Live: Intelligent use of the freezer, the oven and the microwave

I have often observed people underutilising the power of their white goods. These include the refrigerator, the microwave and the humble oven. I am going to describe here the things I have been doing to optimise their use along with the stove or the hob or the gas stove that we use for our cooking, preserving and so on. 

I was inspired to write this post after a friend on Whatsapp asked a few questions related to thawing food and preserving food. Thanks, @mnkshah.

Let me begin by stating the most obvious things:

1. Freezers are for preservation. The temperatures are below zero degrees Celsius. In most cases, they are near -4 to -15° Celsius. At such temperatures, food becomes homogeneous to the human eye. It is therefore imperative to label your food containers before freezing stuff inside the freezer. Labelling can be in the form of either using special freezer labels or using colour-coded lids. 

2. Thawed food should not be refrozen unless you have kept it outside for less than 15 minutes. This is because thawing and bringing food back to room temperatures allows microorganisms to grow inside. Refreezing such food will allow microbes to stay inside and be activated whenever thawing next occurs; sometimes, microbes excrete toxins that are simply chemicals and these will cause you to be very, very sick indeed.

3. Fried foods always taste more heavenly than grilled, roasted, air-dried or toasted food. There is no alternative method to keep the EXACT same taste of fried food without frying it. 

4. Microwave ovens heat and cook from inside to outside, and this is very important when you are heating or cooking foods. This peculiar way of cooking actually can overcook the insides without the exterior being that hot. Remember this while using a microwave oven.

Listen to this podcast.

So, let us dig deeper then. 

First of all, freezing a freshly cooked item as soon as it is cool enough to stop smoking is the best way to keep the item fresh and retain all its nutrients. I have used this method to store away food for the days I won't be able to find time to cook. An example of this is to cook two or three different foods before the start of my run of night duties. This allows me to cook for a half-day ahead of the nights. I usually end up making two or three different foods, including a mix of curries, vegetables and some noodles etc. Remember, rice, noodles, salads CANNOT be frozen. I make those items when I actually need them. However, curries, roasts, gravies etc. can be frozen, so it makes sense to make them all together and put one in your fridge and the remaining in the freezer. 

Items like chapatis, bread, tikka, kebabs, etc, will stay unspoilt in the freezer for months! The one thing to remember is to store it in smaller packets with plastic bags so that you don't have to remove the entire packet when you need just a few for one meal. This is also true when you want to store green peas - they come in large packets of 200 -500 grams, and you won't be needing all in one cook, will you? So, break that up into smaller packets of 40-60 grams each before putting it away into the freezer. You may extend this to items like french fries (when bought raw, the packets are huge). 

A practical way to work with onions: remember, we need onions for over 90% of our cooking. Most dishes need onions to be fried golden brown at the very beginning of the cook. One way to save preparation times is to dice a lot of onions and then fry them in a large kadhai in one go. Once they turn golden brown, switch off the gas, allow them to cool, then drain them onto a clean glass bowl, and transfer them into an air-tight box to store them all in the freezer. You may retain a small portion to keep it in the fridge for use over the next few days, The rest can be frozen and used over an entire month without spoiling. 

Garlic-ginger pastes, chutneys, tamarind pastes, etc. also stay fresh for long periods if they are frozen. To be honest, g-g pastes do not spoil even without freezing, but when kept in the freezer, their aroma is retained for a much longer time. The same is true for green chilli paste. Try it.

Now, let me talk about frozen foods that we buy from the supermarkets. Nowadays, it is possible to get frozen raw stuff but also frozen cooked food. I have bought parathas, pooris, frozen avial, frozen medu wada, frozen cooked okra, and so many other things. When you buy parathas in this way, you need to bring them out and cook them straightaway on the tawa without thawing them at all. If thawed, they lose their hardness and become like putty in your hands. So, remove from the freezer, and transfer them immediately, one by one, onto the tawa till you have made them all. If you don't need all of them, use the numbers you need, but transfer the rest back into the freezer as soon as possible.

Cooked vegetables packed inside attractive boxes are a bit of a tricky thing. They can be thawed in the microwave, but you do need to remove aluminium or plastic coverings from them. This can be a pain, A better way would be to heat them in water in a large cooking pot rather than using the microwave. Just suggesting tricks to make your life easier.

