Paneer Tikka Parathas

I made them last Sunday. We had some left-over paneer tikka from Saturday night and it sure seemed the best way to use it.

Ingredients:
For the filling
- Paneer Tikka (50 gms)
- Ajwain (1/4 tsp)
- Corriander, green chillies and salt to taste
For the dough
- Wheat flour (150 gms)
- Curd (1 tbsp)
- Oil (1 tsp)
- Salt to taste

Method:
1) Knead the flour with water as you usually do when making chapattis. Add the salt, curd and oil (in that order) while kneading.

2) Mash the paneer tikka (you can also grate it but I prefer to use my hands). Add the rest of the ingredients to it.

3) Make 2 portions of the dough and roll them as you would do for a chapatti. Put a generous portion of the filling in the middle of the chapatti. Then start folding up the edges of the chapatti with the filling inside. This is the only challenging part of the recipe. The art lies in making small folds at the edges. Once folded, flatten and roll it again like a chapatti. Only this time it will be smaller and fuller.

4) Shallow fry the parathas on both sides. Serve with some curd by the side, or green chillies, or for the large-hearted a dollop of butter.

Serves: 1 (two portions)

Fancy, eh?

A Matter of Food Literature

The food section of any well-known bookstore satiates a wide range of palates. On the shelf sits Tarla Dalal with her unique compilation of low-cal Jain snacks. Next to her sits the smaller digest-like Nita Mehta with her delectable Indian Thai dishes; and far from both the ladies, usually occupying a complete shelf, is Sanjeev Kapoor with his characteristic soups, snacks, dishes, desserts, post-desserts, post-coffee books. Phew. Of course, we have foren authors too with their ounces, lbs, extra virgin olive oil, bell peppers and other such ingredients which one tends to forget by the time you reach the supermarket.

Browsing through all these books at one go was de-appetising to say the least, and so I would just walk by, disappointed. And that's how it would have been if I had not glanced at the lower-most shelf of the food section at a once-spacious 'Crossword' store. Finally, a collection (albeit limited) of Indian writing on food! What more could I ask for?

I'm currently devouring two books from this collection:

1) "A Matter of Taste", a rich collection of essays, fiction and columns from yester-year newspapers on food. Some of the authors that adorn the pages of the book include: Salman Rushdie, Busybee, Mahatma Gandhi, Amitav Ghosh, Suketu Mehta,Vir Sanghvi, Jhumpa Lahiri and Mahasweta Devi. An absolute must buy for a true food fanatic. To give you quick taste, here is a para of "Past Times: First Tastes That Lasted Forever" by Vir Sanghvi:

'...People always expect me to say that I thought the tasting menu at Restaurant Daniel in New York was amazing (it was not) or that the twenty-two course banquet in Hong Kong represented one of the most memorable meals of my life. But the truth is that now, when I go to a restaurant, I can no longer behave like a simple punter. Part of me is always hard at work: Is the bread any good? Why haven't they poured the wine? Hasn't the fish been slightly overcooked, and so on. The memorable meals nearly all came when I did no food writing at all and was rarely judgmental about food. And, oddly enough many, if not most, were consumed at extremely unfancy places...'

2) And that brings me to the man himself, Vir Sanghvi, and 'Rude Food' his Gourmand Award winning book adjudged as the 'Best Food Literature Book in the World'. He also writes a section with the same title in Hindustan Times Sunday edition supplement, Brunch (which I don't subscribe to, cos like most people I suffer from RDS, as Seema has aptly termed it in http://256shadesofgrey.blogspot.com/2007/05/newspapers-need-diet.html). And interestingly, he also hosts a food and travel show on Discovery Travel & Living (Sundays 8:30 pm IST) which is called "A Matter of Taste"! I'm truly in awe of his writing and more so his acquired taste, backed with knowledge, on various cuisines of the world. A new-age food historian he is.

There are several more to add to the list of books on food writing, ones which I don't own yet but have read about at odd and end corners - A Historical Companion to Indian Food (KT Achaya) and Choice Cuts: A Miscellany of Food Writing (Mark Kurlansky).

A league of their own

I just finished reading an excellent article on the Irani restaurants in Mumbai. The only one that comes to my mind is Britannia in Ballard Pier. I’ve been there a few times and truly relished the salli boti and lagan-nu-custard. What I remember more distinctly though are the antique wooden chairs, white net table cloths, high ceiling with long fans, cat moving under the tables or sitting on them, the meticulous old Irani owner at the cash counter and of course the neatly written menu on the black-board. It has a distinct atmosphere of its own and uncannily it’s the same in any Irani restaurant that you go to, though it was not planned to be so. The figure alongside (borrowed from http://bombaylives.blogspot.com/) gives a peek into what I’ve just described, though not well enough. What is also interesting is that Irani restaurants, though diminishing in number just as the people who run them, maintain this same lazy, days-of-yore ambience even in the regime of McDonalds and Baristas. Not sure whether this has to do with obstinacy on the part of customers or the owner himself. Whatever it may be who’s complaining?

Talking about regimes Iranis can hardly be worried, given that Gen 1 of Iranis in Mumbai made the city their home in order to escape from the treacherous hands of a particular ruler in Persia in the early 20th century. To make a living, they set up eateries at building corners that were generally avoided by local superstitious shop-keepers. Soon, these became hot-spots for artists, writers and other professionals from the creative field - maybe there was something un-biased about the atmosphere that fuelled their imaginative thought.

I can’t help but mention some other delicacies, regular suspects at Irani restaurants, that will surely make you drool: brun maska, chicken potato pattice, egg rolls, dhansak, patra-ni-machi, and berry pulao (haven’t had this but from the description of it surely seems lip-smacking).

An obvious thought extension to Irani restaurants would be Parsi-owned bakeries – the likes of Merwans, Ahuras…but I’ll save that for another post.