Curry filled chickpea crepes

South Indian cuisine offers something very similar to Western crepes. The dosa. In Kolkata restaurants, dosas are made paper thin and crisp. This is very hard to achieve at home with the kind of skillet or non-stick pan most home kitchens possess. When my parents lived in Hyderabad, I found out that the crisp paper thin dosa does not exist outside of Kolkata. Many restaurants we ate at as well as all the neighbors that invited us over for meals made dosas that were soft and pliable. Anyways, the chickpea crepes I made turned out to be something in-between the Kolkata dosa and the softer dosa I ate in Hyderabad homes. I did not pay attention to exact measures, but this is a forgiving recipe. The filling, in my case, was thrown together with various bits and pieces I had as leftovers.

Ingredients:

For crepe,
chickpea flour
water
pinch of salt
oil for frying

For filling,
1 tsp mustard seed
1 tsp coriander seed
1 tsp cumin seed
1 small onion, chopped
2 medium potatoes, boiled, peeled and lightly mashed
1 cup peas
1/2 cup green beans (or any vegetable you would like to add), steamed
1 tsp turmeric powder
1/2 tsp salt or to taste
1/2 tsp black pepper (or chopped green chilli, if you so desire)
2 tsp oil

Method:
Mix chickpea flour with a pinch of salt and enough water to make a batter of easy-to-pour consistency, much thinner than traditional pancake batter. You want the crepes to spread thin easily and quickly.

Heat oil and add mustard seeds. When seeds sputter and pop, add cumin seed and coriander seed. Fry for half a minute and add onions. When onions are golden, in about 5-7 minutes, add all the filling ingredients to the pan and let cook together for about 5 minutes.

In a non-stick frying pan, heat 1/2 tsp oil, let it spread to coat the pan well. Pour about half a cup of crepe batter and spread out into a circle with the back of a spoon. The crepe should be thin and will have a slightly perforated texture. Let fry for about a minute to golden brown, thin add a few drops of oil on top and flip. Cook on the other side for another minute, then flip back over. Put a tablespoon of the filling in the center of the crepe and fold over the two sides on top of the filling. Then transfer to a plate. Repeat until either all the batter or all the filling is gone.

Serve warm with a lentil soup or a chutney or both. Or serve it just the way it is, it holds its own even without any condiments.

Black bean salad

Sometimes when I like the taste of something very much I try and figure out the individual components that went into it so I can make it myself. After having some Southwest egg rolls at one of our favorite restaurants, I bought black beans and frozen sweet corn, two foods I do not often cook. Then we were gone for a week on our Fall getaway to the mountains. Today when I picked up the can of black beans, I no longer felt like having rolls fried in oil. Instead I wanted something light and healthy, so decided this should become a salad. In the week we were gone our cherry tomato plants were falling over with ripe red fruit. The kids and I went out to pick them and they turned out to be about 3 cups full. Some of these would have to go into the salad too. I mixed up all the ingredients in the morning with a generous amount of lime juice and refrigerated the salad for a few hours until lunchtime. Letting it sit in the lime juice turned out to be a good idea, the salad tasted even better at lunchtime than it had done when I taste-tested it right after preparing in the morning.

Ingredients:
1 can black beans, drained and rinsed
1 cup cooked sweet corn kernels (I used frozen corn and steamed to cook)
1 cup chopped fresh tomato (I used cherry tomato)
2 Tbsp finely chopped red onion
1 tsp cumin powder
2 Tbsp lime juice
5-6 sprigs of cilantro, stems removed (chop coarsely, if desired, I did not)
1 fresh jalapeno, chopped (optional)



Method:
Mix all ingredients and chill for 4 hours or more, even overnight should be fine. Serve. I did not add salt because the canned beans had plenty. If you use dried beans that you soak and cook, then you will need to add some salt.

Stop light stir-fry

After the sugar high Halloween weekend, I crave some wholesome nutition, something light and packed with things that are good for me. No complex spices, no fatty meats, something simple. Looking through my fridge, I picked out some red bell peppers and green beans. The bright colors appealed to me, in a natural and healthy way, unlike all those artificial colored candies that were handed out all over the neighborhood for Halloween. I ate this with steamed rice and boiled orange lentils and a dash of salt and pepper.

