French twist.

It feels good to get back to your callings as often as you can.

Specially if the callings are from nature. But today, let's talk about something more appetizing.

It had been a while since I had gotten into the kitchen to do anything apart from the usual oatmeal/omelette deal of the day. And it had gotten, well to say the least, boring.

But recently did I discover a friend in boredom. No, seriously! Boredom can be a friend. But that's only as long as you don't want to be friends with boredom. Nevertheless, I won't bore you with my tales of boredom. 

What I did cook up, was basically a no-brainer. I am still a bit puzzled as to how I got this recipe into my head. But regardless, it still remains a no-brainer. I call it err... Crap! I didn't name the dish!! Okay, oh yes, It's called the umm... Twisted French toast. Goodness! I miss my creativity! Let's get straight to it.   

To make the Twisted French toast, you'll need

A sugar craving

A sugar craving

A sugar craving

A sugar craving

And a sugar craving...

On a more serious note, you'll need

A sugar craving

Some 3-4 day old bread *(I'll tell you why, a while later)

Eggs

Milk

SUGARRRRR!!!

NUTELLA(Or anything you want to stuff between bread slices, except vegetables of course)

And MOST IMPORTANTLY a wish to do something new in the kitchen

Besides, this is one time you'll get to beat something as much you want. Specially for the fact that here, the more you beat, the better the dish gets. Albeit, the only thing you'll be beating up will be eggs.

So start the stove and heat up a frying pan.

Beat 2 eggs in a slightly wide container. If you haven't wondered as to why a wide container, you suck! Well, if you did, I'll tell you why in a while**.

Add sugar as per your requirement into the eggs, some milk, and beat the egg-sugar-milk-mixture a bit more. Actually do me a favor. Beat them till they(the mixture..... or your hands) cry!! Just don't spill everything in the process. Else mom will come home and beat you till YOU cry!! And I am sure we don't want that.... Or maybe we do. SO feel free to spill all the beaten up eggs.

Take two slices of your 2-3 day old bread and spread whatever you want between them. Peanut Butter, jam, Nutella, anything that makes you feel like a 4 year old sugar junkie! 

Now take your Sugar-junkie sandwich and dunk it into the eggy mixture. Just don't leave it in the egg mixture too long. 

Or else 

a) the whole thing will become a soggy mess

b) you'll end up with a lot of raw egg taste when you think you're done with cooking

Meanwhile, on the heated pan, put some butter, just a small knob. This isn't the place to try the EXXTRRA BUTTER trick. Why?? I'll tell you that too, but in a while***.

Make sure that you have evenly coated the sandwich with the egg mixture. If you have, what the hell are you waiting for?? HUH?? Put the dunked sandwich onto the buttered pan! 

It's fun to watch all the bubbles coming from the sides of the sandwich as it cooks. Wait for not more than 15-20 seconds annnnnnd FLIPP!!!

If the pan was adequately heated up, you'll get a nice brown crusty breaded-eggy goodness.  Another 20-or so seconds and your Sugar-paradise should be ready for you to devour. 

Put your delectable sandwich on some fancy plate that has spent most of it's life in some kitchen compartment as a mere show-piece. Just clean it before you put your food on it. Get some cold milk in one of those big wine glasses (if you have them, of course!!). There's nothing that makes you feel better when you pretend to be as sophisticated as a 50 year old when IQ tests suggest that your mental age is probably 3. But that is another discussion. For now, let's concentrate on the gooey Nutella(or whatever you retardedly put between the bread slices) that's oozing out of your sandwitch every time you bite into it. Just don't forget dunking it into the cold milk. 

Just in case you don't get  sugar rush, WHAT ARE YOU???

In case you do, make merry! Jump around. And if you stay anywhere over the 1st floor of a building, stay away from the balcony. 

Now for the * studded explanations 

* The older your bread gets, the stiffer/harder it will be. Just don't let it develop molds.

Why do we want the bread to be firm? If you take brand-new bread and dunk it into the egg mixture, in to time will the bread collapse into a lump of mush. And we definitely don't want that!

** About the wide container for beating the eggs(preferably a big bowl), this is so that you can easily dunk the bread and move on, instead of a Mentos getting stuck in a coke bottle. By the way, if a Mentos gets stuck in a coke bottle, do not, I repeat DO NOT open the bottle cap!!! Specially of the cap is facing you. Now please don't ask of you can open the bottle cap if a Mentos gets stuck in a Sprite bottle. Please!

*** Do not put any amount of "extra butter" on the pan. Why? The dish is as it is super heavy. So if you do put extra butter, and you're Home Alone, you won't be able to eat beyond the first two bites, and the rest will go down the trash can. 

