The Golda Chingri Rises With Narkel-Shorshe

I must tell you that this was made on the spur today. I pretty much decided at the nth moment that this is what I wanted for dinner tonight. For my hasty decision, the pictures for this post have suffered and I have really *beep* photos today.

I have made this same recipe with headless shrimps, and I do notice the difference good old Golda can do to a recipe. So if you can, please use large prawns with heads for this recipe.

Ingredients for Narkel-Shorshe Chingri are:

12 large prawns/Golda Chingri with head, deveined and head cleaned
Half cup grated fresh coconut (just the white portion)
4 tablespoons yellow mustard seeds (shorshe)
1 tablespoon brown mustard seeds (rai)
10 green chillies, slit lengthwise
1 teaspoon turmeric powder
5-6 tablespoons extra virgin mustard oil
Banana leaves (not necessary but important)
Salt

Line the banana leaves in a microwaveable bowl. Lay the prawns/chingri on them in a way that all fit in the bowl. Sprinkle half a teaspoon turmeric powder on the prawns and keep.

In a blender, dry grind the two kinds of mustard seeds until coarse. Add the remaining half teaspoon turmeric, throw in a couple of green chillies and add the grated fresh coconut little by little. Grind this mixture to a coarse paste. Add little water while grinding.

Now slather the mustard-coconut mixture on the prawns till all of them are coated well. Top the ingredients with the slit green chillies, drizzle the mustard oil, and season with salt.

Now add another sheet of banana leaf on top of the prawns. Tightly wrap a cling film/wrap on the bowl to cover the banana leaves. Leave for 30 minutes.

Then microwave the whole thing for 12 minutes. Make sure you time it well and do it just before you eat your meal.

Remove the cling wrap and the top layer of banana leaf just before serving.

Serve the Narkel-Shorshe Chingri with plain white rice.

Ilish Maacher Paturi Photoshoot and Some Learnings

So I took this Bobby Flay-like challenge upon me to make Ilish Maacher Paturi the way it should be, wrapped in banana leaves! No steel tiffin box or microwaveable bowl came in my way this time. I had suffered enough scorn from Bengali food-e-ratis for long. It was now time for redemption.

I used one heaped tablespoon of yellow mustard seeds, one teaspoon of black mustard seeds and one teaspoon of poppy seeds along with few green chillies, and a teaspoon of turmeric to make the marinade for the paturi. Once all the ingredients were wet ground to a smooth paste, I slathered it over the fish steaks. The Ilish we get here is from a Bangladeshi store, they have the best Padma river Ilish, known for its distinct taste and buttery texture.

The thing about Ilish is that you don’t need to wash it thoroughly. Too much washing will drain the taste out of this king of fish! Ideally, a whole fish should be un-scaled, washed and then sliced.

To the mustard marinated fish I threw in few more slit green chillies and some salt and drizzled mustard oil. Mustard oil is one of the most essential ingredients in an Ilish Maacher Paturi, please do not substitute it with any other oil. It will be Ilish Paturi blasphemy.

I kept the marinated fish covered for about 15-20 minutes, before I transferred each individual Ilish piece (with its marinade and the mustard oil; drizzle some more if you want to) on a rectangular piece of banana leaf.

I found the banana leaves in the frozen section of a Chinese grocery store. Make sure you wash the frozen leaves with warm water before you wrap them around the fish. This way they will soften a bit and will not tear.

I used kitchen twine to make banana leaf packets for my fish. You can use bamboo cocktail picks to keep the ends of the leaves together.

Each packet was then kept in a large baking dish and microwaved for 10 minutes. I did think of my traditional bamboo steamer for cooking the fish, but then got lazy and settled to microwave. I don’t think the end result suffered because of that.

Time the cooking process of the paturi well, so that you can serve the dish just before you are sitting down to eat your lunch or dinner.

Snip off the twines and unwrap each leaf to keep on the plate in which your guest/you will eat.

Ilish Maacher Paturi needs nothing else but pearly white plain rice to eat with and your deft fingers to artfully make morsels of the fish and rice and its zingy mustard sauce to transfer you into Ilish heaven. Return from there would be very difficult, because everything then will look so ordinary.

Amala Sen’s Bitter Gourd Side with Mustard, Garlic and Tamarind

Every cook needs aunts and great aunts to pass down their recipes. And cooks who Blog have an extended family who are also happy to pass down their family recipes.

Amala Sen is Sumana Mashi’s Kakima (Aunt) whose signature bitter gourd side was the star of many meals.

Its a simple bitter gourd-potato sauté but with some unusual ingredients for karela. Since Sumana Mashi took the pain to type out the recipe, and make my work simple, I will just go ahead and do something that I don’t usually do on PreeOccupied – use the Ctrl C-Ctrl V keys.

Amala Sen's (my aunt) Karela recipe: Since she never really provided any measures, here I go.

