Rosogollar Payesh -- the shortest cut

If you have known me for the last four years of my blogging, you must have realized by now that I am not-really "a-from-scratch" kind of person and take shortcuts if there is one. I mean I will not take a detour and heat frozen dinners when I cook for the kids or when I try to pack a healthy lunch or put dinner on the table but I will take a jump over the stream if there is one.

Like I mostly buy organic baby carrots instead of the regular sized ones which demands peeling and then chopping. I tend towards buying canned beans instead of the dry which needs pre-soaking. I will invariably lean to buy a box of clean baby spinach instead of the fresh green large leafed bunch. I will tend to over sleep and avoid the "what to have for Saturday b'fast" routine.

Ok, as I write, it dawns on me that the above points more towards me being lazy than anything else. So we won't discuss it any more. Period.

But I must admit that blogging has improved me a lot and I now no longer use off the shelf masala except for Pav Bhaji Masala, Deggi Mirch, Kashmiri Mirch, Kitchen king, Amchoor,...., ok that is getting long. But hey, I am not buying Garam Masala and making Biryani Masala from scratch. That counts.

And what about Ghee ? Come on, I make Ghee. So what if it is from sticks of store bought butter and made only quarterly and everyone except the baby is shunned from eating it to make it last longer.

I also try to bake totally from scratch now, with flour and eggs and frozen butter which never ever is at room temperature. Sometimes I just want to take a box of Betty Crocker and bake one of those totally delicious cakes with minimum effort and say "Ta-da". The family actually loved those more than what I spawn out now and I know they would be eternally grateful if I went back to Betty. But I have a blog where such stuff is looked down upon and I need to live up or down to it.

But even I have to draw a line somewhere.

And you all know that I am "oh so busy" .That I don't even have time to gulp my tea back from work. Yeah, tea is important, much more than ghee.That I volunteer as a chauffeur 3 nights a week and then a tutor , a washing lady, a very uninterested game player, a lousy story teller, a cook and odd job doer.

Those are fun jobs and I am really glad I have them. So as long as I have them, I am not buying me a cow, milking it, making paneer out of it and making my own rasgulla. No siree, no rosogolla from scratch. One fine day I might or not, we shall see. Honestly, even without any of those extra jobs I doubt my finesse and expertise in making things like rasgulla. So I will just open a can of syrupy rasgullas and make a Rosogollar Payesh as I have always done.

This I made not for Diwali but for Bhai Phota or Bhai Duj which comes two days after. My little girls have littler brothers to give phota and we try to celebrate this occasion every year. Not that the little ones are interested in such Rosgollar payesh, they would rather have cake or a lollipop as is the case for LS.

But Bengalis have a tradition of making Payesh on important occasions, kind of like Turkey on Thanksgiving.Only for Bongs, the occasion arises 1 x n times every year. Do I thank my stars that the Bong fore fathers chose Payesh and not Turkey...pheww.

This Rosogollar Payesh is one easy dessert to make and can be made couple of days ahead. It is best when served chilled and also thickens when a day old, a fact I adore.


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Rosogollar Payesh

In a deep thick bottomed pan add
1 can of evaporated milk
2-2&1/2 can of Whole Milk(use same can as Evaporated milk to measure)

Bring the above to a boil. Be careful so that it doesn't spill over.

Now add 1/2 can of Sweetened Condensed Milk to above and mix well. You can use sugar instead of C. Milk. Also depending on your sweet tooth, increase/decrease amount of C. Milk.

Add some ground cardamom.

Keep stirring at medium heat for 30-35 minutes till the milk thickens. You need to stir frequently or the milk tends to scald the bottom of the pan.

When the milk is at a consistency where it is pourable but thicker than what you started with, add a few drops of rose water and a generous pinch of saffron. Give a stir and switch off heat.

Meanwhile open a can of rasgulla/rosogolla. I had KC Das, you can use Haldiram or any good brand. Pick a rosgolla from the can using a spoon or your thumb and forefinger, give it a light squeeze to get little of the syrup out. In a serving bowl, arrange the rasgulla/rosgolla. I had about 15-18 rasgullas. Pour the warm thickened milk over the rasgullas so that the balls are soaked in milky goodness.Note: If your rasgullas are super sized, halve them, it is best to get a can of standard sized rasgullas though.

Alternately add the rasgulla/roshogolla to the pan of milk and simmer for about 30secs to a minute. This makes the rasgulla softer even with less time for soaking.

For a non-messy tip of squeezing rasgulla check Nupur's version of Rasmalai.

Chill and serve.

Phuchka, Egg-Chicken roll, Jhaal Muri and...

