Baking eggs

It's been a while since I cooked something at home, and this morning, after my morning run, I was in the mood for something sinfully heavy. Looking around the house, the only thing(s) that could qualify as heavy were egg and cheese, so I got to work with it. I was soon reminded of a post by Ms BakeAnything and Ms Quiche about mixing stuff with an egg and baking it. And so I got to work on the same.

Now even while making simple omelettes, to make things a little exciting, we add a host of things - onions, tomatoes, spinach, bacon, ham, cheese - to name a few, so I thought of doing the same. I had a little pork pickle left (purchased at Thulp a while ago), a new bottle of Tom Yum soup paste (that Ms Quiche had bought for me recently), and so I decided to toss in these two along with some cheese, onions and garlic. For seasoning and flavour, I used paprika, salt and pepper. Although I started out with 1 egg, I soon realised two was the optimum number.

So I cracked two eggs into a mug, beat them with a fork, chopped up a quarter of an onion, bashed the daylights out of one clove of garlic, added some salt and pepper, and then went on to add a teaspoon of the Tom Yum paste and the remainder of the pork pickle in the jar (about a table spoon). Feel free to substitute the pork with ham, bacon, mushrooms, bell peppers or whatever you love to go into you eggs. No real substitute can be suggested for vegetarians for the the Tom Yum paste, so just add whatever flavouring you desire. Top it up with cheese - as much as your heart desires. I also added some paprika for flavour.

Preheat the oven at 200C and cook at 200C for 18 minutes (Ms BakeAnything had suggested cooking time of 20 minutes at 180C). The end result was quite fabulous and a wonderful meal for brunch.





Ingredients
2 eggs
1 tsp paprika (optional; use chilli powder if you want it spicy)
1 clove garlic, crushed and make a paste
1/4 onion, chopped
1 tsp Tom Yum paste
1 tbsp pork pickle (use ham/bacon/chicken/ground beef/musgrooms/bell peppers)
Cheese, as much as your heart can handle
Salt & pepper to taste

Method
Chop the onion fine, make a paste out of the garlic, whisk the eggs and add the onions, garlic, salt, pepper, paprika, Tom Yum paste, and pork pickle. Add all these into a ramekin (I don't have one, so I used a ceramic mug). Preheat the oven at 200C. Once preheated, place the ramekin/mug into the oven and bake at 200C for 18 minutes. Alternately, preheat at 180C and bake at 180C for 20 minutes. Ensure that ehatever dish you use for baking is evenly shaped so that the heat is distributed evenly and cooking happens evenly.

When we grilled through the night

Soon after the Assamese food festival, the next night, Ms Quiche and Ms BakeAnything invited me to Ms Quiche's place for a night of fun cooking and drinking.

Ms Quiche: "BYOB and BYOF is what it's gonna be."
Me: "Eh?"
Ms Quiche: "Bring your own booze, and bring your own food."
Me: "Oh OK", I said, and I thought to myself, "Wicked!"

The ladies were onto something and were planning on sausages, grilled chicken, salads and what not. The salad was quite a hit even though there wasn't a shred of meat in it. Pineapple, watermelon, and lettuce with a dressing made of olive oil, balsamic vinegar and honey. Divine! Quite simply fabulous. I'd personally never thought of using honey in a salad dressing (or anywhere), but then again, my culinary expertise is very limited.



The chicken was marinated with ginger, garlic, chilli and paprika, and some vinegar and sugar with salt. At the end, we were tearing into the chicken like cavemen. Here's the link to their recipes.



Everyone got a welcome drink, a mojito, and it was quite a superb one. I wonder if these women are moonlighting somewhere without my knowledge.



There was also some grilled fruits - pineapple, raw mango, tomatoes and peppers. The pineapple and raw mango was also a hit.



I decided to make bacon-wrapped prawns. This dish is a result of my hatred towards all places that batter-fry this marvelous combination, thus killing two birds with one proverbial stone. Grilling, or pan frying the combo is the way to go, and the best way to go about doing this is by creating a nice pasty marinade for the two main actors in this show.




