In a Pickle and a Jam

Yesterday’s riches were these: Lemons (from the Arunachali tree that Minz planted over Laddu’s grave), Limes (massive and delicious smelling), Sapotas, Alsande, Green chillies, Dried red chillies, Tamarind, Tomatoes, Rosemary, Drumstick leaves and flowers and a sack full of Amla. It’s like having our own organic box delivered from a nearby farm except, woo hoo, it's our farm :) The drumstick leaves and flowers are best scrambled with eggs to eat with hot chappaties, the rest will all vanish over the next week. But the amla?? Hmmm… I’m going to have to pickle and jam. 

In the Adyar house, our Nynamma used to put to work everything that the thotakaar brought in from the garden. 

Wood apples: Mushed with jaggery and put into small earthenware bowls for breakfast.
Raw baby mangoes: Pickle
Pomellos: Bitter marmalade
Limes: Lime squash, lime pickle
Sapotas: Laid out in baskets to ripen
Thaati nungus: Straight to the fridge to be eaten cold
Tamarind: Dried on the verandah and nicked by us children to be eaten with salt and chili powder

Every season of the year, there was pickle pickling, a jam boiling somewhere or vadams drying on the terrace.

Amma made a nellikai pickle one time, from the abundance of gooseberries that were left over after we had eaten our fill.  She made hers with hot groundnut oil, mustard seeds, curry leaves. But eventually I decide to try a mustard oil pickle. My quantities are all rather slap dash, so I suggest you do the same. I have neither the diligence nor the flair of my mother, aunts and grandmothers - but this is definitely an homage to them. But I warn you, just keep tasting along the way and don't write and tell me all the things that are wrong with these recipes!

Amla Pickle

I kg (approx.) amla 
1/3 cup methi seeds 
1/2 cup saunf seeds (powder them coarsely. I forgot to do this, but I used fine Lucknowi saunf, so...)
1/3 cup kalonji seeds 
1 1/2 tsp asafoetida (hing)
1/2 cup chili powder
4 tsp haldi
250ml kacchi ghani (mustard oil)
Salt to taste

Boil the amla for about 10 minutes. Drain and cool. You could cut them and seed them, but mine were comparatively small, so I didn't see the need. Mix everything together with a seriously dry spoon in a seriously dry and clean dish. Bottle them in clean jars that have been given the once over with hot water as well. The jars need to be 100% dry. Leave the bottles in the sun for about 5 days and gaze smugly on the redness of the oil, the jeweled beauty of the amla, the flecks of methi, saunf and kalonji as the sunlight streams through the jars.

Last but not least, do not take my word for anything except that last sentence, being as I am a wholly untrained and inexperienced pickler....so store your pickles in the fridge.

Amla Murabba

Here is what I did with the remaining 1/2 kg of amla (all the while furiously recollecting my Bombay aunt, Viju chikki's winter amla murabbas): I put those amlas in my favourite orange Le Creuset with about 1 1/2 cups of sugar, 6 Kashmiri red chilies, 8 cloves, 4 large sticks of cinnamon, 1 tablespoon of peppercorns and about 1/4 cup of water and stewed them till the mixture was thick, pinkish and smelled gorgeous. Bottled as well. Delicious with anything - chappaties, rice, roast pork, on toast...

Drumstick Leaves with Eggs

My daughter blanched at the idea, but ended up eating copiously. This is made in many different ways, with coconut, with roasted and powdered ground nuts etc. But mine was a simple porial. I just like the idea of the free-ness of it: Pick some tender drumstick leaves and flowers from someone's tree and cook up a storm. 

Oftentimes, Sathya (from India Garage) will bring me some from his home in KGF. But today, I had a wealth of leaves and flowers from the farm.

Strip about 2 cups of the leaves and flowers off the stems. Wash and drain. The go about things as you would for any porial:

Heat oil, add mustard and allowe to splutter, chuck in a dried red chili or two, a couple curry leaves. Then add the leaves and flowers and 1/2 cup of water to cook it in. In the meanwhile, beat three eggs with salt and haldi. Once the greens have cooked, add the beaten eggs and stir as in scrambled eggs till cooked. Eat hot with chappaties. 

Ps...Just in case you didn't know...

http://www.ayurvedatips.info/amla.shtml

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-01-16/health/35226758_1_amla-health-benefits-joint-pains

http://www.whyfoods.com/vegetables-eating-benefits-drumstick.php

The Heffalump (for Kai & Mia)

The Heffalump came visiting twice in the two weeks that I was gone. No one saw him and we know it was only One him, because Nagaraj told us so. And we believe Nagaraj. By the time the Heffalump-Spotting-Squad, comprising of Kuki and me in the jeep, got to the farm, there had been a rain and very few remaining foot prints. So we couldn't be detetctives now could we? Nagaraj showed us a roundish hole in the ground that he said was a footprint. It could've been or it could've been a spot where Nagamma's pot fell. But maybe it was indeed a Heffalump footprint.

But we do know for sure that this time, the Heffalump was a little out of sorts and really made a mess of the bananas. He (or she, but most probably he, because girl Heffalumps are not known to wander about alone) entered the land from the art shed corner, then into the banana field near the s-shaped loos with the pink roses and ivy. And then, guess what? He doesn't care too much about bananas so these he just picks off the plant and tosses on the ground. But what he really likes is the heart of the banana stem. So he peels the leaves and outer layers away and then eats up the heart. We took photographs of the mess he made. All the nice plants stripped and tossed on the ground. He even made a dent in a pumpkin. Remember I gave that one to you? And Aala made a pumpkin pie and dhamrot with it.

