Indian Griddle

One night a few years ago when I couldn't sleep and I'd repeatedly woken Margy with my sheet-shuffling rolling and tumbling, I decided to just get up and watch some 4am TV. (If television isn't the cure for insomnia, I don't know what is.) Jamie Oliver was on, and he was making tasty-looking Technicolor Indian food. One of his dishes was a pancake made with chickpea flour batter and filled with goodies like herbs, vegetables, and chile peppers. Before I finally drifted back into slumber, I took note of this clever little treat. I'm not sure what it would be called in India, if anything, but it seems related to bhaji.

Later, when I came to, I looked around for recipes for Indian pancakes, and I consulted my authority, the cooking-school wiz kid. And then -- once I finally located a reliable source of chickpea flour -- I just played around, going largely on my fuzzy memories of the Naked Chef. I thinned the flour with water and added spices and flavorings, and though some efforts were better than others, the results were usually pretty good. According to my associates, my pancakes were thicker than anything similar would be in India, but since I was experimenting, I didn't mind. And Margy loved these things. Could not get enough.

So this morning when I asked if she had any requests, she responded with two little words: Indian pancakes.

It will be done.

Not long into the process, I remembered my usual pancake pitfalls: getting distracted by other dishes, and having too much batter.

Distraction: Along with a nice chutney or two (in this case, and in most cases, a spicy cilantro-mint chutney recipe from Madhur Jaffrey and an amazing tamarind sauce from the book Mangoes & Curry Leaves), these chickpea pancakes could easily make a meal in themselves. But for some reason I insist on going further. Tonight I made a shrimp curry as the main course, and tending to it took some of my attention away from the pancakes. I need a controlled environment where I'm able to focus on just the one thing, so I can make sure I get it right. I say this every time, but writing it down might help. Next time I make only pancakes. (Well, and chutneys. But I get those out of the way first.)

Too much batter: These things (never to be confused with Those Things) are great reheated in the toaster oven. Add Margy's love of leftovers, and I know I have to make plenty. The problem comes when I set aside too much filling -- slivered onions and chilies, shredded spinach, chopped shrimp -- and then refuse to waste any, which means I have to overstuff that last batch of pancakes, which means they turn out too plump and not crisp enough. Next time I'm using one onion, one chile, four leaves of spinach, and three shrimp, and that's it.

The good news is that I can't lose. The batter is so easy to deal with and cooks up so effortlessly that even imperfect pancakes are still terrific. But, dammit, one of these days I intend to bring forth the pancakes of my, if not necessarily Jamie Oliver's, dreams.

Homeward Bound

As I tried to avoid the tractor-beam pull of the latest Lindsay Lohan movie and keep my nose in the book I'd never started reading on my trip, I heard the flight attendants coming up the aisle with meal service.

"Beef-chicken-vegetarian? Beef-chicken-vegetarian? Beef-chicken-vegetarian?"

Vegetarian?

I thought that one was reserved for people who call ahead. I was intrigued. My row -- all to myself, I might add (Margy still had a few days of work left in Paris) -- was in the back, so I knew one of those choices would be eliminated by popular demand by the time it was my turn. But which one would it be?

"Chicken-or-vegetarian?"

The beef ran out! Without even asking what the hell it was, I threw caution to the wind and asked for veg. Anything to avoid the funky chicken.

And wouldn't you know that on my afternoon flight out of Paris on Continental Airlines my lunch was... black-eyed peas masala.

It wasn't good -- I won't go that far -- but you know, it was the best meal I've had on a plane in a long time, maybe ever.

The Year of the Keema

I swear I didn't plan it this way, but tonight's turkey keema was a very fitting meal in terms of marking the anniversary of CFM. Keema may be, after all, the dish we've eaten the most over the last 365 days. (Either that, or hamburgers... or maybe bad takeout pizza -- I'll have to check.) This one was particularly fiery, thanks to a potent red jalapeño from the farmers' market. And though any bean will seemingly do and it's fun to sample a variety over time, chickpeas always turn out to be an inspired choice.

We Can Always Count on Keema

I was about to go play a gig, and I didn't feel like cooking. But our local take-out options are so flimsy that I was forced into duty.

I went with trusty turkey keema, tonight served in tortillas, with thick and tangy tamarind sauce.

Hello, Beans

The noteworthy thing about tonight's turkey keema, besides the fact that we ate it with warm tortillas, which is pretty damn fun, is that the meal marked the emergence of our crop of long beans. That's right -- I was able to harvest five whole beans, and since those suckers really are very long (18 inches, I'd say), five was just about enough to get us our vegetables. They were so fresh that they only needed to be boiled for about a minute, and they stayed bright and crisp. As with our tomatoes, we were struck by the beans' clear, delicious flavor.

