Wheat Pancakes - Doddak

My best friend is from Mangalore and I have literally lived in that house while in college and then my post grad studies. I have not met more warm and welcoming people and everytime I go back to Mumbai, its in their house I feel like I have come home.

Konkani food differs a from region to region as well as between the various communities ; but I love the coconut based, mild flavours of "amchi" food. Aunty S is a wonderful cook and I have some great memories of her randayi, dali, taak, ambat, sukke preparations. Batata song is one of my favourites and I make it at home quite often. I tried this version of saasam and it was good too.

Raaga from the Singing Chef is part Amchi and part Tamil so its great to read her blog with the mix of both cuisines. She lives in Gurgaon (where I work) so we have managed to connect on mail and phone, though we are still working on actually meeting in person! She has some great cupcake recipes and meal in a jiffy ideas - perfect for working women!

Singing Chef was the blog of the month for the Tried and Tasted event hosted by Divya of Dil Se but by the time I finally got around to making the wheat flour dosai I have been planning for a long time, the deadline was over...ah, well. The one at S pachhi's house, my friend told me when I was speaking to her today, is made of semolina and grated coconut. This one is made of wheat flour, coconut and a little semolina and is called Gave Pitye Doddak. Took just minutes to make and was a really filling breakfast, served with green chutney.

Gave Pitye Doddak

Araichu Vitta Kozhambu (Gravy made with freshly ground spices)

Most of you must have figured out now that I love kozhambu (South Indian curries), the spicier and tangier the better! There is this one with okra, another one with pumpkin and yet another one with sun dried berries

A week of dals, roti, subzi or even pasta, pizza and tortillas and there will be this gnawing feeling at the back of my mind (or is tongue) and eventually I figure out I can't wait to shake up my palate with a lip smacking kozhambu. It took some time for me to get the proportions right, but when I did, making this seemed even more easier than sambar - atleast one didn't have to wait for the dal to cook.

This Sunday morning was one such day. I woke up feeling quite in the mood for something different than the usual tomato or onion chutney or sambar we have with dosai. It helps if you have a stock of tamarind extract or if you are using tamarind paste.

But even if you don't, pour some warm water over a small ball of tamarind. By the time, you cut the veggies and boil then, roast the masala and grind it, it would have soaked for about 20 minutes - long enough to extract the juice. Boil with the freshly ground masala, add the cooked vegetable half way through and in a bit you have some great tasting kozhambu ready to go with dosai, idli or rice.

This dish goes to Srivalli's Curry Mela which she is hosting on her blog Cooking 4 all Seasons.

Araichu vitta kozhambu

Half a cup chopped pumpkin (drumstick, brinjal or okra can be used; brinjal and okra need to be fried a bit before adding to the gravy and not cooked in water)
Small lime size ball of tamarind soaked in 3 cups of water

Masala:
Red chillies - 5
Coriander seeds - 1 tbsp
Fenugreek - 1/4 tsp
Chana dal - 2 tsp
1/4 cup grated coconut

Tempering:
Oil - 1/2 tbsp
Mustard seeds - 1/2 tsp
asafoetida - pinch
curry leaves - 5-6

1. Extract juice of tamarind and keep aside
2. Cook the pumpkin pieces in about 2-3 cups of water till just done.
3. Roast the spices in half a tsp of oil and then grind to a paste with the coconut.
4. Heat oil in a kadai, add the mustard seeds; when they splutter, add the asafoetida, curry leaves and saute for half a minute.
5. Add the masala paste and fry for a minute
6. Pour the tamarind extract, add salt and bring to a boil. Cover and simmer for about 15 minutes
7. Add the cooked vegetables and simmer for another 5-10 minutes till the gravy is a bit thick and the flavours have blended well.
8. Serve with idli, dosai or rice.

Roasted Pepper and Tomato sandwich - with Bread and Dosai!

I have loved sandwiches ever since I can remember. As a child I was known to ask for a "bread and butter" sandwich when we ate out. I got to taste the amazingly delicious chutney sandwiches made by Subhash sitting on the "katta' outside our college in Mumbai - those squares of bread slathered with Amul butter and green chutney and stuffed with onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, beet and potatoes - what a filling meal for just 5 bucks! Club sandwiches in Gazebo were next, followed by Subway which arrived in India much later. And have you tasted cheese sandwiches made in a "Club" - well they really know how to make one - thick slices of cheddar cheese between soft white bread - none of that wimpy stuff you get on airplanes and in theatres with wafer thin shavings of cheese on dry bread!

