Spiced up Nachos

Nachos are popular Mexican starters and fillers. It is made of simple corn-tortilla chips (imagine crisped up mini Naans), that are piled high with beans, salsa, sour cream, cheese, and guacamole. I don’t think I need to explain what salsa or guacamole is, but on principle, let me. Salsa is nothing but tomatoes, onions, garlic, jalapeno peppers, corn kernels, and beans, bathed and preserved in vinegar, salt, lime juice, and coriander leaves. There are several kinds of salsas, so this is just the basic form. Guacamole is a rich, creamy paste of avocados, onions, garlic, tomatoes, lime juice, and coriander leaves. Both salsa and guacamole are yummy dips for all kinds of chips.

I don’t know why I never thought of making nachos at home until I feasted on some of my friend’s home-made, lip-smacking nachos. Nachos are very easy to assemble at home, and they make excellent appetizers. So, I finally tried making (or rather, assembling) one recently, with a little bit of Indian twist to it.

Ingredients

1. ½ bag of corn tortilla chips (easily available in stores these days). Else, they are easy to make from tortilla. Cut tortilla into triangular wedges, and bake at 350 F for 15 minutes or longer until the wedges crisp.
2. 3 cups of Black beans ( one can even use cooked garbanzo beans or kidney beans - channa or rajma)
3. 1 onion finely chopped
4. 2 tomatoes finely chopped
5. handful of coriander leaves
6. 2 teaspoons of Chaat masala powder
7. 2 teaspoons of salt
8. 2 teaspoon of pepper
9. Juice of 2 limes (or the juice of 1 lemon)
10. ¾ cup of grated cheese (any cheese of your liking - but cheddar is fool-proof with this)
11. 1 ripe avocado
12. ½ cup of low-fat sour cream

Preparation

1. Prepare the Salsa by mixing together the beans, onions, tomatoes, chaat masala, 1 teaspoon of salt, 1 teaspoon of pepper, coriander leaves and juice of 1 lime.
2. I took a shortcut and prepared my own version of “guacamole”. I mashed the creamy pulp of the avocado with sour cream, and spiced it with salt, pepper, and the juice of ½ a lime.
3. Line the tortilla chips on a baking tray layered with aluminum foil or parchment paper.
4. Pile the chips with a spoonful of salsa, and the mixture of sour cream + avocado. Top it with a sprinkle of grated cheese.
5. Broil the chips in the oven for 3-4 minutes (or until the cheese melts). Do not over-bake/broil the chips, for they will burn easily and will become stiff and hard.
6. That’s it! Serve hot.

You can even add other Indian spices like turmeric, red chillies, and cumin while preparing the guacamole the authentic way.

This cannot get simpler, can it? :)

Vegetable Pulao

Pulao, Biryani, and other such variants are flavored rice made from aromatic spices and sauteed vegetables. I have always loved Pulaos/Biryanis. I used to pester my mom to make it, but she being an authentic Tam-Brahm lady, never really liked making spicy dishes that require a dozen or so masala ingredients. Although she has made several milder and tasty versions of the dish, they were never what I was looking for. I finally started experimenting on a formula that suited me, inspired from a host of sources, I have now arrived at an easy to prepare, go-to Pulao. In my early student days in the US, this used to be my signature dish - i.e., a dish that no roommate scoffed at ;).

Ingredients:

1. 1 medium-sized red onion - sliced into long pieces.
2. 1-2 cups of mixed vegetables (neglected veggies in the fridge will do, or use some from a bag of frozen mixed vegetables)
3. 5 cloves
4. 6 cardamom pods (the whole pods with the seeds)
5. 1 cinnamon stick
6. 1 Bay leaf (optional)
7. 3 teaspoons of Sindhi Biryani Powder (I don’t know why, I picked this up a few years back, and I love the flavor of the masala). Or you can use any garam masala, or biryani powder.
8. 2 cups of raw rice (I used plain white rice, not basmati)
9. 4 - 4.5 cups of water
10. Salt to taste
11. A tablespoon of oil
12. Some coriander leaves
13. Two tablespoons of yogurt.

