Chirer Pulao | Poha the Bengali way

Chirer Pulao | Poha the Bengali way

Bengali Chirer Pulao or Chirar Polao is largely similar to a Poha, with small differences like the former does not usually have kari patta, is sweeter and is overall Bong. Made with flattened rice, called chire or poha, the Bengali version is studded with vegetables like potatoes, cauliflower, carrots and sweet peas in winter. Garnished with fried peanuts or cashews, coriander leaves and a squeeze of lime it is a sweet and tart delight, prefect for breakfast.

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Food happiness is when your food takes you back to a happy place. It is like a short vacation to a place where you will probably never return to or at least not for now. The few minutes in your mind makes up for it and the warmth of the memories are enough to piggyback on for rest of the day. Like this Chirer Pulao today took me back to my home in the small town that holds a special place in my heart. I will never be able to go back to that home and the sepia toned memories, now colored in my mind, makes it all the more special.

Winter is a season of beauty and fresh vegetables in the plains of Bengal and nowhere else it makes as much as a show as it does in the smaller towns and villages.

 In the small town that we lived, every house or rather quarter/bungalow had a stretch of overgrown lawn in the front and a patio at the back called uthon. The uthon which was usually cemented had a few trees, a koltola (an area for washing clothes and utensils) and a water storage tank called choubachcha, as water supply through the pipes was only twice a day and water had to be collected in large quantity for later use. I loved our uthon with its huge mango tree and spent most of the winter sitting there under the sun with my books.

The front lawn however was a different story. Depending on the interest of the dwellers, the front lawn could be a fully maintained vegetable farm producing everything from potatoes to cauliflowers or a flower garden that could put a prize nursery to shame or even a rectangular badminton lawn.

 

Unfortunately our front lawn was none of these. It was just a large expanse of green grassy lawn from the gate to the front porch bordered by orange marigolds and shadowed by a huge banyan tree in a corner. The banyan tree took all the attention, praised for shade and breeze in summer and blame for blocking the sun in winter -- oi ashwatha gaach wala bari ta was how our house was identified.

Towards the back of the lawn were a couple of guava trees, and a patch of kitchen garden on the side by the kitchen, tended by my mom. Her kitchen garden in winter boasted mostly of juicy red tomatoes, some carrots and coriander. Not much compared to the huge haul of vegetables that our neighbors would produce. However we did get the occasional cauliflower and potatoes as gifts from the neighbors. 

Even otherwise, vegetables at the nearby haat were as fresh. All local. All organic. Smelling of earth, air, water and manure. I don't know if winter vegetables just tasted better in their texture and taste  but I was way more fond of cauliflower, carrots and sweet peas than the summer veggies of parwal and lauki!

So in winter, Chirer Pulao studded with tiny cauliflower florets, orange jewel like carrot pieces and emerald green sweet peas was a favorite for breakfast or school tiffin.

As far as I go Chirer Pulao is largely similar to a Poha, with small differences like the former does not have kari patta, is sweeter and is overall Bong. The experts may differ. My Mother made chirer pulao with a tadka of cumin seeds and finished it with lime juice and fresh coriander leaves. Sometimes she seasoned it with mustard seeds and curry leaves. It would be a little sweet and tart. That chirer pulao would be studded with crunchy brown fried chinebadam pale on the inside, alu bhaja -- finger length potatoes fried and soft, crunchy florets of cauliflower sautéed to a soft golden brown and luminescent green jewel like sweet pea motorshuti . It was a simple dish, I thought.

The first time I tried to make it on my own in the US, my self-esteem took a good beating. The chirer pulao turned into a chirer khichuri. And it all happened in the split second that I was searching for the mustard seeds while the poha was soaking. I did not know of a term called "mise en place" and I did not know I was using thin poha. It was the wrong kind. The thick poha stands a better chance of holding its own and is the poha of choice for Chirer Pulao.

Having survived that tragedy, I have been making the chirer pualo the way my Mother makes and it is still a favorite. I add more vegetables than the Poha and I also add cooked Oats at times to the same recipe,

Those Delicious Letters - a year and half

It has been more than a year since my book Those Delicious Letters was published. After last October (Oct '2020) , I never got back the mojo to promote it and I didn't do anything. Really nothing. I am thankful to the many reviewers who reviewed it on their blog, Instagram, media et.  I am sorry I was not able to reply to many of them or thank them for their kindness.💓

This holiday season, Dec 15th being the global publishing date (August 20th, 2020 the original date), on a whim I checked the book rating on  Amazon, and guess what ? 

Those Delicious Letters - Amazon.in -- The darn book has a rating of 4.3 with effing 241 reviews, 97% of which is organic. I am a chhota mota author and that is a lot of reviews for me!! Yes, 3% of the initial reviews are from friends and few readers, whom I had coerced to  write one 😝, soon after the book was out. But rest all were folks who read it without me forcing them to 😍

Those Delicious Letters - Amazon.com -- 4.4 with 177 reviews

Those Delicious letters - Goodreads - Goodreads rates it at 3.88 with 225 ratings and 83 reviews !!