On my recent trip to the mater land, I had lofty intentions to make "eating food", especially street food my priority.

Yeah, 2 weeks of binging on street food on the streets of Kolkata was going to be my motto.I had decided. And then I would click enough pictures to last me an year of blog post. I dreamed.

That way I could still have a food blog and not cook. I was elated.

And then some publisher would come across my wonderful blog posts and commission me for a book, a nice glossy book, and then I could chuck my job and start my very own telebhajar ar cha er dokan (tea stall) by NH 34 or NJTPK if you prefer. I was on cloud nine.

But things did not exactly happen as planned. It never does. Not complaining.

I ate a lot, but not exactly street food.The Ma, the Ma-in-law, the aunts and similar characters thought it necessary to feed us delicious, home cooked meals, by the bushels every few hours. While my agenda said I should eat greasy shingara from Mahaprabhu down the road, early morning my Ma got up and made singara from scratch. There is little you can do on the face of such maternal super power.

And thus it went, 3 kinds of fish for lunch, mutton for dinner, long forgotten vegetables like mocha and thor, fried luchi or kochuri for breakfast, narkel narus to stuff your face with. I managed to do my best in spite of this. Aided with dependal, metronidiazole and other such serious sounding stuff I had limited amount of roll, phuchka, jhaal muri, alur chop and such. My pics were taken hastily and I didn't dare take out my DSLR , at any of these places in the fear of being shunned and ridiculed.

But I can't resist sharing with you some of the delicious stuff along the roads of Bengal.

Phuchka, the life line of most female Bongs who have come of age. While gushing about Phuchka to my non-Bong friends and colleagues , I would refer to it as Pani Puri or Golgappa. But that, it is not. Phuchka is well...phuchka. You stand in a circle around the phuchkawala, the shalpata bowl in your hand, you lean forward a little and pop that brittle pale brown ball into your mouth and it goes "phichik", the light sour tamarind water bursts into your mouth giving way to the mashed potatoes, spiced with green chili, cumin powder and red chili powder. Fireworks explode and honestly this is the closest I have experienced to what a M&B heroine would have in a totally different scenario.

And D, you need not worry, I just love food too much.

Phuchkas, I found have become very expensive though. "Paanch takay Paanch ta"(5 for 5), the guy told me. Even then, I did not haggle or ask for a fau( a free phuchka without the tangy water), a typical criteria when ordering phuchka. I ate only 2, in the fear of my dying of cholera and then I moaned my impending phuchka less old age.

Then there is the egg roll or still better the egg chicken roll. I cannot get enough of this but could only manage two rolls during the stay. The very thought that I could not visit Hot Kathi makes me want to take the next flight back.

But the rolls at my para( the neighborhood) almost made up for it.The paratha was soft and flaky, the chicken pieces tender and the spices just right without an overdose of ketchup.The chopped onions extracted from the dungeon below with a squirt of lime added just the right crunch.

And the sauce in that Maggi bottle is not Maggi, it is some amazing tomato thing which my dad insists does not even have tomatoes.

If you can close your eyes and not think of this man perspiring in the hot, humid atmosphere, you will eat only egg roll from the street all your life.

Then there is the Masla Muri or Jhaal Muri as I prefer to call it. This amazingly simple and tasty commodity is not available in all corners of Kolkata any more. The lanes, by lanes and  Shoshtitala'r mor is now overtaken by garish yellow carts selling Bollywood Bhel Puri. Now Bhel Puri is NOT Jhal Muri, though both have muri/puffed rice as the base. Bhel Puri is wet, doused with a wet chutney and needs to be eaten with a wooden ice cream spoon at Chowpatty. Jhaal Muri is dry, can be eaten directly out of the paper bag or using your fingers in Kolkata.

To eat Jhaal Muri you need to travel, slow.You have to take a bus or a passenger train rushing through the green paddy fields and potholed roads to the far suburbs.A commute where time is not really an important factor. It is only to be whiled away and there is nothing better than Jhal Muri to aid you in that process.

The jhal muri guy at the bus terminal or station just tosses some muri/puffed rice with a sprinkle of some suspicious oil, finely chopped onion, green chili, roasted peanuts, a handful of bhujia and a pinch of dry masala powder. I never ask the other stuff like chana etc. in my jhaal muri but you can if you want. He then shakes the mix in the tin can.Poured into a small paper bag made of yesterday's news with a sliver of coconut balanced on the top, you have your fuel for the journey. 

I also ate alu'r chop and singara sold just behind this Jhal Muri wala along the highway.

Tha nimki, gaja and Jalebi stall outside the Puja Pandals.

And when the tummy protested with all that eating, daab er jol aka coconut water came to the rescue.

