The Well-Fed Bong

Tired of potatoes and chillies, I ventured into the local market. Rescue came in the form of Chengdu restaurant, a local joint with rows of local booze bottles at the back and stacks of instant noodle in the front. There was no menu but the woman at the counter did promise me pork and beef in rudimentary Hindi. The pork on offer turned out to be Kangshu Maroo - a dry curry of trotters, pleasant enough if you like that kind of thing. The beef, a tough, chewy local sausage called Juma is made from beef, pork tripe and a generous helping of numbing sichuan peppers. It was too much effort on the jaw for me to get excited about, but apparently its quite popular locally . The hotel dinner too had a non-vegetarian Bhutanese option - a tomato-garlic-chicken stew called Jansha Maroo . Today's dinner did have a rather pleasant version of Kewa Datshi or potato-chilli-cheese curry, which tasted very like the spicy version of a potato in cheese sauce. Still waiting for Ema Datshi ...

Here I am, in a land that's more vertical than horizontal. Bhutan is a land of smiling people in funny clothes, tiny rivers struggling through spectacular valleys, quaint traditional homes everywhere, dark thunderclouds watching over dragons. A buddhist country that eschews materialism is not expected to be very elaborate on food, and Bhutan does not disappoint. Their cooking can be summed up (as a blogger did rather elaborately ) as "water, butter, boil". Ingredients are equally simple - potato, chilli and cheese - sometimes with chicken or pork tagged on. I wonder what the Bhutanese ate before the colonists introduced chillies and potatoes a few hundred years ago. Chillies are a cornerstone of Bhutanese food ; the drive from the airport went past many a rooftop covered with drying chillies. The local food is as spicy as anywhere in India, and chillies of all sizes and colours grace every dish, alongside the other favourite - potatoes. The local cheese tastes like che...

Last night I managed some nice-ish gol gappas but it was the kabab in a hidden corner of Patparganj that made my evening. A tiny shop that relies on your car for seating space, Punjabi By Taste is your typical hole in the wall. What makes it worth visiting is their malai kabab . it's some nicely done chicken tikka slathered - and here's the real deal - slathered with this delectable pepper-cream sauce. Liquid malai with a kick, perfect for the roomali. The twist in the story is that the original Punjabi had run out, the version I had came from next door where his brother had split off a few years ago. Taposh (who took me there) tells me the brother is distinctly inferior, but even that was droolworthy enough for me. Must go back for the first brother...

The Catholics of the western coast sometimes have strange names. Their world is full of elegant names like Braganza or Pereira, but every once in a while slips in a name like Serpis. Situated in Margao's Nuovo Mercado (New Market) is one such name – Jackris. A bakery that's so small it shares its entrance with another stall adorns this name, but the size and odd name belies an outsized reputation. Surrounded by gold shops and barely visible from the street (your best bet is to persuade an old Catholic to hold your hand and lead you there) Jackris is one of Goa's best traditional bakeries. It took me over a decade of trips to Goa to discover it, but it is a discovery. Mince pie, egg puff, bebinca , dodol , pretty much any Goan baked edible is sold here. Everything I tasted can safely be tagged with labels like fabulous or fantastic (even sniffy Catholic aunties award a "very nice"). The good gets elevated to great, while things like doss that I never cared f...

You don't often get a call that asks you if you have a fridge to store tea. A friend of mine spends a lot of time travelling around China and Vietnam; one of the benefits is a constant stream of exotic teas for me. None, however, has been more exotic than the tea that followed this telephone call. Whoever heard of a tea needing a fridge? And that's how I first came face to face with Ba Bao Tea. My version of the Ba Bao tea came from Fook Ming Tong , a Hong Kong purveyor of high end teas, including their own Ba Bao . The tea comes in a beautiful gift-wrapped box of a dozen individual tea bags. Each bag makes one pot of tea, four cups at a time. The tea can be re-soaked in hot water for more tea; at least five or six soakings can be obtained making all of twenty to twenty four cups of tea per bag. Refrigerated storage is, strictly speaking, not necessary, but there's always the chance that the hot humid Mumbai weather will shorten the life of the tea. Everything abo...

Today, I woke up lazy and made myself some Maggi, and it brought back memories. Like many of my generation, Maggi used to be vital to sustenance. In school, it was an after-school snack, in college one of the only edible things on the canteen menu. We we first started working, Maggi was still a key factor in keeping us alive. It was years before we realized there were other ways to do things. Instant noodles, however, is a fascinating food. Maggi is nearly synonymous with instant noodles in India, but the Swiss-German company did not invent it. It started life as a luxury good, many times more expensive than regular noodles in 1958 Japan, founder Momofuku Ando's original intention to alleviate post-war food shortages. It was hardly an instant success – Nissin (the company that Ando founded) trundled along for a over a decade till the cup-a-noodle was introduced in 1971, to instant success. It may have taken a while to get there, but get there it has. The World Instant N...

