Bhai Phota

mixed fruit pie

BAKED POMFRETE WITH STICKY SAUCE

CHICKEN KORMA

Karimeen polichattu

A new discovery from Kerala trip.

The recipe uses karimeen or pearl fish, but my hunch is it will be equally tasty with pomfret or even bhekti fillet.

Anyway, assuming you got hold of pearl fish, cut some slits across the fish.

Now grind some garlic, red chilli, ginger, black pepper, curry leaves, salt, turmeric together. Put in the masala as much as you can digest. Keralites like it hot, so the deadly combo of many red chilli and black pepper is used. We bengalis on the other hand probably should go easy on the chilli.

Now apply the paste all over the fish insert some inside the slits and fish.
Keep it for at least an hour.

Now wrap it up in a kalapata and fry it in oil in a pan .... if you dont have kalapata, just fry the fish in oil, not much oil is needed. Only some of the marination masala will be lost if directly fried in oil.

If you can get hold of coconut oil ... great, otherwise refined oil would do.

Now fry some onion, green chili, curry leaves in a teaspoon of oil.
When the onion becomes transparent put in the fish, fold in the spices.
Add 2 tbsp/fish coconut milk. Make sure whole fish gets to fold in the milk.
Now simmer for few minutes and wait till the water evaporates.
Now serve with some green salad or rice....

blue potato

mr kenworthy made sure that his new restaurant has its share of review,
so i will be brief and precise

• the decor is unique, but would have appreciated more legroom.
• price is slightly on the steep side (relative evaluation: not applicable if you sweat money)
• the idea of ever-changing menu is brilliant
  
• the idea of live jazz classy
• i dont understand the difference between classic French-Italian and French-Italian with Indian fusion
• i totally approve it
  
• must try the desert sampler, even if the waiter discourages you
  
• either i dont like my metabolic system or the portions are too big for one person
  

sundarban

been to sunderban?

the largest mangrove forest of the world?

the last surviving natural habitat for beautiful royal Bengal tigers?
then you can probably recognise the picture above the vast expanse of Ganges lined by sundari trees.
and you would also probably be familiar with worn out tiger-jokes
"there ! there!"

why dont people try their creativity a bit?
here some brand new tiger joke i created
"when we were at sunderban, there this tiger was sleeping !"
(one of the 250 tigers must be sleeping during that time, wont it?)
here's another one~
"seen any tiger?"
"yeah"
(after a confused look by the asker)
"oh you mean here in the forest.. no"

so why am i writing very silly tiger jokes in the food blog?
a) i have some time to kill
b) our food for the trip

my expectation was not high at all. was prepared to eat something cooked in extra virgin petroleum. surprisingly,our cook(not indulging in stereotyping but he was probably from orissa), was a genius, made the trip specially interesting

honestly, he is one of best cook i have seen, and we were told that he has his idiosyncrasies

he would not cook until he is provided with all the spices he asked for.

sometimes ganja gets the better of him and he ends up cooking a recipe with a charcoal flavour.
anyway, no such untoward incident happened in this trip.

.... the mung dal with peas, mansur with tomatoe the alur dum the chicken, vegetables and even begun bhaja 'the aubergine fries' were excellent. of course i tried to figure out the secret. he puts about sixteen spices on average in a single dish and takes his time to cook and magaj (watermelon seeds, and of course brain too) would feature in almost all his recipes

n.b. this post is dedicated to all the dormant co-contributors of this blog