Photo Credit: Raveesh Vyas

One of the things I’m looking forward to on our upcoming late winter trip to India (mid-February through early March) is being able to sample the regional food in the areas we’ll be traveling through. Aditya and I will be in India for about three weeks and in that time we’ll go through Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and West Bengal – so there will be lots of different types of local delicacies to try! A friend sent me this wonderful food map she found to help me prepare for this culinary delight (and to make me salivate), and I thought I’d share it with you all:

(Click to enlarge)

I’m not sure of the originial creator of this map, so if you know, please leave a note in the comments so I can credit approrpriately.

Ah, Diwali. Festival of lights. A celebration of good triumphing over evil. A time to bemuse your boss and win free dessert from your local Indian buffet. …right?

As I’ve mentioned previously, I happen to work in a very diverse office – and with a recent switch in teams, I now report to a South Indian manager. He’s a great boss, but, occasionally, well, I can’t help myself – I’ll mention a Hindu tradition or a Bollywood film just to see his reaction. You see, despite the fact that he knows I’m married to an Indian, he’s always so surprised when I show any knowledge of Indian culture. Shocked, almost.

So, of course, to celebrate Diwali this year I decided to wear a sari to work.

To be more specific, a female Indian coworker and I  coerced convinced the junior staff on our team to wear Indian dress to the office on Friday. My coworker had one sari from a family wedding to wear, and I loaned out saris and kurtas to everyone else. Between the two of us, we were able to get everyone wrapped up, pinned up, and decked out in bangles before our boss arrived. The look on his face was, let us say, well worth the trouble.

I'm on the right

Everyone looked pretty great in their saris, no?

For lunch, the group went out to the closest Indian buffet, Jaipur, where we snapped the photograph above. The staff there was also quite surprised seeing their regular customers arrive in saris and kurtas – surprised & appreciative.  Despite the fact that it was a buffet lunch, they brought out a surprise dish of Indian desserts just for our group at the end of our meal:

It was clear that the kitchen had taken some time to create the dish, which featured Gajar Ka Halwa, Ras Gulla, and Gulab Jamun with a garnish of shredded coconut and cherries. Like every other Indian dessert I have had, it was delicious, if extraordinarily sweet. After lunch we all shuffled back to the office before falling into the typical post-Jaipur sugar coma.

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For anyone wondering, on Diwali proper (i.e. Saturday), Aditya, myself, and the Indian coworker pictured above woke up crazy early to get to a local Hindu temple in time for the morning aarti. It was very quiet there – I think the rain and near-freezing temperatures kept everyone else away. Afterwards we retreated from the cold to Starbucks for breakfast, and then, in the spirit of combining American holiday consumerism with a Diwali custom, we went shopping for some new clothes. And that was how the Gori Girl household celebrated Diwali this year.

(Sunday we returned to my roots, and celebrated an American football Sunday with Vietnamese seafood hotpot and German boardgames at a friend’s house. All in all, a pretty awesome weekend.)

However, at least in the food blogs I follow, I’ve seen an untapped segment in the market – there aren’t any recipes of Indianfied traditional American dishes! This sort of fusion food, along with stir frys, is the majority of what I cook – just simple dishes that you ate growing up mixed with an Indian sense of spices. They’re the best of both worlds:  quick, easy recipes that I know like the back of my hand adjusted so that Aditya won’t complain about “blandness” when we eat.

So, today I’ll share with you my recipe for Quick Indianfied Chicken Pot Pie. This is the dish that got amazed raves from Aditya’s parents when I served it to them. (I think that prior to my cooking it, they hadn’t realized I knew how to cook at all, so perhaps they were just glad I hadn’t accidentally poisoned them.) It’s a very simple, quick, filling dish, so even if you’re not much of a cook, you should be able to manage just fine. Besides the text below, I’ve loaded a bunch of images on my flickr site to show you how to do it step-by-step too.

A bit of a warning first – I’m the sort of cook who doesn’t typically follow recipes. I’ll look through cookbooks for inspiration, but that’s about it. Cooking Indianfied Chicken Pot Pie is no exception – I’ll lay out the basics for you, but I highly suggest that you experiment a bit to get the dish just as you like it. Luckily, it’s a simple enough recipe that it’s easy to change things up without creating something that tastes bad!

What you need:

