my experiments with intuitive and improvised cooking - I

This blog is after all about experimentation. And improvisation… so this is a blog entry that deserves to be here: my trials and improvisations with food… cooked.

I have never really had to think about cooking this seriously. Neither am I really thrilled about it. But mothers on vacation are the absolute inventors of necessities. I don’t like to eat out all the time, so I decided to go against all odds, and decided to fend for myself for a full 10 days.

The condition suited me fine. There was no one else really to be experimenting on with food, other than an occasional customary lunch for the best friend… the best friend that incidentally, is one of the better and intuitive cooks I have known.

For these few days, my reading matter has a latest addition. Print outs of Sanjeev Kapoor’s recipies that my mum has been collecting, and the little book of Indian cooking presented to me by the best friend who, I believe I mentioned earlier is a wonderful cook.

Till date, whatever little I have done on my own has been a bit disastrous. Not the final result… that’s not all that bad. It’s just the massive trail of destruction and devastation that I leave all across the kitchen, and in the process I get many things wrong. And I totally cook by the book. Well, at least I used to…

Now, I can say that I’m getting better, my speed’s increasing. And I’m quite enjoying myself… Now I know why Philipp considered cooking the ultimate stress buster.

So here I go… my experiments (rather successful) with intuitive and improvised cooking. The last few days saw two wonderful improvisations:

Pepper chicken.

Ingredients:

Boneless chicken

Roughly ground pepper

Salt

A tomato – chopped

Turmeric powder

A few cloves

Some butter

Cumin seeds

Onion – chopped

Ginger paste

Garlic finely chopped or paste

Vegetables of your choice (mine being capsicum)

Maybe some saunf powder. I love it in anything.

Preparation:

Mix pepper powder, salt and turmeric powder and apply it over the boneless chicken pieces, just enough to cover them all, keep for half an hour.

Heat a wee bit butter in a pan, and add some cloves to it and the chopped onion and cook till they turn golden brown ( I wonder who coined that term? The onions never do that!) Add the chopped tomatoes, ginger and garlic and the marinated chicken that has been now turned yellow and waiting to get cooked. Add some water – maybe half a cup, and some nice helping of the saunf powder! Mmm … let the aroma spread…

Cook till the chicken is truly cooked, and add more water if wanted. Add salt.

Just a few minuted before the chicken is totally cooked, add the capsicum. I like it to be a little raw and crisp, hence add during the last few minutes over the fire, otherwise it gets all soggy and limp, and not as much fun…

Viola… you have a lovely aroma spreading all around the house… smelling of Cloves and saunf… its tastes awesome too. And I have a happy best friend…

Cooking for just one person – self- is a little perplexing. How much is too much? Is it worth all the effort? What exactly do I make for myself? That was the dilemma I was in when I started wondering what to make for dinner for myself tonight.

I wanted to have soup, then I decided I wanted to make Dal shorba… I had no idea how shorba was made. So I checked out the set of printouts… I needed moong dal for it, but I was out of moong dal, so decided to chuck it and make an improvised version of the dal shorba with Masoor ki dal!

Meghana’s Improvised Masoor ki dal ka tasty shorba

Ingredients:

Take some masoor dal 50 – 100 grams will serve two people with two mid sized helpings.

Chop a small onion. ‘Small’ being an onion of roughly the diameter of about 5 cms.

Some grated ginger

some chopped garlic

one chopped green chilly that’s about 10 cm in length.

A wee bit butter again

Cumin seeds

Turmeric

And salt.

Preparation:

Take the dal, ginger, garlic, chilly, onion, turmeric and salt and add a lot of water to it, and cook it till the dal is cooked. Make sure theres enough water so that some remains till the dal is cooked to verrrry soft! Strain this dal. And keep it aside till you heat the wee bit butter and ad some cumin seeds in it till they crackle. Add the cooked and strained mixture of dal, onion, ginger, garlic and turmeric to the butter and cumin, and some water, till you get the consistency you desire… it will not really be a colloidal liquid, and the water dal and the water will not homogenise properly… but hey… its shorba after all, not dal….

So bring to a boil, add some more salt, and hey presto! You have wonderful tasting Meghana’s improvised dal shorba made out of masoor dal…

I loved it, and had it with 2 slices of kadak toast… what a pity I didn't click pictures of these two recipes...

Wow… maybe I’m soon going to become the next best thing since sanjeev Kapoor after all … Hah! And I’ve only just begun…