Pleasing with Pithe - Monoranjan Pithe

Being Makar Sankranti the day would go incomplete without starting the day with a good dose of pithe. Also known in Bengal as Poush Sankranti, this marks the end of the inauspicious 29 days of Poush and is celebrated to hearld the arrival of Spring throughout the northern hemisphere over a period of 3 days. The harvest festival is celebrated with delectable desserts called ‘pithe’ usually prepared with rice flour from freshly harvested paddy, coconut, milk and date palm syrup. Every household serves up a variety of pithe’s like ranga alu’r pithe, the famed gokul pithe, ashke pithe, dudh puli, soru chakli , patisapta, a savoury pithe called nonta puli (made out of rice flakes with a pea filing). These are either fried or steamed and dunked in milk.

I have two sweet teeth and generally do not require much external impetus to indulge in desserts. This year for the first time I tried my hand in making Monoranjan Pithe – Sweetened coconut filled semolina dumplings simmered on a thickened milk syrup. Monoranjan meaning pleasing. What else a way to please your senses.

Ingredients:

For making the dumplings:

½ a coconut – grated

Semolina – 2 cups

Ginger – ½ inch coarsely grinded in a mortar pestle

Sugar – ½ cup or as per taste

Water – ½ cup or as required

For making the thickened milk syrup -
Milk – 1 litre reduced to half
Sugar – to taste
Green cardamom - 3

Method:
This is not a time taking dish to prepare if you can prepare the coconut filling a day earlier and refrigerate to quicken the prep time.

To make the filling, grate half a coconut - you can use a hand grater to scrape out the flesh from the coconut once broken in half or cut the chunks of the flesh and grind in a food processor (a coffee grinder can also be useful). Desiccated coconut can be substituted if its too much of a trouble. Heat a saucepan or kadai, add the coconut and stir for a while till it starts getting dry and easily comes off the side of the pan. Keep the heat on medium flame, add in the coarsely grated ginger and stir well till the coconut turns slightly golden. Add in the sugar and cook well till it dissolves. You can keep sprinkling some warm water while working on the filling. Keep aside.

In another pan, dry roast semolina for about 5 mins. This will enhance the flavour of the pithe. Once done, set aside and add boiling water in parts till the mixture is moist. Take it out on a plate and knead well into a dough while it is still hot. Keep a bowl of hot water ready for sealing the dumplings. Make small balls from the semolina dough, pressing them in the middle to make a small bati (where the flattened surface gets a cavity to get the stuffing). Take a small amount of the coconut filling, place in the middle of the cavity, pinch the edges and seal with the hot water to give it a semi circular shape as shown in the picture. This needs to be done quickly so that the semolina does not dry out. Once dry, it is difficult to mould the dough.

For the syrup, boil 1litre milk and reduce to half to give it a thickened consistency and throw in some cardamom seeds. Add a little water if it is too thick. Pour in the sugar and place the dumplings slowly and let them simmer in the milk syrup. You will know the dumplings are cooked thoroughly when no trace of the semolina can be seen. Stir carefully not to break the dumplings. The milk syrup should be thick enough to judiciously coat them individually. Keep aside for a while and serve warm.

Happy Sankranti to all my readers.

Coyly Coffee

Romantic coffee does not hurry. It takes its own time to arrive, often double checking with you the exact nature of the brew ordered. Romantic coffee likes absentminded and confused baristas. Baristas who would smile more often than they will bark out your order confirmation. And even if they choose to repeat your order they might repeat it all wrong. Romantic coffee - much like a romantic lover - loves surprises. Like an unpredictable throw of the dice, it will show up in a form different than what you may have expected. That is the charm of romantic coffee over the factory produced “order here” and “please collect here” chains that churn out predictable brews. You may hate romantic coffee on weekdays - your intent then is nothing more than an oral shot of caffeine, disguised as a beverage. You want the predictability of output and service, much like what the analysts covering your company’s stock demand from you, the CEO. Romantic interludes do not hold your fancy. On the other hand, a Saturday afternoon is all about feeling the grass under your feet, breathing in cool air, feeling the sun on your shoulders - and a flirtatious relationship with your coffee.

French Loaf in Richard’s Town, Bangalore, is precisely this. Identity conflict is ingrained in its existence and it starts right at the looks. How else can you explain a franchised store - essentially meant to replicate a factory - housing itself in an old Bangalore bungalow with lawns all around. That too bang in the heart of the City of Gardens (oh, well) with a big, green park just around the corner. Inside, the faux-cane furniture that you have come to expect in coffee shops is conspicuous by their absence. Copiously sized sofas look inviting, yet it is evident they are past their prime (again, much like an old lover, grayed in his hair yet holding a heartful of romantic overtures). You should be careful not to trip over a power chord someone might have laid across the floor to power her laptop. Of course - this is a coffee shop - a kind that might ask “won’t you stay back a while?” when you ask for the check.

My wife and I are regulars at the store so we know what beverage to order. Friazzo Biscayo. A sinful frappe with pure decoction of filter coffee, crushed ice and chocolate sauce topped with a generous walnut brownie, crushed and its wounds doused in even more chocolate sauce. It is a coffee that demands to be eaten. It appeals to your olfactory senses with its macho coffee aroma mixed in a flirtatious affair with the sweet flavor of the chocolate. When it arrives - and it shall take its own time my sweetheart - it will in a plastic tumbler, once again proving the philosophical point that it is not the container but the contents that matter. Are you having just the frappe? Pray, why? It is a Saturday, you are out with the person that matters in your life and how could you ignore the rich spread of the pastries, the puffs and patties? Go ahead - the chicken calzone (“calzone” is stockings in Italian. These stockings were meant for well fed feet) is as good as any in Bangalore. 

