Kitchen Capers... blending yourself into your cooking space....

Adding your personality to your kitchen doesn't require too much money or time but it does require a fair amount you!

I have been slowly settling into my new house. Getting to know my new kitchen. It just about getting to  feel… comfortable. Like a new pair of jeans that need an acid wash to feel lived in, I feel like it needs more... more than the functional aspect of equipment etc. I realised when we were setting up the studio, that for all the effort that we put into personalizing the rest of our home, we rarely take the time to focus on decorating the kitchen! It is after all, central to any home, a meeting place for families to come together and share food, fun, joys, woes, love and laughter. Why leave it to feel utilitarian, cool... sterile? Why not put in a little effort to make it perfect? And the best part is, you don't need to move into a new home to do this, you can do up or redo your existing kitchen, RIGHT NOW!

I usually begin with a theme, a unifying idea that is a recurrent element. It could be as simple as a colour or a color palate. With the studio we wanted a feeling of cosy, so we chose wood, opaque glass and wrought iron. It looks lovely as it is but also allows for additional decor to match a variety of themes. But a home kitchen allows for something more characteristic of the cook or the people in it? Depending on your bent of mind you could choose to go retro, modern, avant garde... Your theme could revolve around a cuisine or you could even pick an ingredient - fruit and vegetables can be very colourful.. spices or nuts offer muted monochromatic themes. A favourite drink or food you love, coffee, chocolate, beer, olives, candy… just look around you, something will strike a chord! Carry your choice of theme into different aspects of your kitchen. In the first home we owned, I had gone with an Italian cafe theme, with cafe style chairs and a daily specials board and all. This time I am seriously thinking of chillies as a theme.



Your walls can do more than hold up the roof. Walls are an empty canvas waiting to be filled.... Pictures offer the easiest wall art and there are a myriad ways to get some. Retro advertisements for cooking ingredients, framed prints of food and ingredients, old botanical drawings of cooking plants offer interesting options. Look for old botanical textbooks and magazines at second hand bookstores, tear pages out and frame. Photos, in collages or individually framed and hung on blank wall space are my favourite way to dress up walls. Blue china plates can add bright contrast to drab white walls, mounted in clusters, or rows above a window or down the side of a cabinet. Old kitchen ware can be attractive on top of a cupboard or windowsill and infuse a touch of cosyness that only old things can. Use collections of postcards, match boxes, coasters, or stirrers by creating collages and framing them for a wall.

Make it a DIY project, get to work with your digital camera - take pictures of ingredients, the food you cook, your family and friends enjoying good food - and frame them, you could even add recipes alongside. Paint your own wall art. OR use favourite recipes as wall paper! Print recipes out onto translucent paper or cut interesting recipes out of magazines rub the reverse of each with a piece of sandpaper and paste to the wall. Seal by applying a coat of clear poly-acrylic paint with a broad paint brush. Ensure that if you are decorating around a theme, such as food, French café style or even wine, the images you hang on your wall are in keeping with the theme of your kitchen. I know framed foodles are going to be a BIG part of the decor in my new kitchen!

You can make utility items count as decorative as well. I find this one of the best ways to display kitchen treasures while making often-used items more efficient to reach. Look out for innovatively made racks for ingredients like spices and cooking oils, hang up mugs or plates in colours to match your walls or theme and find an effective way to store things in constant use as well. You’ll be amazed at how much you can hang knives, cooking utensils, pots and pans even tiny herb gardens in a sunny spot. Create a display area for collectibles; serving pieces, candles glassware, ingredients, by installing glass shelves that offer space without closing in your kitchen as wooden shelves would.

If, like a me (I'm a magpie), you collect paraphernalia, this can really work - knick knacks are ideal to add a touch of personality to your kitchen. Antique kitchen ware that you have inherited or things you have collected; containers, ingredients, coasters, postcards, matchboxes.  Think brass and copper utensils on a wooden cabinet, or hanging on wrought iron hooks against a brick or textured wall. Don’t have an interesting collection of anything? Begin one. I was always fascinated by this one friend that collected teapots. Once her friends and family found out she was fascinated by teapots people began getting her unusual ones. She created an attractive display by laying them out in rows on shelves where they functioned as storage for ingredients.

