: Liver Kosha With Spinach::

There was this slab of liver lying around my freezer for a while. I wanted to use it up, and I also wanted to use up a bunch of spinach leaves I bought during my last visit to the East Austin Farmers' Market. This recipe was born out of that necessity to combine the two. I learnt, while surfing through the net that submerging the liver in milk for a few hours before cooking helps. Apparently, that way the liver loses some of its characteristic bitterness. I did that. And after six hours or so, I marinated it further in turmeric, cumin powder, coriander powder, paprika and a little bit of red chili powder for a couple of hours or so. I followed this recipe more or less. I did brown the liver and the potatoes separately. I also added some sour cream and sugar into the mix. In some ways, this is the standard recipe for cooking anything kosha. But because I needed to use up the spinach, I made it into a puree. And while the liver pieces and the potatoes were being browned in pot number one, I mixed the pureed spinach in pot no. 2, along with the onions and the spices and let it all mix together in a nice gooey thingie. And then added the liver pieces and the potatoes into pot number 2.

I loved the results. I think, this one is going to be a keeper in my kitchen. But still, I missed the taste of the fresh goat-liver that I have eaten in Kolkata. The frozen stuff simply did not taste the same. The again, who knows, maybe it's all in my head. Anyways...

Recipe : Chicken Paprika

I am always looking for new ways to fix chicken. There are quite a few chicken recipes about which I don't have to think much to cook. But most of them are very very South Asia inflected. And yesterday I was feeling like something different. I found this one. But I made few changes.

Ingredients2 1/2 lbs chicken, cut into 2-inch pieces
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp Hungarian paprika (sweet or hot)
2 1/2 tbsp all-purpose flour
2 cups (480 ml) of chicken stock
4 tbsp white wine
2/3 cup (70 ml) sour cream
1 bell pepper, seeds removed and sliced into rings for garnishing
salt and pepper to taste
DirectionsUsing a large skillet, heat oil over medium-high heat. Add the chicken pieces and and brown, turning occasionally, until golden, about 6 minutes. Transfer to plate and cover to keep warm.

Drain fat from pan. Add the onions and garlic; cook until soft. Add the paprika and flour, stirring constantly, for 2 minutes. Gradually stir in the stock and bring to a boil, and continue stirring.

Add the wine and season to taste with salt and pepper. Cover and simmer gently for 20 minutes. Stir in the sour cream.

Arrange chicken on a large platter and spoon sauce over and around it. Serve with dumplings and sour cream on the side.

This was the original one. What I did :

1. I marinated the chicken (Cornish Game Hens with bones) in paprika, cumin and coriander powder.
2.  I didn't drain the fat from the pan.
3. I used ghee to cook.
4. Along with paprika, I added black pepper, white pepper and dill to season the onions.
5. I added tomatoes along with a little sugar (around one tbsp)
6. I added the sour cream in the actual cooking pan and let it simmer in the heat.
7. I used red wine instead of white.

So, at the end, I think, it became a very Bengaliized Chicken Paprika. What can I say-- I am an innovator. And this one kicked ass. 

::In My Mother's Kitchen: Thoughts::

I have been thinking a lot about food, because I am teaching a class on food. I like to eat, I like to experiment with ingredients in my kitchen. But when I approach food as the raw material for my scholarly and creative reflections and productions, I am primarily interested in these things: food and its relationship to concepts of power, food as a site of power, food as a site of resistance, food as a site that exists as an intersection of social processes like labor, commodification and consumption. Because I am interested in the labor that happens around food production, I am also interested in the valence of the kitchen-space. Kitchen the space within which most domestic food production happens. Kitchen the space which has, for so many centuries of human history, has been seen as the space where women belong. I can flip the equation around, and also say, because I am interested in gender, I am interested in the history and politics of the kitchen. I have been trying to find poems and memoir-pieces on kitchen. And this is one of the first things that came up when I did a Google search with the keywords In My Mother's Kitchen.