Recipe for prawn marinade:

20 medium sized prawns (use large ones if you please), deveined, with tails on (keeping the head on is optional, depending on personal preference)
4 cloves garlic
2 tsp sugar (preferably powdered)
2 1/2 tsp paprika
1 tsp red chilli powder / cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp pepper
3/4 tsp coriander powder
1/2 tsp cumin powder
3/4 tsp salt
1.5 tbsp oil (I used olive, but again, your choice)
1 lemon, juiced
10 rashers of Bacon
40-50 Toothpicks

Recipe for bacon marinade:

2 tsp paprika
1 tsp chilli powder
1/2 tsp cumin powder
1/2 tsp coriander powder
1/2 tsp pepper

Method:

Wash and de-vein the prawns, and dry them using paper towls. Mince the garlic as fine as possible. Make a paste out of the garlic, along with the sugar, paprika, chilli powder, pepper, coriander powder, cumin powder, salt, lemon juice and oil. Mix well, and then apply on the prawns and allow to marinate in room temperature for about 30-45 minutes. Now, heat a pan (without oil) and once it's hot, add a few rashers of bacon on it and start to fry them. No, no oil. The bacon has enough fat and we want to fry it in that itself. The idea is to partially fry them, until some of the fat melts and is rendered in liquid form. Do not fry until crisp; we need the bacon to be in a state where we can fold it around the prawns. Once the bacon is slightly cooked, take them off and dry them on paper towels. Collect the fat from the pan and keep aside. Repeat this until all the rashers of bacon have been partially fried, and collect whatever fat you can.

Once all the bacon has been partially fried, prepare the marinade. Mix all the ingredients for the bacon's marinade and use the fat collected (as much necessary) to mix all the dry ingredients and make a paste. Apply it on the bacon and allow it to marinate for about an hour. Once both the bacon and prawns have been marinated, take one rasher of bacon and put two prawns, heads together, into it, such that the tail ends stick out of opposite sides. Roll the bacon over them and secure this with 2 toothpicks, criss-crossing each other (or as many needed to secure it - I used 3 in some cases). Repeat this for all the rashers of bacon and prawns. Keep the 'parcels' in the refrigertor until about 30 mins before they are to be grilled.

Once your grill is ready, and the charcoals are hot, use a skewer and brush a little oil on it and run it through each bacon wrapped prawn(s) parcel. While skewering, leave the toothpicks on or it would fall apart. Skewer about two or three per skewer and set on the grill. Turn the skewers over periodiclaly to cook evenly. If you're using a pan, then leave the skewers aside and set the pan on a high flame, and once the pan is hot, add a half teaspoon of some of the fat collected from frying the bacon. As soon as it starts to sizzle, add the parcels onto the pan. how you manage to do this with the toothpicks still in the parcels is a test of your ingenuity. But rest assured, removing the toothpicks will spoil the show because you want the prawn(s) wrapped under the bacon blanket to get infused with some of that bacon goodness while it cooks.

World Cup finals...a day to remember

Becoming world champs in any discipline isn't a joke. And in cricket crazy India, to lift the coveted trophy that the teams play for is almost a demand, a mandate and not an option. Captains and coaches have lost their jobs in search of the elusive trophy that came to our shores once before, in 1983, a couple of months after I was born. And so on the evening of 2^nd April 2011, the day of the cricket world cup finals between Indian and Sri Lanka, I was at Ms Quiche's place, along with Ms BakeAnything. After the semi finals against Pakistan (also watched at Ms Quiche's house), we'd decided that we were going to watch the finals there too, sitting in the same spots in the same positions.

Ms BakeAnything had baked a cherry pie, and while it was sitting in the fridge after it came outta the oven, we were watching our bowlers get tonked all over the park by the Lankan batsmen. The recipe for the pie shall be put up on their blog and I shall provide a link to it in a later post. Midway through the innings, both ladies decide we need to cook something to go with the pie. I was pleased as punch...cooking, food, and a cricket match. But these two ladies didn't allow me anywhere close to the kitchen, let alone the ingredients or any action that could've helped in the whole cooking process.

Some of the tweets that I tweeted once the game started








So while I had to settle to click pictures and keep myself entertained with the cricket and give a little commentary to the ladies, they set about boiling potatoes and peeling them, slicing them thin, seasoning them with Italian seasoning and then pan frying them. Once this was done, some cheese and water to get it a little runny and presto - one world cup winning snack ready to be downed :) I tell you, we were convinced that we had a small part to play in the victory - sitting in the same positions when fours and sixes were hit, realising that different positions made our chaps get out and so shifted back to original positions, and of course, eating the right things.

Some of the conversations we had:
Ms BakeAnything: Against Pak, when I was cleaning the house, Sehwag was hitting 4s. The moment I sat, he got out!
Ms Quiche: So clean, take the broom...fast!
Me: Yes please!

During the middle overs, the game got a little slow.


Jayawardene then started taking our bowlers to the cleaners!


Q: SL will make 275, but we will win.
Me: It's 268, with one ball to go. He has to hit a six for your theory to work!

