Thursday, June 30, 2011

Poornam Kozhakattai

I thought I’d try and be an ideal Iyer-maami for once and start with a dish that is offered to Lord Ganesha. In the Hindu (Iyer) tradition, Ganesha is regarded as the remover of all obstacles, so it’s customary for us to start anything by worshiping Him and invoking His blessings. So here are my symbolic offerings through my experience of making Kozhakattai! I know my mom will be proud of at least this act of mine. 
Every year, on Ganesh Chathurthi (Lord Ganesha’s birthday), the primary celebratory item on the menu is Kozhakattai (Modhakam). It is rumored that this is Ganesha’s favorite dish. Broadly, there are two varieties of this rice dumpling - sweet and savory. In almost every festival, we try to have a combination of both sweet and savory dishes to balance out the palate, and to symbolically portray the balance and contrast our Life offers. The sweet version (the most common version) has a scrumptious filling of coconut and melted jaggery (known as poornam). This filling is stuffed into cute pockets of rice-flour balls, and then steamed to perfection. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? :). Yeah, so I thought too.

As an adolescent and teenager, my designated “job” during Chathurthis was to pinch out the rice balls, make nimble pockets with my fingers, stuff the filling and neatly fold the corners to make a purse. If I may say so, I was quite good at making the “purses”. My mom and great aunt were much pleased that I could put this skill down on my matrimonial-resume ;). So again, I thought - how hard can this be? Until the day I made my own, I didn’t realize the precision and skill required to make the perfect consistency of rice-flour dough and the jaggery-coconut filling. Therein, is the real skill.

Preparing the rice-flour dough (You need: 1 cup of water, 1 cup of rice flour,  a teaspoon of salt and sesame oil)
Armed with Meenakshi ammal’s book and measurements, I set out to make the rice-flour dough. I have to say that this step is easy-peasy.
1. Boil 1 cup of water with a teaspoon of gingely (sesame) oil and a teaspoon of salt.
2. When the water comes to a boil, add 1 cup of finely ground rice flour (note the easy 1:1 proportion)
3. As you add the rice-flour, start stirring the mixture continuously to avoid forming lumps.
4. Keep stirring (for about 4-5 minutes) till the mixture comes together as a nice lump of dough. (Note: I switched off the heat within 2 minutes or so and continued stirring in the remaining heat. If you find the dough to be sticking to the bottom of the vessel, remove the pan from heat). This step requires a strong arm, so employ a male member of the household if your arms tire.
5. Once the dough comes together looking “glossy” (meaning the flour is reasonably cooked), transfer it onto a wet piece of cloth (any thin cotton cloth works fine.. just ensure the dye on the cloth does not run and stick to the dough. It’s safest to go with a white cloth). Wrap the dough into a tight ball in the cloth, so it continues to remain moist. The dough cracks if it becomes dry.
6. Let it cool a bit. Gently knead the dough when it is slightly cool and ready to be made into balls. But keep it covered in the moist cloth.

Preparing the coconut-jaggery filling (poornam) (You need: ¾ cup of powdered jaggery, 1 cup of coconut gratings, and 1 teaspoon of powdered cardamom). My re-attempt of poornam making is here.
1. Add a teaspoon of water to a heavy bottom pan (or a not so heavy-bottomed pan - doesn’t matter much).
2. Powder Jaggery into little bits. In the US, it’s a lot of work to powder the balls of hard, stone-like  jaggery. A trick I use is - stick the jaggery into the microwave for about 30 secs (or more depending on the amount of jaggery), and crumble the heated, loosened jaggery with your fingers. Caution: Do not over heat, or you will end up with a melted puddle of jaggery.
3. Add ¾ cup of powdered jaggery into the pan, and stir till it melts and begins to froth up in little bubbles (Note: Stir the jaggery on sim, or medium heat)
4. At this point, add 1 cup worth of grated coconut (I approximated here, for the cookbook says the gratings of 1 big coconut - I had no inclination for hunting a big coconut, cracking it open, and grating it).
5. Continue stirring the mixture on sim/low heat, till the mixture becomes “sticky” and devoid of liquid (for 6-7 minutes)
6. Remove from heat, and add one teaspoon (or more) of powdered cardamom.  Allow it to cool. The cooled filling should be a sticky, gooey mixture of jaggery and coconut. It shouldn’t be runny or hard -must be just right.