I'm happy to say my Kosha Mangsho has improved the second time around. Here are the key changes More onions, and sliced rather than diced. There seems to be no situation in the kosha mangsho universe where too much onion is a concern. I finally added twice as much onion as meat, by volume. Sliced, I find, gives better texture - diced just meekly melts away. Dahi in the marinade, along with some green chilli paste. Green chillies give a more predictable, front-of-the-mouth heat. The last time, I had just ginger and salt in the marinade. More badi elaichi (black cardamom) - I tried just one for a kilo the last time, this time I upped it to three. Black cardamom is a powerful spice (on the rowdy side, if you ask me) but mutton seems more than capable of standing up to it. Gur instead of sugar. All that onion is going to be a little bitter when slow-roasted, so the sweetener keeps things from getting unpleasant. Gur is suitably gourmet, what with its organic roots and all, but s...

Yesterday, Vicky Ratnani of the very posh Aurus was on TV stuffing karelas . A recent post of mine about karela in Kerala had people doubting my taste in taste but here a five star chef was happily stuffing the very same thing on national television.With imported cheese too! Which got me thinking... Human tastebuds have a syllabus of four (five if you're Chinese - they couldn't fit a billion into just five) but the only one that gets a bad rap is bitter. Medicine is supposed to be the cause of it, but really – when was the last time you had a bitter pill? Think of it. Many of life's greatest pleasures have a bitter edge. Chocolate is bitter. Marmalade is bitter. Tea, coffee is bitter. Beer, Rum, Whisky and every other variant of alcohol is bitter. Even the olives in Bond's martini are bitter. In spite of all that, leaving a bitter taste in one's mouth is considered a bad thing. No wonder the karela is bitter about it.

Every once in a while, Rushina gets a bunch of bloggers together for a great evening, and the most recent one was at West View at the ITC Maratha, a restaurant I've been eyeing for a while. Weeks after the event, here's my two bits about the dinner. The company was fabulous; its amazing how much fun talking about talking about food can be. Rushina always manages to get together a varied and interesting bunch of people, and I've never regretted attending any of them. The location was very nice too. The food (though it was expensive and tried very hard) not so much. West View is about grilling – it lays out a generous spread of meats and veggies that you pick out and they grill for you. This concept is not unusual, but two key things are required to make it work – good grilling and great ingredients. The first they get mostly right; its the second that the all-woman chef team struggles with.     You would have thought that if anyone could do ingredients right, it...

Foodwise, China was not at all what I expected. I'm going to get right into generalising the food of a billion people into a post shorter than a short story, all on the basis of seven days of experience. As is my wont, I ate on the streets and avoided restaurants for the most part. This may have given me a slightly different bias, but it was clearly everyday diet for the ordinary Chinese. The food was (mostly) delicious, varied, challenging and very, very strange. The thing about China is, their take on food is as far from India as I have gotten. Just a short hop across the Himalayas China nevertheless represents a totally alien experience that Indian Chinese does nothing to ease one into. Singapore and Thailand have distinct Chinese influences, but a visit to the markets there yields the unfamiliar but also plenty of the familiar. In China, its nearly all unfamiliar - the vegetables, the seafood, the sauces, the ways they cook their meats, pretty much everything. Possibly ...

I admit, my kosha mangsho comes out good, but not great. In any case, I made some yesterday. It turned out meltingly tender and more than edible but the drawbacks as I see it are – not enough of that clingy gravy and somehow just not that dark rich brown. Good enough, but good enough is not good enough. Kosha Mangsho which to all real Bongs will mean goat mutton (not chicken, and definitely certainly absolutely not lamb) is basically a variant of bhuna ghosht or braised mutton. You cook it slow, and do not add any water. The spicing is fairly standard: bay leaf whole red chillies, as many as you can bear whole bong-style garam masala (relax, its just clove, cinnamon, cardamom and black cardamom in suitably mysterious proportions) ginger, paste or diced dhania, jeera, red chilli, turmeric paste two large potatoes, halved a little jaggery (or sugar) The body of the gravy is from onions (lots of them – I used three medium onions to a kilo of meat...

