so I put in the veggies, added roughly cut tomato to add colour and some more succulence and just enrobed all of these in the aroma.

A couple of teaspoons of yellow bean paste added a little more flavour, saltyness and just the right agglutination. 


Bingo! I was gobbling my 'stir-fry' having cheated my way through it in 10 minutes flat.

Allegedly Oriental ...

This one goes out to @Ipsita for shaking me out of lethargy and getting me to start posting again... Here goes... Again...


I'd just lugged all the pottery pieces that I'd made and that'd just been glazed and fired. I was hungry as hell and thought it would be good to try out the bowls to see if they really withstood a nuking in the microwave.


I've inherited a fair bit of oriental sauces when @Subha and @Guru moved to Singapore... Here I thought was a good opportunity to put one of them to good use. Now I can't really categorize this one... Is it is a soup... Or is it a salad... Where do I place it on the map? Since two of the four ingredients originate in the orient, I am going to call it 'allegedly oriental'...


I thought my Sunday deserved some colour, crunch and slurp, so I peered into my long suffering fridge and spotted some Napa Cabbage, a couple of red and yellow peppers, and some broccoli. Nice mix, I thought, of greens, yellows and reds! The peppers would be nice and 'sweetish' unlike the green ones, the broccoli would give a nice little something to bite into while the cabbage (I hoped) would spring a little crunch in the mouth.

A little aside... I always wondered at the many variants of 'cabbage' that is consumed across the orient. I love Bok Choi (báicài or 小白菜 )  but always end up associating the Napa Cabbage (dàbáicài  or 大白菜 ) with soupy things for some reason. Putting both in the microwave produces some interesting results depending on how long you nuke...

For example, Napa Cabbage microwaved at 900w for about 3min produces a near cooked but still crunchy-ish effect. Pushing it for 5min or more releases more liquids and also makes the cabbage more slurpy and limpish...The entire process took about 15min including the cutting of the vegetables. I first washed and diced the broccoli into florets and the bell peppers into little diced pieces.

These all went into the fresh-from-the-glazing-furnace bowl and I also threw in some finely minced garlic...

Next the well washed cabbage leaves got sliced and stuffed on top. The thought process was that if the cabbage stayed near the bottom, the juices they released would stay there and not bless the rest of the stuff (especially the broccoli) with much succulence.

And then I just put on the lid and microwaved it for 5min. I pulled out the dish and mixed the entire lot with a generous dash of the Wo Hup Oyster (flavoured) sauce... Voila! My lunch was ready... :)

Perfecting Recipes...

I always knew that there must be a great deal of rigour involved before a 'commercial recipe is released—especially if it is going to be published...
And then I chanced on this very interesting graphic, interestingly enough, on a site dedicated to infographics. America's Test Kitchen apparently does all this before publishing a recipe... Very interesting!

Browse more data visualizations.

Could not resist sharing this.... :P

Well... I found this on a Facebook page that shares daily quotes :D


I liked the brilliance of the idea in its simplicity... How many of us will have ever thought of this?

A Simple Brownie Recipe (2 Variations)

This one goes out to Charu and Swati. 


Here is how I make brownies:


Variation 01 - Brownies with Cocoa Powder 


1 Cup - Unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 Cup - Flour
100gm - Butter (I use this measure since I can just run out and get a slab from the nearest shop :) )
1 - Egg (2 if you want moister brownies)

1/2 Cup - Brown Sugar (You can use plain sugar, but I find it a tad bit too sweet)

1.5 tsp - Baking powder

A pinch of salt (Don't add if you are using Amul butter. It is already very salty)
A pinch of cinnamon and nutmeg powder mix (I don't like the artificial smelling vanilla essence that I get here)


I take the butter (I like Mother Dairy butter since it is not as salty as Amul), and microwave it  in my Borosil dish till it melts. I then add in in the cocoa powder and incorporate the cocoa with the butter. 
(I have tried a variation a very long time back that worked very well... I added a little cocoa butter to the mix and it makes the chocolate much smoother)


By this time the mixture is not so warm so I crack the eggs into the mixture and use a whisk to get everything together.
I mix the baking powder and the flour together and then add that into the mixture. 


