Owls, lions and salmon

Apart from the ball, even owls get kicked around in the football matches. Moreno, the footballer who committed the deed, is getting death threats.

Meanwhile, Moreno says he had been threatened since the incident. “There have been all kinds of things … on the telephone, everything,” he declared in a television interview. “It wasn’t my intention to hurt the animal. It’s very difficult for me and my family who are in Panama and are afraid about all this.”

This is a plot for an excellent B-grade horror film – The Hooting Nightmare. Footballer kicks owl to death. The spirit of owl comes back hovering above the footballer. Every time he tries to kick the ball, the ghostly owl goes hoot in his ear. The footballer misses his kick. He loses his spot in the team. Enter the shaman who will find out an ancient ritual that requires the footballer to be kicked by 25 owls. What happens next we need to see.

Meanwhile the Great American Hunter is on a mission against African lions.

Between 1999 and 2008, 64% of the 5,663 lions that were killed in the African wild for sport ended up being shipped to America, it said. It also said the numbers had risen sharply in those 10 years, with more than twice as many lions taken as trophies by US hunters in 2008 than in 1999. In addition to personal trophies, Americans are also the world’s biggest buyers of lion carcasses and body parts, including claws, skulls, bones and penises. In the same years, the US imported 63% of the 2,715 lion specimens put up for sale.

Of course, there is a flip side to hunting.

“If you remove hunting, the very real risk is that you force African governments to generate revenue from that land and the obvious thing is cattle and crops which just wipe out habitats,” said Hunter.

So hunter / gatherer vs agriculture / pasture.

Meanwhile, back in India, avoid salmon, especially the much hyped Norwegian Salmon. I saw it on the menu at a place the other day – Rs. 600 bucks for some handful of shavings. Ostensibly writing about the budget, Vikram Doctor however makes an important recommendation which may of more consequence than Pranab babu’s. He says that the smoked salmon available in restaurants in India are sick.

Nearly all this salmon is farmed and while it is seen as a premium product here in India, in the West it is not. Fish farmed in big sea cages live in utterly unnatural conditions for the wide sea-roaming salmon; as a result they are often sick, and for that reason are pumped with antibiotics. But perhaps the biggest problem with farmed salmon is that because it’s easily available and can be sold with a premium tag, it stops Indian chefs from using more of the abundant and excellent range of fish caught on our shores. I would love to see more local fish on restaurant menus, but increasingly it’s all salmon or Chilean seabass (overfished).

Now for lunch.

Delicious Fiction

Came across this interesting piece in Pratham Books which features an article from the New Yorker about food in literature.

There are four kinds of food in books: food that is served by an author to characters who are not expected to taste it; food that is served by an author to characters in order to show who they are; food that an author cooks for characters in order to eat it with them; and, last (and most recent), food that an author cooks for characters but actually serves to the reader.

Looking back, I still remember the great excitement about Enid Blyton’s books was partly due to her detailed descriptions of food – the well stocked picnic baskets of Billy-Bob, the tea parties in Faraway Tree, Noddy and Big Ears feasting at home, the supplies stocked by the Famous Five when they went on their adventures.

PG Wodehouse introduced us to the magnificent Anatole, stolen by Aunt Dahlia from Rosie Banks, wife of Bingo Little. Anatole, “God’s gift to the gastric juices” made such brilliant dishes like Cepes a la Rossini and Mignonettes a la creme d’ecrivesses. One did not have to see those plates, simply the names were enough to salivate.

On to Hercule Poirot, the aristocratic detective who has so many times walked into the elaborately laid dinner tables and found people lying in pools of blood or poisoned. In the story Four and Twenty Blackbirds, he uncovers a heinous crime simply by investigating why a man who could not digest suet pudding, blackberries and thick soup ordered exactly that – thick tomato soup, beefsteak and kidney pudding and blackberry tart on a Monday night. As it turned out … (okay if you haven’t read, I won’t spoil it for you)

And then food becomes a subject for diplomacy and power struggles. Robert Ludlum’s The Janson Directive has Paul Janson meeting Hungarian arms dealer Lakatos at the Palace Hotel in Miskolc. Lakatos suggests libamaj roston, the grilled goose liver and the brassoi aprepecsenye, braised pork. Janson however prefers the bakayi serteshus,pork in mushroom and cream sauce. The dinner is accompanied with a bottle of Egri Bikaver, ’82 with the cancelling the initial choice of Margaux ’98. The dinner ends in an ambush with Janson killing Lakatos and his guards.

Bakony Sertesragu

food that is served by an author to characters in order to show who they are

Annabel Richter orders “Water. Still. No Lime. Room Temperature.” She has just cycled to the Atlantic Hotel, driving Tommy Brue to dismay and immediate love.  (A Most Wanted Man, John Le Carre)

The perfect Roast Chicken

The skin has to crisp but the meat inside must be juicy and delicious. Six recipes offered here. Does Tandoori Chicken qualify as roast chicken?

So, Keller’s dry and hot treatment is the key to crisp skin, and pre-poaching gives deliciously juicy meat – but the two methods are sadly incompatible. Given that there’s more flesh than skin on your average chicken, I’ll be adopting the poaching idea in future, but modifying Annie’s recipe to include a final blast of heat, as advocated by Matthew Fort, to help add some crunch.

On My Plate : Vikram Doctor

Sample these few juicy lines: This one protests about buffaloes being overlooked in favour of cows. Buffalo milk is the source of mozarella cheese. And inspite of having so many buffaloes in India, we are still importing from Italy. Dhikkaar!