Six of the last ball!

Me standing hands akimbo in front of Ms Quiche.
Me: You'll pay dearly for this! That last six had better not cost us...
Q: Hehe.. we'll win, don't worry (very unconvincing voice).

Our start was disastrous. Two wickets down in no time, that crazy Lankan called Malinga with his hideously bleached blond hair is giving rise to a lot of potty jokes. We're all worried whether our batsmen are going to choke. The crowd has all but lost hope, but this being the Bombay crowd and not the Calcutta crowd, they don't want to throw stuff onto the field and hand the match over to the Lankans (a la 1996), so they stay behind and try to pretend that they can actually be sportive. People make Rajanikanth jokes and want him to save the team.



There's a partnership building. Looks like our team has some spunk and fight in them. The Lankan skipper starts resorting to cheap lawyer tricks to get a breakthrough. The umpires aren't having any of it though. Thankfully!


Now the boys are fighting back. The run rate required is still manageable. Some bimbo named Poonam Pandey had promised to strip for the team if we won the cup. Do it for Poonam at least, the chants on Twitter get louder. Murali, the ace Lankan spin wizard is getting tonked around. There's real hope now. And it isn't even optimistic hope, we're talking realistic hope here.






Oh boy, in between all this, there's food to eat. And it's awesome what these ladies have made. The pie is abso-effing-lutely delicious, and the potato sliced thingy with the cheese dip was pretty darn good as well. After pan frying them, the ladies had drained the slices on tissues to remove the excess oil, and so when we bit into them, they tasted quite 'light'. And if you like fried stuff, and cheese dips, then too bad you missed out on this :)




The match began to get interesting again. Gautam Gambhir was leading the charge along with young Virat Kohli. All of India was praying for Ganbhir to make a century (he was well on his way). Twitter is chirpy again. People making jokes...until Sanjay Manjrekar opens his mouth, and the dreaded commentator's curse strikes! Gambhir is bowled for 97. Damn!





It's still not over. The game I mean. The food's been polished off, we'd stepped out and come back with some dinner, and now we had only our finger nails to chew on. And in comes the captain and plays the innings that'll go down in history as the epitome of a captain's innings, courage under fire, call it what you like. And finally, just as the last shot of the Lankan innings was a six, the new drug we were all high on, MSD, lambasted one over and above the stands to send a billion into a frenzy never seen before.

Strawberry Soufflé

A couple of weekends ago, mom and I made strawberry soufflé at home. She was expecting guests - a whole lot classmates from her days back in med school. So apart from the rest of the stuff that was made, the soufflé was one of the main draws that evening. Traditionally, soufflés contain eggs and are baked dishes, but mom's been calling this soufflé since I was a kid (back then she used to make one using pineapples) and so I've continued to call it soufflé.

Ingredients:
2 boxes strawberries (box = the small plastic boxes available nowadays)
2 packets cream (200 ml packets)
Gelatin
Sugar to taste

Take strawberries from one and a half boxes (leave half a box for garnishing and popping them into your mouth for an oh-so-lovely feeling). Wash them thoroughly. Take a vessel with about 3/4 lt. of water and dump the strawberries into it, put it onto the stove and bring to a boil. Add enough sugar to the solution/suspension until it's sweet enough (remember, we'll be adding cream later, which will further reduce the sweetness, so be generous). Once this is done, strain the liquid and set aside. While the strawberries are being boiled alive, add about 6 teaspoons of gelatin to a glass of water and allow it to swell. [Note to reader: The 6 teaspoons of gelatin is the proportionate amount needed for 400 ml cream plus nearly 1 lt. of water] Put the strawberry pulp into a blender and b(l)end it like Beckham until it's nice and smooth (mind you, when I say smooth, I mean it shouldn't be chunky). Add this pulpy awesomeness to the liquid strained above. Once the gelatin has swollen, add it to the strawberry + water mixture and allow to set (it would be hot, so let it rest in the open and then move it into the fridge).

Strawberries

After the suspension has set (around 6 hours, give or take a little), take the packets of cream and blend it into the suspension using a hand blender. Be sure not to whip the cream too much too soon or it'll become butter! Pour the new mixture into a large dish you wish to set it in, or into individual cups/bowls and smoothen it. Garnish the top with slices of strawberries. If you've got chocolate sauce at home, you can work your magic and create heaven in your home.

Soufflé

Soufflé - close up

Enjoy it cold, and if you think you like it a little runny, allow it to thaw a little - the gelatin loses its hold on the suspension and it becomes creamier and runnier.

