The look...

It happens often. More so if you are in a hostel, I suppose. You are sitting/standing, just doing anything, preferably in the night. You know how the hostel never sleeps. And there comes the white knight in the dark night. I know, I should put my copyrights on that previous line. And what has the white knight brought along? Food! Okay, the whole scene can also happen in the day time, but then my cool line won't be valid. So we are talking about the poor knight. Obviously, little does he know that he is the knight, or whatever, maybe the vehicle for the food, that will end up in our bellies, which is a good thing, until of course he is good enough to voluntarily share his larder with the likes of you and me.

I mentioned the 'little does he know' part because in most cases, the guy doesn't really know what/who he is up against, which being a perpetually hungry, perpetually greedy bunch of people, perpetually willing to loot anyone and everyone of their foodie resources.

Let;s run the whole scene once.

The guy enters.

He sees the the predators are looming all around him.

He tries to keep things quiet, to himself. Sudden;y he makes a sound. (Damn that polythene bad on the floor!!!) He barely escapes slipping.

Three heads turn to see what happened.

They see him. More importantly, they see his prized possession.

(Shit.)

ATTACK!! He can run. He can hide. But as Enrique says, there's no escaping our love.....for food.

Okay, maybe nothing so dramatic. The problem is not that you have food with you. The problem is that others saw that you have food with you.

It's almost like this. When you find someone looking at your food, firstly, the food is no more yours for keeps, until you are a member of the 'shameless' category, to which, I too belong quite shamelessly, wherein you have no trouble watching people drool over your food.... okay, maybe not drooling over your food, which would make the whole scene pretty gross, but I guess, the point has been decently conveyed.

So when you see this guy eying your stuff, you feel helpless for having what the other doesn't. Besides that, one always is repeatedly reminded by his elders, albeit subconsciously, that 'Sharing is a good habit.', and as Bruce Willis says, old habits die hard. Even if they totally kill you in the process. And to top things off, there's always that look that we hungry kind have, that of an innocent cat. The same look, those big shiny eyes, that helpless cute face, maybe not the cute part of it, but anyways, the sort of face you want to 'ku-chee-ku', in spite of knowing that it has the ability to snap at you any time you give it an opportunity. And hence, you decide to part with a part of what was yours, reminding yourself that it is good to be good, and all sorts of bull of that sort. And then it comes. ATTACK!

Warning! Lock your doors after you enter to prevent collateral damage.

Corn on the mob!

I was pretty sure of not writing a post on this blog of mine, as hostel time means your cooking is mostly limited to boiling stuff(mostly the instant noodles kind of things)... Yeah, that's pretty much it. Never the less, mankind has found tricks to boil stuff that can taste good.
This post is dedicated to one of my room-mates. Credits....later, but I need to thank him for giving me something to write on.
So here goes.
THE BUGGER had been after us about getting corn kernels, each time we went out to the city/town(or whatever you can classify Calicut as). The first time out, he forgot about it. The second time, he bought them..finally! He's got a thing for corn, specially the spiced and overpriced stuff one usually finds inside/outside/nearby food malls....
So we got corn in the room!! Yaaaay!!!! Now what?
Next was a water heater... almost all rooms have this appliance. Then came salt..another friend's room(THE BUGGER's ex-room mate's to be precise). There was a plan to bring along some 'chaat masaala', the tangy powder/ mixture made from err... salt, rock salt.. umm... pepper, powdered cumin,mint powder..err, ya, all that and goodness knows what else. But no one had 'Chaat masaala'!! So we put in 'Chicken curry masaala' instead, which we borrowed from another friend's room... Yeah, even I am wondering how the chicken curry tasted. Another room-mate of mine had been invited to the 'In-Hostel-chicken-curry-party'. I did not bother asking him how it tasted. Fine, moving on... Oh yes, we got some cubes of butter(Okay not we, just my corn-obsessed fellow room occupant.[THE BUGGER])
And yeah, we washed the boiler properly. The only thing I did was washing the lid of the boiler...That's all. After that, we did the 'thawing', as mentioned on the packet of corn kernels. I guess the lengthiest part of cooking was the THAWING!!! The bugger was mad about thawing. That was the only line in the cooking instructions that the three of us, among the four in the room ever heard... obviously the fourth one being THE BUGGER!
So, thawing was over, all the additives, condiments and whatever we had in hand, plunged into the boiler happily, did their thing for about 15 minutes, AND PRESTO!!!!!
Just apart form this weird smell that lingered around for about 5 minutes, which according to one of us(not me), was Sodium Acetate. Although I have a feeling that I am supposed to know what this thing does to the food, I  have no clue, except of the fact that it is a preservative.
So, again, PRESTO!! We got stuff to eat!! We had made a pact to keep the room's door closed, but mistakenly, somehow the latch opened and we had a few peeping Toms and Jerrys' paying us visits. Never the less, whatever came out of the boiler, well, came out pretty good. Though the 'Chicken Masaala' never made the corn taste like chicken, which would have been a very.....strange thing, it definitely wasn't a bad idea, I guess.
THE BUGGER- Abhishek Jaiswal