I can't stop fantasizing about having a huge vegetable garden. Maybe someday.

A Lighter Curry

Today was one of those (many) days where I wake up thinking about what I'm going to make for dinner. Such moods are usually based on indecision and uncertainty combined with the need to move away from something I've been eating a lot of.

Hmm... what to make. Do I even have any stuff sitting around that I can use? Well, no meat. Too much meat these last few days.

A few minutes after rising, I had an idea. As I said goodbye to Margy, who was on her way to work, my last words went vaguely like this: "I'm gonna try something for dinner tonight, and it might not work out. Have a swell day!"

She asked me what I was planning.

"An Indian curry, with tofu" -- tofu that would go bad in another day if I didn't use it -- "and some shrimp" -- I had eight little guys left in a two-pound freezer bag and thought they'd make everything a little more exciting.

She trusted me.

But I just didn't know if I could pull off the tofu. I had excellent fresh tofu (which wasn't really that close to spoiling), and I didn't want it to turn to scrambled eggs in the rich and powerful sauce. Scrambled tofu is another matter; I wanted this to hold its shape. So I fried the hell out of it, in peanut oil perfumed with cumin seeds. I let it drain and made the curry with a paste of onion, garlic, and ginger and a splash of coconut milk. Turmeric and tomato paste gave it that deep color, and the consistency was nice and thick. I tossed in the fried tofu and the shrimp for the final few minutes of cooking, and then I served the curry with green chutney I made with the last of our fleeting homegrown cilantro and, ironically, the first of our burgeoning homegrown mint.

Using tofu in a curry worked out really well. Because I had let it develop a nice crustlike coating, it stayed firm in the sauce, and its relative lack of flavor wasn't a problem in a vibrantly spiced curry. I'll make this dish again, for sure.

More Keema

It would be foolish not to make enough of this stuff to have leftovers.

Practice Makes Perfect

I never get tired of turkey keema (though Margy occasionally does, when she's eaten one batch four times). And it seems to get better each time I make it. With beans, along with the hot peppers and spices, it's almost like Indian turkey chili.

Indian Sloppy Joes

Just as I was about to light the charcoal in the grill to cook hamburgers, the sky suddenly darkened. Lightning flashed, and thunder clapped right nearby. I went back inside, and I took the charcoal with me. Moments later the sky opened up, and I was off to pick up an umbrella-less Margy from the train station. Hamburgers would wait for another day.

But...

Inspiration struck in addition to the lightning.

I wanted a sandwich, I knew that. With my trusty grill ten feet away in the rain, I wasn't about to broil or fry the burgers. I reserve that kind of desperation only for a February snowstorm, and even then I would probably either light the grill or make something else. So... what could I do with this ground beef? Suddenly cumin and coriander and onion and garlic started floating around my head, and I had it: I would make beef keema, I'd throw it on a roll, and we'd have Indian sloppy joes!

With so many terrific cooks and so much great food everywhere, I really don't want to brag, but the sandwiches were even better than I imagined. The fat from the beef along with a shot of tomato paste helped to create a wonderful texture, and the spices and seasonings were bright and vivid. I put the rolls under the broiler so they got crisp/soft. But the perfect final stroke was topping each sandwich with sliced cucumber. Now this conjured some magic. The cukes offered a welcome bit of crunch, and they had a cooling effect that played off the keema's spice beautifully. It was like having a built-in raita, minus the yogurt of course.

The rain poured down, and Margy forgot about her burgers.

Mystery Meal?

I don't even know what this is.

Oh, wait -- Margy does. It was her night out with a friend, and they had a bunch of Indian-fusion appetizers at Leela Lounge in NYC. This is a paneer kabob. Paneer is Indian cheese, and Margy said this version was nicely grilled and quite delicious. She didn't have as much praise for the "assorted veggies" that accompanied the paneer. They were just red and green peppers, which aren't a favorite of either of us. We like red peppers sometimes -- they definitely have their place -- but the greenies just don't do it for us. I aspire to eat everything, but I fall short.

Supercharged Chutney

We had the pork curry again, and like most braised dishes, it was just as good or better the second time around.

Even with a strongly flavored curry, condiments make a difference. The two chutneys I whipped up usher the taste buds in different directions and, with their brightness and sweetness, join with the curry in different ways. The color contrast is pretty cool too.