The omelette-like thing is an omelette made from the left over egg-mixture. Yeah, that's about it...

Besan ke laddoo 2.0

It's been about 6 months since I last witnessed the making of my mom's delectable Besan ke laddoo. The one reason I remember the last time so clearly was because it took great effort on my part to stir the ghee+chick-pea flour(besan) in the wok(kadhai) to get them to their characteristic light brown color, an indication of the laddoo reaching the correct amount of cooking/heating. In the process, I got sore arms for the next two days, and hence, I had an excuse for not doing pull-ups for a while. So, if you want to get big arms, try getting employed as a helper under a halvaee(the dude who makes sweets/halva).

It's almost become customary for my mom to make besan ke laddoo every time I come home, or more so, just before I am leaving home for college. Okay, stating this openly might get me into a bit of trouble with my college folks, but nevertheless. 

So here's my TAKE-2 on Besan ke laddoo.

For some reason , my mom had discussed the recipe for besan laddoo with her sister. She  comes from a family with a legacy of sorts in cooking. Nothing professional, but my grandmother was this really good cook. And that trait remains dominant in my mom, and all my maternal side aunts(Mausi, for convenience). 

So this time around, after getting a few tips from my mausi, my mom had a few new tricks up her sleeve. This was a good thing. Here's the tip my mausi gave...

If you mix in a small amount of ghee and milk into the laddoos before you work with them on the wok, it significantly improves the texture of the laddoo mixture, and quite obviously hence, it's taste!

Now you see, If you don't happen to be popular, you don't have to bother about losing your family's trade secret for some special recipe. Specially so if you are convinced that not many people will take great pains trying what you did.

But that definitely doesn't mean that you wouldn't like to be popular, does it? Moving on.

Now it was onto the wok. All of the pre-worked besan, and ghee(clarified butter), which turned out to be in about a 4:1 ratio was tossed into a wok, and fired up on high flame. Now it was a matter of time, and a lot of mixing, before they turned to that perfect-brown hue.

Then it was in with the powdered sugar and elaichi(cardamom), and more stirring, and tasting the mixture from time to time. 

Here's one thing. Do not add sugar while heating the besan-ghee mixture in th very beginning. The sugar tends to become brown early on, giving the impression that the besan is well cooked, in which case, what one would end up with is 

a) A lot of uncooked and wasted besan

b) Stomach ache, in case one miraculously managed to shape the mixture into balls, and more importantly, eat them!

All said and done, actually pretty well done, it was time to taste the final mixture. It was all fine. We just overshot the sugar. Usually, the ideal sugar:besan shouldn't exceed 1:2, until you are really desperately low on blood sugar. Our mixture clearly felt a tad bit sweet.

So it was back to the wok. With just a bit of besan, ghee and a bit of time, mom saved the day, as usual! And it was only a matter of time before I could gobble a few laddoos. But NO! Who wants to wait? I just scooped a bit of the laddoo mixture into a bowl and stuffed it into my mouth. HEAVVVENNNNN!!!!!

You see, shape is immaterial. As often quoted, 'Beauty lies within...' Someone mischievously rubbed off a few words. The original phrase must have been 'Beauty lies within the laddoo'. So why trouble mom to make balls out of the whole thing, when it tastes good without that last bit of effort? But the good soul that my mom is, she shaped all of the mixture into nice, cute looking things, which would eventually be devoured by desperately hungry and watering mouths!

I just feel happy for having sat next to her in mom's own little kitchen-endeavors, right since the age of 4, as early as my memory takes me. Each of my memories remind me of the exponential learning curve I went through. I hope it all adds up sometime in the times to come.

Cookie Crrrrummmble!!

Now, Sitting quietly is not a virtue I am blessed with. And to be frank, given a chance, I'd happily boast about my fidgety nature, although it does get me into trouble from time to time.
I heard this line somewhere very recently. It goes like "Nature tinkers. It isn't an engineer." So, today was a day to tinker, a day with nature.

Baking cakes is something I was familiar with. I was also no stranger to eating the whole cake by myself after baking it, quite literally. But somehow, cookies were an elusive culinary creation. In spite of containing the same ingredients of a cake, these things taste a lot different. That said, get the dough composition sufficiently wrong, and the cookie starts tasting like a squidgy cake, or the supposed cake becomes a 'tough cookie'....

