Kande Pohe (literally meaning Onion-ed flattened rice) are a staple breakfast dish in Maharashtra, India. Of all the variations I have had, the best is made by Aai (my mommy) hands down- not even exaggerating this time! I’m going to share her simple and yummy recipe here. This is the ‘authentic’ way to make it, per me. And once I show you the rule, you can always appreciate the exceptions 😉
Pohe are flattened/ beaten rice that can be bought in Indian grocery stores. Since they are dried, they can be stored for long periods. They easily absorb liquids and become instantly edible. They come as thick and thin, and for this recipe you need the THICK ones. (Else you will end up with Pohe lumps).
In the Kande Pohe recipe, the fried onions add the sweetness, the peanuts give the crunch and protein, along with the peas to the savory soft Pohe. Lemon juice gives a dash of tanginess.
Trivia: I remember the “chaha-pohe” (Pohe with chai tea) ritual has been an integral part of the ‘bride-viewing’ ceremonies (where the boys family visits a prospective girl’s family in an arranged marriage)! So whats the basis of happy long lasting Maharashtrian marriages? Yes- you got it- savory soft buttery delicious Kande Pohe!
And here’s what you’ll need:
1 1/2 cups of THICK Poha / Pohe
1 medium onion- sliced
1 medium boiled potato- cubed (with or without skin)
1 medium-hot green chilly (depending on how much heat you can handle, add another).
6 curry leaves (also available fresh in Indian grocery stores)
1/2 cup peas (fresh or frozen)
1 tbsp peanuts (make that 2 if you like the crunch in every bite!)
Condiments:
1 1/2 tbsp oil
1 tsp salt (or adjust to taste)
1/2 tsp sugar, 1/2 tsp turmeric
2 tsp lemon juice (or adjust to taste)
To garnish: Cilantro, grated coconut (preferably fresh)
Optional, but certainly a deal breaker in my recipe: 1 tbsp sour cream or 1 heaped tbsp plain yogurt. This prevents drying up and lends a soft texture and slight flavor. Try without it and you’ll know what I mean.
Recipe:
1. In half a cup water, add 1/2 tsp salt and 1/4 tsp sugar, stir and add to dry Pohe in a bowl. Make sure no residual water is left out, yet all Pohe flakes are wet. Add the yogurt or sour cream. Set aside.
2. Heat oil, add peanuts and fry for a minute, take out and keep aside.
3. Once the oil is hot again, add curry leaves and fry for 30 seconds. Add chillies and fry for a minute. Add onions and fry until translucent.
4. Add turmeric followed by cubed potatoes. Stir until they are all yellow and lightly fried (1 minute). Add remaining salt and stir in peas. Add the Pohe and stir well without crushing until they are all yellow. Reduce the heat to minimum, add 1 tbsp water along the edge of the pan to generate steam and cover for 5 mins.
Add the lemon juice.Taste and adjust salt / lemon juice/sugar. Stir in peanuts. Garnish with cilantro and grated coconut. Serve HOT! Most like it with hot chai!
For the longest time, I have not read fiction. One sunny afternoon, I find a book that my brother shipped thinking I’d enjoy reading: The Hindi-Bindi Club by second generation Indian-American Monica Pradhan.
This book is about 3 women from India settled in the United States, and about each of their daughters. The way the book is written, each character speaks for herself.
There is Saroj Chawla from Punjab who is a great cook and runs a catering business. Her daughter is Preity, the Miss Perfect, as viewed by one and all. The other character is Meenal Deshpande who hails from Maharashtra. She is more philosophical than others and has learnt from the experiences she had to deal with. Her daughter is Kiran, a physician and a divorcee in her early thirties who comes across as smart and stubborn. And then its Uma Basu, a Bengali scholar and professor. Her daughter is Rani, a wild child growing up but now an artiste.
