Bicolour Chicken Pie

Bicolour Chicken Pie-- zweifarbige Huenchentaschen?

Finally, I am writing again. I am writing after ages but also after a successful experiment.
I have done something innovative and have not yet come up with a name for it.

I used spinach paste and beetroot paste to make the dough. I kneaded the spinach paste and the beetroot paste separately and see below the result:

Then I gave the dough the shape like below and then cut into pieces and rolled each piece out:

I put the stuffing on half of it ans folded the other half on it. Then it looked like this:

Theses were then shallow fried and we had the end product, ready to serve:

The Stuffing: --

I cooked the chicken with finely chopped onion, chopped green chili and tomato, salt, a few cloves of garlic and a little cumin powder and blended everything after cooking.

Mourola Machher Chachchori

Anchovies with Egg plant and Potato

Main course
Serves two

Preparation time: 25 minutes
Cooking time: 20 minutes

Ingredients:

Mourala fish: 100 gm
Potato: 50 gm
Egg plant: 50 gm
Green chili -- two small
Onion -- 25 gm
Turmeric
Salt
Sugar -- a pinch (optional)

Mourala Fish in Salt and Turmeric

sliced green chili, shredded onion, potato, egg plant

How to prepare:

Clean the fish. This will take considerable time.

Marinade the fish in salt and turmeric.

Cut the vegetables as shown in the picture above.

Fry the fish. Keep at one side.

Fried Mourala

Add potato to the oil and saute. As the potato starts turning golden, add the green chili and onion into the oil. Saute a little.

Add the egg plant. Saute. Stir a little. 

Add turmeric and salt.

Stir well to mix well. 

You may add very little water.

Cover the pan and make the flame small.

As the vegetables are almost done, add the fish. Stir to mix well.

Cover and let everything cook on small flame for about five more minutes.

Serve with steamed rice.

Lau Chingri

Bottle Gourd with Shrimp

Serves 4

Ingredients:

Bottle gourd (lau) – 1 Kg

Shrimps – 200 gm

Salt

Sugar – half a tea-spoon

Turmeric

Green chilies – two small, sliced

Cumin Seeds

Bay leaves

Mustard oil (or sun flower- or olive oil)

How to prepare:

De-vein the shrimps and clean the heads very carefully. Usually we do not behead the shrimps ;) but yes, you can get rid of them since cleaning is not an easy task. Marinade them in salt and turmeric powder. Set aside for about fifteen minutes.

In the meantime, peel the skin off from the gourd and cut it into very thin and small pieces.

Now heat some oil in the pan. If you use mustard oil heat it enough so that the typical smell of the oil vanishes. Fry the shrimps and keep them in one side.

Add bay leaves, green chilies and cumin seeds to the oil.

Add the shredded gourd. Let it sauté a little and then stir. Repeat this. Add turmeric and stir well so that it mixes with the vegetable uniformly. Add salt. Stir and mix well. After adding salt water will start coming out from the vegetable slowly; you do not need to add water from outside; so, just cover it and let it cook.

When the vegetable is almost done, add the friend shrimps and half a tea-spoon sugar, stir and mix well and cover again and let it cook for ten more minutes.

Serve with steamed rice.

Next time I prepare it, I will make a better photo to replace the one above!

Luchi and Mangsho

I can't remember when I experienced luchi after I left West Bengal.
Luchi is a deep fried flatbread made of bleached wheat or maida and much more, much more than just something delicious to eat! Luchi means a puja (worship), a birthday clebration; luchi means a Sunday breakfast! When luchi is there, we know we are going to have payesh or halua and/or alur dom or mangso or alubhaja or chholar dal! Luchi is closely associated to festivity, to happy occasions! That is why I used "experience" instead of "eat" or "have".

In Germany I never prepared luchi or roti although I cooked for my friends often but always chose something I could cook fast, even though the preparation before cooking was long sometimes. Every time I had such a party, I wished if my sister could be there! So, I decided to cook chicken curry which was popular among my friends in India and abroad and luchi for dinner because my sister loves chicken and I missed luchi.

                                                               Luchi

                                             Murgir Mangsho: Chicken Curry
I bought sandesh and lal doi to have at the end. We, Bengalees, love sweets and our meals must end with some sweetness: madhureNa samapayet!