A dozen recipes can be found on the Internet for baking the 'Perfect' cookie. But this was to be an adventure. Maybe not through a completely unbeaten path, as some bloke/lady, a long time ago, had already invented the cookie, but one can always deviate from the suggested path. A bit less of this, a bit more of that wouldn't turn the supposed-to-be-cookie into a fire-breathing dragon. Putting faith into this thought, I was on!
Another thing worth mentioning, before jumping into the whole Kitchen-scene is that, to start something new, right from scratch, one needs a very uninhibited and encouraging atmosphere. More on this, a bit later. For now, let's get baking!

I wouldn't bother with the exact composition of the recipe, as any Tom, Dick or Harry could tell you that.
Step one was to combine butter with sugar. The food processor was not working, so powdering sugar was out of question. So, IDEA!
I took the butter, melted all of it on a pan, added all the sugar and gave the whole thing a good stir. Although using heat to mix the whole thing faster isn't exactly rocket-science, one seems to feel extra-happy after pulling off anything properly for the first time, I guess.
After that came the eggs. To the butter-sugar mixture,transferred into a big bowl, I broke the eggs right in, and gave it all a nice 'beating' with a whisk. So that got sorted. By the way, almost forgot, these weren't normal run-of-the-mill plain flour/white flour/Maida cookies. These were Oatmeal ones...
So to the egg-butter-sugar mixture, I added about a cup and a half of wheat flour, and two and a half cup rolled oats, adding each one slowly. And there I was, with a sticky batter.
Throughout the process, one thought stayed with me. "What if the whole plan wen KAPUT??" All the flour, butter, sugar eggs and all going down the drain was a nasty thought in the back of my head. Both mom and my sister had got a whiff of my apprehensions. Okay, I actually told them what I was afraid of. So here's my little sister, all mature and understanding, saying something like "Chill! Only when you get it wrong will you know how to get it right the next time!" Following that, just a while later, it was my mom saying "It's credible enough that you are trying something by yourself, so chill..."
I was like "Hmmm..... Nice!"
And then, the batter was done.
I'd heard people eating cookie dough, and liking the taste of it. So I ate a bit of what I thought I had made was cookie dough. It tasted fine. Pretty good, as a matter of fact. But what if my taste buds were deceiving me?? I had to put the dough to the test! I needed a guinea-pig!!(My sister will SO surely kill me for this!!)

 She survived the experiment.. Turns out I wasn't the only one being deceived by taste buds...
Moving on....
By the way, here's where I'd like to mention the encouraging atmosphere that is most the most critical ingredient in the making of anything. My sister and I happen to have the fortune of being born to parents who have gladly allowed us a very wide margin for error. Failure has never been a big deal, although never encouraged, but is never looked upon as anything other than a stepping stone. So, it is ingrained in us that the worst thing that can happen is a small delay in reaching the destination. Given this kind of an upbringing, it just gives one a bit of room to be adventurous. And although what I seem to be doing here doesn't resemble SPELUNKING, it certainly looks possible.
Onto the baking tray! For one thing, cookie dough surely is one hell of a sticky, messy thing to handle. Use one spoon to scoop the dough, another one to remove the dough from the first spoon, and then use the first spoon to take the dough off the second spoon.... Yeah, doing it was more confusing.
With the greased aluminum tray ready, the oven all pre-heated, it was time to plonk the blobs of dough onto the tray, and into the oven. And then, there was this.......

Waiting

Then this......

Peeping out of impatience......

 And then, out came the first batch....

I could hear the non-existing audience applauding when I saw these. Had I been sentimental enough, I would have felt tears rolling down my cheeks, or something like that. Instead, I just picked one of these and popped it into my mouth. "Hmm.. Not bad... They could have done a bit better, sitting inside foe another 5 minutes", I though.
Somehow, another two batches rolled out, each, for some reason, seeming a bit better than the previous one. That must be something to do with some weird aspect of psychology, or....that I was actually getting better at it.
Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I remembered something stupid I had done during the day, which I hadn't noticed up till then.
I have this friend flying in from the Middle-East. So I sent her a message saying something like "Jumping across the Arabian Sea tomorrow, right?" Just that instead of typing 'Arabian Sea', I had typed Arabian Ocean....... Brilliant! There HAS to be something ABSOLUTELY UNNECESSARY that I manage to do somehow!

Apart from that, I felt everything else had fallen into place as planned. At the end of it all, I managed to pull off something that looked like this...

Even my dad approved these. Mom gave him one piece from the first batch, saying "Your son's making plans to kill us all. I ate one. Looks like he got the recipe wrong. Here, your turn to try...". His first remark? "This thing tastes like mud.."

Then.....mom gave him a piece of....the third batch of cookies, not a piece of her mind, thankfully.
And then he asked for another one, and happily ate it.
If there was something that sprang up in my head, strangely enough, it was this

All in all, it's just another cookie in my mouth....

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!!"