IN MY MOTHER'S KITCHEN

Fragrance of fresh tortillas and corn stew

Fills my mother's kitchen

Sparsely furnished

Crowded with warmth

Soot-grayed walls, secretive and blank

She moves gently in and out of light

Like a dream just out of reach

The morning light gives her a halo

That plays upon her crown of dark hair

Strong brown hands caress soft mounds of dough

She gazes out into the warming day

Past sagebrush hills, out towards the foot of Black Mesa

How far would she let the goats wander today

Before it rains

Childhood dreams and warmth

Tight in my throat, tears in my eyes

The radio softly tuned to a local AM station

News of ceremonies and chapter meetings

And funerals

Flows into the peaceful kitchen

Lines upon her face, features carved of hard times

Lines around her eyes, creases of happy times

Bittersweet tears and ringing silvery laughter

I ache in my heart

My mother's gentle movements light up dark corners

Her gentle smiles recall childhood dreams still so alive

My mother moves in and out of light

Like clouds on days of promising rain

—Shonto Begay

And here is Begay's website: http://shontogallery.com/wp/

What struck me about this poem is the way the poet reveals the little details of the mother's kitchen. There are so many images in this poem, much like the classic confessional/memory poem tradition of American poetry. But, all those image-work have been mobilized towards a specific impulse : to construct the mother's kitchen as an abode of peace, and the mother as a figure who embodies all that is "gentle" in life. Given Begay's personal and creative history, I am seeing in this poem a well-known trend: constructing the kitchen and the mother that provide refuge against the outside world : the world of funerals, tears and chapter meetings. In other words, the colonizing world which is only capable of generating trauma. But then, the mother in this poem is hardly a "real" figure : she "moves in and out of light", she is like a "dream that is out of reach." Yep, she becomes the classic national allegory. The allegory of the indigenous "American" nation that hasn't been born, that probably will never be born, and therefore, like the mother of this poem will always be a little elusive, its dream-like quality providing solace during moments of stressful contacts with the "mainstream" world.

But this is not just all. I am also thinking about how this elusive mother-figure keeps appearing in male poetry throughout the world. And not just the mother figure, the figure of the allegorized woman, Like Jibanananda Das's classic imageries of "kishorir chal dhoya haat" ( the young girl's rice-washed hands). In spite of their huge geographic and cultural difference, what is common in Begay and Das's kind of metaphor-making is that, it transforms women's actual labor into romanticized allegories, symbolizing some kind of inaccessible, elusive antithesis to the trauma of the outside world. So, when I read poems like this, I cannot help asking: where is the actual labor of the mother within the space of the kitchen? How does the mother-figure's frustrations and hysteria get reproduced within the kitchen space? How does the kitchen become the space where women's trauma (as against the "outside" world and its identification as the space for male trauma) gets constituted, articulated, expressed? And last but not the least, how does the mother herself see this kitchen? Does this ever become the space for expressing her creativity? What I am seeing as I am reading these lines I just wrote, what are the questions that we need to ask in order to de-naturalize the idea that kitchen is the essential space where women find belonging, and somehow, that's inherent in the very constitution of women. Unfortunately, in spite of the beauty of his images, that's what Begay's poem ends up doing.

As I am struggling through these questions, I find myself writing some poems which try to answer these questions. So far I have written six such poems. All of them are pretty short. But I am enjoying writing them. And along with finishing the first draft of the dissertation and teaching, that's what I have been up to.

::Food Memoirs::

Have been reading Leslie Li's culinary memoir Daughter of Heaven: A Memoir With Earthly Recipes for the class I am teaching in Spring. Apart from the fact that her writing is absolutely fascinating, I am also wondering about a few things:

a. I am glad that I took up "food" (or should I say alimentation) as the theme of my class. My dissertation is primarily about violence, resilience and resistance. There is a heaviness to the things that come with it. On the other hand, food is essentially about survival, sustenance, creativity and celebration. At this point in my life, when everything is in the air, and I can hardly afford a decent meal, reading about food keeps me happy.

b. Food is about the quotidian. Consequently, there is an everyday-ness in the very writing of food memoirs that is hard to pull off in other genres. I am enjoying that everydayness immensely as I am working through Leslie Li.

By the way, Happy New Year!

