New Cooking Video: Yellow Peanut Rice

Me, Alana and Paul just made a new cooking video on yellow peanut rice, a South Indian dish from Bangalore, flavored with lemon, coconut & fried peanuts, dals and spices. The actual name for the dish is chitranna (no relation to me!) and means "mixed rice."

The rice goes well with these dishes: spinach raita, palak paneer, green beens palya, sambar, saru. You can find the written out recipe on this post. Enjoy and let me know if you have any questions.

Mumbai Foods Part 2 - A Giant Dosa & The Street

In Mumbai, I think I ate the largest dosa ever with my friend Fiana. Dosa is a South Indian crepe made from a fermented batter of rice and lentils and then cooked on a skillet. You eat it usually with sambar and coconut chutney. We had the dosa at Shree Krishna in Worli -

Walking the streets, you get to see and try so many different foods. Here's some of what I saw.

This vendor is making bhelpuri, one of the most popular street foods in Mumbai. It is a type of chaat or snack food consisting of puffed rice, sev (little tiny noodle threads made from chickpea flour), tomatoes, onions, chilis, sometimes boiled potato and roasted dals, sweet tamarind chutney, spicy mint chutney and cilantro.

Served in some recycled paper with a cardboard spoon -

This is another chaat vendor or wallah. The mound of yellow in front of him is his sev and the bag on the right is papri, fried dough chips. There are also green mangos in his stall that give a sour taste to the mixture. This vendor was making several kinds of chaats.

We ordered the papri chaat from him - papri chips on the bottom and layered with chickpea, potato, chutneys, chili powder, chaat masala, onion, tomato, sev and cilantro.

And then watched him make some bhelpuri -

Next door to the chaat wallah there was a man selling tender coconut - which you drink first and then scoop out the flesh with a spoon cut from the coconut.

We came across a little hole in the wall place making pav bhaji - spicy mashed veg curry and bun -

This stand was selling spiced cucumbers and lemonades -

In the street markets I saw these green and black varieties of chestnut -

Several vendors were selling mixed fruit cut into really decorative shapes -

This was a shop selling Ayurvedic digestives called churan, which are made from dried fruits and spices. In India, there is a huge variety of these that come in powdered form or little nuggets. I like the anardana variety, which is made from dried pomegranite seed and pulp and have tasted one called hing goli - which is a churan made from asafoetida.

Mumbai Foods Part 1 - Chowpatty Beach

I just came back from a trip to India where I visited Mumbai and Goa with some friends and then headed to Delhi to hang out with my family. In the next few posts, I'll share some of the foods and cooking from this visit.

The first 2 posts from my trip are on Mumbai, which I really loved and definitely want to go back to. These photos are from Chowpatty Beach, which is famous for its variety of fast foods. The beach gets really packed at night with young people, families, locals, tourists, etc. and kind of resembles a carnival or fair with a lot happening all at once:

There are a number of food vendors strewn all across the beach and then many stalls all at one corner with every kind of food imagineable - belpuri, papdi chaat, pani puri, vada pav, wok noodles, paneer pressed sandwiches, etc

This vendor on the beach is selling vada pav, which is one of the most popular snack foods in Mumbai. Vada is a vegetable, a lot of times it is made out of balled up potato, battered in chickpea flour batter and fried and pav is a bun. Vada pav is served as a sandwich with chutney inside. This was a two man operation with one guy making the sandwiches and another battering and frying up the vadas.

This stall was serving a snack food from North India, pani puri, which is made from a tiny puffed bread that you poke a whole at the top and fill. I used these puris for an appetizer at one of the suppers.

You fill them with any combo of boiled potato, chickpea, onion, chaat masala, chutney and then fill or dip it into a flavored liquid, which is where the name pani comes from because it means water. The pani is spiced in many ways, either with cumin (jal jeera), tamarind, lemon, mint, dates, etc. Chaat masala adds a pungent flavoring, almost sulfuric from the black salt that's used in it, but the main ingredient is dried mango powder which is sour.

The pani puri guy makes one at a time and you just stick the whole thing in your mouth right away and wait for the next.

This stall was selling pav bhaji, which is similar to the vada pav, but instead the pav is served with a spicy mixed vegetable curry that is mashed. This snack is a specialty from Gujarat and the Mumbai area. It is served with onions, cilantro and lemon.

This stall was selling wok-fried noodles that are made with a mixture of Indian spices, soy sauce and vinegar:

There was also a variety of pressed sandwiches using fresh veggies, chutneys and paneer:

The last stall that I visited was selling paan, which is a digestive and mouth freshener made from a spicy betel leaf that is filled with supari or areca (difficult to describe but it is kind of hard to chew, brown in color and leaves almost a freshener aftertaste in your mouth), a white paste made from pickling lime (a white calcium powder derived from limestone) and then a mixture of different spices depending, like saffron, cardamom, cloves and sometimes even tobacco. You can also get it sweet with sugar, fennel seeds, coconut, rose petal, dried fruit, etc. inside too. This was maybe the most elaborate paan I have ever seen.

You take the whole leaf in your mouth and chew it. Some people swallow it and some people spit it out. In India, if you see these red splotches on the street, it is most likely from someone spitting paan out - yuck!

In the next post, I'll share more of the street foods that I saw in Mumbai.

Spicy Tzatziki @ Drawing Class

My friends Dan and Nate host a really fun model drawing class every two weeks in Nate's art studio in Gowanus called +DRAWING+MODEL+MUSIC+BEER+. Here they are. Dan is the blurry one:

This class is special though because not only do you get to draw a model, you also get to listen to music curated by Dan while having a glass of wine or a beer. The class is really magical because time goes by so fast there and when it's over you don't want to leave as evidenced by the lingerers. To share, I brought snacks of persimmon salsa and spicy tzatziki (recipe below). Coincidentally, the food I brought fit in with the theme of that week's class.

Each class has a different music theme. This one's was British Invasion but not what you'd think. In Dan's words - '"British Invasion" was less about the Beatles, Stones, etc. crossing the pond and going all D-Day on the Billboard charts, but more about the interaction of English music culture with that of the Queen's subjects.' That night we heard music that paired UK influences with ones from India, Nigeria and the US, an eclectic mix from Lily Allen 50 Cent satires to mid-century Nigerian art music, while eating some of my East meets West food:)

The theme for the upcoming class is "first impressions" in light of the New Year where you will hear songs that start an artist's debut album. Here is info on the next class and don't forget to RSVP because space is limited:

Wednesday January 12, 8:00 - 10:30 pm
269 Douglass Street and 3rd Ave., Brooklyn
$10 pays for model, beer, and music.
RSVP nathan.sensel@gmail.com

Thanks to those for sharing their drawings:

Spicy Tzatziki Recipe

Ingredients
17.6 oz Fage container of Greek yogurt
1 cucumber, peeled, seeded and grated
2 cloves garlic
couple squeezes of lemon
~1/4 teaspoon coriander powder, add more depending on taste
~1/4 teaspoon roasted cumin powder, add more depending on taste
cayenne powder to taste
fresh cilantro, chopped
fresh mint, chopped

black pepper
salt

Method
After peeling, seeding and grating the cucumber, wrap it in a paper towel and squeeze out water gently. Leave it in the paper towel to absorb more water.

In a mortar and pestle, mash up the garlic with a couple pinches of salt.

Combine the yogurt, cucumber, garlic, lemon, spices, herbs, black pepper and salt.

*For a variation, I have also fried the coriander, cumin and cayenne in a bit of oil and poured over the yogurt.