Epic fail !!... Well, not exactly.

I like to experiment with food. Their normal form looks and seems far from intriguing. Yes, there are some classics that are better be left pristine, for instance, mom's Rajma-Chawal but with the rest, a fair amount of personalization and customization sounds is just, specially if one knows the original and nature of the original recipe. You may sometimes...actually have a 'recipe' for disaster, but in the hind sight, you just might end up knowing what not to do the next time.
For instance, I bring to you the 'Banana cake'.
Trust me, the day I thought of this dish, it sounded absurd to myself. But I was tired of the chocolate cake. Yeah, I could have tried a dozen more kinds of cakes, which sounded a lot more familiar. Somehow I was rather adamant about this one. For starters, I was slightly skeptical about the existence of the dish. But I had a sort of a mind map of the 'how-to-go-about' of what I was shooting for.
Nothing too acrobatic. I was pompous enough to check the recipe after I had put my creation into the oven(I was unhappy to discover that I couldn't apply for a patent for my creation.)
I was at least delighted that what I had thought of, as the steps of the recipe, were exactly the same things mentioned online. Yaaaay!!!!!
For the banana cake, take the chocolate cake recipe. Chuck the chocolate out of it(until that is that the next thing I will try...leaving the chocolate in place). Toss out one egg from the mentioned recipe(not if your recipe has only one in it!!). Blend one-and-a-half bananas with half a glass of milk and tip it into the batter. Beat the batter up like you haven't beaten a single soul in life! Take out all your frustration down on the batter!!! Beat the air into(Not out of) it!! Just beat it!!(R.I.P MJ!! Do the rest of the drill as the original recipe tells you to and VOILA!!

But, I had faultered somewhere...Not a glitch in my method, but that in my execution.
I forgot to put sugar. I realized this after all the beating and after putting all the batter into the baking tray. Strangely enough, I was feeling bloody lazy! So I just powdered some sugar, put it right over the beaten-up batter, mixed it all in and popped straight int the oven.
BIG MISTAKE. I was actually supposed to take all the batter out of the tray, put in the sugar, beat the poor thing all over again and then pop it into the oven.
I was particularly feeling bad for the batter. So I was like "Look, okay, don't cry! I'll spare you the horror, and myself the effort of beating you up. Happy?" The batter happily stepped into the inferno that awaited it.
45 minutes later, I had a cake... Instead of being light as a cloud, this thing squatted like a ruddy sumo wrestler!!  My fears came true!!!!!
But I am fine with things going bomb! It is sort of a pricey proposition to learning stuff.
Bullshit okay!! Why the hell can't I get it at first shot??!!!

ICE-CREAM SANDWICH

No apples, no jellybeans,nothing of the nerdy stuff in here...at least for now.
It is about the dessert. Ice-cream sandwich..

It was over 5 years ago that my mom took me to this pretty famous Ice-cream shop, down south in Church Gate,Mumbai. It was this shop,nothing very fancy about the way it looked, nothing pretentious, no glitz or glamour ,that which is an omnipresent trait of south Bombay. By the way, Bombay beats Mumbai HANDS DOWN,ANY DAY, ANY NIGHT,ANY MICROSECOND BETWEEN 11.59.59 hrs AND 00.00.00 hrs ..Phew!! Being emphatic about things takes quite a toll!
Sometimes, in the evenings, this shop packs in quite a crowd...quite a startling one at that for such a quaint looking place.