                                               Lal Mishti Doi and Sandesh
Not just in our food culture, the popular luchi has its well-desereved place in our literature as well.
Who among us doesn't feel nostalgic about the popular rhyme by Mohit Ghosh: "phulko luchi phulko luchi/ pet ta phule dhak/ phulko luchi phulko luchi/ peter bhitor phank!/ "?
But not all children can enjoy luchi since their parents cannot afford it. Examples are Apu and Durga, the young protagonists of "Panther Panchali" by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, another classic of Bangla (Bengali) literature: Apu felt happy seeing luchi on his plate as he accompanied his father to his disciples' house and sad too, at the same time, since he could not share it with her sister at home. Luchi is something they seldom had.

Indian Dinner in Paris

I decided to spend the weekend with my friend in Paris. I cooked this special egg curry and the spicy shrimps for dinner and she got wine for us:

Cod Egg Curry!

Prawn in Onion and Tomato: My Success with Microwave!

WE learn only when we are forced to learn; when the situation we are in demands that we must learn. I did not touch the microwave oven in my flat for the last one year. But in the recent past, as my oven broke down twice in three weeks, I realized that I must have a parallel system to avoid unintended fasting in a Sunday late evening. (On Sundays everything is closed in Germany.)
So, I tried utilising the presence of the “Mikrowelle” in my kitchen. It actually went so well that I bought some ceramic pots, made in France, specially made for cooking in microwave oven. They are orange and white in colour. They are beautiful!
So, nowadays I am cooking even typical Bangali dishes, too, in microwave oven.
Here is prawn with tomato and onion, the way my mom used to cook it quite often. Only, I did not add thinly sliced potatoes to it since I feel that I eat too much carbohydrate. Sorry, I was too hungry to present it more neatly in a better container this time. I apologise for this not-so-good photo.

Peas and Sausage Fried Rice

Nowadays I go to gym because I eat like this:


This is my sausage fried-rice!
The meat in the sausage was from poultry.
I used butter instead of oil to make it tastier because butter makes everything yummy! This was a very successful experiment.

Gerlingen Street Festival

Gerlingen is a beautiful village about 15 kilometers away from Stuttgart. This weekend Gerlingen celebrated its 32nd street festival. One of my seniors grew up there. They were to sell mainly east Asian food that they made at home (spring roll, for example)in this fest. The fest took place from Saturday 15:00 till midnight and again the next Sunday till 18:00. (I do not know when exactly it started on Sunday but I am sure much before my day began. I woke up at 11:30.)The spring rolls I had for my brunch. On Saturday I took the U-Bahn from Stuttgart after our hat party and reached Gerlingen at about 22:30 because I wanted to see the fest at night too. I had chicken nuggest as dinner. This was more like a family fest. Local people participated through sports clubs or similar local organisations. Most of the things were home made. People knew each other and said hallo to each other. I was probably the only person who looked like a real tourist. Spring roll and chicken nuggets were not new for me since those are quite popular in Kolkata, too. So, I did not take photos of them even though I enjoyed them. They were sold at a real low price.

But these turkish sweets were new for me. I tasted only a few of them.








There wete sausages, beer, potato salad, pommes frittes, as usual. There were different types of wines, old and new, from Baden-Wuerttemberg. There were Hungarian delicacies. I had my first gulash here.

Nippon on My Plate: My First Sushi

Nuernberg, Germany! A gloomy (read: pleasant because not warm)summer evening. Three young people aged a little more or a little less than thirty from Indian, Russia and America are sharing a table in a restaurant that specialises in Sushi.
It was an adventure since Russia forgot even the name of the restaurant even though it was her idea to have Sushhi. LoL! America searched for it in the internet and, so his mobile played the role of a Navi. India happily followed them.

Reward was here:




I learnt how to eat with chop-sticks! That was my take-away!

Vietnam on My Plate: the Very First Experience

Since one of our friends is leaving Stuttgart, we had a get-together to say "Goodbye" to her.
The venue for the party was the garden in another friend,s house in Ehningen.
There I had my first Vietnam-food-experience.
The dish is called "tikaa": pork ribs with caramelised garlic.

