Made in Shantiniketan, Bidisha Didi’r Chhana-Posto Bhaate

“Chhana chai, didi? Chhana chai? Ek dom tatka.” The chhana wala would call out every morning. And Didi would invariably oblige. Chhana was her weakness, and so was helping all those street vendors who came hollering every morning. They knew Didi would always buy.

When Didi was done making Chhanar Dalna, some chhana would still remain. And with all that extra chhana, she’d make this bhaate. A steamed goody made by mixing equal quantities of poppy seed paste, fresh chhana, chopped red onions, chopped green chillies, and a generous dash of mustard oil. And if little sister Bipasha was visiting her in her Shantiniketan home, Didi would make sure she made a tiffin-boxful just for her!

Didi would serve her specially made Chhana-Posto Bhaate to little sister with plain white rice. She loved watching Bipasha mix little dollops of the bhaate into the shaada bhaat, deftly using her fingers to mix everything and eat with satisfaction writ large on her face. There were times little sister would give big sister’s maachher jhol a miss and finish all her rice with the delicate-tasting bhaate. That’s how much she liked it. And why not!

Ingredients for Bidisha Didi’r Chhana-Posto Bhaate are:

4-5 tablespoons poppy seeds/posto, made into a coarse paste
Equal quantity of fresh, homemade paneer/chhana, crumbled lightly
1-2 tablespoons finely chopped red onion
5-6 green chillies, finely chopped
Generous dash of mustard oil + extra while serving
Salt

In a steel tiffin box, mix everything together – the posto, chhana, onions, green chillies, salt and drizzle the mustard oil. Close the lid of the box and keep in a pressure cooker. Fill the pressure cooker with a cup or two of water. Make sure you don’t cover the tiffin box with water.

Close the pressure cooker and cook the chhana-posto mixture till two whistles go off.

Remove the box as soon as you are able to open the pressure cooker.

Mix the bhaate, add an extra squirt of mustard oil if you want to and serve hot with plain white rice. The addition of the chhana to the posto adds a lot of creaminess to this bhaate. Its a great recipe for vegetarians who’d get protein from the paneer. We loved this new bhaate for its unique and simple flavours.

(Bipasha and big sister Bidisha both live in the US. Little sister often visits Didi in Princeton, New Jersey just to eat her Chhana-Posto Bhaate. Thanks to the two sisters for sharing this recipe. Its for keeps.)

Nameless Kaju Posto Chicken

Forget the Kitchen Stadium, for many home cooks it becomes an everyday challenge to rack her brains over dinner ideas. I usually struggle and remain pretty undecided till the time I actually start cooking. Sometimes things fall in place and impressively so. Sometimes I flip through cookbooks, and close them with equal enthusiasm for their list of elaborate ingredients. The rest of the times I look for inspirations in my own cooking.

Last evening I made this Chicken Curry where the base was made with a paste of poppy seeds (posto) and cashews (kaju).

I don’t have a name for this dish, so maybe you can help. For now, lets call it Kaju Posto Chicken. Under no temptation will you suggest I call it Pree’s Chicken.

Another thing I’d like clarify here (before PETA comes knocking on my door) is that I am not trying to cannibalize the hen you see in the picture. Its just a porcelain planter I picked from a downtown store yesterday and thought it makes for a good prop for my nameless chicken dish.

(Though just between you and me, when I was little we had a parrot called Mithu; he loved Chicken Maggi Noodles and wouldn’t eat chana sprouts or chilies as good green parrots ought to. So we were forced to give him Maggi Noodles with real chicken pieces, he wouldn’t have it any other way!)

Ingredients for Kaju Posto Chicken are:

750 grams chicken (I used skinless, bone-in breast portions)
1 red onion, roughly chopped
150 ml ready to use tomato paste (if you don’t have this, purée two ripe tomatoes at home and use)
7-8 green chilies, slit lengthwise
2 tablespoons ginger-garlic paste
Handful of cashews and 2 tablespoons poppy seeds made into a thick, smooth paste
1 teaspoon red chili powder
10 raisins
4 tablespoons canola oil
Sugar
Salt

Heat canola oil in a pan and sear the whole chicken breasts till they get a nice brown color on both sides. Remove with a slotted spoon and when the chicken is cool enough for you to handle, cut them into bite-size pieces. If you are using chicken which is already cut, skip this step.

In the same pan, sauté the chopped onions, with 3-4 slit green chilies, and the raisins.

Once the onions have turned light brown, toss the chicken pieces in and sauté them further; tops five more minutes. Add the kaju-posto paste and the remaining green chilies and give it a good mix. Then add the ginger-garlic paste, tomato paste, red chili powder, sugar and salt.

