She lives in an Altoids box

Did you all have lots of toys when you were little? I didn't. It was a different time, wasn't it? At least from where I was standing. Parents didn't go out and buy a doll along with their weekend grocery or a stuffed bunny when a child did all her chores. Money was very thoughtfully spent and children less, well, indulged. I'm grateful now for the spareness of that time; it gave my early childhood a sense of adventure that it would not have otherwise had. When you don't have a lot of toys, you learn to be more ingenious with your time, learn to become scavengers and foragers, learn to create worlds out of nothing. Which reminds me of a line I saw on this poster recently - Creativity is subtraction. It really is.

Till I was about nine years old, we lived in a joint family, in a large old house in Central Calcutta. I remember sitting on the terrace with my friends and making clay utensils, and dolls from scraps of cloth. We would bake the little clay dishes in the sun, and have lavish weddings for the dolls. With real food. The food was always real. And usually stolen from our respective kitchens.

D and I try to give Chotto-Ma a sense of that...lessness. She still has more than we did, but less than most. And one of her favourite toys is a little cloth girl that I made for her some time ago. Like the little cloth girls I used to make in the old terrace in the old days.

This is Zaza. She lives in an Altoids box.

To me Zaza, and her curiously strong bed, stands for the sparseness of another time. A time when I made do with what I had. And made memories that stuck in my head like multicoloured Post-its.

It's also the way I cook best: making do with what I have. Foraging through my cupboards without a plan. Throwing things together as I jigsaw tastes in my head. Do you do that?




Butter beans & pistachio tikki

You can soak the butter beans overnight and boil them, but I had canned butter beans sitting in my cupboard. (Because sometimes you just need cans.) And then my eyes landed on a jar of pistachios.
Tikkis came about, and they were very good, so I had to share them with you.

Ingredients

These tikkis have a very interesting combination of spices, but don't hold yourself to them. Make do with what you have. Swap butter beans with black-eyed beans, pistachios with cashew, basil with parsley. Let your cupboards take the call.

3 cups boiled/canned butter beans
1/2 cup pistachios
A handful of basil
1 green chilli
1/2 tsp sumac (if you don't have this, add a squeeze of lemon juice for a slight tartness)
1/2 tsp coriander seeds (dry roasted in a pan)
A sprinkle of coarse black pepper
1 tbs flour (if needed)
Salt
Olive oil

In a blender, or with a mortar and pestle, coarsely ground together the pistachios, basil, roasted coriander seeds and chilli along with 2 tbs of olive oil
In a bowl, add the soft butter beans, the oil-herb-spice mix, sprinkle in the sumac/lemon juice, pepper and salt. Mix well with your hands, coarsely mashing the butter beans. Sprinkle in a tbs of flour if you need to tighten the mix a little. With your hands, form flat, round tikkis.
Heat a flat pan, and drizzle in some olive oil. Pan fry the tikkis till they're nicely browned on both sides. Enjoy!

A hollow stage

Autumn in England always reminds me of winters in Calcutta. And of Christmas holidays growing up; the few weeks away from school. School, for me, was a pink building next to a tramline, with a small tiled courtyard stuck in its middle like an excuse.

From the decade that I spent there, what stands out in my mind are stiffly ironed Keralan nuns, a strong smell of phenyl from the toilets that ran along the corridors, and a black piano next to a hollow wooden stage. The lessons were like lessons, the rules were like rules - neither of which I liked to follow. The one time a teacher inspired me to look up a dictionary was when she called me 'incorrigible'. I might've been reading fiction during fill-in-the-blanks, I don't know. For the most part, School and I did not make much sense together. It might even have been the most incoherent part of my growing-up. A bit like background noise.

What has kept it from fading completely, though, are the friends I made, and kept for good. And that hollow stage next to the piano. Where one day, they discovered that there was something I wasn't difficult about. Hail Mary, the girl sings. And so, I was excused from many a lesson to sing for every Fest and every competition the school signed up for. Singing solos even earned you a few extra hours off chemistry classes, and that's all that really mattered.

The singing made everything look good - the studies, the classes.  Suddenly I didn't mind doing any of it. The last few years of school seems like a different photograph in my head: Happy. I was still incorrigible, I'm sure, but they'd gotten used to me by then. And I'd gotten used to them being them. We'd decided to get along.

This time of year reminds me of that time. The black piano and that hollow stage and practising for those interschool festivals that ran through the winter. And it reminds me of the winter-holidays that followed, when there'd be nothing much to do other than read books and eat well and walk along Park Street on Christmas Day. The best kind of holiday, really.






Mulo diye dal, or red lentils cooked with white radish
A winter dal that my mother used to cook for us, and I now cook for D and Chotto-ma. It's one of those simple recipes that are good enough to hand down generations.

(My friend Dalia asked me to blog it a few days ago. So, Dalia, here you go.)

A note: Inspite of all the menus you see in restaurants here, there is no such thing as Dhal. Only Dal. Please.



Ingredients

1 cup red lentils (Masoor Dal)
1 long white radish (Mulo/Daikon)
1/2 tsp kalonji (black jeera, which you get in all asian shops)
1 large red tomato, cut into 8 big pieces
1-2 dried red chillies
A bunch of coriander, chopped

 

Trim leaves off the radish, peel it and cut it into big cubes.
Wash the lentils till the water runs clear.
In a large pan, add lentils and radish. Cover it with 2 cups of water. Add salt. And bring to a boil.
Once boiling, lower the heat and simmer till the radish is cooked. The radish should still have a bite, and not have turned too soft. Spoon the radish out of the lentils, and let the lentils cook till they've split properly.
In a separate pan, heat oil, add the kalonji and red chillies. When the chillies turn dark, add the tomatoes and stir till the tomatoes soften.
Add the boiled dal and the radishes, more water and salt if needed, and a couple of green chilles. Bring to the boil once, and take it off the heat immediately. Add the chopped coriander.
Serve hot, with or without steamed rice.