Cooking on the Sigri

Back to old fashioned cooking

When a friend sent me 'Rots'. Thick rotis with designs embossed on them dipped in ghee. They tasted out of this world. The secret lay in cooking it slowly on sigri. Great I also started experimenting. Ever faithful Guddu was more than happy. We bought kilos of koyla and found a spot near the garage. Inaugurated it with dum ki chole biryani. It was made in huge quantities but it improved with each day. 

This was the final product. Added on was a dash of lime and a slice of onion.

It was garnished with some mint leaves.

Just for memory's sake the little achar jug I won in some game in the Ladies' Club and is filled with mango pickle that yet another friend gifted me.

aloo chhole biryani

            Aloo chhole biryani

Returned from Mumbai and was forced to order food from outside as the mess goes on chutti on Sunday evenings. Frightened of the traffic particularly on a weekend asked for home delivery. It turned out to be fairly appetising food  that included a aloo-chhole biryani. It came in a earthen matka sealed with atta. Decided to copy it back home and this is how Guddu served us in a huge pan.

 The problem of abundance is that we landed up with more chhole and less rice. Even the aloos were scarce. However it was enjoyable.

Please note the beautiful BSF mats with the Punjab border's panther  embroidered on it. They are made in Ferozepur by special Muslim embroiders who do the zardozi work with care.

A special Lunch for D2

Dinaer was leaving by the five o’clock flight to Mumbai. So in a feast fit for a king Kyar Singh dished out Vegetable biryani. The recipe had just come in the Rajasthan Patrika’s ‘Parivar’ pullout. It went with aloor dum. My Bengali taste buds taking over. Arhar ki-dal and accompanied by cucumber-tomato-onion raita.

You can see my famous Jaipuri lac-bangles. Nowadays they set it with coloured Swaroski crystals. The more the rows of crystals the more expensive it is.

My dry decorations have survived nearly eight years of transfers and storms (personal and otherwise). They were made by two wonderful gardeners in my lovely paradise of Jallandhar. They were so tiny and thin that one wondered how they were recruited into BSF. Before memory fails me they went by the name Haldar and Nag. Dear husband called them my country cousins. They grew giant sized dahlias and chrysanthemums and I wish I could mummify my garden and carry it with me. So may be this was part of the dream.

I almost forgot the Bhindi one of Dinaer’s favourites was made as well.

So here goes the recipe:

You need Rice -1and a half cup, one medium sized cauliflower, onions three, oil four tablespoons. Kyar Singh added peas as well instead of potato as recommended in the recipe.

For the Masala paste

Cinnamon –one, cloves-3-4, green cardamom, dhania powder, jeera, saunf, lalmirchi and ginger 3 inch.

For the paste add water and grind it into a smooth paste.

In a nonstick pan add oil and fry the onions till they are brown then add the masala paste. Keep gas on sim for 2-3 minutes. Then add 3 cups of water, and let it cook. When it begins to boil add the washed and cleaned rice. Cook for 10-15 minutes with the lid on.

However, Bahadur cooked it in the pressure cooker and waited for 1 and half whistle?

What Does Cooking mean to me ?

What does cooking mean to me?

Cooking meant staring at my mother bringing forth mouth watering samosas and delicious biryanis in the kitchen from apparently inedible ingredients. I wondered if I could ever become a magician like her. Ma didn’t like having me hanging around the kitchen. She would shoo me out saying, ‘You will always have to cook all your life once you are grown up.’ Occasionally I would manage to sneak out a samosa before the whole batch was ready. Or she would let me taste a bit of the fried vegetables going into the biryani. But she was deeply offended if I swallowed her naryial laddoos meant for the puja. The offerings to gods were sacrosanct one couldn’t play around with that.

As one started living in hostel and had to face the occasional strike by the mess workers one was forced into cooking a simple meal of boiled rice with vegetables thrown in had with a dollop of butter. This proved to be quite a success amongst hungry friends and my Bengali bhaat was a staple during those days. Another easy and nutritious meal was bread and scrambled eggs with some potatoes added to make it filling.

Now that I look back I can understand my mother’s fear that all daughters have to fall in to the drudgery of cooking. She wanted me to escape such a conventional life and wished I would excel in academics, be career oriented and not tied to the kitchen.

Surprisingly, life has allowed me to look upon cooking as a pleasure since the truth must be told my husband’s job provides me the luxury of trained cooks. So I have spent a greater part of my life following recipes from different women’s magazines. I also love watching cookery programmes on TV. I am fascinated by the sparklingly clean utensils and brand new gadgets on the show. Although, the women who accompany the cooks on the show and go, ‘oooh-so-delicious’ grate my nerves.

I have turned out delicious cakes, soufflés and kulfis to the delight of my sons. They have adored my concoctions of chicken and mutton curries from various regions of India. I have diligently kept cuttings of interesting recipes published in the Hindi newspapers. Now my file is bursting in the seams with them. Some have turned yellow and smell of various curry powders over the years. In an attempt to preserve it for the future I got them scanned and downloaded into a CD.

Every season has a particular favourite fruit or vegetable. Some are not so popular and some downright rejected. I have tried to tempt them to accept or at least try them out. The favourites are easy to work on. One can have gobi-ka-parantha, aloo gobi sukhi, or in a curry form. The curry could be seasoned with achar-ka-masala or with Bengali spices.

But how does one make lauki delicious or sarson-ka-saag palatable to the young ones?

So often enough the rotis are stuffed with various vegetables; and pilaus are made with methi and palak.

I often experiment with sweets since dear husband has a weakness for it. Once while offering a traditional Bengali pathishapta, he declared it as pura of his village days only exception being that I should not stuff it with mawa. So now my cooks are ready with the pura sweetened with artificial sweeteners at the end of each meal.

As we grow older the search is on for foods that are steamed or stir-fried and eventually of course life comes a full circle as one must learn to live with as little food as possible. To realize that all this is a chimera ‘maya’ and one must control one’s senses and not indulge them; in our quest for salvation.