By now I have a greased tray lined and ready I pour the mix in and dunk it into a preheated oven after sprinkling some walnuts on top.


I still have not started using the thermometers, but I realized that the trick here is not to have the oven on full blast and to get the brownies out while a skewer insert still does not come out clean

Variation 02 - Brownies with Compound Chocolate  

1 'slab' - (Varies between 100-200gm. More is good :)) - Compound Chocolate. I prefer Selbourne Extra Dark (Still quite sweet at some 30% cocoa :()

1/2 Cup - Flour

3/4 slab of a 100 gm butter pack

2 - Eggs

1/2 Cup - Brown Sugar (You can use plain sugar, but I find it a tad bit too sweet)

1.5 tsp - Baking powder

A pinch of salt (Don't add if you are using Amul butter. It is already very salty)

A pinch of cinnamon and nutmeg powder mix (I don't like the artificial smelling vanilla essence that I get here)

The chocolate and butter is melted in the microwave and then the eggs and flour are added in turn.


Then it is popped into the oven and baked till it of the consistency required.


If you like some interesting banter and want to ogle at some nice photos, here is a nice site that has a recipe for brownies... http://goo.gl/ic0tC

করলা বেগুন (Korola Begun) - Karela/Bitter Gourd with Baingan/Aubergine

This is one of the simplest recipes that I tried after getting my hands on the two volumes by Renuka Debi Chowdhurani-রকমারি আমিস রান্না (Rakamari Amis Ranna) and 

রকমারি নিরামিস রান্না

  (

Rakamari Niramis Ranna)

I could not lay my hands on the kind of বেগুন or baingan (aubergines) that I normally would find in Kolkata. So I settled for the variety that is commonly available here in Mumbai.

I would have ideally wanted to cook উচ্ছে (uch-chay)--a smaller cousin of karela that you get in Bengal but then... 

The most time consuming part about this is the amount of chopping needed. First the karela got chopped into tiny dices...

Then the বেগুন/baingan become little cubes less than a centimetre across...

A little splash of vegetable oil fumed with heat and I tossed in the karela bit while I chopped the baingan.

I sautéed till the karela was a little browned...

I kept the karela aside and heated a few teaspoons of oil in the same pan and added a little sputter of mustard seeds. I used these but the normal ones work and taste just as well... 

... then I added the baingan/বেগুন and cooked it a little but not till mush.

I added the turmeric/haldi/হলুদ mixed with a little water since the original recipe called for হলুদ বাটা or ground fresh root turmeric. 

... after a few tosses, I added the karela in and mixed everything together and cooked for a few minutes more...

And... I was ready to eat :)

Mango Chocolate Oatmeal Chewy Drop Cookies (No added sugar or fat)

I have been trying out these 'fruit-infused' cookie things for a while. I am usually not very happy with the cookies that are dished out by the standard coffee shops (stale, dry, overpoweringly sugary), or even Subway outlets (limp after being baked a while back and with a greasy aftertaste...).


With the mangoes fast disappearing at the end of the season, I just wanted to bake something with the fruit. And not the standard muck that they give at every confectionery (orange in colour, tasteless, and usually called Alphonso when it is not...).


So I started by trying out a cookie sans all these irritating things. Which did turn out better that I really expected ... But the Sugar, Egg, and Flour-less Cookies were another trip altogether...


 Anyways.... Now that the ranting bit is done....


Guru dropped in for the second last time before he goes away for good to Singapore. So I thought that this was a good time to bake something for him and Shubha.
  
By the time all 'imagin-ing-about-the-food' had stopped swirling in my brain, time had flown and Guru was calling me, irritatedly, asking me when I would land up at his place. <rolling eyes>...


I did not want the standard compound chocolate in the cookies, so I got our some chocolate that some cocoa mass and cocoa butter instead of the hydrogenated fat. I also got out some orange peel.

This had to be done rapidly so I got out some Chitalebandhu Aamras (mango pulp) and squelched out a couple of bowls of the pulp.

Next a couple of cups of oat meal got dumped into my trusty old mixing bowl. (I made a mental note to ask someone to get me some nice steel bowls when they fly in :) )

The chocolate slab got chop-chopped ...