A friend from Vietnma cooked it for us.
IT WAS REALLY VERY GOOD!

Shrimp and Potato in Mild Mustard Gravy

Bon Apettit to myself! This was my dinner tonight.


First I added shredded onion and half a green chilly to heated oil. As the onion turned golded I added the shrimps and potato and sauteed for some time. I added salt, turmeric powder, cumin powder and coriander powder a little and stirred from time to time, and then water to bring it to boil.
After the potatoes became softer I added mustard and a pinch of sugar and boiled untill the potato was completely cooked.

The word "mild" is important. All the spices, and especially mustard, if added more than required, will destroy the taste. On the other hand, when added only a little, will bring in the out-of-this-world flavour to the food.
Instead of mustard I can cook it with tomato, also. In that case, too, mild is the key-word. The quantity of tomato should not be so much that makes it taste sour.
I used olive oi, but traditionally it is cooked in cold-pressed virgin mustard oil.

I had it with steamed basmati rice.

Aubergine mit Hackfleisch und Kaese

Germany is world famous for its automobile industry. We associate tennis, music, many inventions and even Indology with Germany. Germany means Steffi Graf, Albert Einstein, Max Mueller, Grimm Brothers! But not many of us know that Germany has a very diverse and delightful food culture. Just like us, Germany not only has innummerable tasty recipes of her own but also open to taste and assimmilate food from any other region of the world. In the small local foodstand that is open only in the morning as a part of the local meatshop in my tiny village, I have tasted my tastiest Lasagna, freshly prepared in their kitchen early in the morning, like all their other dishes.
Today I picked minced meat Lasagne for breakfast and something new for lunch: Aubergine mit Hackfleisch und Kaese.

The half of a big aubergine with mixed minced meat and cheese melted in mouth. With leftover of last night's spinach, steak and cheese salad, it was a grand lunch in the late afternoon today. :)

Steak, Spinach and Cheese Salad

Even though the original ingredients for this dish includes raw baby spinach leaves and boiled beet root, I boiled spinach leaves thoroughly, since EHEC has proved itself fatal in this region and I did not add beet root since I do not like it booiled at all.I added a little black pepper while boiling the spinach. For the meat I have used mini steaks of turkey. For oil I used olive oil, as usual.

Looks like Schaschlik! :)

It was my pleasure that this was recieved well.
I made this for our barbecue evening!

Russian Salad: My Version

This is my very own rice and schrimp russian salad.
I owe the idea to my Russian weekend, no doubt. But I have used grated carrot and mayonese instead of smetena

My Russian Weekend!

From India, sitting in a garden house in Bamberg, Germany, having an authentic home-cooked Russian lunch in an unusually warm Spring afternoon!! Doesn't it sound interesting?
This was my first Russian food exprience:

1) Fish


2)The plate contains salad, beans (pickled), carrot (pickled)and yes, Kartoffelbrei (mashed potato), we are in Germany after all.



The ingredients of the salad are crab, hard-boiled egg, sweet corn, rice and Schmand(creme)/mayonese. Now I can make this salad, too, thanks to my host, a beautiful young lady working for an MNC on deputation in Bamberg!
This was just the small beginning of the weekend-long feast.

Eating White Sausage Like a Bavarian!

White sausage with sweet mustard! Out of this world!
I can suck the meat out from inside the skin. And why just before noon, I can eat them round the clock. In fact they made my dinner today!

Beef with Pepper

Today I tried my hand for the first time on beef as I cooked my lunchinner (= lunch + dinner, since it was too late for lunch but quite early for dinner).
I mixed pepper, salt, and a little turmeric with the beef, cut in tiny peices and let it stand for about fifteen minutes. I sauteed the beef on olive oil with shredded green chillies and shredded white onion.
After that I added water into it and cooked for some time.
I had it with steamed Basmati rice.
It was tasty but at the same time easy to cook.
I am very satisfied with my f-i-r-s-t beef curry!

Putenfleisch-Bällchen mit Tomaten- und Jogurt-Sauce

The name should be kofta curry of turkey (minced meat)for my English-speaking friends.

I cooked this for the first time.
And it was quite loved by the tastebuds of my friends. Very satisfied experience that way.
It is a spicy dish.