Mutton Saagwala for the Popeye of My Life

Its summer here. Which means we have an abundance of everything. Including spinach. But before that, take a look at the more colorful summerlicious moments I managed to see with my lenses.

Now for the recipe for Mutton Saagwala, loosely translated as mutton (a generic term in India for goat meat) cooked in spinach. A healthy, delicious meat curry most often cooked in winters in India by many North Indian families. It has strange resembles to Palak Paneer.

Well, my two cents are that this dish could possibly be palak paneer for the hardcore mutton lovers.

Ingredients for Mutton Saagwala are:

1 kg goat meat/mutton (I buy the shoulder portion with enough marbling from my butcher lady)
400 grams spinach, cleaned, washed, and chopped coarsely, stem and leaves, and pureed with little water
1 small can of tomato paste
1 large, juicy red tomato, pureed
1 large red onion, finely chopped
2 tablespoons freshly ground cumin powder
2 tablespoons pureed garlic
2 tablespoons pureed ginger
2 tablespoons green chili paste
1 teaspoon red chili powder
1 teaspoon turmeric powder
1 teaspoon garam masala powder (black+green cardamoms, cloves and cinnamon)
3-4 tablespoons ghee
Julienned ginger for garnish
6-7 dry red chilies for garnish
A few shavings of (frozen) unsalted butter for garnish
Salt

 
Start by heating the ghee in a large pan. Once it is really hot, add the onions and sauté till lightly browned. Add the meat. Make sure there is no moisture/water in the meat. This will help you get a nice, brown color to the mutton.

Add the green chili paste, cumin and garam masala powders to the meat and let it cook on low heat, covered all the time for 10 minutes.

Now add the pureed ginger and garlic, season with salt (I use sea salt), mix, cover and cook for another 10 minutes.

Scrape the spices and onions from the bottom of the pan and let them cling on to the mutton.

Add the pureed spinach, red chili powder and turmeric to the meat and mix. Crank the heat up to medium and let the pureed spinach bubble for about 10 minutes. Once you have spinach splinters attacking you, add the tomato paste and puree and cook covered for 10-15 minutes on low heat.

You will see the change of color in this dish – from a bright, green to a moss-colored. Slowly, but surely a thin line of oil will appear at the sides of your cooking pan. At this point, you have a choice of adding your work-in-progress Mutton Saagwala to the pressure cooker to cook through the mutton. I did that and waited till two whistles went off to cook my mutton.

Transfer the Mutton Saagwala to a serving dish and garnish generously with shavings of unsalted butter, julienned ginger and dry red chilies. You can add some green ones too for added heat and color.

Serve Mutton Saagwala with warm chapatis and salad. A meal like this should be consumed by keeping quiet, and listening to your own chomps and burps. Meals like this also make a family less cranky and more happy. I have proof. My almost-two-year-old sealed my Mutton Saagwala with her stamp of approval by saying “nice” and “wow”, all in the same breath in between her dinner.

Enjoy! 

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.

The Good, the Bad and the Bengali English; Now Translate Potol

A couple of days ago, when we were singing paeans about Tagore, updating our status messages on Facebook about the literary achievements of the genius called Rabindranath, somewhere in a dark corner of another world, some Bengali was heard saying (to his host) - the phood was yammy! (Literally translated as – I do not know the difference between the sounds “u:” and “ɑ:”. Why? Because my mammy did not make me laarrn.)

There is something endearing about us Bongs and our pronunciation of English words. I admit, we are no Jhumpa Lahiris out there to impress the English-speaking world, hence we have all the right to roll our eyes and say - Bhee the peepull, with as much pride as our Big Sista in Calcutta does.

It does not take long for a non-Bengali to discover that we Bongs mix up our “w” and “v”. In vain is most certainly In wain, and a woman is always a voman. Try saying that ALOUD. But to do that, you will need the soul and the soft, mellifluous voice of a Bengali. That would mean you will have to take a huge riks (read risk; pronounce riks!). While we are on the topic of enunciation, its not entirely unusual for the phish-eating Bengali to mix the “f” and “ph” sounds. The accent gets thicker when he is drinking.

I have never known a Bengali who writes grammatically incorrect English. In my circle of Grammar Nazi friends, we poke fun at each other for our community’s inability to pronounce certain words. That’s how perfect we are. At least in our heads. And I am not even venturing on to talking about the bushy-faced Bengali still hanging on to his embroidered jean pant and bush shaart.

