Pizza Amore

Yesterday I found myself cleaning up the leftovers of my fridge. With no fresh meat or veggies other than tomatoes I couldn't cook any 'sabzi' to go with the store brought frozen tandoori roti lying in my freezer , so I decided to try something outside the box and use the roti as a base for a homemade pizza! Luckily I found some shredded Italian cheese and leftover uncooked 'Alderwood smoked' bacon so all I really needed to prepare was pizza sauce.

Pizza sauce :
Blanch two medium sized tomatoes in boiling water for about 10 minutes (I used roma tomatoes). The skin will detach itself from the pulp and can be removed. In a bowl add half a cup of warm water to the tomato pulp and crush the pulp roughly with a spoon. Then add salt to taste , pinch of black pepper,two cloves of minced garlic, a pinch or two of sugar , a handful of the Italian cheese and about a tablespoon of the MOB ( marjoram, oregano and basil) . Those three dried spices as I found out are the holy trinity of pizza sauce. Mix everything together and let it sit for about 30 minutes for the tomatoes to soak up the dried spices.

Finally take two tandoori rotis as the base , laddle half the mixture on each base. Top it generously with rest of the shredded cheese and finally the meat of your choice. Since I was using bacon , I pan fried the bacon fried till it was 90% cooked , then cut in half inch pieces for the topping. Bake the pizza on a low rack on 450F for 10 minutes and you are ready for an ultimate treat.

The tandoori roti being whole wheat gave this pizza a healthy dimension and most importantly it cleared my fridge .

ciao.

Ramen on Top

So after a looooong hiatus I am back! In the last 6 months I have eaten several twisted dishes and cooked some myself ...I have visited foreign lands and pigged out on world delicacies. However for lack of any inspiration to write and a complete disregard for my less than half a dozen readers I have avoided posting about my adventures and /or recipes. In a feeble attempt to make a comeback , I thought I would post a simple recipe that takes an average student's most staple food i.e Ramen (Maggi tastes even better) and turns it into something that I find as tasty if not more than the Chinese noodles you get on the streets of Mumbai and much much more healthier.

Some facts:
Ramen is actually quiet healthy, packed with protein and fiber , if you throw away the sodium and MSG laden spice pack which comes along with it. With a few basic ingredients and flavorings so can make it much more authentic and flavorful than that sneaky little bastard.

What you need (for 2 people)
1 green bell pepper ( cut in very thin slivers)
1/2 carrot (also cut in very thin slivers)
2 green chillies (also cut in you know what)
250gms of boneless chicken thighs cut in 1/2 inch cubes (tofu is a good replacement for veggies and spca volunteers)
3 cloves of garlic diced finely
2 tablespoons of all purpose flour
salt and pepper
low sodium soy sauce
chili vinegar and chili oil ( if you have regular vinegar and regular oil add two dried red chillis while cooking)
1 egg
And finally two noodle cakes.

How to cook the noodles:

Bring a pot of water to boil. After it has come to a rolling boil immerse both the cakes without breaking them in the water. Time it for 3 mins (not one min more!) Break an egg into the pot and with a fork stir the egg and noodles so that the noodles loosen up and the egg breaks up.

1 more min ...and strain the water ...noodles will be cooked 'al dente' and thats what you want. Add a few drops of oil to the eggy noodles to avoid them from sticking and keep them covered until later.

Add salt and pepper to the chicken or tofu and then finally the flour. Stir the chicken until the flour has coated the chicken properly. Then fry the chicken in sufficient oil for about 5 mins. Drain the oil away and rest the chicken on a paper towel to soak up any residual oil.

In a pan , heat about 1 tablespoon of chili oil. Saute the garlic and chillies first , then add the veggies. Add the chicken after about 5 mins and toss in couple splashes of soy sauce and 1 teaspoon chili vinegar.

Saute further for 2 mins and finally add the egg noodles . Turn of the heat and stir gently to mix in the veggies ,chicken and noodles.

Garnish with chopped spring onions...and serve hot. This stuff tastes authentic 'mumbai chinese' and you deserve it.

