Monsoon Diary (21 page)

CHANNA (CHICKPEA) MASALA

This makes a nice side dish for
puris
or rice. If you use canned chickpeas, it’s quick and easy to prepare. I frequently make this on weekends when we spend the whole day outdoors and come into the house ravenously hungry for some home-cooked food. All you need are canned chickpeas, canned tomato purée, and an onion. However, if you have time to soak and boil the chickpeas from scratch, this makes for a more authentic preparation.
Channa
masala
can be eaten with
puris,
chapatis, or just rice, which makes it a complete protein. A rice pilaf,
channa masala,
and a
raita
makes a complete rustic meal.

SERVES 4

1 teaspoon olive or vegetable oil
1 teaspoon black mustard seeds
1 teaspoon cumin
1 garlic clove, crushed
1 large onion, chopped
1 large tomato, chopped, or 1/2 cup tomato purée
1 teaspoon
garam masala
(available in Indian grocery stores;
if unavailable, use red chili powder or paprika)
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups cooked chickpeas (cook in pressure cooker until soft,
about 10 minutes)
Chopped fresh cilantro
Juice of 1/2 lemon or lime

Heat the oil in a pan and add the mustard seeds. When they pop, add the cumin, garlic, and chopped onion. Sauté over high heat until the onion is translucent, about 3 minutes. Add the tomato and mix well. (If you are using tomato purée, you will need to sauté it for a longer time than you would a chopped tomato.) Add the
garam
masala
and salt, and mix well.

Stir in the chickpeas and boil for 3 to 5 minutes. Pour in 1/2 cup water. Lower the heat and cook until the gravy becomes thick. Garnish with chopped cilantro and lemon or lime juice.

EIGHTEEN

Descent of the Relatives

A YEAR INTO our marriage, my parents decided to pay us a visit. It was traditional for someone from the bride’s family to visit and help set up a household, and so they came armed with utensils, cooking vessels, and bed linen. They also smuggled many substances of dubious heritage into the United States. One was
narthangai,
a citrus fruit that makes a delicious sour pickle. Knowing my love for it, Mom packed it in a plastic bag. For good measure, she also brought powders of various kinds: curry-leaf powder, chili powder,
sambar
and
rasam
powder. Since she couldn’t wake up in the morning without covering herself in her favorite Pond’s sandalwood talcum powder, she packed five containers of this.

Prior to departure, my father opened the suitcase and was appalled. Right on top were packets and packets of white talcum powder, which my father promptly confiscated. “They will think it’s some sort of chemical,” he said.

Both my parents were cross and testy when I phoned them a few days before they left India. “Your mother thinks she is traveling to the nearest village,” said my father. “The customs officers will never let us enter America carrying all her powders. I haven’t been sleeping at night thinking of all that could happen. And your mother blithely keeps packing away.”

Mom was equally irritable on the other line. “What can these customs people do?” she asked. “If they ask what it is, I will tell them that I am carrying Indian medicines.”

“Ha!” said Dad. “Indian medicines indeed. They will throw everything into the trash can.”

“Let them throw,” Mom said. “It will reduce my load. Why can’t you think of your poor daughter instead of those prying customs officers?”

“What if those prying customs officers jail us indefinitely when we transit through London? What if they deport us back to India? What if they think we’re terrorists because of my moustache?”

My parents fought all the way across the Atlantic and arrived without any of the powders, pickles,
papads,
and sweets. The customs people at Kennedy Airport had tossed them all.

IN AMERICA my father loved going to the grocery store. He derived great pleasure from looking up strange substances in the encyclopedia and seeing if he could spot them at the store. His culinary adventures were innocuous in and of themselves, except that he had no idea about how much to buy. In India my mother did all the shopping. As a result, my father’s estimates of quantity were frequently greater than what he—or even we—could eat. To paraphrase an old saying, Dad’s eyes were “hungrier than his stomach.” Our collective stomachs, I should add.