Preparation:

1. Heat oil in a skillet.
2. Add cloves, cinnamon, cardamom and bay leaf and saute on medium heat until the spices turn fragrant (you could also slightly crush the spices in a mortar and pestle to bring out more flavor)
3. Once the spices are fragrant and begin to sizzle, add the chopped onion and saute till it turns translucent.
4. Add the mixed vegetables and saute till they become a little tender.
5. Add the biryani masala, and salt and stir well into the vegetables. You may additionally add chilli powder if you need more spice and heat.
6. Once the masala is well mixed into the vegetables, add raw rice and mix it well with the vegetables and the spice. If raw rice is sauteed in the oil and spices, it doesn’t stick to each other and turns out fluffy when cooked. Usually, Basmati rice is used, and it undoubtedly imparts a lovely, unique flavor. But ordinary white/brown rice should be fine too.
7. Transfer the rice+vegetables into a rice cooker (or pressure cooker).
8. Add 4 cups of water (or 4.5, if you don't like your rice to be al dente).
9. Sprinkle a handful of washed and cut coriander leaves. I add the leaves before cooking the rice, because as the coriander cooks and seeps into the rice, its flavor becomes much richer.
10. Mix two tablespoons of yogurt into the water+rice+coriander. I learnt this from my mother-in-law. The yogurt adds creaminess and a subtle flavor to the rice.
11. Cook the whole thing till the water is fully absorbed.

That’s it! Stir the cooked rice when ready so that it gets fluffed up, and serve with chips, vadaams, or raita.

As a variation, I sometimes add tomato paste to the vegetables. This turns out good too. Some friends of mine add black cardamom and star anise as well. Both are strong, potent spices, so go easy on them - perhaps add one each. Other friends add minced ginger and garlic before adding the onions. Coconut and poppy seeds are favorite spice blends too... but I will dedicate another post to one such exhaustive variation!

Since it is really simple to throw in spices, saute the vegetables and cook the rice, anybody can prepare this flavored rice dish.

Tapioca Upma

Tapioca upma is commonly known as Sabudana Kichidi in Maharashtra. Tapioca pearls are cooked and sauteed in a spice ground that mainly comprises of roasted peanuts and chillies to result in a warm, spicy meal. But when such dishes make their way to the south, hard bred people like me convert it into an Upma by adding familiar South-Indian spice blends to it.

So, this is another recipe that I took down from my mother-in-law and tweaked it generously to arrive at a Tamil variation of the Kichidi.

Ingredients (feeds four)

1. 4 cups of Tapioca pearls soaked in water for 8 hours. If you forget to soak it on time, worry not, just soak the pearls in lukewarm water for 4-5 hours.
2. ¾ cup of unsalted, shelled, peanuts
3. 5-6 dry red chillies (or green chillies if you prefer)
4. 1 medium onion, finely chopped
5. 1 teaspoon of brown mustard seeds
6. 1 teaspoon of cumin seeds / jeera
7. 1 teaspoon of Hing
8. 1 teaspoon of turmeric
9. 3 teaspoons of coriander seeds (dhania)
10. 1 teaspoon of bengal gram dhal / kadala paruppu / chana dhal
11. 1 teaspoon of Toor dhal / yellow or orange lentils / thuvaram paruppu
12. 1 teaspoon of urad dhal / spilt dehusked black gram / thuvaram paruppu
13. 2 tablespoons of oil
14. Salt to taste
15. Curry leaves and coriander leaves for granishing
16. The juice of half a lemon

