Kathal ki Sabzi: a Veggie's delight !

Last week we were at my sis-in-law's place. They have an independent house and an enviable garden wherein they grow a huge variety of plants and trees. Of all trees, what awed me most was the sight of the jack-fruit tree laden with the fruit.And of course, I brought one home!

During my childhood spent in Orissa, almost every second home had a jack-fruit tree. What's different about the jack-fruit tree is that unlike other fruit-bearing trees, many of the fruit grow on the trunk/branches near to the ground. Some of the fruit can grow up to two feet in length. Exchange of home-grown vegetables/fruits was very common in our childhood days and jack-fruit featured quite commonly in that exchange. Sometimes we received the fruit. None of my family could stand the smell of the ripened fruit and we used to offer it to people who loved them. But when the raw one was at home, I used to pester my mother to make the sabzi, the Bihari style. There is one recipe for the Andhra style too wherein the jack-fruit is chopped very fine and cooked with mustard powder.But my favorite is this one.

From my childhood, my friends kept teasing me saying that I don't know what I miss as I never tasted non- vegetarian food. Inside my heart I used to wonder what it really tastes like but never had the desire to do so.
For vegetarians, let me tell you that kathal ki sabzi, the recipe that I share with you now looks exactly like mutton when cooked and when my friends tasted it, they remarked that it even tasted like mutton ki sabzi!
So here goes...
Call it Kathal in Hindi, Jack-fruit in English, Panasa in Oriya and Panasakayi in Telugu. I choose to call this recipe as kathal ki sabzi as it is the Bihari style of cooking the curry.

To prepare kathal
1. Skin the kathal first. For this, you need to oil your hands and the knife as well. The fruit exudes a milky gum-like substance which doesn't leave your hands easily. I wore the kitchen gloves as an extra precaution and applied oil to the gloves itself. Keep a small bowl of oil at your side and keep dipping you fingers in to it from time to time as you cut the kathal.

                                                                   The uncooked pieces.

2.      Cut the kathal into 1 inch cubes. Discard the hard middle section of the kathal as it doesn't cook.

3.      Soak some tamarind in water and squeeze out the tamarind juice. Add one tsp of salt and a pinch of turmeric to this extract. Put the kathal pieces in this tamarind water and pressure cook. Switch off after one whistle.

4.      Drain the kathal. After draining, fry the pieces in a shallow pan adding two tbsps oil for each batch of about ten pieces. Fry till they are golden brown in color.

5.      To give it a yummier taste, add potato as well. Cut potato into half-inch pieces and fry. Do not remove the skin.

The fried pieces 

To prepare gravy:

1. Make a powder of 6-7 cloves, dalchini, elaichi(big), 1 tsp black pepper, 1/4 nutmeg, 1 tbsp dhaniya, & 1 tsp jeera
2.  Make a paste of 3 medium-sized onions. Fry in 2 tbsps of oil till it starts leaving oil.
3. Add 1 tsp of ginger-garlic paste and fry for a minute.
4. Add the above masala powder. Fry well. Add turmeric and lal mirchi powder. Fry for 1-2 minutes.
5. Add paste of 2 large tomatoes. Keep stirring from time to time till the paste starts leaving oil.
6. Add salt and tej patta. Add water (approx 2 glasses) till you have the desired consistency for the gravy.
7. Add the fried kathal and potato pieces, cover with lid and cook for 10 minutes on low flame.

                                                                      And ready to go!

Note:

1. This recipe is for three people.
2. A ten-inch long kathal is enough for five people.
3.  It is important to make this kathal ki sabzi in mustard oil to enhance its flavor.
4.  Some people recommend adding the mutton masala powder available in the shops instead of the garam masala that I used.
5.   It takes about an hour and half to prepare the curry.
6.  It can be eaten with roti/nan/ paratha.

SMS

I received this SMS some time back and every time my thumb moved to delete it, I stopped. So sharing this:

You don't know how high you can fly until you give a real try. 
Just do your best in each try. 
Maybe the sky will have to shift a little high. 