Putting the two together
1. Once the rice-flour dough is cooled, take a little ball and pinch and flatten the ball between your fingers, as if you were making a bowl (recall your days of playing with clay and play doh). Keep a cup of sesame oil nearby, and dip your fingers in the oil to avoid them from sticking to the dough and tearing the bowl/pocket you are creating.
2. Place a teaspoon (more or less) of the cooled poornam filling into the pocket, and seal the edges by bringing them up into a knot, and press them. The end result should like a draw-string purse.
3. Grease idli plates with some sesame oil, and place the stuffed kozhakattais on them. Two per plate if they are small-medium sized. If you don’t have idli plates, you can devise your own steamer. You can use a vegetable steamer etc.
4. Bring some water to a boil in a tall, deep vessel (the ones used to cook pasta). Place the idli plates inside it, and make sure the water doesn’t touch or come above the bottom-most idli plate... if that’s case, your bottom kozhakattais will turn out soupy.
5. Close the pan (with a lid that has a vent for allowing the steam to escape) and cook on high heat for 10-11 minutes.
6. If the kozhakattai’s color is changed from pale white to a creamy beige and it looks soft, and the filling oozes through here and there, then you know it is cooked! Transfer onto a plate and eat away.

Lessons learned from past mistakes:
I realize I need more “visuals” to demonstrate the making, filling and sealing of the kozhakattai. Will take more helpful pictures the next time around!

Let me bring your attention to point number 5 of the filling preparation stage (the step highlighted in red). This is a tricky step, the most crucial step that decides whether your filling will be runny and spoil the kozhakattai by making it sloppy and goopy, or if your filling will turn into a hard candy, making the kozhakattais inedible.The proof is in the stuffing, indeed. Unfortunately, Meenakshi ammal doesn’t provide a concrete clue for us novices to know when to remove the filling from the heat. In my case, I kept stirring the mixture because I wanted a liquid-less state (as the book suggests), but somewhere I went too far (despite not reaching the liquid-less state). I realized that I shouldn’t be heating the jaggery for too long as it would turn into candy, so I removed it when this fear crept in. However, it was a bit too late. The jaggery was just past the right consistency. My poornam filling was chewy - it was thankfully not hard, but regretfully not soft and gooey either. When I asked my mom and mom-in-law to solve this for me, both couldn’t verbalize the exact clues to look for, to check if the filling was ready. It is an intuitive feeling, they say. But I haven’t reached that stage of intuitive cooking yet. So I will continue to explore, and hopefully offer some tips on the exact time to stir, the heat at which to stir, and the consistency to look for to get that perfect yummy texture. If you have words of wisdom to offer, please do!

(Update: the poornam turned out right in my second attempt. All it takes is to stir the jaggery+ coconut mixture for exactly 6-7 minutes on low heat.).

And here was the output :)










Wednesday, June 22, 2011

The Meenakshi Ammal Project

My husband Anand and I watched the popular movie Julie and Julia recently. I never expected Anand to be even remotely interested in it. But to my surprise, he not only watched the entire movie, he watched it with much interest! It also sparked an “idea” in him. The movie is based on this woman Julie Powell who resorts to cooking as a solace to her stressful life. Through cooking, she finds meaning, purpose, and contentment in her life. She takes on the project of executing and blogging about all the 524 recipes from the encyclopedic book on French cuisine written by the legendary chef Julia Child, who made French cooking accessible to the ordinary American housewife. Julie set a deadline - 365 days to execute and write about all 524 recipes. The experience taught her the rewards of perseverance, and the joy of focusing one’s energy on a constructive and fun project.

Upon seeing the movie, Anand encouraged me to kick-start a similar project to recreate all the hundreds of recipes documented by our South-Indian, Tam-Brahmn cooking legend, Meenakshi Ammal. At a time when cook books were unheard of, and it was uncommon for a timid Tam-Brahm woman to bravely venture out of her kitchen to even think of publishing her recipes, Meenakshi Ammal was a true pioneer. Almost every Tam-Brahm bride since the 1950s has been gifted a copy of her books to initiate into the ways of authentic South-Indian-Brahmin cooking. And I am no exception. My father-in-law gifted all three volumes of her books - “Samaithu Paar” (Cook and See, literally speaking). 