Preparation

1. Dry roast the peanuts, coriander seeds, bengal gram dhal, toor dhal, urad dhal, red chillies and Hing.
2. Grind the roasted spices
3. In a pan, heat some oil. Add mustard seeds and let it splutter. Then add cumin seeds, pinched curry leaves, and turmeric and stir.
4. Let the diced onions join the party in the pan. Saute onion till it turns translucent. Stir on medium heat.
5. Next, add the drained tapioca (make sure to drain and squeeze out water, without mashing up the tapioca). Stir the tapioca to incorporate the onions (about 4 minutes)
6. Now add the ground spice powder (of peanuts and others) and stir well. Keep stirring the tapioca so that it blends with the spices and doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan.
7. Add salt, and cook the tapioca for about 8 minutes (stirring often). When the tapioca pearls cook, they turn glossy and translucent.
8. Finally, switch off the heat. Squeeze some lemon juice and garnish with coriander leaves. I made the unforgivable sin of not stocking up on enough coriander leaves - so my upma was devoid of its lovely aroma.

Since Tapioca is high in starch, the upma will be a little sticky. The spices may seem excessive, but they are absolutely necessary to add some flavor to the otherwise bland and starchy Tapioca. This upma goes down well with some creamy, cooling yogurt that cuts the edge off of the spices.

Tapioca Rice Vadaam

Vadaam is a sun-dried wafer that gets fried into a crispy accompaniment to rice. A century ago, hot tropical countries like India wasn’t blessed with a year-round bounty of vegetables. In the scorching hot summer months of April and May, everything wilts under the merciless eye of the Sun. So, our great grandmothers thought hard and came up with vadaams as tasty, crunchy substitutes for side-dishes that usually require vegetables. Vadaams are Indianized versions of chips that don’t require vegetables to make them. We do make plenty of vegetable chips too, though!

Vadaam is one of several forms of sun-dried food made in India. Some involve drying (and hence preserving) salted vegetables and fruits, while others involve drying out the moisture from starch - such as rice and tapioca. In South India, starchy foods are almost always available aplenty. So, we are adept at subjecting starch to every conceivable form of cooking. We cook them, pound them, grind them, dry them, bake them.... anything else I’m missing?

So, when the temperature soared to the 80s in my little town, I wondered if I should make vadaams too, for if I missed my opportunity this time, I would have to wait for a year to see the sun shining so merrily on us. Ever since this thought crept into my head in July, I planned to start the vadaam-making-process at the dawn of every weekend, but managed to entrap myself with other activities and projects. Finally, a week or so back, I put my foot down and decided that the vadaams shall be made, come hell or high water. I took down the recipe from my eager and enthusiastic mother-in-law, who by the way, is a huge patron of this blog! She is my most faithful reader and marketing agent for this little space - thank you so much, amma! :). Aside that, she is a great cook, who still does everything from first principles - including, vadaam making, thanks to my father-in-law’s knowledge and help.

The recipe she gave me sounded quite simple, so I geared myself and Anand to execute it.

Ingredients:

1. 1 cup of tapioca flour. I ground tapioca pearls in a coffee grinder and repeatedly sifted the coarse flour to get 1 cup of finely ground flour.
2. 7 cups of rice flour.
3. 16 cups of water
4. A huge piece of Hing soaked in warm water (or about 3-4 teaspoons of Hing. It may seem a lot, but Hing is a major flavoring. Besides, hing helps us stomach the starch).
5. 5-6 teaspoons of salt. Salt is always subject to individual preference, but this is a safe estimate, although it might seem like a lot. Remember, salt is a natural preservative.
6. 10 green chillies (or more depending on how spicy you like the vadaams. Our spice intake is mild, so 10 green chillies were just right for the 8 cups of flour).
7. The juice of 3 lemons (or more depending on how juicy the lemons are)
8. Strong arms to stir ;)
9. A few plastic sheets to lay out the wafers in the sun.