From the eyes of these three mothers and daughters, you get to experience their wonder years growing up, their challenges with motherhood/daughterhood in a foreign country and all the gossip of what the girls call “The Hindi-Bindi Club”. As I read on, at different points, I could identify with some, the goosebumps, the nostalgia. And above all laughed and laughed at the humor! Saroj has her roots in the cosmopolitan Lahore, a part of India before the horrifying Partition, to become a part of Pakistan. With the character, you go back to the days half a century back with the description of the beautiful city, the festivals, the cheer, the Basant (Spring) in Lahore. Its poetic. Reminded me of the old Hindi movies. Meenal represents the typical and realistic Marathi woman and her life as a girl in Mumbai. The Mumbai rains, the paper boats, the street food, the beach etc. Uma is from Kolkata – the city of so many shades and contrasts. She is an intellectual, has a tough past, how she deals with it and her triumphs, her perspective towards life- its all is very inspiring.
Then there is the second generation of the daughters and their lives and challenges. Thus, it is a seamless patchwork of old and new Bollywood movies into a spectacular melange; now who wouldn’t like that! The book is very entertaining and brings that warm and fuzzy feeling. Its one of those I didn’t want to end. I highly recommend it to women, especially women from the Indian subcontinent settled abroad. They can most identify with it. I will be surprised if no one makes a cross-over movie out of it.
The best part is, each chapter is followed by a recipe. That is a real treat in more ways than one! I actually tried out a few!
My last word: A delightful book that is a must read! 🙂
I had to make something for this new playgroup of moms and toddlers I joined. Since me and my husband were on a ‘juice fast’ (more on it in another blog), I wanted to make sure I use the two loaves of whole grain wheat bread we had.
These are some of my wheat bread snack ideas (which surprisingly were successful):
Crispy sweet discs: Cut out small “discs” out of a few bread slices (the size would be that of a quarter). Or any shape if you want to be adventurous. Roast them on both sides until crisp brown on a non-stick pan with salted butter. Unsalted could be used, but I found a dash of salt adds a savory flavor to it. Sprinkle powdered sugar and serve.
Crispy Sweet Wheat discs
Wheat bread bites: Remove the sides of a three bread slices.
1.Put some non-sweet cream cheese (I use the Philadelphia 1/3 Less Fat Chive and Onion flavor and love it!).
2.Cover it with another slice and spread some Tangy Barbeque sauce (I had it leftover from McNuggets bought the past week). This is flavor goes very well with kids.
Variation: Alternatively, you could use regular pesto or tomato pesto sauce, that will go well with the adult party crowd. Cover this with the third slice.
3.Cut this 3-layered bread sandwich into a matrix of 9 square pieces. Stick in a toothpick. Serve!
Savory Wheat Bread Bites
Variation – sweet: Substitute the non-sweet creme cheese with the sweeter version, and the sauce with a fruit jam or jelly. These could also be Peanut Butter and Jelly bites. Same old recipe with a new look!
If you like it hot, brush a little olive oil or spray PAM and broil in the oven for a few minutes until golden crisp. Stick toothpicks and serve.
Grilled cheese sandwich – Now this is my all time favorite indulgence ever since Mr. Husband made it one time. Its fast and easy to make and is yum!
You need two slices of bread, grated sharp cheddar (regular or 2% fat), Sriracha sauce (You can get it in Asian Food isle) .
Helps to apply a little PAM Spray on the non-stick girdle or the grill ( I love my good old girdle to the grill!). Put one bread slice, cover it with shredded cheddar cheese, a little bit (or a little more- depending on your heat you can handle!) of Sriracha sauce, cover it with another bread slice and press it down. I used a steel plate and mounted a nice heavy marble mortar . Turn when one side is crisp brown and wait till the other one is too.
Put a bread slice on the girdle, cover it with sharp cheddar cheese, add some Sriracha sauce and cover it with the second bread slice.
Press the sandwich down until the lower slice is crisp brown, then flip and press down until the other side becomes crisp brown.Check out the golden goodness of this awesome grilled cheese sandwich!
My love affair with Apple started the moment I saw the iPod Touch with a colleague back in 2007. I was impressed by the magic the device could do and it’s beauty that was simply fantastical. I owned the iPhone later and the iPad. And they never let me down. Before I knew it, I was already in awe of this cult called ‘Apple‘. I watched the company’s CEO Steve Jobs giving the Stanford commencement speech. It left a deep impact on me, like it did on thousands. It was unostentatious, simple and above all, great!