So the shop...Yeah, IT is located on the main road of a very posh locality,but for those who aren't looking for it, they will never see it. It's like platform 9 3/4... Remember that one??
It's like over 50 year old, run by a Parsi family for about 2-3 generations. The shop goes by the name K. Rustom. Goodness I love Parsis' for their influence on Mumbai's food culture!!!!
So I go to this place for the first time, I check the menu. These fellows have like 20 odd flavors. None of them are 'odd' as such. I spot this flavor 'bitter chocolate'(Dark chocolate basically) and I have a place I cannot live without visiting whenever I am back in Bombay for my vacations!

Now here's the deal. The ice-cream on offer has no magical texture like a Gelato or some other rich and fancy variety. It nevertheless tastes ABSOLUTELY AWESOME. Getting into minor technicalities, the ice-cream looks like a 300 ml Tetra Pak carton in terms of volume. They quite literally hand you the ice-cream as it is in your hand,just that on two sides of the ice-cream,they slap on a biscuit-wafer,wrap the whole thing in tissue paper and hand it over. Annnd you then happily chomp along!! Even the price is reasonable. 50 bucks a piece.
Here's what I frankly fear. These folks invented the ice-cream sandwich around 50 years ago, about the time, Douglas C. Engelbart had thoughts of making a Computer Mouse, never thought of their ice-creamy concoction worth calling an invention, kept running the shop, SOMEONE COMES ALONG, SEES THEIR CREATION, TAKES IT SOMEWHERE, MAKES IT MORE FANCY AND PUTS UP THE NAME 'ICE-CREAM SANDWICH'!!!! Notice the crescendo in my tone??
The story sounds very akin to Steve Jobs glorifying the mp3 player by giving the world the IPOD!!
(That device definitely was remarkable though...or so was his presentation!)
You see the tragedy how Apple's software is being challenged by something fancifully called the ICS?? See?? See??
But all said, the one place that shall remain my favourite place in my hometown, at least till either I, or the place shall exist,will be
87 Stadium House, Opposite Ambassador Hotel, Veer Nariman Rd, Churchgate, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400020
"Majja ni life!!"

Discovery!

It's been a while that I wrote a post on cooking. I recently realized that if one can't come up with something, there are 2 things...
1-Think more
2-Quit it.
It's not like you have many more options....well,if there are in your mind, OUT WITH IT!!
I had nothing new on the Foodie-frontier..
Then I suddenly had one. This one's  nothing fancy. Rather a bit too simple. But amazing stuff. At least quite so if you are damn hungry and will do anything to eat something in 5 minutes.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!!! No FRILLS!! No FANCY!! I present to you...the humble KHICHDI
As far as 'Wikipedian' accuracy goes.... Khichdi is a South Asian preparation made from rice and lentils (dal). Frankly speaking, that's all there is to it.
So it all happened this one fine not-so-shiny morning. My mom was late for work. She had not made anything for the afternoon to feed her only son. Never mind.. So she was like... "Kiddo! I'll tell you the secret trick that my mom told me to fill my stomach"(that must have been told to my grand-mom by her mom and so-on-and-forth) I was like OKKAYY!! :)
So she told me the following....I just put the same stuff in steps...
1-Take rice:lentils(any variety/type you got at home) in a 1:2 ratio.
2-Wash this mixture thoroughly,drain the water off 
3-Whatever volume the rice-lentil mixture comes to, add 2-2.5 times that volume of water into a pressure cooker.
4-Add the rice-lentil mixture into the cooker too(yeah,don't forget this step please!).
5-Add turmeric,chilly powder and salt as per volume of your khichdi(Ideally,for one person consuming one cup small cup of the rice+lentil mixture,half a tea-spoon salt, a bit less than half a tea-spoon of turmeric,chilly as per your liking...)
6-Shut the cooker and put it on high flame.
7-Let the cooker "Blow it's whistle,baby" for 3-4 times at max....and 'There we go!!'(Do not let the cooker's whistle go off more than 3-4 times!!)
Eat it plain, with yogurt, or anything else you please to eat it with.  

Big MISTAKE!!!