It being Sunday and all that, I decided that a nice brunch was just the thing to celebrate the glow of finally having run past the ten kilometre barrier (warning: some walking involved). A couple of months ago, the very imposing Shiro had advertised a Masterchef Brunch (along with, presumably, dishes from the show). I did not make to that, but that day Shiro crawled into dark recesses of my brain as a possible brunch option, only to be sought out and exposed by today's deep meditations on my choices. My first look at Shiro's brunch was underwhelming - it looked like a very small spread, not even half a dozen salads (mostly veg) and a scattering of dessert options padded with a couple of sushi rolls. Having already paid fifty bucks to park the car, I was disinclined to leave my chopsticks, groaning inwardly at the thought the zillion lost options at nearby Four Seasons (my other choice for emulating those healthy Japanese eating habits). However, Shiro had more sense th...

The frenetic Durga Puja over, a nice slow midweek holiday emerged yesterday. Sunny weather, nothing much to do all added up to picture windows and leisurely lunches. I chose Tasty Tangles . Yes, ok, its a chain (though not a very big one) and its format is very fastfood. However, in this area it has the nicest picture windows and (though this can't be that good for them) easily available seating. It also has some wonderful things on the menu.   Tasy Tangles had all the leisurely look I wanted – huge windows flooding the place with sunlight, enough empty tables that getting a seat was not a struggle yet sufficiently full to not make you the sole saviour of the waiters. The place has a bit of an odd menu – a tearaway sheet of paper where you tick off what you want and hand to your waiter (who, of course, trained in old world graces will insist on repeating the entire order and checking the ticks). The menu isn't big and unusually for an Asian restaurant is dominated by v...

Bengalis like their festivals more food-centred than any other community. The Catholics keep saying feast this feast that, but they don't really mean it – apparently things like joy and spirituality are being consumed there. Bengalis don't call anything a feast; what's the point, its all feastly. For those idiots who thought Durga Puja was about pandals and idols, you have basically missed the point. Ma Durga's annual visit is basically an excuse to gorge. In Kolkata the para pujas ply you generously with food for free – calling it bhog (food offered to the god) tags enough religion on it to avoid any guilt pangs. And what feasts these are!   Mumbai pujas do bhog too; lunch and dinner. Dadar's Shivaji Park had a nice bhog spread at lunch (vegetarian, but thats how it is on some days) – hundreds of people in queue being doled out some very nice khichudi along with begun bhaja ( batter fried aubergines), a veg curry, a tomato-date chatni (chutney) that was w...

Pheesh Phrai (fish fry to the rest of you plebs) was left to us (along with pheesh chop , pheesh cutlet , Enid Blyton, Victoria Memorial and other cool stuff) by the British. This simple crusty brown rectangle is one of the things guaranteed to produce mild glazing to ocular orbits of bongs everywhere, not to mention uncontrolled salivation and the urge to lick ones lips. Bread (and thus crumb) is phoren to Bengali food and bonelessness of fish practically a sin; fish fry is thus rarely made at home by the well brought up Bengali boudi .It has always been a guilty pleasure, associated with the forbidden roadside stall, the fancy cocktail party or that other great Bengali culinary event - the wedding feast; no bong is truly married unless every dhoti-clad guest has stuffed himself silly with first rate pheesh phrai . The basic genuine fish fry a bhadralok will consider worthy of mauling in his the true-bong accent is a crumb-fried fillet of bhetki , accompanied by a blazingly zingy ka...

Nature's Basket Bandra tempted me yesterday with a rather expensive salmon steak. It was all frozen and plasticwrapped, but it reminded me of some very nice dinners in the USA. Salmon was one of the things I learned to make well, out of my hours of watching Food TV on my (then very new) HD television. It helped that it was also very easily available in New York, and needed little by way of persuasion to come out beautifully. Today morning, therefore, I defrosted the fish and heated up a pan. The process of salmon is simple, heat a pan, splash some oil, place the steak on it, then pretty much leave it alone for the correct period of time, turning it just once in the process. Salmon has a soft melting texture when barely that tiny hair breadth above undercooked that's just magic, and fooling around with it will not get you anywhere. Cooking here is all about almost not cooking - put on the pan, turn once and take it out - all about the timing. Of course, I did the who...

I misjudged the Leela . Far from being clueless about local food, the hotel actually puts on quite a spread in their regular menus both at lunch and dinner. It turns out the conference had requested a less adventurous menu, hence the constant attempt to feed us Thai and French. The executive sous chef (as hardboiled a mallu as they come) revealed this secret to me over a crib session, and invited me upstairs to the Terrace restaurant to sample some of the real thing. True it was. Suddenly, lunch was full of unpronounceable names and strange textures. Surprising for a land with a fishy reputation, the veggie options far outnumbered the couple of non-vegetarian items on offer. The food was all that Kerala is reputed for - complex flavours, complicated textures, lots of spices, coconut milk, pepper and, of course, appams. I'm not going to try and produce a documentary on all that I wolfed down, but suffice to say that two sneaky visits to the non-conference menu filled me up wi...