Sometimes there is just nothing to beat the taste of a freshly made sandwich for breakfast - it really is a power breakfast! And of course, you can pretty much put whatever you want to into it - which is what really entices me.

This morning I had a loaf of multi grain bread and though it would be perfect for a sandwich for everyone. Boiled two eggs, roasted a capsicum , sliced a tomato and some olives and shredded some cheese and I was all set to go.
The bread sandwiches were moist and juicy and dripping with the flavour of the roasted peppers and mustard. The eggs made for a good protein boost in the morning.

But after making the sandwiches for my husband and my daughter, I decided that so much of fibre wouldn't go down well with my stomach (I don't digest fibre easily). So I mixed up some instant rava dosa batter for myself and stuffed it with the same fillings! Yummy!
I am sending this dosa to Srivalli's Dosa Mela - glad I could make something unique for this Srivalli - your list for your target of 101 dosa varieties is quite inspiring!

You can pretty much use whatever you want - if you don't want the egg replace them with cucumber or sliced boiled potatoes. Put in some green chutney or pesto instead of the mustard and onions if you are upto eating them in the morning.

Roasted Pepper and Tomato Sandwich

Ingredients:

Multigrain Bread - 1 loaf
Filling:
Tomato - 1 big sliced
Eggs - 2 hard boiled, yolks and white sliced separately
Capsicum/Green Pepper - 1 (Roast the pepper on a low flame or under the grill till the skin blackens all over, wrap tightly in a foil paper and leave aside to cool for 10 minutes, unwrap, peel skin, deseed and slice)
Black olives - sliced 5-6
Mustard - 4-5 tbsp
Butter - 1-2 tbsp
Hung Curd - 2 tbsp
Pepper powder - to taste


Low Fat Multi -Grain Bread Sandwich:

1. Cut a 6 " piece of the bread and slice horizontally, leaving the back still attached so that it opens like a book.
2. Spread the hung curd on both sides and fill with 3-4 tomato slices, olive slices, roasted capsicum slices and boiled egg white slices.
3. Drizzle mustard on top and sprinkle pepper powder to taste.
4. Grill for 2 minutes or serve just like that.

Multi Grain Bread Sandwich for kids:

Cut sandwich as above, spread butter or cheese spread on both sides. Fill with tomato slices, roasted capsicum slices and whole egg slices. Shred cheddar cheese all over and drizzle tomato sauce on top. Grill or serve soft.

Instant Rava Dosa Sandwich

Dosa Batter:
1/3 cup - Semolina (sooji/ rava)
1/3 cup - Refined flour (Maida)
1/3 cup - Rice flour
Yoghurt - 1/2 cup whipped with 1 1/2 cups water
Green chillies - 2 chopped fine
Coriander leaves - 2 tbsp chopped
Cumin seeds - 1/2 tsp
Salt to taste

1. Mix all ingredients of the dosa batter and keep aside for 5 minutes.
2. Heat a tava and pour the dosa batter (should be thinner than usual dosa batter) from a small cup and let it spread outwards. Do not spread with the back of a ladle as far as possible instead tilting the tava a bit if needed.
3. Drizzle a tsp of oil all around and cook on a medium flame till the edges are brown and lift on their own. Quickly flip with a spatula and cook the other side for a minute on a low flame.
4. Remove onto a plate, browned side down. Fill a strip of the dosa a little away from the edge with tomato slices chopped fine, olive slices, capsicum slices and egg slices and drizzle mustard or green chutney over it.
5. Start rolling the dosa from the filled side to the other side and press together. Slice into rolls with a sharp knife and serve warm.

Appam and Vegetable Stew - WBB - Balanced Breakfasts

Appams are something both of us love and when in Chennai, we hardly needed a reason to go out to the neighbourhood Kerala joint and feast on those lacy fluffy circles of heaven. I haven't been very successful making aapams at home, though to be honest I didn't really try too much - why bother with facing failure when we could just as easily eat out!

Then we moved to Delhi - if I thought Chennai needed Mumbai's Udipi restaurants when I moved there, then Delhi definitely needs any kind of South Indian restaurants (yeah sure, Saravana Bhavan is here with meals that cost a minimum of Rs 300 per head!!; Sagar Ratna restaurants are few and far between)

So we pined for our appams with chicken curry and vegetable stew......The last straw was when Hubby started travelling extensively to Cochin for a month and used to come back raving about the food. That's it - I decided that it was time to shake off the laziness and crack this thing!