I had written about this dessert called almond Mela'nge a while ago...and completely forgotten about it. I shouldn't have done that. I got the spelling quite badly wrong... Thankfully, the word I spelt wrong was not 'Almonds'. Otherwise, I'd have had to go and sit back in grade 5 or something..
Okay, for some reason, I ran into this word while watching a lady cook some french dish. Annd I made a discovery.
The word is... MIRANGUES... It is pronounced as Mer-(as in mermaid) and Rang-(As in boomerang)...so it sounds like Merang if you utter the word. Damn you!! French cooks!!!
Damn!! The guy who told you the 'Mela'nge-or-whatever-it-was' story was DEAF!!
Okay, I took the word at face value!! But damn the French...
You see, Right now, I feel like the guys in those 'BLOOPERS' type videos. Even better, I feel like a Newspaper editor who just found out that ... there's something wrong. Not with the article content,but the name.....
And, as we all know, it is a crime to spread wrong information.Hence......

Kaapi !! Indian Press

NFCUK- No French Connection,U Know
This one is for the coffee freaks/connoisseurs. If one belongs to the southern part of India,There is lot higher a chance of you being a coffee lover..simply because,the north side has more like the "Chai pila do yaar!" ("I'd love some tea,buddy!") population. I only belong to the south in terms of genetics. I have spent all my life in the middle. So,quite logically,I like both,tea and coffee. But,I have a lot more of the bean-gene,if I may put it correctly.
Here's the 'chase'. Ever since I tasted coffee, I just lost my 'thing' for the Instant variety. Now,I am not technically abreast with professional jargon like 'Body','Overtone' and stuff that is used to define the taste of coffee,but I do have a basic layman's(maybe a teeny-weeny bittttt more) idea of things. And,yes! I would love to know those terms! But,for now....

Those fancy expensive coffee shops/cafeterias have always caught my attention. Not for their fancy offerings kept on display(or maybe sometimes),but the dark roasted beans in the transparent contraption of unnecessarily big machines(espresso machine..) that squirt out the coffee liquor. These machines,apart from being unnecessarily big and complicated,are also unnecessarily expensive....Anything big,clunky,complicated and most importantly...expensive beyond the requisite are....out of the wishlist. I feel rather proud to call myself a miser,in the worldly sense. Not that I hate spending money. I have this knack of getting stuff done,a lot cheaper than most folks would do. What people call misery, I call frugality... Maybe later on that.
Another thing that caught my attention,was the FRENCH PRESS. This is also a fancy machine that caught my attention when I was watching this show DEXTER...The machine comes in the starting theme song. I looked up for it's price....about Rs.5000... a more fancy way to put it, about $100(more like $90 now...if you know why..)
So I was like...Hmmm....(That was all that I was like...)

I am proud of being an Indian for more reasons than I can count. But the best part is the 'Jugaad' mindset. This word is best defined in a book called Jugaad Innovation, that I read recently. Jugaaad means- Figuring a makeshift/quick and solution to the problem,without compromising on it's integrity.
There is this thing called Filter Coffee,a specialty of south India. The coffee liquor used in these coffees is extracted from the coffee grounds(powdered beans) using this stainless steel contraption.
I came across this utensil(Okay...no rocket science here) when my mom bought it while returning form our holiday in Coorg,Karnataka,as we had bought a lot of roasted beans.
When I saw the working mechanism of the French press and the espresso machine,and then saw the Indian stainless steel contraption, the concept used was a combination of both the expensive machines.
In the ESPRESSO machine,there is this condensed puck of coffee grounds through which,pressurized steam is forced to produce the liquor.
In the FRENCH press, there's this big container. You gave the grounds placed over a movable sieve.Hot water is poured onto the grounds. There's this plunger you press,the hot water is forced through the sieve,extracting all the coffee-ish goodness...and woalah!

The Indian machine is a lot less complicated,lot less cheaper...annnd basically uses the same concept as it's overtly expensive cousins...and the best part,tastes just as good. Wow!! How Do We Do It? Discovery channel should start a new show,specially for Indian innovative stuff,after their already amazing show, going by 'How Do They Do It??'

It's pretty simple..
There are two compartments in the utensil....The top one...and....the bottom one.
The top part has holes on it's bottom side.
Fix the top and bottom,
Put the grounds into the top part. There will be a plunger sort of a thing to press down on the grounds to compact them up. Use the plunger. Make a puck out of the grounds and leave the plunger  on the grounds,in the to compartment. Pour hot water...the kind left for 5 seconds after turning off the gas,post boiling.
Close the top compartment.
Do this at night. It takes like 2 minutes.
Wake up in the morning. Your liquor is ready!
The time it takes is worth waiting for. Besides, you wouldn't realize it pass by.

That's how we do it!!
Suggestions most welcome.