And so his foods languished, sometimes for weeks, in the fridge. This worried him, for he took it as a sign that none of us shared his passion for new and exotic foods. I know many worriers, but my father’s version has all the nuances of a Stradivarius. He worried that he was spending too much money buying stuff that no one else in the family could eat. He worried that the things he bought would go bad and proceeded to ingest them at a rapid rate. Then he worried about their effects on his “tropical body,” unused as it was to temperate climes and their food. He worried about what his son-in-law thought of his experiments. He wondered if the grocery-store clerk thought he was senile, or worse, retarded, because he frequently asked for items that nobody had heard of. “You would think someone who works in a grocery store would know how to cook salsify,” he said. “But that clerk didn’t even know what salsify was, let alone how to cook it. He looked at me like I was from another planet.”

I didn’t think it was appropriate to tell him at that point that I had frequently wondered the same thing myself.

Since I have inherited my father’s penchant for worrying, I was his frequent confidante. “Do you think,” he whispered to me one day, “that your mother approves of my shopping trips?” I didn’t really know, but I reassured him that if Mom didn’t approve, she would make it clear. Unlike my dad, my mom wears her opinions on her sleeve.

After watching a documentary about the virtues of eating soy, my father went on a soy kick. He started with soy milk and bought two gallons. When he discovered that we didn’t partake of the beverage, he proceeded to drink it continuously, sometimes diluting it with beer, until he got diarrhea. “It has an expiration date,” he said mildly, when I chided him for drinking too much too soon. “Since I bought the stuff, I must drink it.”

An American friend unwittingly added fuel to his fire by raving about soy’s isoflavonoids and antioxidants and how they had the capacity to confer renewed youth. Encouraged, Dad bought several packets of tofu bologna, tofu ham, and tofu pups, a vegetarian version of hot dogs. He had never eaten hot dogs before, nor was he likely to, given that we are a vegetarian family, but this didn’t stop him from exploring America’s most famous food. “The French call their hot dogs
chien chaud,
” he announced one day.

The tofu version of the
chien chaud,
however, proved to be staggeringly bland, even after we dressed it up with ketchup, salsa, and mustard (all of which were on Dad’s list of foods to try). The tofu ham was even worse, and the tofu bologna took the cake for the worst-tasting soy product we had ever eaten. So there we were, left with three packets of tofu slices that nobody wanted to touch.

My father wouldn’t admit that he hated the stuff just as much as the rest of us. He took to eating it with breakfast. “Stick a couple of tofu bologna slices inside my toast,” he instructed me. “On second thought, make that four slices—I have to finish it up quickly. And smear a generous amount of peanut butter on them.”

When my mother asked if this daily devotion to tofu was necessary, Dad retorted, “It is not bad. Quite refreshing, actually. Besides, you are the one who keeps harping on how I should eat healthy foods.”

After a few days of this, even Dad got tired. But he couldn’t bring himself to throw out the remaining slices. His solution was simple, and in retrospect we all should have expected it. He snuck the tofu into our coconut chutney. With disastrous results.

Coconut chutney is a favorite accompaniment to breakfast in my family. A hearty blend of grated raw coconut, roasted lentils, a couple of green chiles, and some salt, my mother makes it almost daily, since it is easy to prepare and goes well with most Indian dishes. We eat it with
dosas, idlis,
toast, tortilla chips, and anything else we can think of.

There are those who tinker with the traditional coconut chutney recipe, adding a tomato to give it some tartness, or fresh cilantro for some tang, believing—wrongly, in my opinion—that it adds to the taste. I view such digressions harshly. Why mess with a recipe that is five thousand years old? I ask, echoing Ram’s sentiments. Why adulterate pure coconut chutney with unnecessary additions? My contention is that cooks who add foreign ingredients to chutneys do so to hide their own ineptitude. I have spent the better part of several afternoons trying to veer lax cooks away from such transgressions. How, then, to account for the fact that my father is the biggest culprit of all in this regard?

Unlike me, my father views the chutney with heretical flexibility. He thinks of it like soup stock, as a base into which he can add whatever he pleases, be it peanuts, leftover rice, or potato chips. He has even added a few chunks of pineapple, which delivered a sweetness that was totally against the chutney’s character. When my mother blends her chutneys at home, she keeps an eagle eye on my father, who prowls around the kitchen looking for something imaginative to throw in.