I found a similar story to mine on Ginger and Mango and was quite inspired by Inji Pennu's success in making perfect palappams - they looked so delicious! The rice flour paste in her recipe was the one major difference between other recipes I have tried before, and also appears in Madhur Jaffrey's recipe for Appams.

Well, it did the trick and I was able to make fluffy appams for the first time. I was afraid that the batter wouldn't ferment enough since February in Delhi was still quite cold, so I left it out quite long and it became a tad sourer than needed. Easily remedied the next time round! And there is definitely going to be a lot of next times!


I served this with a vegetable stew (ishtoo) which is easily the dish for me, which has the simplest of ingredients and the richest of flavours!

I am sending this breakfast duo to Weekend Breakfast Blogging #20, the brainchild of Nandita of Saffron Trail which is being hosted this month by Mansi over at - Fun and Food. This month's theme is "Balanced Breakfasts" and Mansi makes it easy with this definition - "A balanced and wholesome breakfast is something that combines 2 or more of the food groups below to fulfill nutrition needs.

Fruits or vegetables (dried fruits are fine too)
Grains and Cereals (whole grains, oats, high-fiber foods)
Dairy (skim milk, low-fat yogurt, cheese, cottage cheese (paneer) )
Proteins (eggs/egg whites, peanut butter, beans, nuts, sprouts, protein isolates)"

With rice in the appam and vegetables in the stew, I think this breakfast is as balanced as they come...not to mention so so tasty!

Kerala Vegetable Stew

Ingredients:

Potatoes - 2 medium peeled and chopped
Carrots -1 medium peeled and diced
French beans - 8-10 diced
Green peas - 1/4 cup
Cauliflower florets - 1 cup
Coconut milk - 1 cup thin milk and 1 cup thick milk
(If using coconut powder, then just make 2 cups of coconut milk as per the instructions)
Onions - 2 sliced
Green chillies - 5-6 slit lengthwise
Ginger - 2.5 cm grated
Curry leaves - 10
Salt to taste
Coconut oil - 1 tbsp
Cinnamon stick - 1 "
Cardamom - 1
Cloves - 3-4

Method:

1. Heat the oil in a pan and add the whole spices to it (cloves, cinnamon, cardamom). Saute for 3-4 minutes
2. Add half of the curry leaves and the green chillies, all of the grated ginger and sliced onions. Fry till onions turn translucent and then add the chopped potatoes, 1 cup of water and 1 cup of thin coconut milk and salt.
3. In the meanwhile, boil the chopped vegetables in 3/4 th cup of lightly salted water till just cooked and keep aside.
4. When the potatoes are soft and well cooked, add the cooked vegetables, rest of the green chillies and curry leaves and the thick coconut milk. Gently heat through for about 5 minutes, take off fire and serve with hot appams.

Jacque Pepin's Potato Lace

My book of handwritten recipes says I wrote this recipe down from Women's Day - definitely something I got from the circulating magazine library in Chennai. It was all hit and miss what you would get each month under the category of "Foreign publications"! But atleast you would get a wide variety of magazines to read each week at a fixed monthly rate.....I have yet to come across something like that in other cities.

This is a really nice pancake recipe for those lazy Sunday mornings when you feel like having something more substantial than an omelet but a little less daunting than brunch.

Some potatoes, onions, eggs and flour and you're set. This recipe is by Jacque's Pepin, a native of France who became a widely respected chef starting out at age 13 as an apprentice in the family restaurant. He was extremely popular in America with his TV shows and cookbooks.

You can see the original recipe here and also here where it also mention's the fact that this was the recipe his mother used in her restaurant! So, maybe it should be called Jacque Pepin's Maman's recipe....

Potato Lace

Recipe adapted from Jacque Pepin's recipe

Ingredients:

Onions - 2 large

Potatoes -4 peeled

Eggs - 3 small

Flour - 3 tbsp

Coriander - 1/4 cup washed and chopped

salt - 1 tsp

Freshly crushed black peppercorns - 1 tbsp

Oil - to shallow fry the pancakes

1. Puree onions in a blender.

2. Shred potatoes in a grater using the bigger holes. Use a potato ricer if possible. S

queeze out as much of the moisture out of the potatoes as possible, using paper towels if needed. Removing the moisture removes the starch also, and that makes the pancakes crispy.

3. Mix the flour, eggs, grated potatoes, pureed onions, chopped coriander, salt and pepper in a bowl till well blended. The batter will be thick but of dropping consistency, add a tsp of milk if needed.