To be honest, I was never that interested in learning to cook the dishes of my specific Tam-Brahm community. I love the rasams and the curries, the dosais and the idlis, but took them mostly for granted. My palate wanted to explore other flavor combinations. I was eager to learn the mechanics of making a delightfully light and fluffy roti, the aromatic chole masala, the different flavorful sauces of Italian cuisine, and master the lusciously honeyed world of baking. But having dabbled in all of the above, I have come a full circle now as I desire to perfect the cooking traditions of my bustling community. My heart lies in my traditional food; as open as I am to other cuisines, I am most content with rasam rice. I also realize how inadequately trained I am in my own cooking traditions. I have been cobbling together my recollections of my mother’s ways and her dictated recipes, but have never invested time to learn them properly. I used to smugly skip an ingredient or two - such as curry leaves, or hing, which I thought were just minor garnishing entities, and would end up with a dish that would surely lack in its prime authentic taste. That’s when I understood the significance of every little ingredient, and the unique flavors and roles they play in our cooking. I find South-Indian cooking to be the most challenging in terms of precisely replicating the flavors and nuances of textures, perhaps because I’m more aware and tuned to its authentic taste. Most people can make sambar and rasam, but only some can nail the exact flavors.

There are also some people who believe South Indian food isn’t healthy or nutritious due to the excessive amounts of carbohydrates, the overcooked and few vegetables used per dish, the liberal amounts of mustard oil, coconut oil used, the lack of enough protein, and the cloying levels of ghee, sugar, and cream used in the heavenly saccharine sweets. Obviously, there is some truth to it. But these foods suited the lifestyle of our ancestors. And this was the very best the women could innovate given the limitations on the kinds of vegetables, fruits and grains that were available during different times of the year, not to mention the vagaries of monsoon and the financial atmosphere. Without the luxury of supermarkets that perennially offer a wide range of vegetables, fruits, and specialized ingredients from across the world, our great-grandmothers had to think out of the box to stretch a buck, or a cup of rice, to feed a dozen or more hungry mouths. Rice was the staple in the tropics for it grew abundantly. If rice is powdered or ground into a batter it helps to feed more mouths (4 cups of rice that go into making idli batter feed more people than if cooked). Living in the hot tropics, people didn’t even have refrigerators back in the day to preserve food. If there was extra milk, it had to be consumed or converted to curd, butter or ghee. And then the butter and ghee had to be used up. And so on... So although one can argue about nutritional concerns, I still deeply respect and laud the strategies and adaptions that went into our cooking traditions.

But in today’s age, there is always room for tuning the recipes to make them more nutritious without compromising on much of the taste. Indulging in a few sweets and savories on days of festivities is not going to cause a dent, or sudden bloating. Everything in moderation is safe and sane. Besides, I think one needs to try and honor the traditions of festivities as much as one can, for women like Meenakshi ammal dedicated their life to perfecting the unique sweets and savories. The least we can do is create a few pieces of the sweets and eat them while we still can!

Meenakshi Ammal’s measurements and ratios are precise to the tee. The books have been quite handy to refer and follow during the making of specialized sweets and savories. I have a lot of respect for this sweet old woman who braved life’s tragedies and emerged by immortalizing her name and skill. I definitely need to pay my tribute to her. So, I start my Meenakshi Ammal project. I will recreate all the (350+) recipes from her three books, and will write about my experiences and revelations. But much to Anand’s disappointment,  I’m setting no deadline, for I’m just being realistic :). I hope to finish all the recipes within my lifetime for sure. And I am glad that I already have prepared quite a few, so I can happily check those items off the list! (although, I don’t have photographic evidence for all of them).

I don't expect any fame, recognition, kudos, books, or movies through this attempt of mine. It’s just a simple, straight-forward tribute, which also serves a practical purpose - I get to feed myself and Anand! I suspect that's the reason why Anand has been egging and imploring me to do this ;). He is a very willing recipe tester, and a merciless, honest critic with a very sophisticated Tam-Brahm-Kumbakonam-trained tongue :). So, if I honestly gloat about a successful dish, believe me, that is indeed a golden dish worthy enough to be served to the toughest Kumbakonam maama!

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

A Tribute to Cooking

I’m infamous for having been an extremely fussy eater as a child and for steadfastly remaining anorexically thin for the most part of my life thus far (although that phase has ended quite dramatically now). So, no astrologer would have predicted this. I would take ages to complete a bland meal of curd, rice, and naarthangai (dried and salted pieces of a tart fruit that is supposed to be a good digestive aid). I was that kid who needed her class teacher to check her lunch box of its emptied content at the end of lunch break. I liked only two vegetables, and perhaps one fruit. I didn’t even care for chocolates, pastries, or ice creams. If you gave me a box of exotic chocolates, I would carefully place the box in the refrigerator and will forget about it till I am reminded of it. If you pleaded with me to try one, I'd graciously eat one, or perhaps two, if I’m in the mood to please you. But I did like something. What I did like (but in moderation) was the unholy, unhealthy, fried food varieties - crispy dosai, chips, vadams, om-pudi, murukku, etc. The only exception to this was idli with (and only with) tomato-onion chutney. In displaying at least this much enthusiasm for food, I was able to call myself reasonably normal.