Any don'ts? Well, you cannot freeze rice, pulaos, biryanis, noodles, etc., but bread and chapattis are just fine. Raw vegetables like tomatoes, brinjals, kaddu, etc. become absolutely watery and mushy when frozen. Coriander leaves stay okay for a few days, then turn into a sloppy mess. The same is true for mint leaves, spinach leaves and all leafy vegetables. Curry leaves, though, will stay good for a long time, but you need to remove them from their stalks. Long beans, french beans, etc. are also okay with freezing for long periods. 

Any words about the humble OTG? I think we all under-utilise it since the microwaves came along. To reheat chapati, kababs, samosas, etc. the OTG is fantastic, as the food heats evenly unlike what happens with the microwave. OTGs are also great to grill kababs, make cakes, make dhokla, and heat farsans of all kinds before consuming them. Popcorn is better made in a microwave. 

And that's it for now. Please participate in the discussion with adding your comments below. Thanks for reading this post. 

Live: Hobbies and Me

This post is not about food, although my blog is mostly about that. Well, in a way, since I do love cooking, and this is a hobby for me, the underlying theme is food. But, as the title says: this is a blog about living. So, in a way to enhance your life, each one should discover, research, adopt and then nurture a hobby that has nothing to do with one's normal field of work. 

I am proud to say that I have not one, but many hobbies. Sometimes, I wonder how I ever find the time to do my normal work! 

My earliest hobby was to collect stamps. I did this from my early childhood to some time around the age of 10 or so, then gave it up as I hardly received stamps from overseas. Next, I took to collecting matchbox covers. Since the paper labels were stuck on thin wood boxes, I would soak the tops in water till the labels came off the wood, then dry them and stick them onto the pages of a special notebook. It was a time-consuming exercise, but as I went on searching and cataloging covers, I realised these had price denominations just like stamps! A branded box cover sold at different prices over the years, so, for example, I had a "SHIP" brand cover for 5 paise, then 10 paise, then 20 paise and then 25 paise! This would all go on a separate page!

The hobby died out as my life became more and more complicated. From adolescence to the dawn of the internet age, my next, all-consuming hobby was reading books. I have read comic books, children's books, love stories, James Hadley Chase, detective tales, Enid Blyton, classics from Charles Dickens to Jane Eyre, and, as I grew in age, I have devoured Wilbur Smiths, Arthur Hailey, Shakespeare, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Ludlum, Colin Forbes, and so many others. 

Reading inevitably led to writing my own books. During my school years, I wrote a series of adventures of four kids and their dog who go out and form a boys' club, then solve mysteries - exactly as Enid Blyton's Famous Five or Secret Seven did. I even wrote a full-length Hindi novel, a short biography of a fictional author, a full-length English novel, and poems galore. 

My writing hobby has continued, although I blog much more than write novels or poems. Readers who wish to read my work are requested to click HERE. 

Sometime around 2007-8, I turned to photography, I purchased my first digital DSLR camera, my Canon 550D. I have played around with it over the last decade. I amalgamated my interest in photography with my newfound interest in birding. I now go out birding, using my Canon camera and my different zoom lenses to record and save my sightings for posterity. 

Birding has been a very rewarding hobby insofar as it gives me peace, immense satisfaction and happiness of a very high order. I will write about birding in another post elsewhere. 

For this post, suffice it to say that for a fuller life, do have one or two hobbies. Discover the talents inside you, adopt the hobby and then nurture it over the years so that it takes you further and further in the territory ...

Review: Michael Wan's Mandarin Restaurant

This is based on dinner that I had here with a friend. I had been meaning to go to Mandarin since long as it looks like a chic place. When you peek in from their glass front, you can see English, Chinese and Asian guests, but what impressed me was that most of them seemed to be well-heeled, dressed in suits and formal attire. 

Located on Clifton street near the town centre, Michael Wan's Mandarin Restaurant is an easily accessible.

