The Cauliflower ban

I think I can stop telling people that I can't cook now.

And do you know how I found this out? Yesterday evening my flatmate was experimenting with an aubergine. She didn't want a curry and she didn't really know what else to do with it (Aubergines are so tricky). She thoughtfully cut them in half, paused and then turned to me with a thoughtful face and said "Indu, how do you think I should make this?" so I made my suggestion and turned my attention to my bolognese again. and then I paused. Slowly, with my converse squeaking on the laminate flooring, I turned to her and she turned to me. Our widened eyes met...did she just ask me for my input in a cooking task?

Well there it is. I am have an opinion on cooking that is valued.
Hurrah!

This change did not occur overnight, I will backtrack and tell you how this happened. It started off with a cauliflower. On a whim I decided I would try cooking a cauliflower dish with potatoes and peas called Aloo Gobi. I purchased the vegetable walked home jauntily and placed it on the counter. It looked at me as if to say "You don't really know what to do with me, do you?"

I consulted a cookbook that I recently purchased in Foyles. It's called Indian Family Cookbook and it has a pink baroque cover. It's a bit fancy and glossy to be practical in the kitchen but it had wonderful pictures and a nice introduction by Simon Daley and his mother-in-law Roshan Hirani (Rose).

Indian Family Cookbook by Simon Daley with Roshan Hirani

The introduction establishes a very homely, family-orientated cooking.  The kind of Indian cooking Daley describes is from Indian province Gujarat which is South-west of Punjab, as you can see on the map.


My flatmate happens to be Gujarati and describes the cooking as not as "fattening as your [Punjabi] cooking". This 'Us and Them' separation is most distinctive in attitudes towards food.  Each region has a distinctive cooking style and a pride about it. I remember having a bite of a Gujarati style samosa. It was a small crispy triangle and I remember thinking, "Pah! too sweet!"

The regional pride filters into cooking techniques too, like in my flatmates suggestion that Gujarati food healthier than Punjabi food. There is some truth in this because on the flip side Gujarati food is seen as too light by Punjabi foodies. My Gujarati flatmate says of a fried flat-bread "You guys put butter on the inside and outsides of your parathas and we just put it on the outsides"

Now, I can't pretend to unwrap the ideologies of Indians worldwide but I can give you a microscopic view of the dynamics of British Indian students. I cook with another girl of Punjabi descent, a keen Gujarati cook and a a very very keen French cook of Algerian-Moroccan descent. There are at least 3 different meals being made every evening (mine normally comes from a packet so barely qualifies) and there is always a lot of debate. A typical conversation in our house follows this format:

"Are you guys hungry too?" everybody nods enthusiastically.

Gujarati cook begins to describe a Gujarati meal.

Confused looks all round.

Gujarati cook tells the Punjabi cooks what we call the dish in Punjabi.

"ooh! that dish, yes we call it..." 

Moroccan cook remains confused.

There is a constant overlap between Gujarati and Punjabi cuisine reflected in the  layer of languages used. We use the French, Punjabi and Gujarati words for specific food dishes and alternate between them.

So now we've established a few attitudes to regional Indian cooking let us get back to Simon Daley's Introduction. He writes about his first experience of Indian home cooking at his mother-in-laws house:

Daley's description highlights the homeliness of the environment. Rose's house is a home, not only does it boast of "dented" pans and "wipe-clean tablecloths" but everything about the house is to do with practicality not pretence. In the previous paragraph Daley describes the "bulk- bought food" and "industrial sized cans of cooking oil" which adds to the practicality of the household. There is no glamour or show only homemade, wholesome food. Nourishment and happiness seem to be at the heart of Daley's representation of the household and the reader is evidently supposed to warm to Rose and regard her as an expert. Daley describes an "impressive stack" of chapatis and a "pristine layer" of  "perfect rice". To add to the domesticity of Rose's home he also likens her chapptis to "breeze-blown pillowcases". And everybody knows there is NOTHING more domestic than breeze blown pillowcases.