Of all the reviews, the one most precious is a review written by my Baba. I am not sure if he read the book in its entirety, we did not have any discussions over the content or the plot line. The book was not in one of the genres he would read. The font was not big enough and though my mother mentioned that he sat around with it in the month of last September, I doubt that it held his interest. It was my Mother who actually read the book  as I would have expected her to.

But that is not important. What is important is Baba was very excited about the book and would religiously tune in to all the lives I did as part of book promo last August-September. He shared all my book posts on his own FB wall (something I was very embarrassed about at that point). He was excited about the web series offer asking details that even I had not asked my publishers.

And then he wrote a review on Amazon.in. I DID NOT ask him to write it just because I thought it would be difficult for him to post a review on a platform other than Facebook! He didn't even tell me that he had posted a review. But there I found it one fine day much later.  Notice how he has put in a sales pitch about discounted price and no delivery fee 😂😂

My Baba was not a foodie at all. He had no love for food unless it was a Bengali mishti. He did not like cooking and found the whole process highly over-rated.  Many a times when we would urge him to learn some cooking, he would say he could make tea, buy his mishti from stores and put together a Doodh-Pauruti-Gur for dinner, that is all that was needed for him to survive!!

When I got an offer for my first book from Harper Collins, he was happy but could not fathom how "me" of all people could write a cookbook. "Tui physics ar engineering pore ranna r boi likhbi keno bujchi na" !! Maybe he was worried about the kind of recipes I would unleash on the world. Or "Ranna r Boi" was not a thing he felt was worth writing, though once the book was out he championed it the most.

So anyway, I had really wanted to write a novel which was not a "ranna r boi", a cookbook, and show it to him. I don't know why as a 40+ woman, I felt like I had to prove my literary merits to him but I am so very thankful that I could do that and he could be a part of the book even if for a short time.

Thanks to all who read it, enjoyed it, loved it and shared your stories with me. I am so glad that I could spread a little happiness and cheer through my books.

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Thakurbari r Beet Baata -- Beetroot paste

Though we get each and every vegetable around the year and at all times, every season I tend to gravitate towards those vegetables which were specific to that season  while growing up. 

Well, I make an exception when it comes to three of my favorite vegetables -- tomatoes, cauliflower and coriander leaves. These were very much winter vegetables in my childhood and even while waxing merits of seasonal eating, I am so very glad that now I can have them at any time of the year.

With veggies like Beetroot, I have seen I inadvertently end up buying and cooking more of this veggie in winter than summer. Similarly with Lauki or bottlegourd, which I am pulled towards in summer months but not so much in the winter.

So anyway, every winter, beetroot reminds me of 3 things, Yes the rule of 3 is ruling me today.

Bhejetebil Chop with grated beet and carrots, Beet Gajor er Chechki and a soup that my mother would make with big chunks of carrots, beet, thick slices of onion and potato sautéed in butter and then cooked in a pressure cooker with lots of broth spiced with whole black peppercons, cardamom and probably ginger.

No doubt I loved #1 and #2 but hated #3. I have tried to make that soup a couple of times as an adult and quite enjoyed it but I don't know why LS calls it "chemical jhol" and refuses to have anything to do with it!!

This time when I got beetroot, I wanted a quick easy recipe and found the Beet Baata in the slim book titled Thakurbari'r Ranna.  Now in contrast to popular belief, the recipes included in this book were not necessarily what was cooked in the Tagore Household, neither were they Rabindranath Tagore's favorite dishes.

This book is written by Purnima Thakur, daughter of Nalini Devi and Pramatha Chaudhuri. In the preface, the author very clearly says that these recipes are collected from a tattered recipe book handed down to her by her aunt, Indira Devi Chaudhurani. Indira Devi, the favorite niece of Rabindranath Tagore, had never entered a kitchen or cooked on a regular basis. But she was a connoisseur of good food and whenever she liked a dish that she tasted, she made sure to collect the detailed recipe from the cook and diligently note it down in her book. Purnima Tagore has also included some of her mother's recipes in the book. 

Surprisingly, never once in the book has the author mentioned a dish being cooked in the Tagore Kitchen nor anything about Rabindranath Tagore enjoying "beet baata" on a winter afternoon. She has very deftly and cleanly kept Tagore out of it and yet every time, someone cooks and shares a recipe from "Thakurbari r Ranna"  they want you to believe that the dish will make a poet of you.

If that is your intention, you have to skip this recipe. However you would be foolish to do so. From whomsoever this recipe of "Beet Baata" was collected, was a genius. It is the  easiest thing to do with beets and gives you way more value than the effort you put in.