My eating-out companion Luckey and I went to eat here on Friday the 2nd of June 2017. We were sat at a 2-seater table that was in a crowded, front area of the restaurant. The waiters were quite prompt in their attention to us and kept hovering nearby to take the orders. It was a bit uncomfortable for me. Eventually, we ordered our soups. I had a Chicken and prawns hot and sour soup, while Luckey had a more traditional Chicken sweet corn soup. My soup was not as hot as I am used to, and, to be frank, tasted quite sweet. I managed to polish it off. 

For the main course, we ordered a Kung Pao King Prawn and a Chicken Sizzler with garlic sauce. We had this with steamed rice. While the Kung Pao was an interesting concoction of large, well-cooked king prawns, onions, and a few other vegetables on a nice gravy of roasted cashew, the sizzler was a disappointment. Not only did it never sizzle, it was insipid in taste - I couldn't even make out the garlic taste in the final product. 

Hot and sour soup

Kung Pao king prawns

Chicken sizzler with garlic sauce

The main course with steamed rice

Yours truly

With Luckey

The bar at the front 

The entrance area

To go with the food, we had a cocktail each. It tasted of chocolate liqueur. 

They added a 10% service charge on the bill. The final bill was a bit steep, no denying that. However, you could not fault their eagerness to please. Hence, I paid up that charge. And that's that. Thanks for reading this review.

Ratings:

Stars: 4
Food: 3.5
Ambiance: 3.5
Service: 5
Cocktail: 5

Recommendation: Ask for rear seating as they have sofas and more comfortable seating there.

I had written a review of this restaurant on TripAdvisor UK (read the review here)

The management responded with the following comments:

blkman1, General Manager at Michael Wan's Mandarin Cantonese Restaurant, responded to this review, 2 days ago

Thank you for your review, we're glad you enjoyed your evening with us.
We remember you from the pictures you were taking of the restaurant which you mentioned were for your blog :-) The area where you were seated was a temporary dining area which is added to the usual dining area for the duration of the Blackpool Dance Festival (this is usually the bar area) and may explain why you felt a little cramped.
We're very surprised to hear about the lack of sizzle, that's very unusual and if you had mentioned it to one of our waiters it would have been happily replaced without question.
Thanks again and hope to see you again
Team Mandarin

Live - Some food for thought on how to do so

All of us desire the best in life. We all want to stay healthy, live long and be happy. Isn't it ironical then, that most of us strive for these things with all the money and time we have, but seem not to find the solution to the questions?

I wanted to point you all to an interesting source or two that come to you from a website that I have openly promoted here on this blog. Fuhrman.com has THIS and THIS book for your consumption. Do take a look at them, and let me know if they interest you enough to buy them. 

Even if you don't actually purchase them, let me tell you that reading about how to live long isn't exactly the best way to live long. You have to eat sensibly, enjoy doing your work and so on, and sleep well and engage in moderate exercise to achieve that best balance of rest and work to live longer. 

Live: Anatomy of a Foodie

From: http://spreadshirt.co.uk

This morning, as I was cooking up some interesting stuff, I got to thinking about what makes me different from the millions of people who cook because they have no desire to eat ready-to-eat food from a supermarket, or those who cook because they have to support a loving family.

And, after some consideration to this question, the answer came to me in a kind of epiphany. A foodie is willing to experiment.

And that's it, basically. 

Today, I began to make a pasta dish from a ready to stir-fry vegetable pack and a pack of free range egg noodles. I had some left-over stir fry sauce and I am thinking, like, well, that's all that I need to make myself a good, edible meal. 

But, wait! How can I make this dish interesting? My first thought was to add a tadka of Indian masalas. How would that work, except that it would change a Chinese dish to an Indian mix? I had to think of something else.

Now, before I continue, let me add that, for me, the final look and taste of the food matter, but it's the whole journey from purchasing a food item, to storing it the right way in the fridge, to cleaning, cutting and preparing the various ingredients, to cooking them the right way, to storing them in the right containers to serving them at the right temperature, in the right plate/bowl - to finally putting the food in one's mouth - this entire journey is the full experience for a foodie. 