Containers offer a lot of options for innovation. I converted an old pickle jar I found languishing in my grandmothers house into a salt pot. Is sits near my stove top and reminds me of her every time I reach for the salt! Containers are something that no kitchen can do without and from the tiniest spice box to the biggest bin, everything you need offers an option to innovate. Look for recyclable or quirky alternatives to everyday containers, a beat up old bucket can be used to store rolled up dish towels in colors that coordinate with your walls or floor. Old biscuit tins offer attractive options to keep things in. Look out for those quaint pepper shakers that come in pairs - I remember a pair of owls I was gifted once. Older designs are sometimes the most classic ones. There is no better place to find "cool" storage items for your kitchen than an antique/junk store or your city’s equivalent of Mumbai’s Chor Bazaar. Go on the hunt, include friends and make a day of it, you won’t believe all the interesting things you'll find!

Glass bottles are available in a variety of shapes; triangular, curvy square even stars and doughnuts, look around! Decorative bottles, either empty or filled with all sorts of appealing combinations of herbs, olives, chillies, berries and lemons are all the rage. Besides tops of kitchen cupboards, glass-front cabinets, and counter tops place these in small arrangements in varying the shapes, sizes, and colours on windowsills, they’ll catch light passing through and create prisms of colour. You could even create your own displays, recycle wine bottles and use them for oils, vinegars and liquid ingredients, use a tall bottle to stand spaghetti in, arrange other pastas or even dals in layers in a large pickle jar and place in a corner. Create a spicy pot pourie with coffee beans, whole spices and herbs, place it in a glass jar that has lost its lid and cover with a net trimmed with beads. Not only will the whole spices look immensely attractive but and occasional shake will release its aroma or simmer spoonfuls in a covered pot when you want added atmosphere, when your guests arrive uncover the container and release a cloud of fragrance!

The kitchen is where we grab our first cuppa as we look forward to a new day, pencil appointments onto the calendar to jostle with birthdays, anniversaries homework and festivals, help kids grow into good people, and like it or not, this IS where the party always ends!! Oh, and did I mention cooking? This is where women spend one third of their waking hours stirring love into food hoping for the high praise of “mama makes nice food” and plates scraped clean! It deserves attention!

Food poetry and or quotations can be framed and put up. This micropoem is by me ....

GYAAN
How to Buy a Foodle illustrated by me.

Zhanzhanit Thencha Potatoes for Maharashtra Day !

 

 

“Zhanzhanit”- means electrifyingly spicy in Marathi, its an exclusive word used for chilli preparations, mostly the ones that are so hot that it makes one cry while eating. Marathi is the regional language of my home state of Maharashtra and the Maharashtrian communities that live here. This is the state in which Mumbai, the city where I was born, is located and I like to think there is a lot of Maharashtrian in me :) I have also grown up eating Maharashtrian food.  

Chillies which are intrinsic for adding heat to Indian food, only came to us in India in the 17th century with the advent of the Portugese. But for an ingredient that entered our cuisine so late, they managed to make themselves irreplaceable very quickly. Today they are extensively used and every region in India grows a different variety of chillies. Green chillies are used in daily cooking as part of the tempering, to spice up chutneys and salads but usually for their heat alone. 

The Maharashtrian Mirchi Thencha is one of the few Chilli recipes that roasts chillies to make a rustic condiment named after the method of preparation it calls for (Thencha means pounded). The smoky flavour from the roasting adds to the heat of the chillies and the aroma of the garlic. 

Preparation Time: 20 minutes; Serves: 4

Ingredients:

For Thencha
1/2 c hot spicy Green chillies
1 c Garlic, peeled
Salt to taste
Peanuts, toasted and crushed (optional)
Oil

For Thencha Potatoes
250g Baby potatoes par-boiled in salted water with jackets on
1 cup stock
2 tbsp of the Thencha
Salt to taste (if required

Method:
For Thencha : Roast chillies and garlic on a hot pan till slightly blackened. 

Place  in a mortar and pestle or blender and process to a coarse paste with salt and peanuts (if using). 

When done transfer to a jar. Thecha can be stored for 4-5 days in the refrigerator.

To make Thencha Potatoes : Mix Thencha with stock and add the potatoes. Toss well until coated. Taste and adjust seasoning if required. Cook till potato jackets are crisp (add 2 tsp of oil towards the end if you like).