• Two large or four medium karela, cut in crescents, washed and rubbed with salt and turmeric
• You'll need also enough similarly sliced potatoes to make about 2/3 of the karela amount
• In karahi/pan heat 3tbsps oil (I use olive, she did mustard) and pop 1 tsp or so 'panch phoron seeds' i.e. mustard, methi, kalonji, fennel. Jeera (in some kitchens, randhuni/celery seeds).
• Add karela slices and fry for 5 minutes so all pieces seem lightly browned. Now add the potatoes, stir fry for another 5 minutes.
• Sprinkle salt for the whole amount and a 1/2 tsp or so more of turmeric.
• Cover and cook on medium heat as usual. Meanwhile in a small blender jar or coffee grinder crush fine 2 tbsp mustard seed. (if it's wet ground always add a pinch of salt and a small piece of green chili to stop the acridness) I always check dry ground stuff by taking and pinch of it and adding a few drop of water--is it smooth or rough at this stage?
• Back to 'karela'--also crush in pestle 4 cloves of garlic and have some freshly ground black pepper handy.
  Check to see if karela is cooking in its own moisture--best not to add water which dilutes taste. If its too dry add a sprinkle of water.
• When karela and potatoes are cooked, make a well in the centre of karahi pushing veggies up the side, turn up the heat a few notches and when the well-bottom has no moisture add 2-3 tbsps of mustard oil.
• Bring oil to smoking point, add the crushed garlic cloves and brown slightly before mixing it all.
• Now add the mustard paste, ground black pepper and stir around.
• For the final touch you need about 2tbsps of thick tamarind paste thinned out with a bit of warm water.
• Mix this all in gently, taking care not to break karela pieces. The result should be on the dry side--a happy combo of bitter, tangy, garlicky, tartish tastes spiked by the pepper and mustard oil. You can eat this with rice or chapatis. All I did was follow Sumana Mashi’s instructions and out came a tangy, garlicky, delectably good Bitter Gourd side, which we had with Rice and Sambar.

Thank you, Sumana Mashi.

Other bitter gourd recipes from PreeOccupied are here.

Borbotir Chorchori

I don’t know how to cook Borboti any other way, except for the traditional Bengali Chorchori.

Borboti/ Barbarti is a summer vegetable, the rest of the world calls it Yard Long Bean or Runner Bean and sometimes even Asparagus Beans.

A Borbotir Chorchori is a great side which opens up a lunch paired with a bowl of daal and rice. I found my bunch of Borboti in a Chinese grocery store. Lesson# 437: Borboti is NOT just a Bengali vegetable. The Chinese call it cheung kong tau or dau gok.

Ingredients for Borbotir Chorchori are:

250 grams long yard beans, ends chopped off and cut into roughly two inch pieces
2 medium size potatoes, cut in cubes
A cup of diced pumpkin/ buttercup squash
A cup of diced eggplant
3-4 green chilies, broken from the middle
Mustard oil
1 tablespoon paanch phoron
Half tablespoon yellow mustard powder
Half tablespoon turmeric powder
Half tablespoon red chili powder
Sugar
Salt

Heat oil in a wok and sauté each type of vegetable separately. Keep aside.

In the same oil, add paanch phoron and the green chilies. Let them splutter for a few seconds, then add the already sautéed vegetables. Add all the spices, season with salt and sugar and mix well. Sauté for another couple of minutes.
Pour enough water to drench the vegetables, cover and cook. It should take about 15 minutes on medium heat to cook the vegetables. If water remains, cook uncovered for a few more minutes till there is hardly any water. In Bengali, we call this consistency makho-makho where only the extra moisture is made to evaporate. Yet it does not leave the dish parched.

How do you cook your Borboti?

Two Simple Macher Jhol Just Like Mommy Makes It!

A Jhol has many avatars in a Bong’s kitchen – mangshor jhol, murgir jhol, macher jhol, dimer jhol…

If you haven’t got the drift yet, you can make a Jhol by pretty much adding any vegetable or fish and meat in a runny curry and call it Jhol!
I am particularly fond of these two Macher Jhol I am going to share with you today. They will stump you with the simplicity and ease with which they are made. You will also reckon that both these versions are pretty similar, ingredient-wise. Except for the key difference – the main spice that distinguishes a jeerer (cumin) jhol from a shorse batar (mustard paste) jhol.

Both these jhol should be served with steaming hot rice and a hearty squirt of lemon juice.

The jeerer jhol is light on the tummy. In olden days, it was  often given to “patients” recovering from a fever or some such diagnosed disease. Though I have used Rohu (fresh water carp), it isn’t surprising to see a jeeyol mach (or shingi mach) thrown in in this kind of Jhol. Essentially as this kind of fish is easy to digest and good for health.

The shorshe jhol is for more celebrative days. The pungent taste of mustard gets rightly balanced by the vegetables and the tartness of tomatoes.

(The photos in this post are from two days, two recipes. One with ground cumin and the other with yellow mustard seeds.)

Ingredients for Macher Jhol are:

4-6 Pieces of shallow-fried fresh water carp (preferably Rohu)
Seasonal vegetables like cauliflower, beans, eggplant, sugar peas (whole), raw/ green banana and potato diced or cut lengthwise
2 medium size ripe tomatoes
Few green chilies
Handful of fresh coriander, finely chopped
2 tablespoons cumin powder or paste of the same quantity of freshly ground yellow mustard seeds
1 teaspoon turmeric powder
1 teaspoon red chili powder
Mustard oil
Salt

The way to fry the fish is to rub salt and turmeric on it and shallow fry in hot mustard oil. Keep aside.

In the same oil, sauté the vegetables, the same kinds together.
Keep them aside.

Make a runny mixture with the cumin powder (or mustard powder), turmeric, red chili powder, slit green chilies, salt and coarsely chopped tomatoes, adding about two cups of water.

In the same pan/wok that you fried the fish and vegetables, add this mixture and bring to a quick boil.

Now add the hardy vegetables first followed by the ones which do not take much time to cook.

Once the vegetables have cooked (but not mushy), add the pieces of fried fish. Give it one good boil, check the salt and turn the heat off. Garnish with freshly chopped coriander.
Serve hot with plain rice and lemon wedges. Its okay to re-heat the macher jhol but be careful that the delicate pieces of fish don’t disintegrate.

That’s your jeere or shorsher Macher Jhol. Hearty, healthy and very wholesome.
You can drop out the fish pieces and make a vegetarian jhol too with this recipe.