In short, I can’t call myself a foodie. It took me a long time to realize what “food craving” or gluttony meant; or for that matter, even properly understand what pangs of hunger meant to the tummy. I was totally impervious to it. That shows how blessed and fortunate my life has been.

Not sure when I crossed over, but at some point, food started to interest me. This interest was not in eating, but in cooking. I started watching cooking shows with my mother, intently observing the various smart techniques that converted raw vegetables and grains into delectable dishes. I viewed, and still continue to view the kitchen as a mini-science lab. There is science and precision to everything, and it excites me to recreate a dish as if I am recreating a fun experiment in the lab. Add a dash of creativity, and the experience only gets better. I also love basking in the thrill and joy of creating something that my family would relish, appreciate, and enjoy. I realized this quintessential "Joy of Cooking" when I was left by myself (in the kitchen) to feed my father and myself for two short weeks.

Though some may not relate to this “joy” (which is obviously subjective), cooking is essentially a basic necessity that everybody needs to acknowledge and appreciate. As social animals, men came together over food (and hunting). Sharing food was a custom that the earliest cave men (and ape) societies practised. The generous gesture of sharing your source of sustenance brings together communities and societies, and fosters communal harmony. Food-sharing has always been the center of any celebration, for food is the most vital part of our survival. We express our happiness and sorrow in the kinds of food we eat and distribute. And cooking was almost a turning point in our evolutionary game. Cooking meant we could eat and digest more plants and animal parts to suit our body’s constitution. This enlarged the set of items we could subsist on. It meant we could live even on tough roots, grains, and tubers, and weather droughts. The more items we creatively cooked, the more protein and vitamin-enriched foods got into us, helping us evolve into a more healthier, smarter species. We were one of the fittest who could survive, thanks to our tools, our ability to make fire, and the ability to adapt and change what Nature offers us to something that suits us (of course, we are also paying the price for this arrogance, but that’s another issue). But cooking is one such highly useful skill we acquired, and cannot do without. It deserves its own tribute.

I believe cooking is one of the most enduring, significant gifts you can give to your family. A happy tummy is a precious state of contentment! I have heard poignant stories of my great grandmothers who toiled in their kitchens, working with flimsy wood burning stoves, rugged manual appliances, and a lean budget to unfailingly deliver sumptuous dishes. It’s inspiring and touching to think of these women who selflessly worked themselves to the bone to keep their family well-fed. Despite the bleak finances, their pitiable physical ailments, the number of mouths to feed, and the very limited groceries available, they were smart and resourceful enough to always find a way to whip up something efficient, tasty, and relatively healthy. It’s humbling to think of their times in contrast to mine. In this pampered age when I am blessed with a plethora of fancy and time-saving appliances to grind, puree, shred, chop, dice, slice, heat, freeze, whip, beat, bake, clean, and do everything else in between, when I mostly have only two tummies to feed, when I have the blissful option of freezing and reheating food, and when I am fortunate to receive the help of my spouse, I still get overwhelmed. Even two hours of cooking everyday sounds daunting. When it’s time to celebrate a festive occasion, as much as I am excited to try out the authentic sweets and savories, I also keenly dread the aftermath of cleaning, and well, sore legs. And at the end of such long days when I have the feeling of having spent my entire life in the kitchen, I reflect on my great-grandmothers, grandmothers, grandaunts, mother, and every other woman in my ancestry, and bow down to their dedication, applaud their mammoth efforts, while also resenting their stifling, confined life.

So, this blog is mainly a tribute to all the kind and wonderful women, and to their art of cooking that has passed down generations and stood the test of time and varied palates! There are so many awesome cooking blogs that have spread like wild mushrooms. This feeble effort of mine pales in comparison. But I wanted a space to record my experiences and lessons learned from my culinary adventures, so to say. Recreating all the ingenious recipes of my ancestors is my way of acknowledging their hard-work and ingenuity. In doing so, I pay homage to them in my little way. By ancestors, I don't mean just my South-Indian ancestors, but I mean in a larger sense - the whole world of human beings is one family.

This blog will likely not contain any fancy recipes, for I mostly follow tried and tested recipes, and haven’t gotten to the stage of innovation yet. I don’t promise on delighting your visual senses with lovely photos of tastefully (and artfully) presented appetizing dishes, for I neither have the skill, the time, nor the equipment required to do so (as evidenced by the header image). But I will try to present decent-looking dishes with stories, suggestions, lessons learned, and little bits of adaptions and techniques. Every dish has a story behind its creation and cooking. My aim is to relate and record the story.