So, what did I finally do? I had cooked lamb kidneys about 2 days ago, and had partaken of about half of it that same day when I was working a "long day". The remaining half of this masala item was still waiting in the back of the fridge shelf. I brought it out, diced all the kidney pieces and the potatoes into smaller bits, and added them to the noodles-stirfry sauce-vegetable pot. Stirring the entire mix one more time, I finally came out with a Chinese stir-fry vegetable noodle lamb kidney pot!

This is what makes a foodie: the love of eating transcending borders and making the foodie try out new things at every step of his food journey. For me, I am always experimenting. At a Sainsbury store the other day, I was browsing through the aisles and noticed that there were many things that I had never ever had the pleasure of trying. Now, don't get me wrong. I experiment, but I still stay focused on thinking ahead. I won't, for example, buy pork meat in any form. Nor will I aggressively try new stuff. I remember a day when I went to a frozen foods store known as ICELAND. It stores mostly frozen food. Now, on that particular day, I approached a freezer with meat from exotic animals. I was literally amazed by the variety of meats - there were the usual kinds such as lamb, beef, pork and fish; there were also a few more familiar things like partridge, quail, venison and squid. But then, there was a slew of stuff that made me almost puke. Alligator meat, crocodile meat, hare meat, and even meat from an armadillo! Most of these were in the form of burger patty, but I simply stepped back and snapped the door shut. I will experiment, but even I have a limit, so, not those, please. 

Here are a few things I made in the last fortnight or so: The first is a stir-fry I made last week from noodles, moong sprouts, bell peppers and black bean sauce. To this mix, I added chopped, cooked pieces of chicken tikkas that I had purchased from an M & S food store. The result was delicious!

 This second is the Bohri traditional dal-chawal palidu. I will post the recipe for this in a subsequent post. I added drumsticks to the palidu (this is the gravy-like stuff in the green bowl), I think this is a favourite dish for me and I usually end up making it about once in a couple of months. It takes a little more effort than the stir-fry I have shown in the photo above.

This is the lamb kidney that I was speaking about. It turned out so good that I literally licked my fingers after having the first half of it with lachcha parathas. 

This, the final one, is a preparation that I made from halal chicken, a rogan josh paste, some tomato and fresh onions. It needed no other spices as the rogan josh mix had everything in it. I was pleasantly surprised when I first tried the item with some brown rice while working a night shift at the hospital. It was remarkably tasty. 





Which brings me to the end of this post. Tell me, friends, what experimentation do you all do when you start on your own food journey? Do add your comments. 

Eat: Cooking for one

I have learned more about cooking since I went solo - about five years ago when I first moved out of my family's home to live and work in Saudi Arabia. Over the years, it has been all sorts of things to me: exciting, boring, rejuvenating, humbling, frustrating, and more. Over and above all this, though, I have learned so much. And not just about cooking, but about staying healthy, about nutrition in general, about worldwide cuisine, about sharing, about conserving resources, (and about optimising them as well), about natural food photography vs. blogging photography vs. advertising food photography, about recipes and how to write them, about translating the names of ingredients from one language to another, about storage of food, about how to purchase fresh ingredients and how to recognise when food has gone bad - and so much more. Eventually, it emboldened me to start this blog!

Here are a few moments from my experiences:

• I was busy surfing the net, having kept some lamb meat in a pressure cooker. I never heard the whistles of this cooker as this was a different kind where the weight simply rotates above the lid without making any noise. The lamb got burned completely as I forgot about it for over an hour. When I opened the lid, the pieces were burnt into black, coal-like bits! (Learned to pay more attention to the kitchen when food is cooking, and bought a kitchen timer on my next visit to India - which I still use!)
• Learned to dice and half-fry onions in a large batch to save time. I would store those half-cooked onions in a large box and take as much as I needed to make food till that supply got over. I don't do that any more, though, as I have a very small fridge in my Blackpool quarters).
• Learned to use an oven to cook some dishes like fish and chicken. I had never used an oven either in India or in Saudi Arabia. And here, I am talking of the big oven that comes below the hob, not a microwave or a simple OTG that I HAVE used in the past.
• Learned how to differentiate between different European vegetables. These are available at greatly hiked prices in India, where they are sold as exotic foods. To give you an example, while a small piece of Broccoli is sold for 40-60 rupees in Mumbai, the same is available for a few pence in the U.K. Well, the prices are comparable because a U.K. pound is still over 80 INR, but in comparison to U.K. prices, broccoli is as cheap as cauliflower.
• Started taking pictures and shared them on social media. Everyone has been appreciative, not the least my own daughters who now wait for me to visit India so that they can ask me to cook all those delicious things I make when I am abroad.
• Learned how to store stuff in a small fridge and freezer. In the accommodation where I live, I barely have 100 litres of space between the small fridge and the freezer. I have to really optimise how I use that space in the best possible way. I end up cutting long things like drumsticks, ridge gourd, long cucumbers, etc. I turn the large tomatoes into a tomato puree. I squeeze out the water from the lamb and meats to shrink the bags of raw meats. I buy and store only as much as I know the space I have left. (The other half of the 200 litre space is shared with a flat-mate.)