For people who are not risk-takers, this message is wonderfully inspirational.
Thanks, Sheetal, for sending this.

Of Anna(s) and Events

There is one Anna sitting in fasting in Delhi protesting against corruption. It is amazing to see how he swept up and touched people across the country! The middle class, the (largely) honest tax payer was hurting as scam after scam of unimaginable proportions was hitting headlines. Looking back, Harshad Mehta’s 4000 crore scam seems diminutive now! The latest one, the 1.76 lakh crore scam befuddles most of the middle class minds who don’t really know how many zeros the figure contains. Many of them are busy commuting to work, working, taking care of family and inevitably paying the taxes through salary deductions. Caught up in this loop and unable to do little else, they only can be frustrated and helpless when they see their hard earned money warming some undeserved pockets. That one voice, therefore, garnered gigantic waves of support. Like everything else these days, Anna’s movement also is seen through eyes of cynicism. Plenty of voices have FBed and Twittered, both for and against the agitation.

Just about a week ago, the crowd frenzy took a different dimension. History repeated itself on the 2^nd of April. The underdog of 1983 had now become the favorites for the 2011 World Cup. The difference between 1983 and 2011 also is the pervasion of cricket into many more homes via TV screens. In a country where a wooden plank, three sticks and a ball make cricket, where you find kids playing cricket on every road and gully, where the children may not remember the Math formulas but cricket stats are quoted confidently and accurately, Dhoni came close to displacing Sachin from the position of Cricket God with THE SIX which made history by bringing the world cup back to our country after a 28-year long wait.

And then we have the Annas of Telangana. [Yeah, men usually address each other as ‘Anna’ in the Telangana regions of AP]. One of those Annas went on a fast for independent state of Telangana last December. Hyderabad has seen several bandhs in the last one year seriously disturbing the life of general public. People closer to the OU were practically imprisoned in their homes as the Annas and their followers resorted to stone pelting and destruction of public property. These protests gathered momentum and led to the so-called Million March on the 11^th last month. People gathered in droves defying the police, breaking through barricades to join in the protest, wreaking havoc, breaking the statues that lined the road, throwing the desecrated and broken statues and cameras snatched from the journalists into the murky waters of the Hussain Sagar.

We witnessed crowds, enthusiasm, hullaballoo, cheering, stomping, sloganeering, madness and mayhem…all within the last one month.  In the first event, the fight is against the common enemy of the middle class—the greedy government official. In the second, it is India against the rest of the world. In the third, it is one Telugu against another Telugu. While the first event caused people to connect emotionally and fight as one single entity with a enemy within, the second brought tears of great joy and goose bumps as we, irrespective of class, creed, religion and language celebrated our—India’s—moment of triumph over the world, the third had us frightened by the sight of the noisy mobs silencing the streets with their acts of violence and mayhem.

I do not know what motivates someone like Anna Hazare to speak for the people. But right now, I, as a middle class person will rather submit to the optimism that the voice beckons, be swept away in the euphoric success story of Indian cricket than be intimidated by pessimistic, destructive and divisive forces.                                                                

Friendship

Came across this wonderful poetry and was taken through a nostalgic trip down memory lane.

Friendship was either 'katti' or 'mitti' in those days. Put your thumb under your chin and flick it a couple of times and it was a 'katti' meaning end of friendship. 'Kattis' would last a few hours or maybe till the next day. Things were forgotten and forgiven quickly as you needed that very friend to play with the next evening. Wagging of your little finger showed a 'mitti' and your friendship was instantaneously resumed.

What happens to all those stories of  friends &  best friends--'kacha dost' and 'pakka dost'? What happens to those promises of ever lasting  friendship? What is it in the adult world that does not permit such friendships any more? Why is trust so hard to come by? We have never seen a more well-networked generation. Yet, I believe we are the loneliest of people.