This is the reason I chose this cookbook out of all the eye-catching Indian cookbooks in Foyles. It had a real authenticity about it. Even though the cookbook wasn't about Punjabi cooking, I hadn't noticed until I got home, there was a lot of overlap between Rose's recipes and the ones my family cook.

Let's get on to the Aloo Gobi itself.

Mine actually resembled the glossy book version! Wahey!

The all important ingredients. SALT, PEAS,POTATOES,CHILLIES

I didn't actually follow the recipe but used some innate knowledge of measurement. and tasting as I went along

Aloo Gobi. I added peas for colour and avoided them when I ate them. I don't even like peas!

By this point I was on a cooking high (must have been the chillies) and I thought that I may as well make chapattis too. My mother had given me the flour in the vain hope that I would eat well at university (ha!)

Kneading the dough.

Makeshift utensils. Upside down oven tray.

Not as round as they should be but by this point I was tired. This cooking business really takes it out of you!

Waiting for it to blister

Chapati

A simple home cooked meal.

By this point you must be wondering what this cauliflower ban is about when it seems to have been made so wonderfully.  What the cookbooks don't tell you is to grab a extra strength Air-wick.

This vegetable, after all the effort you put into making it, will still betray you. It will seep out of the pan and into the kitchen where it will reign until you open all of the windows, wave a tea-towel around in the style of a helicopter and then sit, defeated, in its wicked aroma. At least that is what I saw my flatmates doing when I came into the flat.

East meets West

So far this blog has explored Indian food from a British perspective but what happens when the British adopt and adapt the Indian culinary tradition?

In the past week I have discovered two very interesting adaptations of Indian family cooking. The first occurred when I dug out a Indian Jalfrezi wrap kit that my mother had given me:

 

and the second was a dubious Argi Bhaji sandwich:

Let's start with the names. 
Firstly,what is the 'Argi', in Argi bhaji?  It doesn't mean anything to me in English or any of the Indian languages I understand. But what my ear did pick up was the rhyming quality which makes it memorable. Even if Argi means nothing to me!

Jalfrezi wraps are also an oddity because wraps are distinctly un-Indian to me but I was eager to try this new combination absolutely loved having Jalfrezi in a chapati style wrap. It was lazy Indian food and perfect for a quick meal.

Sharwood's advertising sets the scene:

 From the opening of the advertisement Sharwood's has emphasised the duality of their products, a combination, or a twist, to the traditional curry. This is evident in the contrast between the flamboyant truck and the idealised English countryside. It is worth noting that Sharwood's does not intend to recreate a traditional home cooked meal, but it aims to mimic the restaurant curries that the nation is fond of.

The wrap kit is as easy as they claim:

Only three steps? My kind of meal.

Everything you need.

Stir fry chicken. I couldn't leave the recipe untouched and added chopped green chili's and turmeric powder

And then the peppers. Finally some colour!

What Sharwood's have called a spice blend. But on close inspection it seems to be Garam Masala which is a traditional Indian blend of cumin seeds, black and white pepper corn, cardamom and cloves.

It goes into the warm wrap, with some of the mysterious salsa they provided. I added a dollop of greek yoghurt because I added extra chilli!

My overall experiance of these spin-offs has been mixed. I throughly enjoyed the Sharwood's wrap kit because the combination of salsa and Jalfrezi chicken complimented eachother. The sandwich is another matter, it had the potential to be a great vegetarian sandwich but something did not live up to expectation. Firstly, let us rule out the argument that bhaji's cannot go with bread because it becomes too dry. My mother makes bread bhajis that are delicious she smothers triangles of bread into the batter of potato spinach and gram flour. There doesn't seem to be any innate incompatibility between bread and bhaji, and the ingrediedents are authentic, I can only conclude that inside the sandwich was too bland a bhaji.