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BS however insisted on having nuggets and fries at the McDonald. Sighhhhh.....

Happy Deepavali, the Winner and Forgotten Food

It seems every week I surface only to wish someone something. This week I holler Happy Deepavali.

Life has been extremely busy since we got back.The littlest one has a new fresh bout of separation anxiety which makes it extremely difficult for me to rush out to work, to cook, take a shower. Yes, I haven't taken a shower for the last 3 days. Ok, scratch that. It is not entirely true.

Once home all my time is for the girls until after 9. And while before I would sit down after that to do anything blog related, now I just huddle with the Bangla books I got back from my recent visit. There is a sinful pleasure in huddling on the corner couch with a book on a winter night while flames dance in the fireplace. The guilt of not cooking, not making anything special for Diwali slithers in the shadow and I bravely ignore it. There is a whole lot of pleasure in not cooking for Diwali as long as you can scavenge goodies to eat, trust me.

Choddo Prodip(14 candles) to be lit on the day before Kali Pujo on Choti Diwali

Occasionally I look through the comments on my last post, the beautiful comments on forgotten food. Thanks Everyone, those comments were the most beautiful words on food I have ever read.

It seems it is not always about the food, it is about that exact person who made it, the memory we carry with it. That was the recurrent theme in most of the forgotten food that readers mentioned.

Brat Payal talks about, "Dadi's aloo chips and aloo papads and sweet whole aamla achar!!  She would slice the potatoes up patiently and meticulously, sun dry them in the verandah, we were incharge of manning the drying chips and papadums...shooing the drooling birds and turning the chips over...one by one! I miss miss those...can we bring back the unforgotten human behind these forgotten dishes...:)"

Really, would it be the same if you slogged and made them instead of Dadi, maybe not.

Sonal's Aaji made home made Supari,  "As a child I remember every summer Aaji would make a huge trip to a specific store to purchase ingredients like betel nut, aniseed, dried ginger, licorice, rock sugar and many many exotic spices. These would be sun dried for a few days on our terrace and then crushed on an iron khalbatta(mortar & pestle) by one of her trusted aides. The final SUPARI would be bottled in glass jars and distributed to family members near and far away. You never left home without a jar of Aaji's famous SUPARI. It was like a good luck charm from her……"

Sometimes a food is forgotten because it is easier to lament about it than cook and serve it. How much effort is not too much effort to re-create such a dish ?

Eves Lung mentions "Chapor Ghonto" -- made with chholar daal bora , thhor ( the stalk of the banana plant ) and assorted veggies like brinjals,potol,etc with a phoron of with methi , red chillies ,randhuni and ginger paste .And a small bay leaf. 

On my recent visit I ate lot of the Bengali foods that is never cooked at my home. It is not that I have forgotten them, it is just that I have never taken the pain to know how to make them, it takes too much of an effort and they don't get made. This time my Ma and Ma-in-law made Mochar Ghonto, Thor, Chapri diye Mocha, Taal er Bora, Dhokar Dalna and what not. No, whatnot is not a dish.They made it with an ease I can never muster. I don't think I will ever make Mochar Ghonto or Taal er bora at home. Naaah, too much effort I will say. And thus slowly, gradually such food will be forgotten by the next generation or the next.

As Manasi says Puran Poli, "This is not forgotten, but never made at home because it is time consuming and so I'd like to bring back Puran Poli ( I have learnt it, but not perfected)just the way my grandmother used to make"

At times a food is forgotten because it is too simple. The sabzi that your Ma made with Roti everyday, the jhol that you loved to hate and sweared never to cook as an adult. This is the easiest category to bring back.

Satrupa talks about "Santula" -- "There is nothing fancy about this dish and may be that's the reason I happily forgot it.Vegetables are cooked with little water, salt and turmeric powder in a pressure cooker. Then it is seasoned with panch phoran and garlic. It is an everyday diet and we usually we have it with roti. But now I would luv having it any day ..."

Maninas talks about "Fried Bread Dough", "Which food would I like back in my family? My mum used to fry some bread dough in oil (looking a little like naan), which we had with sugar, or jam, or some savouries. It was delish!"

And now about the Give Away. I picked up a random winner using the Random Number Generator at Random.org .

Drumrolls for the winner is Indosungod. Indo, Please send me a mail with your choice and I will have it shipped.

Because it is Diwali, I decided to give one more gift of $10 Amazon gift card. And this time the winner picked up was Shruti who said "mocha'r ghonto". I am not sure if Shruti blogs. Shruti send me a mail at sandeepa( dot )blog(at)gmail(dot)com and I will send you the gift card.

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To read more on forgotten food go through the wonderful comments of this post.

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