Deepavali cookout at home - 2

So the final day of Deepavali and the brother and I need to eat again, but this time, we decided not to have anything fancy (notice that although I do all the buying, cleaning, cutting, cooking, etc, I just said we...somethings not right, I think I'm not getting enough from this deal). So, good old white rice along with some chicken was the 'order' of the day (that's what my brother does...he orders, and I comply like a dud!).

I still had some coconut milk from the the experiment on day 1 and so decided to incorporate that into the dish. I made a marinade out of coriander, green chillies, and garlic, and marinated the chicken in it overnight (actually it was marinating for almost two days :) ). Oil into the pan, tossed in some more chopped garlic, cumin, and green chillies, fried it a bit, and then in went the chicken. After a few minutes, I added the coconut milk to the pan and cooked over a low flame until the chicken was nice and tender. I should have made a career out of this, although, coming to think of it, I'm not that old yet, so I guess there's still hope :)

The end product

Another angle

Family cookout

So the second night of Deepavali saw the brother and I go to a cousin's place for a family get together. And in Bunt families (as with families of most communities in India), this involves food, and a lot of it. So here's a sample of just some of the things that were on display. The usual "kori-rotti" and "neer dosa" that most people associate Mangalorean cuisine with WAS NOT there, and I'll let y'all know that Mangalorean cuisine isn't just kori-rotti and neer dosa. There's a whole lot more, and although essentially rice-based, there are soooo many dishes that are made.

Chicken biryani

A flat, dry rice cake

Chicken stew

Idlis

Chicken curry

Some kind of payasa

Another sweet stuffed with coconut & jaggery

The last dish, a sweet, is a little unique in it's prep method. The other 'shell' is made from rice. The rice is mashed into a paste and smeared on turmeric leaves. Once this is done, it's filled with grated coconut and jaggery and then it's folded in half and steamed. This is one of the several rice-based sweets we have, and although we had only a fraction of the dishes here, t'was still a superb night of fun, food and frolic.

Coming up, Deepavali cookout at home part 2.

Deepavali cookout at home - 1

Mom wasn't in town for Deepavali and it was time to flex my culinary muscles again, so here's what I did. I wanted to have rice, but not plain rice. So I decided to cook something, and a little differently - without a pressure cooker. So I quickly sauteed some onions, red capcicum and garlic in a wok and tossed in some rice and quickly stir-fried it for a couple of minutes.

I then seasoned the entire mixture and poured in coconut milk, and further seasoned it with some Thai seasoning that I had. Once I got the ration of rice : liquid right (I made the balance by adding water), I sliced in a couple of chillies and covered the wok with a large cover. I think it took about 10 minutes, but keep popping the cover off after 10 mins to check when it's done - you don't want this thing drying out on you.



After the rice was cooked, garnishing was done with a little chopped coriander. Now all I needed were some spicy prawns.


I don't quite know what to call this rice, but for now I'll just call it yummy. The chillies I added turned out to be duds - they weren't spicy at all, which in fact turned out to be a blessing because the rest of the flavours stood out, and the coconut milk just made it soooo freakin' yummylicious.

OK I'll call it Thai coconut-milk flavoured rice (sorry, imagination not working here).

Rice - 1 cup
Coconut milk - 2 200ml packets + water to make up the difference
Red capcicum - 1/2
Onion - 1 large
Garlic - 3 cloves, sliced
Thai seasoning - how much ever you want until it tastes right
Coriander - for garnishing
Salt & pepper for seasoning

So now for the prawns. I got back to sauteeing the rest of the onions, a little tomato, and some garlic.


To this, I added about 3/4 teaspoon of cumin, and then added some prawns that were marinating in chilli powder, lemon juice, ghee and some salt. Cook on a high flame for about 4 minutes or so or until they lose their transparency and become opaque, and voila...

...this is what you end up with. I couldn't have enough snaps taken of this :)



I won't call these the typical Mangalorean prawns, so we'll just say spicy prawns.

Prawns - 250 grams

Tomato - 1/2
Onion - 1/2
Garlic - 3 cloves
Chili powder - 1 teaspoon heaped
Lemon juice from half a lemon
Cumin - 1/2 - 3/4 teaspoon
Ghee - 1 teaspoon (for marinade), 1 tablespoon (for cooking)
Salt to taste

Marinate the prawns for at least an hour in the salt, lemon juice, chili powder, and ghee. Heat pan with ghee and cook onions, tomatoes, garlic and cumin, and add the prawns and cook until done.

Thus ended part 1 of the cookout. Day 2 saw us head to our cousins place where there was a family get together, which meant more food :)