::In My Kitchen::

I don't have a fancy kitchen. What I have is more of a half-kitchen than anything else. And I am not the most organized person in this planet. But, I like to eat. And I like to cook. And as much as I problematize domesticity, there is something about walking into my (relatively) clean kitchen during the break, grind the coffee-beans, make myself a cup of coffee, sit down to work. This semester had been particularly stressful for lots of different reasons. I didn't have much time to cook at all. On most days, I depended on another friend to feed me. On other days, when I did make something for myself, I boiled rice, potatoes, lentils and eggs, mashed them up and ate them with a bit of butter or ghee. Yes, the classic Bengali shedhho-bhat. So, it would be nice to get a chance to cook some simple dishes in my modest grad-student kitchen in the next few days. So these are the things I am planning to cook during the next week or so:

Chicken Adobo

Kosha Mangsho

Some kind of a vegetarian dish (I am not sure yet).

Tonight, I will marinate the meat for the adobo. And then, tomorrow I cook.

::The Chapbook Manuscript Done::

I finished assembling my chapbook! I have assembled chapbooks before, but never before have I felt this sure of a particular project. During the last three days, I have succeeded to edit a lot of flabs from the poems, attain a specific narrative arc, and an ordering of poems. I just emailed it to a poet friend of mine, for her feedback and comments. I will also hand in a hardcopy to another friend of mine tomorrow. I am not hoping for great things here, since I will have to finish, edit, revise the dissertation, and find a job. Besides, I know, I still have lots of work in terms of strengthening individual poems. But I am hoping, by the next contest and publication cycle (ie, fall 2012), I will have a manuscript to send out to.

In other news, I went to Mi Madres for brunch yesterday with a friend. Their tacos were heavenly. I tried Pork Adobado,onions, avocado and Barbacoa served with picco de gallo. I will definitely go back whenever I have a chance. I need to begin to resume work on my dissertation. It will happen-- tomorrow.

TidBits

Left-overs always taste so much better! Couple of days ago, I made this kosha mangsho with goat meat. I followed this recipe almost verbatim. Koshano is a form of slow-cooking, I guess. But it does some magical things to the meat.

In another week, we will bang right into National Poetry Writing Month. I don't think it will be a good idea for me to try to do the challenge with the dissertation still looming large in the background. Instead, I am taking up the challenge of working on my poems everyday. I don't know if that will amount to writing a new poem, or revising an old one. Sometimes, it takes me three or four days (or more) to get a poem out of my system. I don't want to yank out a poem a day because of April happens to be some kind of poetry month. But it does feel good to see that poetry receives a kind of special attention during this April, and there are events around it.

The dissertation-chapter is moving, although not as fast as I would like it to go. But it's moving!I have a strange, inconsistent relationship to deadlines. In case of the dissertation, the deadline to submit at least once to the writing group during a semester has been very very helpful. It has made me sit down, organize my thoughts, and just to produce something. Even if that "something" happens to be very rough, sketchy, and tentative. I mean, if I have a first draft at least I can go back to it, revise,and make it better. But it's hard to produce that first draft, often times! In case of my creative writing, I prefer to write without deadlines, and then put them up for workshops. Sometimes, I have generated new stuff for a workshop, and have revised the existing stuff extensively. But in general, I do like to produce creative stuff on my own time, and then use the workshop for thinking through the feedback.

Pepperoni Fried Rice

I desperately needed to clean the refrigerator. Hence, this one.

Ingredients:

Pepperoni

Onions (I used pearl onions, around 8. But others would do too.)

Tomato (1, finely chopped)

Garlic (four cloves, finely chopped)

Green chili (1, slit in the middle)

Coriander Powder

Paprika

Red Chili Powder

Turmeric

Basmati Rice

Salt

Frozen mixed veggies (anything else will do too)

Preparation:

Heat butter in a skillet.

Temper it with cumin seeds, turmeric,salt, coriander powder, red chili powder, paprika.

Let the spices sizzle.

Pour in minced garlic, tomato, green chili, onion pieces.

Let everything mix together into a mush.

Throw in the pepperonis.

Then the de-frosted veggies.

Let everything mix thoroughly.

Throw in the rice. Let it mix with everything, fry them together a little bit. (I did it for around 7 mins.)

Pour some water. Cover the skillet.

As always, I don't really keep a record of the portions. I do whatever my eyes suggest. But the result wasn't bad at all!