The tamarind-based chutney is sweet and sour, with a little heat off in the distance. The green cilantro-mint chutney is vivid and herbal, and its chile heat is right up front. The two make great partners.

Curry Lab

Lately I've been trying to combine two of my most pleasurable hobbies: braising pork and cooking Indian food.

I don't think I've ever eaten pork in an Indian restaurant, and my Indian cookbooks contain only a few pork-centered recipes. Apparently it's not easy to come by a pig in India, and if you do, apparently there are other more important things to do with one besides eat it. But as much as I love the traditional lamb, it's more expensive than pork -- and pork's incredible melting fat does thrilling things to a curry.

For this one I decided to use whole country ribs rather than cut the meat into chunks and take it off the bone. First I browned the ribs, and then I braised them on the stove. I basically did Italian-style pork in an Indian sauce. Oh, the results! The thick curry, made with onion, garlic, ginger, tomato, coconut milk and spices, was enriched by the pork fat, and the flavors, helped along by the presence of bones, were deep after about an hour on the stove.

As a corner-cutting naan substitute, we heated some pocketless pitas and brushed them with butter. We needed as many things as we could find to soak up that sauce.

Old Faithful

I like to make enough turkey keema for us to have a few lunches throughout the week, but last time I made so much that even Margy, great lover of leftovers, grew sick of it long before it was gone. So tonight I made half the amount. I hope it's enough...

Chutney Makes It Better

For this quick dinner of leftover turkey keema and cauliflower dum, I boiled a few green beans and tossed them in tamarind chutney while hot. We poured the chutney over the turkey and rice as well.

Too much is never enough.

Tamarind Dreams

Weddings are wonderful, but it was time to get back in the kitchen.

I was planning to whip up a large batch of ground turkey keema to feed Margy and me during the week, and I needed a side dish. Lucky for us I had a head of cauliflower, that most Indian of vegetables, in the fridge. It gave me the perfect reason to use my newish cookbook, Mangoes & Curry Leaves, a huge, colorful volume that explores the food of India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. It was a Christmas gift from my mom and I had yet to try one of its recipes.

This one, cauliflower dum, was a winner. It's a tomato curry made rich by lots of grated onion. (I have to say that as thickeners go, you can't really beat grated onion.) Traditionally the pot is sealed tightly with a strip of dough and submerged in coals or ashes, but tin foil and an oven make things easier, if a bit less fun. When the pot came out, the cauliflower had become very tender, but it wasn't mushy, and it kept its color in the face of all that tomato and turmeric.

I also made a tamarind sauce from the same book. I had made thin brown tamarind chutney before, and it was much like the condiment used in most Indian restaurants. But this one was different. It was thicker and lighter in color, and it really highlighted tamarind's sour fruity flavor, sweetening it just a bit with sugar but also spicing it up with ground fennel and a strong hit of cayenne. Margy and I couldn't get enough. We poured it on the keema, the cauliflower, the rice -- and we may just have it on a hamburger later this week.

Indian Visions

The first thing I think of when I think of Indian food is color. I see green, I see red, I see yellow; I see shades that are even more beautiful, like fried-dough brown, ginger gold, and tomato-cream orange. Then I think of the aroma of cumin, the smell of garlic and curry leaves frying in a pan. And I think of textures from crackling to creamy. I think of a lot of things.

It's the sheer sensory bombardment that seems to be the hallmark of many things Indian -- the food, the music, and, so I'm told, the country itself (which Margy and I have vowed to visit). It's the right kind of sensory bombardment.

When you make Indian food at home, you get to enjoy all of the above sensations when you eat the food, but you also get to enjoy them when you cook the food. Just make a green chutney and you'll see what I mean. Throw a whole lot of fresh cilantro and mint leaves in a blender, add as many chilies as you can safely endure, plus a squirt of lemon juice and a drizzle of yogurt, and turn that blender on. Get a snootful of what's happening in your kitchen and I defy you not to find yourself humming a happy tune along with the whirring blade.

Of course, then you need to make a bunch of things to eat with that chutney. Nurse, cancel my one o'clock...

Besides an occasional streamlined curry and our official household dish, the quick-to-prepare turkey keema, I cook Indian food when I have some time to spend on it. The kinds of dishes I choose tend to keep me busy -- chopping, grinding, pureeing, then finally cooking -- for so long that I get a very real sense of accomplishment just putting them on the table.

