If you think I am going to write about Alaska, that is where you would be wrong.
When I first got married, the only thing I knew to cook was rice and beans. That is it. My husband loves to eat (as do I). At that time, neither of us knew that. We were just getting out of student life where that standard staple was "daal chaval." (lentils and rice) We were both so heartily tired of that, it took us 4 years to introduce daal back in our diets again. We were just happy with anything that wasn't daal.
Right after we were married, we had to be apart for 6 months for our jobs and every time he would come visit, I would learn a new dish. With just a full time job and nothing else to occupy my time, I learned a bunch of stuff from mom through the phone and the internet in those 6 months. Slowly over the years, I have become a fairly good cook, but one thing remained elusive.
Introduce Puttu (rice funnel cakes). It is a breakfast dish from the South of India. It is a deceptively hard thing to make. You ask any veteran puttu maker for a recipe and they will tell you "just mix the flour until it looks right." Of course, that makes complete sense to someone who is trying to make it for the first time.
It was my nemesis. I loved it so much, but I COULD NOT MAKE IT. When my mom came to help with my first pregnancy, she asked me what I wanted from Kerala and I said "I need puttu." So she brought 7 kg of puttu podi. And made puttu for me 4 days a week, until my husband was ready to throw me out of the house, him being not so obsessed with it as I was. But he is a sensible man and knew enough not to mess with a 9 month pregnant woman. And I pretty much ate all of it. That would be the story of how I gained 25 pounds and took 4 years to get back to my pre- pregnancy weight.
Once when my in-laws were here, my FIL thought he could teach me to make it because, it is "such a simple thing". I tried telling him that I have tried and failed before. There are 2 ways you can fail at puttu making. When it comes out of the puttu maker, it can either fall like an avalanche or be very hard depending on whether there was not enough or too much water. But he was *sure* I could make it. He is an optimist, what can I say? So I followed instructions and made it. And when it came out, it was so hard, you could kill people with it. He said to keep it and that he would eat it (He hates to waste). Since I do love my husband's family, and since we believe that weapons of destruction have no place in the home, I threw it in the trash.
So I was resigned to the fact that I can only eat puttu when my parents or in-laws come to visit or when I go to India. And that is how things were until 3 days back.
A week before that, we were getting groceries at our local Indian store when I saw a puttu packet on the aisle. All my insecurities resurfaced, but it was like a wound I wouldn't stop scratching. I quickly put it in the cart. And when I came home, I looked at the instructions. Would you believe it, it said mix flour with "enough" water and cook in the utensil. There were NO measurements. I thought I would hang on to it until the next parents visit. Then I was visiting my friend Sherin's cooking blog and there was it, a puttu recipe. And I read her similar experience with puttu making. There she had done the trial and error work for me and glory be, there were measurements!!!
And I tried it.
And it came out awesome. Just like God and the good people from Kerala intended.
I had arrived. I had crossed the final frontier. I did a victory dance.
Here is a picture of the puttu and the egg curry I made to go with it.
(The video of the victory dance not included)
And then I died and went to puttu heaven.
THE END.
Recipe:
PS: I had to increase the steaming time to 10 minutes after the steam comes out of the vent. I made no other changes.
puttu with egg curry
1 comment:
lovely to read.
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