The news of Steve Jobs’ death came to me with the grief that you’d feel for the death of someone who could have been your personal hero. Since I didn’t know much about him then, I very much wanted to. I got my first iBook, “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson. As I read from the Preface to the last page, it unraveled this man who had many facets, great as well as dark. Reading excerpts or news articles on him online, and watching a 60 minute documentary on TV just shows the tip of the iceberg. That’s really not him. If you wish to know this man, you got to know all the complexities that Jobs was, I felt. These words here are not meant to summarize the book; his life will need more words than these to tell the story. Many many more. This is but a trailer to entice you to watch the movie, if you wish to.
Initial reaction?
Honestly, I was slightly disillusioned towards the beginning as I was prepared to get inspired. It shattered my myth of a perfect hero to reveal the real person in real circumstances, and how he was ‘not a role model boss or a human being tidily packaged to be emulated. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair’. He would have his own version of reality which people around him would call “reality distortion field”. To his coworkers, he seemed too idealistic to be realistic. He was a control freak. He was straightforward to the extent of being rude, brutally rude, more often than not. He didn’t mean to be like that, he was just made that way.
Why read the Biography?
So what’s the big deal about Steve Jobs? Why read the biography? Well, there’s much more to him than this. Steve was an artist always striving relentlessly for perfection amidst imperfection. He was an ardent admirer of art and music, and was a great Dylan fan. A visionary with a beautiful vision of the future. An idealist who aimed to be, and to do things, greater than the greatest. He had an unusual ability to focus and make the impossible happen. He had a zen-like austerity, simplicity and a sense of minimalism that is reflected in all his creations. He always wanted to be at the intersection of technology and humanities.
Jobs’ passion was to create products that were great, or “insanely great”, as he would put. He was so detail oriented that he even made sure the inside parts – which the customer would never see- also be assembled very carefully and beautifully. He didn’t believe in market research or finding out what the customer wanted (Henry Ford is believed to have once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses!”) His philosophy was to think two steps ahead and he gave products customers didn’t know they wanted.
Quick exercise- A world without Steve / Apple?
The concept of home computers would not have started and the great GUI that made easy for one and all to use computers. Without Pixar– which broke open the frontiers of digital imagination and kids, young and old -we’d be deprived of brilliant cinema ( Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Up and so many more). Without the iTunes store music piracy would become the order of the day for none to contain (and we’d be deprived of the great feeling of legally buying a song – not the whole CD-just for 99 cents..’click’). Without the App Store the world would be deprived of the great apps for users and the billion dollar industry that it has become. Without the iPod, iPhone and iPad, the boundaries of engineering and design would not be pushed to unimaginable limits and we would not have the joy of owning and using them (think of a music composition or a movie that most impacted you- what if it was never made?). He really didn’t ‘invent’ anything, but he was a “master at putting together ideas, art and technology in ways that invented the future”.
This is a story of a man who forever changed our world, for the better.
On the Biographer…
Walter Isaacson has more than succeeded in doing justice to the subject as a biographer, is what I believe people who knew Jobs would agree. The book progresses eloquently from Steve as a child to a college dropout to his phases of extreme diets for months, dropping acid, meditations and attempts to find enlightenment. Then are his days of becoming a millionaire in his mid twenties to a series of failures and ousting from Apple. Followed by that is his final comeback to write history and build which is now the most valuable company on earth. With these eventful circumstances one gets to know the complex personality of the man. A lot of instances in the biography, the author gives his own take on people, things and situations, starkly different from how Jobs had seen them based fact finding he did himself. He is said to have had over a hundred interviews with Jobs family, friends, colleagues and competitors and over forty interviews with Jobs himself. He seems to be very transparent and has tried the subject play a second fiddle to nothing; his writing style is simple rather than complicated verbosity.