Lemon Rice

Yesterday I was too impatient to put up the recipe of the lemon rice I had cooked. So here it is:

Ingredients

Basmite Rice

Butter

Lemon, 1

Paprika

Coriander Powder

Cumin

Chicken Stock

Salt

Sugar

--Melt the butter in the pot.

--Sprinkle all the spices, leave them for a little while. Occasionally stir. Soon enough, they will begin to emit a beautiful smell.

-- Now squeeze in the lemon juice from the lemon.

--Let the juice mingle with the spices.

--Pour the rice. Stir, until the spices get well mixed with the rice grains.

--Keep stirring for 5 mins or so.

--- Mix water.

--Let the rice boil.

--- Now eat.

Nopales Con Pollo

I want to write down this recipe before I totally forget it. A couple of days ago, I bought some cactus from the store. This is my first time experimenting with them.

Ingredients:

Cactus (chopped into small pieces)

I Medium-sized Tomato, chopped into small pieces

10 pearl onions, chopped

Chicken Sausage, shredded

Mushrooms

Garlic, 4 fat cloves

1 Green Chili, slit in the middle

Dil Leaves Powder

Oregano Powder

Parsely Powder

Cumin Powder

Black Pepper Powder

White Pepper Powder

Chili Powder

Shredded Cheese

--Heat olive oil in a pan. Then pour some parsley powder, oregano powder, cumin, black pepper powder, paprika, chili powder. Let the whole thing mix for like 20 seconds.

--Then throw in the tomatoes, the onions, the garlic. Saute. Let the whole thing turn into a mush.

--Add the slit green chili.

--Then throw in the sausage. Stir the whole thing together.

--Now throw in the shredded cactus. Stir.

--- Add the mushrooms. Depending upon how seasoned you like your food, sprinkle some more of the spice powders.

--Stir the whole thing for around 5 minutes. Or until all the ingredients get mixed beautifully.

--Then cover the pan with the lid. Do not add water. The cactus pieces will bleed enough moisture. So, unless you want it real soupy, do not add extra water. Let it cook for 15-20 minutes.

--Then turn off the heat. Put the whole mixture in a glass pot. Cover the surface with shredded cheese. I used cheddar, because that's what I had in the refrigerator. Anything else will be fine too.

--Bake it in the oven for 10 mins.

I ate it with Lemon Rice. I believe it will go well with ordinary white rice or other varieties of rice too. It was GREAT!

Food and Growing Up

I didn't grow up eating lots of poppy-seed (posto) curries. My mother wasn't especially fond of them, and would tell me, posto is more of a ghoti thing. Meaning, it's more of a food that belongs traditionally to the people who are from West Bengal than us, the bangals, who are originally from East Bengal(now Bangladesh). Bengali cuisine is not something one easily gets in US. In lots of ways, Bengali food doesn't share a lot of the characteristics of Punjabi food, which has come to be understood as the India food in US. It's not as spicy, less greasy, more flavorful. Spices are used more to season things rather than to blunt the original smell of the vegetables, fish or meat. It does frustrate me sometimes that I cannot walk into a Bengali restaurant and order the delicacies I have grown up eating. On the other hand, I do like the fact that Bengali food hasn't been assimilated into the mainstream of American food cultural, the commercial culinary tourism. Whenever I cook something Bengali, I feel as if I am cooking up a secret, which I can (and do) share with my loved friends and only loved friends here. Today I cooked posto-murgi (chicken with poppy seeds). It is not something I have had ever tasted while growing up. But I would consider this dish irrevocably Bengali--the phoron (throwing of whole spices into hot sizzling oil), the poppy-seed paste, adding a little bit of sugar for the whole dish to have a caramelized taint. It does make me think about what constitutes authenticity when it comes to food? How does one take into account the regional/local/familial variations? What do those variations reveal in terms of the social historical and political dynamics of things? I made it based on these two recipes here and here. The result was delicious. The poppy-seeds gave the chicken pieces a very different kind of texture.