Listening to this very simple poetry brought  a tear to the eye and the memory of  all those small meaningful things now lost for ever.

CRICKETTTTTT!

Yes, that is me shrieking in exasperation. And before you men out there dismiss it with a shrug and say, “Women...what do they know of sports,” let me tell you I was a great fan of cricket. Though not able to quote statistics at random, the interest in cricket was held fastidiously till the infamous match-fixing allegations in the famous year of the century, the Y2K. That’s when I lost faith in cricket and gave up watching it.

The world cup was therefore obviated from my radar as were all previous cricket matches including the supposedly very thrilling 20-20s. Yet, it was not to be so this year. I could not but submit abjectly as I found myself swathed, swamped and smothered by an all-pervasive delirium.

TV news channels are taken over by well-known Mademoiselles, thrusting mikes under people’s noses asking, “What do you think about tomorrow’s match?” “Do you think this match will really benefit the peace process in India-Pak relations?” Switch channels, and you have another equally popular Anchorji doing his best balancing between comments of Indian/Pakistani cricketers and audiences. Bites, bites and more in every channel. Perhaps the India and Pakistani cricketers are making more giving these bites than what they did during their playing careers back then. Even the equable DD news channels submit to this frenzy interviewing people chanting pro-India slogans.

At office, the mail exchanges stopped at 2:30 pm. A ticket assigned to a (guy) network administrator gets transferred to a lady associate. A coincidence? 95% of people are missing after lunch. They are licensed to absent themselves today as the office has giant screens set up to enhance the watching experience. Every few minutes, loud shrieks told us that one of the Indian batsmen had scored. I left office early and found that, thankfully, the trains were running half empty too! Who would want to leave the match and spend one hour traveling?!

At home, the family is stuck to the TV, forbidding me from touching the remote...my saas-bahus are relegated to repeats! :( When I could lay my hands on the remote for a few seconds during the break, I turned to the Telugu news channels. Unmindful of the sober news of the death of a very prominent actor, cricket updates were running gleefully in the scroll below.

Even when I was away in the kitchen, loud cheers and bursting crackers outside told me when a Pakistan wicket fell. Stony silences were indicative of a Pak batsman’s 4 or a 6.
The last over was crowned by the deafening sound of crackers accompanied by loud cheers from youngsters zooming past on their bikes.

Sanity prevails as the key match of this world cup is over!
Now you know why we Indian women cannot remain impervious to the world of cricket! :)

My companion for life

When you sit to write about a topic you are deeply passionate about, where do you begin? There seems to be so much to write about.Well, I talk about something that fascinates me...books! Just as a foodie salivates at the thought of eating, so does my mind at the idea of reading. The mind immediately conjures images of rows and rows of books of varied thickness, different writers, different genres of writing! My secret fantasy is to remain locked inside huge book stores like the Crossword, Odyssey etc. and lie sprawled amongst all those books...all mine and keep reading and reading. I don’t think I’d be tired of the activity ever.

Where did this journey begin? I have no recollection. The farthest that I can throw my mind back is to reading the Chandmamas when I must be 7-8 years of age . We kids not only read those interesting stories but also remembered the names of the artists who used to so painstakingly paint each of those pictures within. Gradually, that interest spread to comics. The Amar Chitra Kathas were devoured with gusto even before they lost their new smell. This time it was not only the artist but details like printer, publisher…all were memorized!

There is an interesting story about our reading the Amar Chitra Kathas. For our vacation, being in Rourkela, we had a long distance to travel to our native in AP. We had no other means of travel other than the Bokaro Express. The berths used to be made of wooden planks. 'Bedding' consisting of bed sheets for us all was one of the regular features of travel. We kids weren’t fazed by the hard berths or the long 24- hour travel because at the beginning of our journey, we were each given a rupee and asked to go and buy a book each. Three comic books amongst the three of us! Those books were read and quickly exchanged and exhausted before the end of the journey. A little later when I was in my teens, we had the Konark Express and imagine what! It had a built-in library where you could keep borrowing books throughout your journey. That sure made the travel tremendously exciting!