When the tofu bologna began disappearing from the refrigerator, we should have checked the chutney. But Dad showed remarkable restraint in the beginning. All we could detect was a slightly smoky taste. We thought it was because the blender had overheated.

Spurred by his success in escaping detection, my father got bolder. One morning we woke up to find him brandishing a bowl full of chutney. “I couldn’t sleep,” he explained. “I decided to start breakfast.”

My mom got busy making some steaming hot
idlis,
and we all sat down for a hearty Sunday brunch. The fluffy dumplings, soft and bland, are a perfect foil for the spicy chutney that is poured liberally over them. And this is exactly what we did on that fateful morning: grab a handful of
idlis
and pour Dad’s chutney on them.

As usual, my mom, who had been up since dawn and was therefore ravenous, was the first to go. She took one bite, made a strangled sound, and stopped chewing, her mouth full. She sat there for a moment, looking slightly stunned, shaking her head slowly from side to side like a woeful elephant. As my husband and I watched, she glanced murderously at my dad and walked purposefully into the bathroom. We heard her cough, retch, spit, then throw up, until finally, mercifully, she turned on the tap.

My father grabbed his grocery bag and left the house.

MY FATHER’S COCONUT CHUTNEY

Coconuts are a life force in South India. Women apply coconut oil to their hair every day to make it healthy, long, and lustrous. Coconuts are auspicious participants at every ceremony, ranging from births and christenings to weddings and everything in between. They are a favorite food of the Hindu elephant god Ganesh, who is considered to be the harbinger of good fortune and the remover of obstacles.

For making chutney, the selection of the coconut is all-important. Smell it to make sure it hasn’t gone bad. If it has a tart, fermented smell, then the coconut is overripe and not suitable for chutney. Good coconuts have a sweet, nutty fragrance.

SERVES 4

1/2 cup freshly grated coconut or
1-
inch chunks coconut
1/4 cup roasted, unsalted peanuts or roasted
channa
(available in
Indian grocery stores)
2 green chiles, Thai or serrano
1 small tomato, chopped
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon oil
1/2 teaspoon black mustard seeds
1/2 teaspoon
urad
dal

Grind the coconut, peanuts or
channa,
chiles, tomato, and salt in a blender, adding 1/2 cup water until it forms a paste. Place in a bowl and set aside.

Pour the oil into a stainless steel pan over high heat, and add the mustard seeds. When they start to pop, add the
urad
dal and remove from the heat. Pour this over the ground coconut paste and mix well.

NOTE: Indians traditionally use tamarind to impart the tartness in a
chutney. I use a tomato instead to get the same effect because it is healthier. This
chutney does not keep well in the fridge and should therefore be eaten on the
same day. If you do have leftover chutney, freeze it instead off putting in the refrigerator, which will make the coconut taste rancid after a day.

AFTER MY PARENTS left, Nalla-ma came for a month. Nalla-pa was busy with patients, and she had to occupy herself. So she made a whirlwind tour of America, with us being her first stop.

When I got married, I thought Ram was a picky eater. But Nalla-ma really took the cake. Well, not exactly—she didn’t eat cake because it had eggs in it. Not only that, she had a bewildering assortment of food rules that were as irrational as they were inconsistent. And they changed all the time.

Upon arrival, Nalla-ma announced dramatically that she wouldn’t eat anything she hadn’t cooked with her bare hands. This was a foreign land, she said, and one never knew if errant cooks had accidentally dumped lard in the supposedly vegetarian items. When we traveled, Nalla-ma came armed with little packets of food. Trips with her were like Arctic expeditions, with every food contingency examined and prepared for.

The weekend music classes that I taught in New Jersey turned into complicated affairs. Before Nalla-ma came, Ram and I would drive on Friday evening to the Comfort Inn, spend all day Saturday and Sunday there, and return Sunday night. We grabbed a sandwich here, a pizza there, and that was it. No longer.

On Saturday morning Nalla-ma went into the kitchen at dawn and didn’t emerge until she had cooked enough food for the weekend. We would fill empty yogurt containers with fragrant curries and head out to New Jersey. We stayed in a corner suite so that the other hotel guests wouldn’t complain about the sound of music and the smell of food that wafted from our room. Between classes, we ate whatever Nalla-ma had cooked—for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.