Preparing the Dough:

1. Mix the tapioca and rice flour.
2. Bring 16 cups of water to a boil in a deep, heavy bottomed vessel. I added a few spoons of sesame oil to the water to ensure the flour doesn’t stick too much to the bottom of the vessel. But I don’t think the oil made any difference!
3. Grind the green chillies and salt together (coffee grinder works). When the water comes to a boil, add this mixture and Hing, and stir well.
4. Next, slowly add the flour, simultaneously stirring to avoid lumps.
5. Once all the flour is added, reduce the heat to low and keep sirring (strong arms needed) until everything comes together as a glossy mass of dough. This was too much dough for me to successfully stir. So, Anand, grudgingly helped out :). (note to vadaam novices, start with half the measures)
6. Finally, switch off the heat. Add the juice of the three lemons and mix again.

Preparing the vadaams

1. Lay a few plastic sheets out in the sun. You can also use aluminium foil or wax paper - you basically need a material that won’t stick to the moist dough. Place paper weights, stones or bricks on the corners to avoid everything from taking off.
2. You need some kind of a press, with a hole at the bottom to squeeze out the dough to form patterns. We use a traditional murukku or thenguzhal press which looks like the bottom-right picture:

Moist vadaams on the left, dried vadaams on the right

One fills the lower part with the dough and then pushes down the lever-like press on top of the dough-filled part, and out comes the dough in a pattern that matches the template that has been fitted at the bottom of the press. We went with the “star - *” template - the wrong one for this kind of wafer apparently! But if you do decide to use this, squeeze out the dough in the form of short straight lines. The resulting shape will be like a squiggly line with little thorns sticking out - like a thin cactus. The right template to use is the one which has a bunch of concentric holes. Move/rotate the entire contraption as you press down on the lever, to form complex spirals of dough like the one in the picture.

Several such spirals will spew out from the numerous holes in the template. The vadaams will not expand in the heat, so you can squeeze out several such shapes close to each other. Refill the press with dough, press, draw squiggly spirals, and repeat. This is a tiring process. But it speeds up if you have handy-dandy helpers like Anand, who has actually done all this as a kid. He even used to sit and guard against crows and squirrels from tasting and devouring the vadaams. So, we took turns and finished forming the vadaams on the plastic sheet.

Typically, vadaams are left to dry and bake in the sun for about 8-10 hours everyday, for roughly 4 days, and sometimes even as long as a week. When the sun goes down, the sheets of vadaams are brought indoors, and if there is rain, they are left to dry under a fan...although fans are never effective and are just mitigating agents making sure the vadaams are not moist enough to go bad in the heat.

As per Murphy’s Law, the sun decided to hide behind the clouds when we finished squeezing out the vadaams. Within a couple of hours, it threatened to rain, and it did rain! Apparently I should have checked the weather more diligently before starting a full-blown ambitious project that is dependent on the weather! As Anand cursed and grumbled at me, I hit upon a rather obvious alternative - the oven! Sun gives heat, the oven gives heat too, right? So I tested one batch at 170 F in the oven (170 is the minimum temperature setting my oven allows - it corresponds to the “Warm” setting). I basically simulated the intensity of the Sun when it lashes over the Sahara desert in peak summer. The vadaams baked at this setting for 10 hours and they dried to a crisp, or so we thought. But I think the outsides baked faster than the insides. So I left the second batch in the oven for 10 hours at 170 F, and for 8 hours with the oven light on and the heat turned off.

This does go against the principle of energy conservation. But the weather decided to be murky the entire week, leaving me no choice. You will know the vadaams are fully dried if they are brittle and have no trace of white dough or moisture in them.


Frying
This is an easy enough step. Heat vegetable oil. When hot, drop in the vadaams and gently move it around encouraging it to expand. Do not wait till the vadaam turns golden-brown. Take them out when they have fully expanded in the oil and continue remaining creamish/off-white in color. Vadaams take just a few seconds to expand and fry in hot oil. So they are very quick to prepare. Make sure to reduce the heat of the oil after a few minutes of frying, for overheated oil makes burned, unevenly fried vadaams. My fried vadaams couldn’t retain their spiral shape because as they expanded in the heat, the tight, thorny spirals broke, resulting in pieces of fried vadaams. All because I used the wrong template on the press! They tasted good, so it was thankfully not a futile venture.