Here are a few of the best things I have made over the years. You can see more in my Facebook albums.

Molokhia soup

Prawns curry with rice

Masoor pulao and kadhi

Chicken masala

Batata wada

Lamb burgers

Pav bhaji

Lamb curry

Cluster beans and potato - the humble guvar with aloo

Spinach, Punjabi style

Dal-chaval palidu

Bhajia kadhi

Masala dosa

Bombay potato

Shirkhurma

Paya - trotters

And so, it has been a pleasant experience for me. Do share your own experiences as cooks - whether you are with your family or alone somewhere on Planet Earth. Thank you for reading. 

Eat: The convenience of ready to use/ready to eat food

Today, I am going to write about ready to use stuff. Whether it is about using such stuff to cook food quickly in your kitchen, getting your hands on preserved ingredients when fresh stuff is inaccessible, or getting your hands on prepared stuff that can be added to your pan so as to save time - or, whether it is about ready to heat and eat food - the truth is that these foods and ingredients are here to stay, whether they are healthy or not, and whether you like them or not.

So, just browse the website of any grocery store online, and what do you find? Over 60% of the products belong to one of these categories. Let me go down the list one by one.

A. Stuff used in the kitchen to prepare or decorate food:

1. Using items that help you to cook faster: This list includes cut and diced items like vegetables, meats etc. They are mostly in the frozen foods section. Who among us has not purchased these from time to time? So, be it mixed cut vegetables, diced and quartered pieces of boneless meat, shelled and deveined prawns, garden peas, cut and diced okra - these are the most frequently shopped for items. To be fair, there is no harm in purchasing them if they have been fast frozen at the place they were cleaned and diced. I am not sure, though, that this actually happens. The index of freshness of food is nowadays indicated by food miles: how far or how long did the food travel or stay without preservation. Obviously, items that are frozen at the place of produce are the best, such as frozen berries or cold-pressed oils. Modern belief is that frozen foods that were frozen rapidly after being cleaned or processed or harvested are nutritionally as good, or sometimes, even better than fresh food that has stayed on the shelf for a long time.

 This category also includes ready-made mixes that help you conjure exo

tic dishes in a jiffy. I am, of course, referring to items like "Chicken Balti mix", "Lazeez Haleem mix", "Beef ragu mix" and so on. It also includes frequently bought items like sambar powder, idli mix, medu vada mix, rabri mix and so on. The list is endless. You just need to follow the instructions on the box, and voila! your exotic food is ready.

2.Using items that are otherwise inaccessible or not easily available: In this category are items that mostly are difficult to procure. It may be a situation such as mine. I am based in Blackpool, and this place generally does not have Indian food stores. I am therefore unable to quickly find condiments and spices that I need. This applies also to Asian vegetables such as cluster beans, small aubergines, tinda, etc. I found frozen cut vegetables of all these kinds in Preston! Curry leaves are another rare commodity in Blackpool Now, you can either go to Preston every few weeks to buy fresh curry leaves, or, as I do, buy dried curry leaves available in a bottle. These stay unspoiled for months! You can find almost any leaf in dried form in a supermarket - whether Indian, or European. Ever bought coriander that is dry and available in a bottle? Do try it.

