Idlis

After pissing around forever, the CC has finally managed to make the idlis of his dreams.

Fluffy, fluffy, fluffy, fluffy, fluffy deliciousness.

Here are the practical problems in a nutshell:

The CC lives in a colder climate. The CC lives in a climate where there is serious temperature variation between day and night. The CC lives in a drier climate.

All of these are real problems that need to be solved. Many of these do not apply to the Californicators or those in God's Waiting Room, the Floridians. Congratulations on your luck!

Ingredients

1 tbsp fenugreek seeds (soaked)
urad (soaked)
idli rava (read below)

patience (and lots of it!)

Recipe

Soak the fenugreek seeds and the urad for 6-8 hours.

Grind the crap out of the stuff to produce an extremely smooth paste with as little of the soaked water as possible.

Now, add 2.5 portions of the idli rava by volume. Add some water to make a thickish paste.

Now, comes the patience part. You need to let the stuff ferment in a warm-ish place at a relatively stable temperature. What only takes overnight in India can easily take four days out in the US. An oven with a pilot light works wonders.

Some auxiliary observations:

Do not add salt up front. This prevents the sourdough from forming.

Do not use chlorinated water.

If the batter seems dried out, add water and stir periodically.

The thing will ferment eventually, and you will get fluffy soft idlis.

Patience, young Jedis!

Upma

The CC has been craving this but he had run out of ingredients. To add insult to injury, a friend mentioned via chat that she was making it. The CC could've killed her for bringing it up on a day where heavy downpours coincided with unachievable cravings.

So an quick trip to the store the next day, he set out to make it.

The idea is simple. Take finely ground wheat (cream of wheat, farina, rava), and cook it with spices till it's light and fluffy. The similarity to both couscous (tiny cooked pasta), grits (tiny bits of corn), and innumerous similar dishes worldwide should be noted.

Ingredients

1 cup rava (cream of wheat)
1 small onion (finely diced)
2-3 green chillies (finely chopped)
1/2 cup broken cashewnuts
assorted finely diced vegetables (carrots, peas)

1 tbsp mustard seeds
1 tbsp urad daal
asafoetida
8-10 curry leaves

1-2 tbsp lime juice

Recipe


Fry some mustard seeds at medium heat, add the urad daal and the asafoetida, followed by the curry leaves. Apologies for the bad quality of this picture but the CC had to get to the next step before the daal burnt.

Add the onions, green chillies, and let it fry for a while.

Add the cashews and let them fry.

Now, we need to roast the rava at medium to medium high heat. This step cannot be hurried. It is the source of the deliciousness thanks to Master Maillard. If you don't do this, or try to speed it up, you will end up with boiled wheat (which tastes about as good as it sounds.)

The mixture needs to be stirred continuously until it turns a pale brown. Do not let it burn.

The vegetables should go in towards the tail end.

This is the hardest step to describe. There are two ways to do this. The "Indian" way, or the CC's way.

The Indian way involves adding the roasted rava to water. This requires you to correctly gauge the amount of water and lime ahead of time, and mess around with splashage. The CC's way is slower but will get you flawless mess-free results that are indistinguishable from the original.

Add water a few tablespoons at a time using a tablespoon. Do not "pour". Stir, and break up the lumps. The idea is to let them steam in the tiny amount of water. Keep repeating this quite slowly until it becomes hard to break up the lumps at which point stop adding water. Towards the end, you should add the lime juice if you like. Yes, the CC is aware that these instructions sound like "get off two stops before the last one" but what can he do?

Take the pot off the heat at the end. Even the modest heat coming off a gas stove will destroy it. After all this work, you don't want to blow it in the last step without even realizing it.

Do this right and you will end up with a light and fluffy delight.

Do this wrong and you will end up with something that looks like fratboy upchuck after an all night kegger.

The CC knows he won't earn any points for subtlety with that simile but readers "in the know" will give him high marks for dead-on accuracy.

Fluffy delicious upma

Akoori

A spicy Parsi breakfast recipe.

Classic Indian (North Indian and Gujarati) spices combined with French technique.

Toss in the tomato and you have multiculturalism before the word (and world) even knew it existed.

There are probably as many recipes as there as Parsi families, and there are all kinds of variations ("fried cubed potatoes") but why let details stop us from enjoying a classic meld of New World elements, Indian spices and French technique?

Ingredients

6 eggs (beaten)
1 finely diced onion
4 tbsp ginger-garlic paste
3 green chillies (diced into very thin rounds)
2 large tomatoes diced
2 tbsp cumin seeds
salt and pepper to taste

Recipe

First up, the CC should observe that all egg recipes should only be cooked at two temperatures -- low, and medium low, and the latter is reserved for omelettes. If there is one piece of French technique that will serve you exceedingly well, it's this one.

The mise-en-place.

Fry the onion at medium low heat.

Add the ginger-garlic paste, and fry for a bit. At each time, you want to control the wetness of the dish making sure you are actually frying not steaming in the released water.

Add the green chillies, and the cumin. Fry for a bit.

Add the tomatoes, and fry for a bit. Turn the heat down to low.

Add the eggs. Since you are scrambling, pull in the cooked eggs from the outer edge to the center and scrape the bottom of the center to let the eggs cook.

Akoori (with toast)