Then the walnut bits also joined the rest in the mixture...

Now, it was time to chop the candied orange peel....

I added a nub of ginger to add a delightful little zing in the cookie just when you were not expecting it... to offset the sweetish richness of the chocolate...

I chopped the ginger in to little bits...

... and then all of this went straight into the bowl.  

I added a teaspoon of baking powder (but you can really bake these cookies without it...)

After a good stir, I added a cup of आटा/ataa (aka whole wheat flour) to add some more 'body' to the cookies...

Once the flour was incorporated into the mixture I poured in the mango pulp. This was meant to have a three fold effect--bind the mixture, add some sweetness and to add that little interesting flavour when you bite into the cookie...

After a good mix....

... I rolled out some baking parchment onto the racks and dropped lumps of the mixture.

Tada! All ready to bake in my preheated oven while I cleaned things up and got ready to get out of the house with the cookies...

And this if how the cookies looked straight out of the oven... Notice how the chocolate looks all gooey... The trick with chocolate (as opposed to compound chocolate) is that the chocolate stays gooey-ish even after the cookie is cooled since the chocolate is not actually tempered. Next I shall try making a nice batch of giant muffins with chocolate sunk into the centre. Should be interesting :)

 

চিচিন্গায়ের তরকারী (Chichingay-er Torkari) or Snake Gourd Curry

I have been meaning to cook চিচিঙ্গা (chichinge or snake gourd) for a while now.  I even bought the darn thing and then it just stayed in the fridge. The external appearance just tells you that this beast is much easier to cook that the other cousins. 
Well... At least the preparation bit is way easier. Even with the back of a blunt-ish knife it was an easy task scraping the outer skin away a bit.

This I quickly chopped into semi-circles or what you would describe in Bengali as চাকলা-চাকলা করে (chakla chakla koray).

This proceeded to nuke (microwave) for 2min while I got the ফোড়ন/phoron/tempering ingredients ready.

I took some garlic cloves and roughly sliced them along with  a small onion. I also took a Kashmiri red chilly, some mustard seeds and a small roundel of garlic. The garlic nub was quickly smashed, the Kashmiri chilly gutted to rid it of the seeds that could potentially set my mouth on fire, and then the oil splashed into the pan for a quick heating.

The chilly and the mustard went in first and sputtered till the chilly aroma wafted from the pan...

Next the onion and the garlic bit went in... I have a tendency to caramelize the garlic since I'm partial to the taste it imparts to whatever cooks after that...

In the meanwhile I got the microwaved (hence steam cooked) চিচিঙ্গা/chichinge out...

Now everything went into the pan with a little salt added...

And voila! My dinner was ready... 

Whole Wheat (आटा) Crusty Bread

Usually the first attempt at baking something 'simple' turns out be anything but that... So when I thought of baking bread, I was sure that something or the other would go boink... This one though, worked like a charm... 

One of the advantages of staying in the 'not-so-affluent' part of the Mahim is the proximity of humbler things like an aata chakki (आटा चक्की). On a lazy Saturday, I started thinking of bread as I dozed off on Friday and finally moved/willed myself to the aata guy late in the morning. I realized that he was scalloping the grinding stones of his mill and would not make flour till an hour later. The laziness took over and suddenly it was evening! I woke up with a start and got myself the flour. It was warm and smelt heavenly.


I came back and got the yeast block out of the fridge...

... I sliced off a bit of the yeast and this weighed in at around 52gm...

... I took about half of this (25gm) and about 10gm of sugar and mixed this with some warm water...

Soon the yeast activated and was ready to mix with the dough...

I measured about 3 and a quarter cups of flour to get 501gm and added some salt to it 

Then a quick knead later it put it in a bowl and covered it with a moist face towel.

This I put in the microwave to give dough some privacy while the Mumbai monsoon moist warmth worked its charm. An hour later the dough had doubled in volume and was airy and sticky.

I kneaded this a little more and oiled the tins...

The dough went into the tins and then I poke them with a fork and started preheating the oven. 

The dough went back into the microwave and before I could pop them into the oven, the dough had risen some more...

After about 35min in the oven my bread came out and tasted awesome... 

I carried some for Titin en route to meeting Chandu... :)