Blue Ginger

One of the perks of living in the Northwest is the diaspora of authentic Asian eating joints that are never too far away. And by Asian I say that in the American sense which means southeast Asian to the rest of the world. From Chinese restaurants who have their main menu written in Chinese with the English menu available on request to sushi joints that put some Tokyo equivalents to shame (or so I have heard), we have everything. If Vietnamese pho or Thai penang curry was something you only saw and heard on travel shows, you can get some of the best over here. Food writers attribute this abundance to the proximity of southeast Asia to the west coast of US. I for one, don't care. What I do care and cherish is the fact that all it takes is a grumble in my belly and a 5-10 min drive to dive right into sizzling golden tempura or spicy tom yum gai.

Intermingled within these exotic cuisines and hidden under the anonymity of it's more popular counterparts is the cuisine of the Koreans. For not so long ago , I would have put it under the 'a lot like Japanese' category. It all changed when I went to an authentic Korean joint called Kokiri last year and I was jolted with amazement at the uniqueness and personality of the menu and the food that I ate.

Just writing about Korean cuisine would be like experiencing a good glass of wine with your eyes closed, i.e incomplete. Luckily I had my camera with me three days ago when I took M out on a date to Blue Ginger in Bellevue. This place is as Korean as they get, with huge tables centered with a fire grill , the sour aroma of kimchi floating in the air and nerdy Korean waitresses. We had the option of sitting at the sushi bar since by the way even Koreans eat sushi, but we were there for a different experience. Where else would you get to cook your own meat!

One of the traditional settings of a Korean meal is the Korean bbq where meats are cooked at the center of the table atop a grill to the accompaniment of about a dozen side dishes and individual rice bowls. We chose bulgogi as our main protein . Bulgogi literally means 'fire meat' , and is thinly sliced beef marinated in soy sauce , garlic and sesame oil which is to be cooked to your liking on the grill. You heard right! the raw meat comes in a huge platter with a pair of tongs at your disposal. You slap on the meat over the grill and cook it to your perfection. Unfortunately they do not pay you to cook your own food because that is part of the experience. We also decided to order the vegetable platter , which came with sliced zucchini, sliced pumpkin, succulent mushrooms an a big fat slab of onion which also had to be grilled by us!. However the best part of the meal for me was the banchan. Banchan refers to bowl sized side dishes served along with the main protein dish and rice to be consumed as accompaniments. What will blow your socks off is the number of them! The waitress comes with a trolley peckered with these small little bowls, and as she starts transferring those goodies on to the table, your huge table suddenly starts running out of space. Initially you will panic at the sheer number of these insignificant yet intriguing embellishments until you come to terms with the fact that sometimes life can be fair and sometimes you do get more than what your bargained for!

The banchan Blue Ginger decided to bestow upon was the ubiquitous kimchi which is deliberately rotten spicy hot cabbage, kongnamul which is boiled and seasoned soybean sprouts, sweet mu-chae made of sweet white radish in vinegar sauce , stinky tofu not to be consumed by the weak stomached, stir fried fern shoots called gosari-namul,stir fried squid called something I cannot pronounce, garlic mashed potatoes, pickled zucchini, stir fried gelatin noodles and salad....phew.

We finished it off with plum wine ordered by M which was a perfect compliment to the myriad of textures and flavors we encountered in our food adventure, not that warm sake would have been a bad choice , but I had already tried that during a previous visit.

Whether you call it similar to other Asian cuisines or not , Korean cuisine does make you review how food can be prepared, presented and consumed. It makes you realize that sometimes rotten, slimy and stinky can be adjectives used to describe mind blowingly awesome food. It makes you realize how juxtaposing complex preparations of banchan and soups against the simple staples of rice and meat can be sweet music to your unknowing palette. All in all it makes a pretty twisted meal!.

Goa Untwisted

Beyond the rave parties and 'I love Goa' t-shirts , beyond the Anjuna market and Baga beach , beyond the foreign, NRI and Indian tourists lies the real Goa ... the Goa that I know. It is the Goa where my ancestors lived until two generations ago , their houses a living proof of the rustic lifestyle that is lost among the glamorous , hippy image of the new emerging beach neighborhoods.