Young Steve Jobs with his Macintosh
The final words…
Most creative people in the history of human species want to express their appreciation for being able to take advantage of the contributions that came before us, and want to add something significant to the flow. To be able to contribute was the genesis of his intense drive.
Any literature that touches you leaving an impact, my father would say, is great literature! This book too leaves you with a strong sense of inspiration. You also get a sense that, the void you’d have for filling with accomplishment, has risen higher towards greatness.
Haven’t yet made up your mind to read the book? ‘Think different’!
I began several posts but never got to the point of posting them on my blog. Didn’t think they were worthy. Not that I didn’t have my occasional moments of “ah-has” and reflections… I did. The festivals that came by sans fun on the downside, and the newly discovered passion for authentic Maharashtrian cooking, on the upside.
Lets talk about the downside first. As for the festivals, you didn’t have to do much in India. Just go with the flow and fun was guaranteed. In a foreign country, if you do not have an enthusiastic community that you are involved with or if you do not have kids (who you’d want to expose to Indian culture irrespective of how religious you were in the past!), you have nearly no motivation to celebrate! That was the bitter truth I was struck with. Hope the next time I have at least one of the two factors to motivate me!
On the upside, it was a whole new world of cooking. I never grew up thinking I would or could “cook”. I’d conveniently think I am not the girly-girl type and got away with it in my mind. Then, just a few days back during one of my cleaning sprees, I found the tiny “Annapoorna” brass idol my mother gave me during my wedding. My allowance from hubby to keep God idols is limited to a few. The rest are put away only to come out on Diwali or some occasion that calls for it. I struggled for few moments to decide if it should go back in the ‘God box’ or be out. Made a decision and put Her on my gas stove top. This was the same time period when I saw myself ponder a lot on my childhood and how I grew up, the cooking and the customs followed, the festivals and the traditions observed…everything. The more I thought, the more I felt distanced from it, and that was painful. Unfortunately, those days are limited to the memories safe in my heart and to the old pictures; my parents are back home in India and my dear grandma passed on a few years back. Besides, the city where I grew up, the people, and the new phase the India in general is in makes everything so different. Nothing is the same but for the postal address… Or it could be that I was stuck and everything around has moved on. Whatever it was, the best way for me to relive it all was -yes you are right on- “cooking”! Pretty counter intuitive, I know.
I started with one authentic Marathi ‘eggplant potato dish‘ that I found online on a cooking blog. In Marathi weddings, this type of curry would be a commonplace as I saw growing up. This blog was awesome I thought, as this blogger had all these amazing regional recipes from Maharashtra. I felt at home and delighted. And with this blog I discovered several related blogs which was a treasure to me, to say the least! “Grandma was not around, but her kinda recipes came to me from the universe” kinda feeling (I left the theater, but “drama” hasn’t left me; please don’t hate me for the over-dramatization!). On a serious note, I felt closer to who I was. I felt grounded (used as an adjective here).
Home made Methi Paratha
Then came the Methi Parathas, the pumpkin parathas, the pumpkin sabji (typically made for puja’s), the sabudana khichadi, and so on. I made my own variations to the recipes from inputs from my mother. These blogs opened up several new avenues with one click just like Minesweeper (oh-I would love to play that game). If you liked it too, you’d know exactly what I am talking about! Strangely, I never came across these blogs before in my Google searches. To me all this was something like suddenly discovering you were a great painter when you knew you couldn’t paint for nuts!
Pumpkin sabji (yeah- could've done a better job at the picture had I known I was to post!)
Friends and relatives liked my “work” and hubby has still to reach the point of “cant take it anymore”. Now, when I am around in the kitchen, as I secretly catch a glimpse of the little Annapoorna idol with her ladle, She seems to transform but for a moment into the apron-clad fairy godmother, swings her ladle and winks at me with a mischievous smile before she transforms back into the tiny idol amidst shimmery gold dust!
"What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?" -- Annie Dillard
Life according to one of life’s truly gifted naturally born wafflers… an open diary of a Saffer in a different land... life in the greater Dublin & Leinster area. (Blogging since 2011) My quests fuel my dreams… my dreams fuel my quests!!
Madame Zenista 