Order your food and find a place to sit - better than the old-world inside are the shaky tables on the lawns (C’mon, you are in Bangalore honey and it is all about the weather). Once you have settled down, make a slow start to the conversation - remember, romance is not about speed, it is about substance. Take this into account when you ask for the check because this coffee shop really does not want you to leave. If you are in a hurry (and why would that be?) you can go up to the counter and pay for your food. Now that you are done, please do not rush out - and do take a different way out because there is a display of cakes on the way out that could just tingle your romantic self, make you forget the sit-ups at the gym - afterall, it is a late winter Saturday afternoon.



French Loaf in Richard’s Town brings the romance back into coffee. If you are looking for a Cafe Coffee Day or Starbucks like experience of a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am style coffee, I would advise you do not stop your car at French Loaf. But then, you are not the “corporate type”, are you? I think I did notice a die-hard romantic below all those pretentious layers of “sent from my Blackberry handheld”. Listen to the voice from your passenger seat - pull up at French Loaf and remember to order the Friazzo Biscayo

The Loneliness of Bengali Cuisine

There was a time, about a decade and a half back, when I would hear a lot of this. “You know, in a lot of ways, they are like us”. This was a Bengali seeking the comfort of commonality with a Gujarati. Drilling down on the point would reveal that the resemblance stopped at a mutual affinity for the sweet taste. “They put so much sugar in their cooking, you know”, would be the next gush of coyness. Desperation of a culture in seeking a bedfellow (that too in one that is perched at the other end of the country’s map) is perhaps the first sign of debilitation. But then we Bengalis have so often prided ourselves on our self proclaimed loneliness on a self anointed cultural peak. “We are different, baba, bujhbe na (you won’t understand)”. We allow a single political party - Communists - to rule our state for more than three decades, drive a marquee car factory out of the state (to Gujarat, no less), support South Africa when a Sourav Ganguly-less Indian team plays at the Eden Gardens - we are indeed different, baba, bujhbe na. So frenzied has been our zeal to not be bracketed with the “bourgeoisie” and “decadent cultures” that slowly the world has happily left us alone in our cubbyhole.

Hence it does not come as a surprise when Bengali cuisine gets the same treatment and is allowed cessation from the culinary milieu of India. “Bengali food” is an institution by itself and in a way has meandered away from the mainstream (as you can see from the photograph that adorns this post. This was taken at Puri, Odhisa). The divergence starts right from the mustard oil that is used as the cooking medium (until recently before clever marketing moved the dial a bit towards the vegetable and sunflower oils. Actually, I have this thumb rule of determining a locality in Bangalore to have a high concentration of Bengalis - check the shelves of the local Foodworld for Dhara mustard oil) right down to the mishti-doi served after the meal. Loneliness is fine so long as others are aspiring to reach that vaulted spot, but that clearly wasn’t what was happening with Bengali’s. We got left behind and elements of our culture never made it past the Bengal-Jharkhand border. The story was the same with Bengali cuisine, until chains like “Oh, Calcutta” and “6 Ballygunje Place” did their bits as culinary ambassadors, reaching out to metros other than Calcutta (though, I must confess, a large part of their clientele are Bengalis residing in those metros)

Richness of the Bengali cuisine is accentuated by the fact that it is also an international culmination of two very culturally rich heritages - that of East Bengal (now Bangladesh) and the traditional West Bengal (immortalized in popular parlance as “bangal” and “ghoti” owing allegiance to East Bengal and Mohun Bagan respectively in club football). It really has no reason to go around looking for vague similarities and extend shameless “friend” requests - to use a Facebook metaphor - eking out frivolous culinary similarities in other cultures. Cultural exchanges, including culinary ones, happen out of a feeling of mutual respect - not condescension.

Perhaps the revolution can start at Puri.

 

                                      ----------------------------------------------

Wouldn’t it be poetic if the said “Draupadi Hotel” specialized in five cuisines and not three?

And the moment is here...

Okay, so here it comes - my first blog. The idea of the blog has been percolating for quite some time and I just wasn’t ready, in the sense that I could never seem to find the so called ‘right moment’. But I have resolved to make 2011 a year of doing rather than a year of dreaming. The year has kicked off to an unexpectedly good start and I’m happy to have added this blog to a list of things I have shipped.

What else makes me happy? Cooking and my art work. To me both the activities have a lot of similarities. They both need to be transformed, blended and appeal to the senses. The result of both offers the same sensations when presented in the right balance. Enough said - read the "About" page for more thoughts on this subject.

My blog predominantly sets out to offer such things that would stimulate your sensory reaction, be it food, or visual art. I chose to name my blog ‘Apple & Cinnamon’ for a simple reason that I love them both. The name also has an element of duality and their combination is as sensational as they are by themselves. It is all about the marriage of ingredients that give things the exotic touch, the perfect blend of the woodiness of the cinnamon and the sweet sour apple.

Hope you enjoy reading. And wishes for a superb happening next 11 and a half months.