Cook this on low-medium heat, covered all the time for five more minutes. Add one cup water when the raw spices get cooked. Cover and cook till the chicken gets tender and the extra liquid dries up. The sauce should be clinging to the chicken pieces. Do not pressure cook, please.

So did you think of a name?

Posto Bhaate, a Bangal’s Way of Inducing Sleep

When we were kids, Mum would make a coarse paste of Posto (white poppy seed/khus khus) and serve a small dollop of it with hot, steaming rice, a little ghee and a pinch of salt. Of course the adults also got a crunchy green chili to go with it. This combination would often start many meals in our home.

Then Mum learnt this variation of the Posto Bhaate from one of her friends who is a Bangal.

Posto when made into a paste has a grainy-creamy texture to it. Its often added to mutton, chicken and fish dishes in Indian homes. The most popular Bengali dish is Alu Posto which is small cubes of potatoes cooked with green chilies and the poppy seed paste.

Poppy Seeds have a really short shelf life and often times you will see small insects in them, even though you did not open the bottle for months. I usually store mine in the fridge in a glass jar.

Ingredients for Posto Bhaate are:

Half cup poppy seeds/posto, soaked in water for 10 minutes and sieved
1 small red onion, finely chopped
4-5 green chilies, coarsely chopped
2-3 tablespoons mustard oil
Salt

Grind the poppy seeds in the smallest jar of your blender. Traditionally, the lady of the house would use the shil-nora to do this. (My Mum compares the texture of a good posto bata to chandan/sandalwood. Smooth.)

Add very little water while doing so. You will see that the poppy seeds change color from a dusty brown to a whitish color. Stop when you get a smooth but grainy texture to your posto.

Transfer to a steel tiffin box that should fit in the pressure cooker. To the posto, add the chopped green chilies and onion. Drizzle the mustard oil and season with salt. Mix.

Close the lid of the tiffin box and place it in the pressure pan. Fill the pan with water up to two-thirds of the tiffin box. Cook on medium-high heat till one whistle goes off.

If you don’t have a pressure cooker, keep the closed tiffin box in a thick sauce pan, keep a weight on the lid of tiffin box, fill the pan up to two-thirds of the tiffin box with  water, cover the pan and cook for 15-18 minutes.

Serve the Posto Bhaate with plain white rice, if you have children, remove the chili pieces from their share and add a little smear of ghee, that way they will not feel the zing of the mustard oil.

A little Posto Bhaate and some hot rice usually starts some memorable meals in our home. But I will admit, sometimes I have been so carried away by its simple taste, I have eaten all my rice with the Posto Bhaate. Trust me, its that good. Second only to the afternoon snooze it will induce.

Culinary Comeback with Shōrsē Diye Chingri Maachh

You can take a fish out of water, but you cannot take the fish out of a Bengali. Even though that Bengali is pregnant and claims she has aversions for anything non-vegetarian.

After being sufficiently mocked and made fun of for continuing on my no-meat, no-fish hiatus, and being treated as a social pariah, I thought of a culinary comeback.

The urge was there. The ingredients too. Just under 30 minutes, I was eating a lunch today with a work-from-home husband. A meal we will remember for a long, long time. Hope my grape-size baby will too.
Ingredients for Shōrsē Diye Chingri Maachh (Shrimps in Mustard Sauce) are:

500 grams tiger shrimp or prawns of your choice, shell and tail on, deveined
2 tablespoons plain yogurt
Two and a half tablespoons yellow mustard seeds
1 heaped tablespoon poppy / posto seeds
Half teaspoon turmeric powder
4-5 green chilies (I used about six!)
2-3 tablespoons mustard oil (No other cooking oil will work. Trust me.)
Salt

Wash and clean the shrimps. In a grinder, make a course powder of the mustard and poppy seeds. Since the quantity is little, its best to do a dry powder first and then add half the quantity of the green chilies and wet grind with a little water. You can also add a little salt and the turmeric powder to this mixture.

Now add the mustard-poppy seed mixture to the shrimps along with the yogurt and slit green chilies. Add salt (if needed) and drizzle the mustard oil all over the shrimp. Mix well.

You can either steam this or cook this in the microwave for 10 minutes. Of course covered all the time.

If you have a pressure cooker, put the shrimps and its sauce in a steel tiffin box, pour a little water at the base of the cooker and cook this till a whistle goes off.

Else, you can put it in a microwaveable bowl, cover and cook for 10 minutes.

There are no two ways of eating the Shōrsē Diye Chingri Maachh. It has to be eaten with steaming hot rice and yes, we did eat with our hands today.