3.Using items that are available fresh, but you still buy them frozen for convenience: This is a somewhat gray area, but modern consumers often do this because they feel it is an easier way. This prevents the need to visit the grocer every day. Some people will buy fresh, then store it in the freezer having zip-loc'd it/ Still others will save the additional bother and simply store frozen food purchased from the counter. It all depends on your budget. I would prefer to buy fresh and store what I don't need immediately, but refer to the paragraph above on possible benefits of freshly frozen food (an anachronism, but there ... you have it!)

B. Ready to Heat and Eat Foods:

These are the fastest growing segment of foods. Available in the past as microwave dinners, they have now taken on a completely different complexion. All you need to do is to heat and eat them. You can find them on supermarket shelves all over the world. They cater to every palate, every culture and every taste. You can now eat Japanese, Thai, Korean, Indian, Indonesian, or even Chilean food bought off the shelf of Marks and Spencer in the UK, or Big Bazaar in India. These foods invariably have preservatives, additives, colourants and other agents to keep them without spoiling even without refrigeration. It is the multi-layered packaging that is the secret to these foods staying fresh until the use-by date. I am not referring to freshly packed cooked foods, but sealed foods that can be kept without cooling.

C.Cooking and storing food in the freezer for later consumption:

During my discussions with friends offline and online about this post, I was reminded of this third category. I am sure we all do this with leftovers. Well, not all of us, but quite a few of us. We do this because we don't want to throw away our labour of love. We also do not want to eat the same food again and again. So, we put aside some of that food into the refrigerator - either in the lower, normal fridge section (to be consumed in the next few days), or, as is postulated here, into the freezer section to be eaten after a much longer period of time. Now, mind you, some foods preserve well, while others become soggy and inedible - such as rice. 

So, dear reader, tell me, have you used some of the above kinds of foods or not? What is your opinion? Do share in the comments section. Thank you for reading this post.

P.S. All images are copyrighted to their respective brands.

Review: Sapori Restorante Italiano in Blackpool

Located on Clifton Street, Sapori Restorante Italiano Blackpool is a unique restaurant that has earned plaudits from every guest who has visited it in the past. Luckey, my restaurant-hopping colleague and I went to this interesting place on a weekday. It was her treat this time, and she had taken care to book a table for us. Which was just as good, as Sapori, ranked 11 among the 700+ eating out places in Blackpool by TripAdvisor, can get pretty busy even on a weekday.

Sapori means Taste in Italian

This was to be a typical Italian dinner, so we occupied our allocated table by 07:10 p.m. The waiters were upon us within a minute, so it was up to us to tell them to hold off for a bit while we studied the menu. It is a fairly large menu with antipasti, pane, pasta, carne and many more categories. They have a bar where hard spirits are available, as well as a wine menu and soft drinks. We did not look at the desserts as we were full up to the gills after the starter and the main courses.

Eventually, we settled for a shared antipasti, a Crocchetta Di Pesce (described as Smoked haddock and spring onion fishcake served with home-made tartar sauce), followed by a separate main for each of us. While Luckey ordered a Salmone (described on the menu as "salmon fillet cooked in a sauce of white wine, dill and cream served on a bed of mashed potato with vegetables ", I settled for Gamberoni (described as King prawns cooked in a sauce of garlic, tomato and a hint of cream. Finished with Gran Marnier). We did have a drink each that complimented the menu items to some extent. 

Here are the pictures of the foods we ate:

Haddock fishcake

Salmone

Gamberoni

Contemplative

Two foodies on the prowl

A section of the guests around us

It was a delicious meal. The king prawns were very tasty and the gravy of tomatoes and cream was excellent indeed. I did taste the salmon as well. It was not spicy, and it was really smooth and well-cooked. The fishcake was great as well. No complaints at all.

At the end of the dinner, we thanked the staff. One of them, who is one of the owners, greeted us personally and requested us to visit again. 

Ratings:

Food: 5 stars
Presentation: 4.5 stars (I deducted half a star because they used soy sauce in all the three dishes to decorate them - no variety).
Ambiance: 4.5 stars
Hospitality: 5 stars
Overall Rating: 4.5 stars

Recipe: Bohri style paya masala (Trotters)

Hey friends. I am going to share with you my own take on making PAYA. What is paya? As you might have probably guessed, paya is a derivation from paay or pav - which are crude Hindi versions of leg. As opposed to "Raan" which is the fleshy thigh muscle and bone from a sheep or a goat, paya refers to the non-fleshy portion of a goat or sheep's lower limb from the knee joint downwards to the hooves. This is what payas look like when you purchase them from a butcher.