Ingredients:

2 red bell peppers, cored and cut into thick strips

2 cups green beans, cut lengthwise into 2 inch pieces

1 Tbsp oil

salt to taste

Method:

Heat oil in frying pan. Add red bell peppers and green beans and cook with frequent stirring for about 7 minutes until veggies are crisp tender. (Optionally, throw in some chicken or tofu to make it a complete meal served over steamed rice or noodles.)

Orange lentils with green beans and winter squash

Red, yellow and brown leaves are strewn all over the backyard leading up to the woods that our house backs up to. With each gust of wind, more and more waft gently down to the ground. The temperatures have dropped and I smell winter in the cold gusty winds and the golden afternoon sunshine. Kolkata, the city of my birth, used to get mild winters like the cool Fall season here. This is a time when I want to cuddle up to my childhood memories in the warm comforting embrace of a blanket.

A hearty lentil soup with butternut squash and green beans very lightly spiced with five different seeds made for a warm and fulfilling lunch late. Fennel seed gives this soup a predominantly sweet and fragrant flavor.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup orange lentil
2 cups water
1/2 inch ginger root, peeled
1 tsp turmeric powder
1 small onion, chopped
1 cup peeled cubed butternut squash (or pumpkin or other hard squash)
1/2 green beans
1 tsp fennel seed
1 tsp fenugreek seed
1 tsp cumin seed
1 tsp mustard seed
1 tsp nigella seed
1 tsp coriander powder
1 Tbsp oil
1 tsp salt or to taste

Method:
Wash and drain lentil, then cook with ginger root and turmeric powder in 2 cups of water in a covered pot or pressure cooker till tender. In my pressure cooker, this took about 6 minutes. Heat oil in a frying pan and add mustard seeds. When mustard seeds sputter, add all the other seeds and fry for half a minute. Then add onions and fry till golden brown, about 7 minutes. Add green beans and butternut squash a fry for another 3-5 minutes. Finally add all this to the cooked lentil alongwith coriander powder and salt. Cook once more in the covered pot or pressure cooker for another 5-7 minutes until vegetables are tender. Serve with steamed rice or flatbread (roti, naan, poori, you pick...)

Whole wheat banana muffins

These are healthy breakfast muffins I made with my bit-of-this bit-of-that technique on a hurried Friday morning, after the kids had been bored all week with some same-old same-old breakfast foods (oatmeal, crepes, oatmeal, crepes, you get the idea...). These contain no refined sugar, though you would not have known it at all from the taste. They helped me use up some of the overripe-with-black-spots bananas sitting on my kitchen counter. They were a snap to put together as well - less than 10 minutes to mix the batter and then about 20 minutes in the oven on a timer while I could go about doing other things. I think I will be making these more often, and next time will try to note down exact measures of what I use.

These are best enjoyed warm, though Baby #1 ate 4 of these throughout the course of the day. Heck, even I ate 3 of these throughout the course of the day, they taste awesome warm but also taste good when cool. Beau loved them, none the wiser that the muffins had no refined sugar and had more whole wheat than white flour.

Ingredients:

whole wheat flour, about 3/4 cup

unbleached white flour, about 1/2 cup

1 tsp baking soda

3 Tbsp butter or margarine or shortening, whatever is "safe" for you

2 eggs

1/4-1/2 cup "safe" milk (rice, soy, cow, nut...even apple juice will do, I think)

2 tsp rice vinegar

2 large ripe bananas

1/2 cup raisins

Method:

Preheat oven to 350 F. Sift together flours and baking soda. Coarsely mix in butter with a fork, probably better if it is softened first, though mine was not. Mix in eggs. Add vinegar and enough milk to make a cake batter consistency, neither runny, nor stiff. Mash in bananas, fold in raisins. Fill muffin cups halfway full and bake in preheated oven about 20 minutes or until golden and a toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.