Duck Recipe

The duck sat on my freezer for too many days. Meanwhile, I kept looking for recipes in the web. Most of them seemed too complicated for my grad-student kitchen. And then, I just decided to give it a try. I mean, you can't really go too wrong with the South Asian spices. Slow-cooking makes everything delicious, and somehow I happen to know duck wings should be cooked longer than chicken wings. So, here is my duck recipe. I still need to find a snazzy name for it. But for now, I will stick to the ubiquitous curry.

Ingredients:

duck wings

mustard oil

pearl onions (pink)

garlic (two fat cloves)

ginger paste

two green chilies

tomato (1)

clove powder

cinnamon powder

cardamom powder

fennel seeds

curry leaves (so that it tastes vaguely South Indian)

coconut powder

cumin seeds

paprika

coriander powder

Marinate:

Time: at least 30 mins.

--Wash the duck pieces. Pat them dry. In a large bowl, mix mustard oil, red chilli powder, salt, sugar and all the other spices(clove, cardamom,cinnamon, fennel seeds). I have no clue about the amount. I sprinkle whatever looks good to the eye and feels okay in the fingers. Throw the duck pieces in. Make sure the oil and the spices get smeared on the duck pieces evenly.

--Heat the oil. When it's hot enough, throw in the cumin seeds. Let them sizzle. Then throw in the onion-pieces. I had them finely chopped. The big advantage of the pearl onions is that, you will have to work real hard to not have fine pieces.

--Then once the onions turn transparent, throw in the green chilies, garlic pieces and the ginger paste. Add a little bit of sugar and salt. Continue stirring and frying for about 10 mins.

--Then add the chopped tomatoes. Stir until they all turn into a mush. Throw in the duck pieces.

-- Fry them along with everything else for about 20 mins.

--Pour some water in the marinate bowl (not a whole lot. Just a little). Mix the leftover spices with the water well.

--Pour the water in the duck and spice mix.

---Stir some more (for around 7 mins.)

--- Throw the curry leaves in. Stir some more (around 5 mins.)

---Cover the pot.

--- Take the cover off after 5 mins.

---Add some more water. Add some coriander and paprika. A little bit of all other powdered spices referred above. Stir them well. Reduce the heat to "low." Let everything slow-cook for 45-60 mins.

Duck done. Now eat. With rice. Plain or biriyani-ed. I settled for the plain. Biriyani would have involved too much work for one evening. It was delicious. If there's any part of this recipe that doesn't suit you, or any ingredient that doesn't work for you, feel free to change it. Make it your own.

food/memory post

I can't ever get the pastas right. Either I boil them for too long, or I drain them for too long. Something. Some little disaster always takes place when i am trying to cook them. Probably my MLM heritage doesn't go very well with Italian Anarchism!:))) My quick grad student food is rice. I put it to boil, go in to take a shower or check my email, come back after 10 mins, and it's all done. I am a perfect rice maker. And my comfort food happens to be bhat-dal-alu-dim shedhho, with a little bit of ghee/butter/mustard oil, green chily and salt. It's the simplest food one can think of. Just boil the potatoes, an egg, a cup of lentils, mash them all up together and with rice, eat with your fingers. Somehow, more than anything else, this simple mash reminds me of home and the quick meals my mother would often cook when an unexpected guest would drop by. Or those fever-filled days, when I would feel too sick to eat anything else. And of course, the boiled potato serves so many different functions in so many different kinds of Kolkata street food. It is one of the bases of phuchka, the basis of aloo chat, bhelpuri... and now that it's Pujas again, and my ninth consecutive year of not witnessing it, phuchkas happen to be one of the things I most sorely miss. Yes, my phuchka-memories are not devoid of people. But those are too complicated to write about in a food-memory kind of a post. But the thing is, I have never tried to make phuchkas at home. And I don't think I ever will. Phuchka-eating in the street signify to me a kind of public-culture of food which wouldn't really feel the same if made in the domestic space of one's home-kitchen. For example, phuchka is possibly one of the first street-foods which had always been associated more with girls and women than with men. know quite a few rabid male phuchka-addicts, true. But what I am trying to say is that, the kind of gendered norms that have historically prevented women from inhabiting the space of the street tea-shop or chayer dokan, for example, has never really been applicable when it came to phuchkas. Rather, it was always understood to be women's food.

A possible topic for exploration? A Cultural History of the Phuchka? Sounds quite scholarly, no?