Before paya (or trotters as they are called in English) can be made to look like this, they are actually part of the lower limb of these animals, and hence covered with skin, muscles, etc. The butcher needs to remove all these outer stuff and boil the legs to get to the bone and cartilage structures that you see alongside. The hooves may still be covered with dirt, so you must clean the hooves completely, often with a sharp knife before you can start using them.

Now that you have obtained the trotters, let us go ahead and cook them. But before that, let me add that many Middle Eastern cultures cook trotters from larger animals such as oxen or bull, or even from a camel. The preparation of these is beyond the scope of this post. I will describe only how paya from goats or sheep is prepared.

Ingredients: 

1. Paya, 6 in number - cleaned and cut into 4 pieces each, such that there is a knee joint piece, a shin piece with a long bone and a sliver thin long bone attached to it, and two halves of a hoof - 4 pieces per paya.
2. Chick peas, about 50 grams
3. Chick pea flour - about 2 tablespoonsful
4. Fresh yoghurt -100 grams
5. Whole spices - cinnamon sticks, cloves, black pepper, cumin and black elaichi (1-2).
6. Ground spices - Ginger garlic paste - 5 grams
7. Ground powdered spices - red chilli, turmeric and garam masala
8. Julienned ginger - a few, for garnishing
9. Coriander leaves - chopped, for garnishing
10. Onion 1 large or 2 medium - cut long and thin
11. Cooking oil - 2 tablespoons
12. Salt, to taste

Preparation:

1. Put the clean paya into a pressure cooker with water enough to get a stock solution at the end of the boil. Add salt, a few green chilli (optional) and a few ml of cooking oil into the mix and then close off the cooker and cook the paya for at least 10 minutes at high flame. The cooker should start whistling at around 6-7 minutes. Continue to cook as paya takes a  little longer to cook. When the lid cools down sufficiently, open it, and then check if the paya is well-cooked. If yes, the outer tissues should be soft and easy to remove off the bone. If not, they aren't ready as yet, and you need to close back the lid and cook some more.  Your paya and the stock will probably look like this:
   
2. Separate the paya from the stock which will be all needed.
3. Wash the whole chickpeas and boil them in a pan till they are soft. Drain the water and keep the chickpeas aside. Add the boiled chick peas to the paya stock.

       4. Blend the yoghurt and the chickpea flour together so that no lumps are visible or felt.

Method:

In an open kadhai, heat some cooking oil. Drop in the whole spices one by one, allowing each to splutter. Once they are all done, remove them carefully into a saucer. (Well, you can't get the cumin out). Next, add the onions and fry them till they are brown. Reduce the flame, add ginger garlic paste, powdered spices and salt, and cook for a bit longer, say about 3-4 minutes. Next, add the yoghurt-chickpea flour paste and continue stirring and cooking the entire mix for the next 7-8 minutes, turning the flame on to about 80% of maximum. Once you start smelling the roasting of the flour, reduce the flame again, adding the paya stock to the mix.

By now, you should have a broth-like liquid that looks a bit like this:

As this mixture keeps cooking, add the whole spices back in. Now you are almost done. Just before you add the paya to this mixture, you will be at the penultimate step of your preparation.

At this stage, the paya soup is almost ready. The oil has started to separate and the whole concoction is looking very tempting. Add the paya now, keep stirring, then close the cooker again for about 10 minutes to finish off the cook. When the cooker has cooled, open the lid, garnish the paya with coriander and julienned garlic and serve hot with nan or tandoori roti.

And that, my dear friends, was how my paya turned out.

Post-note: I have come across other forms of the paya preparation. The variations include the following:

• Yoghurt is mixed with the onions and ground into a paste instead of the chickpea flour
• Normal flour is used instead of chickpea flour
• Chickpeas are not added at all.
• The stock and the paya are the end-product and served as a soup instead of a masala
• Paya is eaten with khichri instead of roti

What other variations have you seen? Thank you for reading. Do add your comments.