Perhaps another day.

But my favourite mention will be from the recent movie Bhooter Bhobishyot, where the front desk lady at the real estate developer’s office is heard saying (to someone) on the phone, Hard diks crash hoye gæche. Kichchu shave hochche na.

I squealed with glee. Little things make me happy.

That is exactly the reason I turned these mundane-looking potols into a dish fit for royalty. The Shorshe-Narkel-Potol. That’s Parwal in Mustard and Coconut for you.

 

Ingredients for Shorshe-Narkel-Potol are:

10-12 potol/parwal washed
1 heaped tablespoon yellow mustard seeds
1 teaspoon black mustard seeds
1 tablespoon poppy seeds/khus-khus/posto
Half cup grated coconut (I use the freshly frozen kind)
5-6 green chillies
2-3 bay leaves
4-5 tablespoons mustard oil
Sugar
Salt

Begin by randomly (but gently) running a blunt knife on the potol. Just to scrape off lengthwise bit off the skin from places. DO NOT peel the skin off. Cut both sides of the ends. You can keep the potol whole for the recipe or cut them in halves if they are larger.

Grind together the mustard seeds, poppy and green chillies. Start by dry grinding the seeds first, once a coarse powder, add the green chillies and a little water to do a coarse wet paste.

For the coconut, do a coarse wet grind and keep.

Heat mustard oil in a thick pan and add the bay and potols. Sauté on high for 4-5 minutes. You can cover and cook till the potols get lightly coloured at the edges.

Add the mustard-poppy-green chilli paste to the potol and mix well till the vegetables get coated with the paste. Reduce the heat and cover again.

After about 4-5 minutes, add the coconut paste. Give it a good mix, cover and cook for about five more minutes.

The moisture from the wet ground ingredients will help soften the potols. Make sure you keep scraping the spices from the bottom of the pan, else they may burn.

Once the potol has cooked, add the sugar and salt. Cook uncovered till the extra moisture evaporates and the spices and the coconut cling on to the potol.

Do one last taste test and season with more salt and sugar if necessary. You can throw in a couple of broken green chillies to add some more heat or leave the dish as it is. I did not add any turmeric to my dish. Just because I wanted the natural colors of all the ingredients to show. You can, if you want to.

An accent-deaf Bengali would eat this Shorshe-Narkel-Potol with mushurir dal and rice. And maybe a rui maach bhaja on the side.

Kancha Lonka Murgi, Green Chili Chicken Curry

This had to be documented as a blog post since so many of you have already liked it on Facebook. There is no childhood memory or a hand-me-down tale to be narrated today. It was the Poila Boishakh lunch pictures from Finely Chopped and my own greed which led to the re-creation of an experimental recipe which sure is for keeps.

Ingredients for Kancha Lonka Murgi are:

6-8 medium size skinless chicken pieces, bone in
1 large red onion, finely chopped
8-10 green chilies, halved lengthwise
1 tablespoon green chili paste
2 tablespoons ginger paste
1 tablespoon garlic paste
1 tablespoon coriander powder
1 teaspoon turmeric powder
2 black cardamoms
2 bay
4-5 tablespoons mustard oil /use canola or vegetable if you don't have mustard
Salt

Heat the oil until almost smoking and add the onions, bay and black cardamom to sauté till the onions are lightly browned. (I used a pressure pan to make this dish. You can use a thick-bottom pan or karahi / kodai to do so.)

Now add the slit green chilies and mix well with the onions. Keep the heat on medium lest you burn the onions. Give the chilies about 4-5 minutes to release their deep zingy flavor.

Add the cleaned chicken pieces and coat them well with the onions and chilies. Make sure you lightly brown the chicken on medium heat.

Now add the wet and dry spices except the salt, cover and cook the chicken on medium heat. Scrape off any spices/masala which stick to the bottom of the pan. This should take about 10-12 minutes.

You will notice the chicken and spices releasing oil at the sides of your pan/karahi, lower the heat and check if the chicken is done. Now add the salt and cover again for 8-10 minutes on low heat. Do a taste test and garnish with a couple of more green chilies. Take the Kancha Lonka Chicken off the heat. The dish should not have a runny gravy. In Bengali we say - makha makha. (Or is it makho makho?)

Serve this chicken dish with ruti/chapati/phulka or parathas.

Kancha Lonka in Bengali means "green chilies" and Murgi is "chicken".

That’s an absolutely stunning Kancha Lonka Murgi for you.