This was my first vegetable curry, based on a Bombay curry in Suvir Saran's Indian Home Cooking and thickened with coconut milk (left over from Wednesday's surprisingly successful white-food experiment) and a puree of onion, garlic, and ginger. Could anything be bad about that? I used every vegetable in the house: peas, carrots, mushrooms, spinach, broccoli, and string beans. Margy and I were pleased with the texture of the sauce, though there was a hint of separation on the plate, which I'd like to eliminate. And the flavor was gorgeous, bright on the surface from the spices and deep down below from the well-browned puree of aromatics.

We ate the vegetable stew with basmati rice and a piece of pan-roasted steelhead trout -- and, of course, green chutney.

Margy's Indian Hors d'Oeuvres

I wasn't invited to this one. Margy and her buddy G went to Leela in NYC, which Margy described as a hip, urban Indian restaurant. The place is pretty new, and incorporates fusion elements (surprise, surprise) into its Indian repertoire.

They ordered a bunch of appetizers: lentil fritters, chaat (made with those great Indian "crispies"), samosas, and tandoori-roasted Indian cheese (paneer) kabobs. You can barely see the kabobs, but Margy said they were delicious.

Me, for a long time I didn't understand the Indian cheese thing. It just seemed out of place, as in my post-collegiate ignorance (funny how that works) I thought "Asian" and "dairy" were mutually exclusive. But I like to work my way through menus, so I tried paneer eventually, and it was wonderful, closer to firm tofu than cottage cheese in consistency. And its mild flavor makes it the perfect foil for vibrant sauces and chutneys. For the last bunch of years we've been ordering it constantly. The next step is making it myself.

Keema Improv

In Indian cooking, I believe the word keema refers to any dry-textured (not too saucy) dish made with ground meat. Which means the possibilities are endless. I've been making big batches of it with ground turkey, but tonight I tried it with beef.

I was still intent on cooking out of the pantry without making a trip to the market, and I had one more day before we needed indispensable items like milk and fresh vegetables. Poking around, I found a single hamburger in the freezer. A good start, but not enough to feed Margy and me. I looked in the cabinet and saw a can of chickpeas. Now I had my dish.

It was a snap: Add tomato paste to sautéed onion, garlic, ginger, and fresh chili (powdered cayenne or red pepper flakes would work just fine), mix in ground cumin and coriander, toss in a can of rinsed and drained chickpeas with a little water, crumble the hamburger on top, stir everything around until the beef is cooked and the beans are tender, and that's pretty much it. I found the keema holds together a bit better with beef, because it's fattier than turkey and the fat acts as a binder, but both versions are delicious.

Paris Journal: Restaurant Bimal

Every trip to a faraway land must include at least one dinner fiasco. Tonight we had ours. Somehow even our camera picked up on the out-of-focus nature of our Friday evening.

Margy and I had plans to meet up after she finished work, to grab a quick bite before going to a party she had been invited to. Though we had been told the party would feature some good homemade food -- and the idea of eating at the home of a local was quite tempting -- I was deeply skeptical. I pictured great crowds of people with whom I could not communicate and big empty bowls that had once held delicious things to eat. So we figured we'd deal with dinner first rather than fight a Frenchman over a forkful of lentil salad.

And then we lost our nerve. We decided to go straight to the party and eat there.

We waited around a bit after Margy finished work, eventually caught a cab, and then stood outside our destination trying to get the door code to work. When we finally cracked the code, climbed a wide winding staircase, and pushed through the door of a huge and majestic Paris apartment, we found exactly the scene I'd feared, only on an even larger scale than I'd pictured it. There were four big rooms packed with people sitting in front of cleaned plates and empty bowls. So Margy did a few quick double-kiss hello/goodbyes, and we left.

With the clock running out on dinner -- it was past 10:30 at this point -- we had to find a place to eat. Fast. Our standards slackened by the minute, and we considered the cookie-cutter sushi joints that for some reason dotted the block we were on. We even sat down at one, only to look at the mass-produced menus featuring bright photos of almost nothing but salmon, and bolted.

A couple of minutes later we shrugged and chose Bimal, an Indian and Pakistani joint near all the sushi houses. It was fine, if nothing spectacular. We picked a vegetarian menu of samosas, palak paneer (spinach and Indian cheese), and dal makhni (lentils), and washed it down with a bottle of the Beaujolais Nouveau that had been grandly unveiled the previous evening. The wine does not have a great reputation, but after seeing innumerable signs announcing its arrival and hearing little local bands play raucous odes to its potency, how could we resist? It actually went well enough with Indian food.

So in the end, as far as dinner fiascoes go, this one could have been much worse.

Keema Again?

"Ta-ra-ki-ta, ta." --Ravi Shankar

We've been eating this all week. It is the stuff of paradise, this turkey keema.

But why the hell didn't I throw in some peas?