Kalakand - an Indian dairy dessert

When my brother heard that both my children have now outgrown their dairy allergy he suggested that I make something with khoa, which is a very condensed form of cow milk made by cooking milk for a long time over low heat to the point where it starts getting thick and pasty. Many Indian desserts are made with khoa, and it can be purchased as a block in the frozen section of South Asian grocery stores. My brother's particular suggestion was to make kalakand with khoa, paneer, ghee and sugar. I did not have any of these four ingredients at home, not even the sugar. But I did want to make kalakand and ended up making the first kalakand in my culinary life with the ingredients I had on hand and it tasted absolutely authentic too. So here is my recipe for kalakand using ingredients that are available at most US grocery stores - ricotta cheese and condensed milk.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup condensed milk

1 cup ricotta cheese

1 tsp cardamom powder (optional)

Method:

In a lightly greased non-stick pan, cook together the condensed milk and ricotta cheese on medium high heat with frequent stirring, until the mixture comes together in a pasty and somewhat grainy mass and easily leaves the sides of the pan. This took about 10-12 minutes. Turn off heat and let sit in the pan for another 5 minutes. Then pour out the mixture onto a lightly greased plate and lightly spread it out to uniform thickness with a spatula. Sprinkle cardamom powder on top. Let cool, cut into squares and serve.

My children have a preference for less sweet, when it comes to Indian food and dessert, so this is not overly sweet. To make it sweeter, increase the proportion of condensed milk to ricotta cheese or add some sugar when cooking the mixture. The cardamom powder could be replaced by other essences or flavors as desired, such as rose, or slivered almonds or pistachios.

Shown below is the cooled kalakand on the plate, up close to demonstrate the grainy texture. Kalakand is supposed to have a grainy texture because of the paneer that it is usually made from.

Fish, the Bengali way

This is a tilapia curry with little lentil dumplings and vegetables. The initial tryst with food allergies had scared me off fish and shellfish for quite some time. Now that my daughter is well over a year old and past all her protein allergies and insensitivities, I am zealously introducing her to the quintessential Bengali food - fish.

Having acquired some live fresh tilapia from the Chinese store yesterday, I proceeded to cook maccher jhol, i.e., fish curry, for lunch today. The people at the store had already de-scaled, gutted and chopped the fish making the task of cooking it considerably simpler. But between the two kids and my still lingering cold, I was kept busy and tired for the greater part of the morning, So I decided to throw in a few other things into the dish and make it an all-in-one shortcut meal. In went some moong daler bori, greens beans, butternut squash and potato. Bori in Bengali is a miniature dumpling, usually made of some kind of lentil and shaped like a Hershey's Kiss. As the name indicates, the bori I used is made of moong lentil. The resulting dish came out tasting very much like the bori maach my mother used to cook, with more than a hint of sweetness from the butternut squash.

Masoor dal shedhho or boiled masoor lentil steamed in a stainless steel container while cooking rice, fried papad and some leftover mishti doi nicely rounded out lunch, and made it almost festive.

Ingredients:

1 lb Tilapia, skin on and cut into steaks

1 tsp turmeric powder

1 tsp salt

1/4 cup moong dal bori

1 cup peeled and cubed butternut squash

1 cup green beans, cut into 2 inch pieces

1 medium potato, peeled and cubed

1 tsp mustard seeds

1 tsp turmeric powder

1 tsp cumin powder

1/2 tsp salt or to taste

3-4 green chillies, slit lengthwise (optional)

1/2 cup water

Oil for deep frying bori and fish

Method:

Wash the tilapia steaks, rub 1 tsp turmeric and 1 tsp salt all over them and set aside for half an hour. Deep fry bori in medium hot oil until brown, about 1-2 minutes, drain and set aside. Do not let them burn, they fry real fast. Then fry fish pieces in oil to get them crispy brown, about 5 minutes on each side. Drain from oil and set aside.

In a non-stick pan or wok, heat 2 tsp of oil and add mustard seeds. When seeds sputter, add the squash, potato and green beans, remaining 1 tsp turmeric, cumin, salt to taste, green chillies, if using, and fry for about 5 minutes. Then add the fried bori and the water, cover and let cook until veggies are cooked through, about 7 minutes. Finally place the fish pieces in this gravy, adding more water if you wish to have more jhol or gravy. Let cook for a few more minutes till the gravy comes to a boil and turn off heat. Serve over steamed rice.

The picture below shows fried bori, fried tilapia and prepped veggies, before being cooked into a gravy. Note that the tilapia should be fried so thoroughly as to be edible at this point.