I suppose after eating a whole field of banana stems, the Heffalump must sit down and burp. But I can only imagine this part. I spend a lot of time imagining the animals that I know are there, but that I haven't seen as yet. The bear that Nagaraj saw on our lane a week ago, at 6 pm, as he made his way back from Vardenahalli. The mother bear and cubs that the painters saw two years ago. The 5 elephants that the forest department chased past us and towards Savandurga. The leopards that must love the rocks. The wild boar that come for the groundnuts and sometimes root around in the bananas. Thank goodness we see a lot of peacocks or I might just have to imagine them as well.

And so I imagine that the Heffalump, after destroying the banana field, walks to the pond and gets a good drink of water. I know for a fact he scratched himself on the tamarind tree near the oven because we have evidence! A dusty red patch of mud high up on the tree that Nagamma pointed out to us.

Infinite Souls

Picture yourself in a boat on a river...

 

with tangerine trees

and marmalade skies

Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly

The girl with kaleidoscope eyes

I saw a rosy okapi upon the stream

I ate some okra-hominy in a sunbeam

I saw a silly zebra eating broccoli Cuba Libre

& an inky octopus inside the sea

in a little yellow bus came down to me

as I was sittin on the morning eating Corn

- from "I saw the Sunflower Monkeys of the Moon" by Allen Ginsberg

 

She sweeps with many-colored brooms,
And leaves the shreds behind;
Oh, housewife in the evening west,
Come back, and dust the pond!

You dropped a purple ravelling in,
You dropped an amber thread;
And now you've littered all the East
With duds of emerald!

And still she plies her spotted brooms,
And still the aprons fly,
Till brooms fade softly into stars -
And then I come away.
- Emily Dickinson

You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and did tricks for you
You never understood that it ain't no good
You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you
You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal.

Cellophane flowers of yellow and green, towering over your head

Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes







Now she's gone

Grade 5

God, I love 5th graders! They’re like raw guavas and skinned knees and wet swimsuits and squeaky voices and hot chocolate fudge and Akon and tight hugs and fake burps and real farts all served up at once.

We had 31 of them over for camp at Infinite Souls recently and… well, I lost my voice. Seriously, by Day 2, it was gone. I can pin point the exact moment when it departed – it was 3.45 am, Feb 21st.

I was fast asleep by 11.30 pm having exhausted myself begging kids to get into their tents and hit the sack for we had a 6 am trek the next day. Deep in some wayward dream I heard a huge, piercing scream and rushed out, hair awry and eyes frenzied, only to find all 31 wandering about in Superman pajamas, flashing torches like fireflies and saying “Varun did it, Varun did it” like 30 stuck records. Said Varun kept it up with a contrapuntal “I didn’t, I didn’t”. Turns out they had been awake all the while, the little devils, while innocent I lay asleep and dreaming. Then apparently Varun tripped over a tent cable and fell on one of the girl tents and Vanchika screamed like a banshee and then they all fell to bustling about like 4-foot tall busybodies. Long and the short of it…I lost my voice. It could be terror or else acute laryngitis.

I shone my pathetic Motorola phone light into Varun’s tent balefully, hoping the sight of me would cause the inmates to cower in fright. I opened my mouth to yell at them and here’s what came out “W..gr..h…f..grrr….t.” So they giggled and said, “What’s happened to your voice?” and that was the end of that.

They’re indescribable, this bunch. Like a mouthful of pop-rock; pop-blitz-crackle-spark. Driving you craaaa-zy and then making you collapse laughing. Somewhere in that dreamy liminal space between babies and stroppy teenagers.

Here are 10 wonderful moments from this camp:

1. Watching them play with Bamboo and Mushroom, delighted that the dogs would climb the hill with them.

2. The rounds of fake coughing. It started with one real cough at about 1 am and then continued from tent to tent; a good 30 mins of fake coughing.

3. All of them worrying about not having brushed their teeth before setting off on a trek. “Then how can we drink water on the trek?”

4. The boys rapping “Don’t trust a halli, never trust a halli” and “Meet me at the MTR”

5. One of the boys crying because someone said, as he lay in his sleeping bag in his tent “You look dead, dude”.

6. Shiv telling me his dog’s name is Cosmic Energy, “But we call him C.E.”

7. Watching them try Burma Bridge, try Tyre Wall, try Zip Line – nervous, worried, agrophobic – but not about to let it show too obviously

8. The two bodyguards (one of the children is from a political family) telling Vineeth that they were scared of wildlife and snakes

9. Arya telling me Vineeth’s scary ghost story during the trek with others filling in details

10. Watching them discover that someone had squirted them with Dabur Red toothpaste in the night. Oh, the fury!

11. The incessant questions about food. “What’s for lunch?” soon after they’d eaten breakfast.

12. Watching them try archery and see their hands afraid to let go of the arrow.

13. Their delight at the meal they cooked for us by themselves - wow

14. All of them exhausted and asleep by 9 pm the second night.

15. The moment when they say goodbye and they hug and dog pile you to the ground.

Oh, that’s more than 10…never mind.