The heat of Naga chilli Times Of India Crest June 12, 2010

The Naga chilli has a wonderfully fruity flavour. But to taste it, you have to survive its incendiary spice!

Ever since the Naga chilli scorched its way to world fame as the hottest chilli in the world, dethroning the selectively bred Red Savina, it has been the hot favourite of cooks and foodies. But there's much more to the Naga chilli, also known as the Naga jolokia and Raja mirch, than its heat. I had the good fortune to discover the Naga chilli when a friend and fellow food writer, Theyie Keditsu, presented me with 12 chillies.

This fiery number, however, first caught my eye when I was interviewing Chef Vivek Singh of London's Cinnamon Club restaurant a couple of years ago. He was in the news for having created the world's hottest curry. A curry so hot that diners were asked to sign a disclaimer before daring to sample it. That curry contained six Naga chillies along with other hot peppers.

Naga chillies clock in at over one million units on the Scoville scale (the measurement of spicy heat). That's more than double the spice quotient of the Red Savina pepper, 100 times spicier than jalapeño pepper and 20 times hotter than cayenne pepper. The only thing hotter is pepper spray that's used as a weapon in chemical warfare and used to fend of assailants. Which is probably why India's military is set to harness the Naga chilli's firepower to combat terrorists, immobilise criminals and quell riots.

When Theyie, who is Naga, delivered her precious gift to me, I just looked at my treasured bounty at first. What a riot of colour. Who can forget the glorious colours, from lemon yellow to raging orange, deep to almost fluorescent green, and every imaginable shade of red from glowing auburn to flaming crimson. . . If only we could make a salad of these beautiful chillies, but it would be a killer since a single chilli can season a full pot of curry, I thought.

I needed to get an idea of its intrinsic taste, so I decided to taste a tiny bit. Slicing the tiniest corner of the tail end of one of the chillies (the most potent bit of a chilli is towards the head, where the seeds are located) released a distinctly viscous, sweet scent that gave way to a sharp grassy after-note as the tiny sliver reached my tongue.

Heat is the natural defence mechanism of chillies, in fact almost all spices. So it was but natural that this little thing would hurt me back. But once the pain of the heat had flared away on my tongue, I was left with a far deeper flavour that was sweet, juicy and savoury all at once. It was well worth the pain.

The fruity flavours suggested that the chilli would do well in a sweet-spicy chutney. So I concocted an apple and Naga chilli chutney and had Theyie taste it. Her eyes widened and a smile appeared, along with a purr of delight. Theyie explained, as she dug into the chutney with a spoon as if it was an ice-cream, that in Nagaland the chilli is taken very seriously. Mostly eaten in chutneys or preserved as pickles, the chilli's formidable heat is always the highlight of dishes to which it is added. Priced between Rs 1, 000 and Rs 1, 500 a kg, the chilli is expensive by local standards. It's a matter of prestige to offer dishes containing Naga chillies, and hosts make sure guests know what they're eating. So my chutney was cheeky after all, as it allowed chilli connoisseurs like Theyie to rediscover the flavour of the pepper that is often overpowered by its heat.

Now I needed to preserve the rest of my chillies so I could savour them for longer. First I sliced one chilli and dropped the pieces into a glass jar. Then I heated 250 ml of rice bran oil till it was hot, but not smoking, and poured it over the sliced chilli. Since the aroma of the Naga chilli is quite overwhelming, I could already smell the whiff rising from the oil. I discovered its real aroma when I opened the bottle a few days later. Sitting on my shelf, the oil had turned a pale orangey-red and absorbed the fragrance and heat of the chilli, becoming a great condiment in itself. Fruity, spicy and delicious, it was great to drizzle over soups, add to salad dressings and dress grilled meat.

I got almost similar results from dunking one of the chillies into vinegar. It worked beautifully in tandem with my Naga chilli oil and as a pre-cooking marinade for meats. The vinegar also gave me the idea of a Naga chilli vodka. And since good ideas should never be ignored, I sliced up two chillies and tossed them into a bottle of vodka. They are doing well there if the last whiff I got of them is anything to go by. I am looking forward to deliciously warm winter tipples this year.

To focus on heat as the sole merit of the Naga chilli is to do it an enormous disservice. But then, one must be clueless about an ingredient to widen the scope of its use.