4. Take a deep nonstick skillet, pour about 1 tbsp oil and heat it.

5. Pour about 3 tbsp of batter in the skillet and spread immediately with the back of a spoon like a dosai, as thin as possible. It will have tiny holes and jagged edges.

6. Cook over medium heat for about 1/2 a minute to 1 minute on each side till crisp. Serve immediately.

7. Make the remaining pancakes in the same way, 1 tbsp of oil should be able to take care of a batch of 3-4 pancakes.

These need to be eaten immediately while they are still crisp to get the best taste.

Masala Uttapam (Savoury stuffed rice flour pancakes)

When I was in the first year of degree college in Mumbai, there opened this Udipi restaurant in Matunga called Shri Sundars. Matunga and King’s Circle in Central Mumbai is filled with Udipi joints, some of them which have been there for decades, so a new one opening in that area was just another addition to the clutter. But as we discovered during the three years we frequented it (and I use this term loosely, “lived there” would be more like it!), the restaurant came up with dishes which were quite unusual in terms of Udipi restaurants then which were almost identical in terms of their menu and appearance. Except for Ananda Bhavan idlis…mmm….but that’s another story.

Spring Roll dosa, Chowmein Dosa and some other really wacky sounding dishes filled the menu card of Sundars (we dropped the Shri almost instantly!). Of course there was the usual idli, sambar, medu wada, mysore masala dosa which were really good, but what attracted us at first were these unusual items. Soon we were regulars there - the place was clean, the waiters soon knew us by sight (and hardly got any tips) and the prices didn’t hurt our bare pockets and purses.

And what one of our gang of 8 would definitely end up ordering, was the Masala Uttapam – something I loved and had never tasted till then. I still remember that dish – uttapams stuffed with a delicious potato masala and always, always topped with a juicy slice of tomato embedded right in the centre. I recreated this dish from memory, not sure if this is what they do since it wasn’t as brown and the masala wasn’t exactly stuffed, but it tasted just right to me.

I guess nostalgia wears rose coloured glasses but this place, with all its memories of the fun times I had with my friends, holds a special place in my heart. P & G, I will always remember you guys, ordering one paper roast dosa since that’s all the pocket money you had (or maybe because you were just plain cheapskates!) and then each would begin eating from one end, so whoever ate faster would get more of the dosa! This recipe is for you and the rest of our gang.


Masala Uttapam
Ingredients:

Dosa batter – 400ml (preferably a day old or a little sour)
1 cup rice, 1/3rd cup urad dal –soak rice and dal together in water with a tsp of fenugreek seeds for about 5-6 hours. Drain the water and keep aside, grind in a mixie or grinder till you get a smooth batter. Add the drained water little by little and as much as is needed. The batter finally should be smooth and neither too thick and nor too thin. Transfer to a large vessel with space for it to double after fermentation, add1/2 tsp salt and mix well. Keep overnight and by morning it should have risen to the top.

Potato masala
Boiled potatoes – 4, peeled and mashed
Turmeric powder – ½ tsp
Onions – 2 chopped fine
Green chillies – 3 chopped
Mustard – 1 tsp
Curry leaves – 6-8 leaves
Chana dal – 1 tbsp
Urad dal - 1 tsp
Oil – 2 tsp for the potato masala and more for making the uttapams
Coriander – 1/2 cup chopped

Method:

1. Heat 2 tsp oil in a kadai and add mustard, when it splutters add the chana dal and urad dal and stir for 2 minutes till golden. Add the curry leaves and green chillies and sauté for 2 minutes, then add onions and fry till transparent.
2. Add the turmeric powder, salt and mashed potatoes and fry for another 4-5 minutes, add chopped coriander and take off flame. Cool.
3. Keep the dosa batter ready , heat a non stick tava till just warm, smear some oil on it and then pour a ladleful of dosa batter on it; spread the batter from inside to outside but not too thinly. It should be thicker than what one would do for a dosa.
4. Immediately take a big spoon of the potato masala and carefully spoon it onto the still uncooked uttapam in a smaller circle, taking care not to disturb the batter. Press down with a spatula till well embedded in the batter. All this should be done on a low flame.




5. Increase the flame to medium high and circle the uttapam with about a ½ a tsp of oil. Let it cook for 2-3 minutes till the underside is golden brown and then flip over with a spatula and press down. Cook for another minute and then remove from tava.
6. Serve hot with coconut chutney and sambar.