Well, the appetite was whetted and then there was the fact that we lived in the Steel Township and as any township is, we were a close group, socializing across languages and cultures. The movie halls numbered only 4 in all for a population of about 4 lakh! So one can imagine the interest that the people had for movies. Moreover movies were considered ‘bad'. Only selected movies, and that too only after passing parents' certification, were allowed to be watched. But I don’t recall ever longing to watch movies. Perhaps 2-3 movies in a year were all we watched. Well, I seem to digress...the point I am trying to make is that with no other source of entertainment (no TVs those days either) all that we kids were left with were those HUGE playgrounds to play on (quite enviable and unimaginable for the kids of metros these days) and books to read. Most of us were voracious readers and none of the township parents had dispensable income those days. The books were therefore preciously preserved and then exchanged for more with neighbors and friends.  And most of the time, they would find a way back to the owner though a little dog-eared. There were some fights over the condition of books, I remember, if returned torn.

The first few baby steps with the Amar Chitra kathas led to Archie’s, Tintin, Phantom and then my first novel—of course, Enid Blyton—the blue dragon, the green dragon, the yellow and then the red series indicating that that particular Enid Blyton was for the elder kids. Hardy Boys followed, and then Nancy drew. Perry Mason, Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Hailey, and who can forget the most important book for the teenage girl—the Mills & Boons series... we girls used to be hopelessly lost and come out starry-eyed after reading those Mills & Boons. The classics were not spared with the reading of Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Somerset Maugham, Pearl.S.Buck and then later 'adult' books like Harold Robbins, Sidney Sheldon. The passion for reading was such that the newspaper that the samosa- seller used to wrap the samosas in wasn’t thrown away until we ensured that there really wasn’t anything worth reading on it.

In the later years, I read Taslima Nasrin, Kushwant Singh, John Grisham, Salman Rushdie and even Shobbaa De (!!!)

The books that have made an impact are:
1, The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy
2. Roots by Alex Hailey
3. The Good Earth by Pearl.S.Buck
4. The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum
5. Carpetbaggers By Harold Robbins

After marriage I was again in a small township with its own infrastructure and you guessed it… with its own well -equipped library! For someone as passionate about reading as I, that was a God-sent gift. My job required me to travel 3 kms and with no traffic, a 10 min drive. If I left home at 8 am, I was back by 4:30 pm. And that left me plenty of time to read…at least one novel a week.

In Hyderabad, I travel 60 kms each day to and from work taking around 4 1/2 hours to travel and very little time to read and enjoy books like I used to. And for the first time in my life I am distanced from a regular supply of books from a library. Human beings adapt and that’s what I did too.Books were replaced by online reading. All the classics are available online and that’s how I finished reading ALL short stories and novels written by my favorite author— the inimitable PG Wodehouse!

These days I have discovered the world of blogs and find many interesting blogs to read...each of them displaying such different genres of writing. The skewed laptop screen has replaced the book in bed and I curl up with it now reading all those blogs.The medium has changed but the habit stays on...hopefully never to be cured. :)

PS:I still have with me all those Amar Chitra Kathas  read in my childhood. :)

Recipe for 'khotta'

While returning from Bhubaneshwar by train, I met a Oriya lady who shared the recipe for 'khotta'. Though I did find many recipes for khotta on the web, what better than one from the horse's mouth?
Well, for those not conversant with  Orissa cuisine, khotta is a kind of chutney made of tomatoes and goes with khichdi.
Heat a teaspoon of oil. Splutter some mustard in it. Add one finely chopped onion. Fry and then add green chillies split long. Add 1/2 kg tomatoes sliced. Put some haldi, salt, sliced dates and put a lid to it and allow it to become soft. Now add sugar and water and boil till it becomes like a thick gravy-like paste.