Hello 2014!

I've been a little quiet on the blogging front recently- I attribute it to being in India last month, general hectic-ness around the Christmas break, and laziness.
Anyway here is a quick photo update on my recent eatings.

Kolkata involved a lot of family meals, a wedding, and copious visits to mishti dokans. This led to me experiencing the chocolate sandesh via Balaram Mullick for the first time- and I declare it to be surprisingly good.

Christmas dinner involved a highly indulgent Indian meal, with some Bengali and north Indian standards- saag, cholar dahl, prawn biriyani (which turned into more of a pilao rice really), tandoori-style salmon, and paneer tikka. New year went heavy on the seafood, and light on the crazy partying.

Anyway, here's to 2014 and whatever it might bring!

Eating in Kolkata

So I started this year in India, specifically in Kolkata (or Calcutta). As I was mainly seeing family, most of my meals were home-cooked, and so this post isn't going to be great for eating out recommendations (for that I always consult one of the best Indian food blogs around). Anyway, I did manage to consume an awful lot of mishti (Bengali sweets), discovered that food court eating can actually be pretty good, and had a regular intake of chanachur and other snacks.

Here are some pictures and a few words.

 

Not a handy snack for the taxi driver, but limes and chillis for good luck and to ward off the evil eye.

 

Many, many mishti- shondesh, roshogolla, and mishti doi.

More shondesh. Same basic recipe, but they come in many shapes and sizes.

The counter at a branch of Balaram Mullick- an excellent Bengali sweet shop, though the service was somewhat sketchy.

 

This was the year I had my first experience of eating in some shopping mall food courts. After some (a lot) of skepticism, I was pretty impressed. There were lots of counters for north and south Indian, Indian-Chinese and European food. Everything we ate was cooked to order and rather tasty. Above are some masala dosas from the mini food court that is randomly located in the Spencers supermarket in South City Mall. There's also a Flurry's concession there that did a rather good chocolate cake. Below is my chola bhatura from the food court in the City Centre mall in Salt Lake. The bhatura were more like giant luchis, but that's not in itself a bad thing.

 And also from City Centre was this plate of true fusion food- paneer hakka chow mein. Kolkata has always been keen on its Indo-Chinese food, and I really liked this slightly more sanitised (and veggie) version.

This was also the first year that I saw supermarkets becoming a bit more than a novelty destination, but markets like Gariahat still seemed very popular. When they say it's a wet fish market, they are not joking. I'm still not sure what I was stepping in but it was worth it for the super-fresh fish.

Golda chingri from the market above- these are giant fresh water prawns, which I cooked with green beans.

There aren't that many Indian vegetables that you can't also get in the UK now, but the fruit I've yet to see are these custard apples. These ones were huge and filled with a delicious custard-y goop that you have to  scoop out with your fingers.

Some excellent Bengali home cooking- koroishutir kochuri and aloo dum, a pea-stuffed fried bread with potato curry.

Snacks galore! These were mainly of the crisp variety (always of interest to me) but often with masala flavourings.

I liked this sign- it provides essential information on where the snack vendors are located (as well as the toy shop). 

So Kolkata was rather good for eating. The highlight though was probably the spectacular lunch cooked by my auntie (Joya mashi), which for some reason I forgot to take a picture of. Her idea of a simple lunch of cauliflower bhaji, fried fish, fish curry, prawn curry, dhoka dalna lentil cakes, rice, and tomato chutney, was pretty amazing and not one that I'll forget soon.

Ambala Indian Sweet Centre

In many ways I'm not very good at being a Bengali. I don't merrily chomp through fish heads, and there is no Rabindra Sangeet on my ipod. However there is one way in which I am very Bengali, and that is my love of mishti, Indian sweets or mithai.

As a child I baulked at my mum's thin, yellow macher jhol fish curry and fried bitter gourd uchay bhaja, but was happy to scoff down homemade syrupy sweet gulab jam or roshogolla. It's actually quite unusual for Bengalis to make many sweets at home, as back in Calcutta pretty much every neighbourhood has its own local sweet shop for all your mishti needs. Unfortunately an equivalent was very much lacking in the Cambridge of the 70's and 80's, so I was dependent on my mum's skills in this area and the occasional trip to the Ambala Sweet Centre in London for my fix. There are many branches of Ambala across London now, but the original shop is on Drummond Street. This is dangerously close to King's Cross Station, and I have to restrain myself from visiting on every single trip to London. Amabala is not a Bengali shop, but I'm not parochial in my mishti enjoyment, so anywhere selling jelebis, burfis and ladoos is fine by me.

Here's what I picked up on my most recent trip:

Ladoos! Probably my favourite Indian sweet, ladoos are made from fried gram flour soaked in syrup. The chickpea at its finest in my opinion.

Burfi! In this case chocolate and pistachio. The chocolate ones are a bit of a Western innovation, which involves pouring a thin layer of chocolate over a plain burfi. My sort of fusion cooking.

Indian sweets do have a reputation for being almost painfully sweet, and indeed some are. But there also some beautiful flavours of cardamom, cashew and pistachio, the richness of milk and cream, and textures that range from crumbly or softly spongy, to crispy. So as a change from the mince pies and chocolate yule logs that I might be consuming in the forthcoming festive season, I may well have a ladoo too. And with Christmas in mind, a selection of Indian sweets would make a top gift (nb they freeze very well, so you don't actually have to eat them all immediately).

Ambala also sell a range of savoury food, (I've written about their samosas before). And if you can't get to one of their many shops you can also order online (though not the samosas sadly).