In principle, vadaams are easy to make. But keep in mind constraints like the weather and the other mistakes I did, and you will end up with a blunder-free experience!

Ulundu Vadai / Medu Vadai / Urad Dhal Vadai

Continuing with the Festive theme, the prescribed savory item that signifies celebrations and festivals is the Ulundhu Vadai. Vadais are crispy, deep fried, crunchiliciousness made of Blackgram Dhal, also known as Urad Dhal. These days, it’s much easier and time saving to buy the de-husked version of the pulses than go through the minor hassle of peeling and separating the husk after soaking the pulses in water. But the farther one starts from first principles, the better the output will be!

This kind of vadai is extremely easy to prepare, and is both mine and Anand’s favorites. The only catch is in forming the vadai and dropping it safely into the oil.

 
Ingredients

1. 1 cup of de-husked black gram dhal (urad dhal)
2. 2-3 dried red chillies
3. ½ teaspoon of Hing
4. Salt to taste
5. A few curry leaves
6. 1 teaspoon of ghee (optional)
7. Vegetable oil to fry - 2-3 cups

Preparation

1. Soak the urad dhal in water, for 1 hour
2. Drain the water and grind the dhal to a relatively smooth paste with the red chillies, hing, salt, and curry leaves, adding as little water as possible. My mother keeps stressing on adding as little water as possible.
3. Both mother and mother-in-law recommend mixing the resultant batter with a teaspoon of ghee. Ghee makes everything taste better!
4. Heat oil in a heavy-bottomed frying pan. Test if the oil is hot enough by dropping a pea sized amount of batter. If the batter sizzles and begins to fry immediately, the oil is hot enough.

Forming the Vadai

Urad dhal batter is generally sticky and mushy. It’s not greasy, but it likes to adhere to your hands, making it hard to form the vadai with your hands. So keep a bowl of water nearby to wet your fingers periodically - before and after touching the batter. Secondly, this kind of vadai requires a dainty hole in the middle (like a smaller donut) to ensure even cooking of the batter. Else the outside of the batter crisps up faster, leaving the insides uncooked and mushy. Not pleasant. So, traditionally, a wet banana leaf was used by women to dump a small ball of batter onto it, after which the batter was flattened out (with wet fingers), and a hole was made in the center. Then, after wetting one’s fingers again, the flattened batter was carefully removed from the leaf (by usually inverting the leaf) and gently transferred to the hot oil. Care must be taken to retain the hole, so that the vadai cooks evenly. If the batter was ground with too much water, it makes it much harder to gather slippery batter from the leaf.

These days, in lieu of banana leaves, we use pliant plastic sheets - one way to recycle/reuse the tonnes of plastic wrapping and covers we amass.

Form vadais on the plastic sheet/banana leaf and gently transfer them into the hot oil. Do not splash the batter into the oil, for the little bit of water in it can decide to dangerously splutter. Once the oil is hot, reduce the heat to medium/medium-high, else you risk burning the vadais outside. Turn the vadais gently until both sides cook/fry to a pleasant golden color and transfer them onto paper napkins to drain excess oil.

It is an art to form the vadais. One needs some relentless practice to from even shaped, perfectly formed vadais, so give yourself a pat on the back if you have come close enough to retain the elusive hole in the vadai! I have also come to confirm my mother’s theory that left over batter that sits in the fridge makes exceedingly crisp and wonderful vadais the next day! Of course, it is also accused of drinking a bit much oil in its post-refrigerated state, but the taste and crispiness makes one forget such trivialities :)

Variations:

Hotels add a teaspoon of baking soda to the batter to plump up the vadais. But home-made, conventional ones don’t have this ingredient.

Some people add a few spoons of raw rice to the soaking dhal, because ground rice makes the vadais even crispier. But again, the traditional ones skip the rice.

Finally, one can get creative and add finely chopped vegetables such as onions, carrots, spinach, ginger, etc. to the batter to give the vadais more crunch, texture and flavor.