My mother's ancestral home lies nested in a quiet corner of Pernem , a small town situated just inside the Goa - Maharashtra border. Here in this house which was literally built room after room over a century I have spent most of my childhood holidays. Like every village town house it has a well whose water tastes sweet and which is home to two tiny turtles that eat all the parasites and filter our drinking water. The jack fruit tree in the back garden bears huge fruit every summer so that the house never runs short of it's supply of dried jack fruit candy. A small road from the back of the house leads to a stream beyond which lie extensive paddy farms so lushly green that you feel they have been painted over. A road along the fields takes you to the center of the town which is adorned by the main temple and an adjoining market that sells fresh vegetables probably harvested that very day and fish that seem to have jumped right out of the sea into the fisher woman's basket. People are kind and gullible. When I walk up to them in my American military shorts and a 'hare Krishna' t-shirt they don't look at me strangely . One spoken sentence in Marathi and they treat me like a relative.

Just two months ago I was in Goa with my brother and my folks walking around the market on a sultry November evening . We decided to head over to 'Himalaya' , a small restaurant cum grocery store that embodies the hospitality of the state unlike the tourist shacks on Carambolim beach. We ordered a seven rupees falooda each, and the kid working there having recognized us from previous visits just smiled and started scooping up a mighty mean beverage. What landed on our table was eons beyond the famous 'Royal falooda of Badshah's in Mumbai . The ice cream was creamier , the syrup was not too sweet and the small bubbles floating in the concoction seemed crunchier and I fell in love with Goa all over again.

But if my appetite was not whetted enough, that same night it would explode because on the menu of our home cooked family dinner was the quintessential Goan dish called xacuti . It is a curry dish made of complex spices using local ingredients like freshly grated coconut and dry chillies with either chicken or pork and no one makes it better than my grandfather. That along with fried rava coated pompret and double roti was like bombarding your taste buds with flavor bombs that defied logic and made me wonder if I could ever get over that sense of fulfillment. Being a food junkie , I have eaten all over Goa , from the snazzy beach shacks on Calangute to inconspicuous little vindaloo joints in Mapusa , but never has anything matched the healing power of my grandfather's xacuti.

If xacuti is quintessentially Goan , so it the experience of driving from Pernem to the central district of Ponda. If you look beyond the newly constructed highways and the newly introduced pollution from the newly bought cars you will see acres of fields bordered with palm trees . You will see mud walkways running through the fields and farmers and their kids scampering along the walkways with natural agility and a smile on their faces. Along the road you will see narrow byways almost invisible to the speeding motorist that if followed lead you to congruous yet unique temples and churches nestled in their own ecosystem of vendors and devotees. You won't see topless , tanned and broke tourists zipping past in their rented two wheelers. Instead you will come across unknown villages and their village centres. You will cross their main markets and their panchayats and dainty little mud houses and cheerful playgrounds.

When the Portuguese started annexing Goa in the late 15Th century they began systematically demolishing temples in a bid to convert locals to their own religion. In the process many pandits packed up their Gods and retreated to hills of central Goa where they took refuge in the valleys and eventually established temples for their 'Gods on the run'. Many temples are still isolated, surrounded by as few as a dozen houses which call themselves a village. One such village called Keri is my paternal ancestral village. That village is what gave me my name and somewhere within my soul I still feel like I am home when I enter the village premises. The fact that the closest town of Ponda is 40 minutes away by rickshaw or that there are less than five families that comprise the meager population of Keri gives me the feeling that I am trapped in time, a feeling that enhances itself when I walk down the brick steps beyond the awning of my ancestors house and come across a lake, almost hidden in the hills that surround it. That November afternoon when I stood on the edge of my true Alma mater and spread my arms I still remember the excruciatingly numbing beauty that belonged to me for that instant.

If anyone said that Goa belonged to its beaches they would be wrong , if anyone said that Goa belongs to its churches and temples they would be even wronger. Goa belongs to its people. It belongs to the fishermen, and the farmers, the locals of dozens of cities like Panjim who zip around in their Honda Activa's on their daily trip to the market . It belongs to my grandfather who is spending his retired years in his childhood house after working hard all his life in Maharashtra. Someday in future if I can embrace Goa for what it really is , I hope it will belong to me.