I believe in buffaloes. Not so much in their existence, since they do a good job of existing whether or not anyone believes in them, but in their importance. I have lamented in the past in ET the prejudice that so many Indians, sadly even Mahatma Gandhi, have had for cows over buffaloes. The cultural and religious reasons usually advanced for this strike me as dubious , if not downright racist (or speciesist).

And then taste this, a narrative on the consumption of the humble banana in Germany (East, West and Unified):

Fruit at least was one thing they could buy, and that’s probably why so many bananas were bought in those first days. East Germans were soon eating double the amount of bananas than West Germans – whose consumption was already the highest in the EU. But bananas would also feature as the realities of reunification sunk in. West Germans patronisingly called East Germans ‘Bananen’, while Easterners accused the Westerners of practising patronising banana politics – one former Communist leader accused West German parties of handing out free bananas to lure voters in the 1990 elections.

Now, when one writes about food, it does not have to be about recipes or about cooking. It has to be about the place in culture and to use a Hindi word in the zahan of people. Finally, after much pleading, we have this blog by Vikram Doctor called On My Plate. Immediate bookmarking, adding RSS feeds to Google Reader, etc etc is recommended. And I believe Doc doesn’t mind the odd comment here and there, especially if there is a lead to another topic on food.

An evening in Moss

Saturday the 20th I was at Moss, a neat lounge in Bangalore and there were seven of us including Madhu Menon, the owner of the place. Here are some photographs of the evening. 

 

Savouring our rum

What did we drink?

1. A spicy drink with Old Monk base that Madhu concocted right there in front of us
2. Regular Old Monk with coke

What did we eat?

1. Drunken Beef (really outstanding stuff)
2. A fish preparation which I have forgotten what it is called
3. Black pepper prawns
4. Thai combo meal
5. An aubergine (baingan) dish
6. Chicken satay 

There were four of us from IIM Bangalore tho’ that was purely incidental. The conversations ranged from the latest on the recession, food, pop-culture, IPR issues in playing music in pubs and lounges, etc.

Good meal. Went back to my room in IIMB in an auto paying Rs. 200 for the fare. I have never paid anything more than Rs. 100 for an auto in Mumbai. The maximum I ever paid was when I was working in Delhi – I had to go to Greater NOIDA to the LG office from my office in Malviya Nagar. So I fixed an auto guy who took me there and brought me back. His meter ran out two times over.

Recession dinner time

A friend of mine who runs a lounge in Bangalore spoke of how the economic situation is hitting the fine dining places in many of the large cities. Popular hang out places are running 40%-50% – much much below normal. 

In Mumbai, the situation seems to be mixed. Today itself I came back from a dinner at Oh! Calcutta in Tardeo. I was with the wife and the wife’s parents. We had an elaborate meal. We made a reservation in the morning itself. We came in by 8.30 pm and took our seats. By 9 pm, the restaurant was full. Oh! Calcutta does have a reputation for leisurely service. With the restaurant full, the leisureliness became a tad too irritating.

Anyway, the point of the matter is that Tuesday evening, i.e. working day, we have a full restaurant where the average meal for four people is around Rs. 3K. So are people recovering from the economic crisis?

Cut to Toto’s Garage Pub in Bandra. A typical working day night would resemble a Borivili local train. Friday and Saturday nights would resemble a Virar local train. These days, it resembles the early morning harbour line trains. There’s enough place to stretch out horizontally and have your drink, zamindar style.

Of course, for Toto’s the additional hit happened because of Ramodoss’s smoking ban. The smoking ban has significantly changed the usage behaviour of the patrons of Toto’s. Now, half the customers are standing outside in the footpath puffing away. After one puff, customers go in, finish their drink and order one more. Even as the bar tender is preparing the next drink, they are back outside for another puff. And life goes on.

By the way, at Oh! Calcutta tonight, for those who are interested, we had the following

1. Mutton Ryzala
2. Shorshebata Ilish (with bones) – without bones is for the cowards and pretenders
3. Chittagong Chicken
4. Bhaja Platter – an assortment of fried vegetables including brinjals, bhendi, fulgobi and alu
5. Luchi
6. For starters, we had bhetki fish fry and prawn cutlet

For drinks I had Vodka with aam panna (which was interesting) and the wife tried Vodka with tender coconut water (which wasn’t exciting at all) .

The memories of Raan

Our friends Jenny and Dave have experienced Karim’s at Jama Masjid. The visuals and the talk of the heavenly fare brought back memories of one dinner on a cold winter night in December 2006. We started with some, well, starters – sheekh kababs and shammi kababs, while the raan was being made. Then some chicken legs followed. And some more kababs. Then came the raan – a full leg of mutton nicely roasted with all the spices that brought Europeans all the way from their cold houses to the tropical lands of the Indian subcontinent.

After about three hours of quiet, focused and extremely epicureanistic consumption of the food, we sat back – hunger satiated, tummies double in size, and the body nicely warmed up.

The temperature outside was in single digits but I slept the whole night without a blanket.  

In the past, I have eaten at Karim’s at Hazrat. Of course, the food here is at the same level. But the ambience of the majestic Jama Masjid, the cloistered lanes and streets of old Delhi and the general chaos gives a completely different experience.

Note: Vegetarians may find this place a bit unappetising

Cosmopolitan Thali

I saw this sign outside a restaurant in front of the Konark Temple, last week.

The sign reads

“Dosa, Ittle (Idli, I suppose)“

and then a whole range of thalis

“Marwari Thali, South Indian Thali, Bombay Thali, Gujurathi Thali, Orissa Thali“

This is truly cosmopolitan – people of all cuisine preferences will get their kind of Thali.

For the hungry Bongs, fret not, you just have to walk down couple of shops and you will see this

Bengali Thali – Veg and Non-Veg complete with an Air India Maharaja welcoming you