1. A Casserole Dish - I use your basic 13×9 glass dish, but you can use whatever you have on hand, as long as it has sides of at least two inches or so. You can even go crazy and use a pie pan!
2. Chicken – I use chicken breasts because they’re a leaner meat, and thus healthier, but you can use whatever cuts you prefer. Three chicken breasts were enough meat for my dish, but you can vary this based on your preferences – I like my chicken pot pie to be reasonably chicken-y, but don’t want the chicken to overpower everything else. If Aditya were cooking the dish, he’d probably use five chicken breasts.
3. Frozen vegetables – Again, the amount and type of vegetables you use depend on what you like. This dish calls for frozen vegis ’cause they’re cheaper, just as healthy as fresh in the US, and way, way easier than cleaning and chopping fresh vegetables. In the casserole pictured I used about three cups of corn, peas, and carrots, but in the past I’ve used string beans, lima beans, okra, and capsicum (bell peppers), and, when I had the time, fresh chopped onions. I would not suggest using broccoli or cauliflower.
4. Cream of —– soup – These are the soups that come out of can looking all gelatin and nasty. I used two cans of cream of chicken soup and one can of cream of mushroom soup, and all were the “reduced fat versions”. Because that lets me believe that the cans actually contain something healthy. You can use only two cans if you prefer your pot pie less juicy, and as always, feel free to mix it up on the exact variety you use.
5. 2 cups of Bisquick, two eggs, and 1 cup of milk – This is for the top of the pot pie. I like my crust thick, but if you prefer it thinner, cut out some of the Bisquick & milk in equal proportions.
6. Indian Spices – These, of course, are what shift your basic chicken pot pie into an Indianfied chicken pot pie. Because the focus of this dish is on something quick & easy that you can put together without much trouble, I use the premixed spices that you can get at any South Asian grocery. Specifically, I used roughly one tablespoon each of the following spices: black pepper, garam masala, chicken masala, coriander/cumin, red chili powder, chopped garlic and “mystery” masala, and two tablespoons of turmeric. The “mystery” masala is a container of mixed spices whose label was accidentally wiped away – normally I’d use two tablespoons of chicken masala, but I ran out, so a tablespoon of the mystery masala was substituted in. Yeah, Indianfied Chicken Pot Pie is never the same from one time to the next – but it’s always good!

Cooking the dish, step-by-step

1. Pull out your chicken and throw it in a pot of water to cook by boiling. If the chicken is frozen, then it’ll take about 30 minutes to fully cook – you can check by cutting through the chicken to make sure the meat is white all the way through, rather than pink. Don’t worry – there’s other stuff to do while your chicken cooks.  Also don’t worry that the dish will taste bland because the chicken is boiled – it won’t.
2. While your chicken is cooking, mix the Bisquick, milk, and eggs together in a bowl until the mixture is creamy and has little to no lumps. Leave it in the bowl for now.
3. Open up your cans of cream of —– soup, and empty them into your casserole dish. Then dump your frozen vegis in there. You can also add your spices at this point, but I prefer to wait until the chicken is added.
4. Pause for a snack of hummus & carrots. Also preheat oven to 400ºF.
5. Take your chicken out of the pot (it’s been about 30 minutes, right?), wait for it to cool, then shred into small, 1-inch long pieces, placing pieces into the casserole dish.
6. Add spices! I like to add my spices last, so that I can better eyeball exactly how much I’ve put in compared to the mass of the rest of the ingredients. When finished, your casserole dish should be looking pretty colorful. Then mix it all together.
7. Smooth & even out the mixture in the casserole dish, then pour in the Bisquick mix for the crust, spreading it to all corners of the dish to fully cover the chicken mixture.
8. Place chicken pot pie in the preheated oven (see step 4) for 30 minutes or until the crust turns a nice golden brown.
9. Enjoy!

If you’re confused at any step, feel free to step over to my flickr site to see exactly how each step is done.

My boyfriend is from Gondia and I wanted to learn to cook some food from that area of India. What kind of Indian food do you cook for your husband?

Heh, well, I guess it’s confession time here on Gori Girl: I can’t remember the last time I cooked real Indian food. Maggi? Sure. Ginger tea? It’s been known to happen. TastyBite or other yummy precooked packaged Indian meals? We’ve got a pantry full of ‘em. And we’ve got a kabob takeout place on speed dial.

But I don’t ever cook a full meal of real Indian food. I mean, I have in the past, but it’s not a regular thing at all. There’s a simple enough explanation for this – I’ve just never learned how to cook Indian food. When I grew up in California I had a lot of Chinese and Taiwanese friends and neighbors, so I can make a fair number of Chinese dishes. I’ve managed to pick up a few things from my Mexican, Japanese, and Korean relatives (yup, it’s a rainbow of colors at family reunions). But until I met Aditya I wasn’t close friends with anyone who could cook Indian food. Of course, given his limited repertoire in the kitchen, I still didn’t know anyone who could cook (much) Indian food after I met him either.

Nowadays, I mostly limit myself to adding Indian spices to change the taste of some of the dishes I already cook. Turmeric powder gets tossed into the stirfry, or garam masala is added to the sausage stew after it’s done. Actually, it’s a bit of a hazard for our friends who dine at our house without knowing this habit of mine – they’ll bite into the chicken pot pie, only to discover there’s a bunch of chicken curry masala in the sauce.

While this response might be a superficial answer to Veronica’s question (no Indian food is cooked for poor Aditya), it isn’t a particularly helpful answer for people looking to make some familiar food for their partners. This question actually comes at a particularly good time, as I’ve been thinking about trying my hand at real Indian cooking. So – how can you learn to cook Indian (or other, new-to-you) food? Let’s go through the difference resources available:

1. Family members
   Your best bet to learn real homestyle cookin’ is to study under the person that gave your partner his or her food back home. Yep, I’m talking about your partner’s Mom or Dad. My mother-in-law, Maa, is an amazing cook. I’m really looking forward to her visiting this summer and teaching me all her little tricks in the kitchen. When picking up a new cuisine that depends heavily on spices, like Indian food does, it’s especially helpful to learn from an actual person who can explain how each different bit affects the dish. If you can’t learn from a family member in person, getting a secret family recipe on the phone with details, or at least the name of a good, simple dish to keep an eye out for might be the second-best thing.
2. Friends
   Exactly the same deal as family members from above, except that they probably don’t know your partner’s favorite childhood meals. Ask around – you’d be surprised at who is secretly a great cook, or at least has a couple of great recipes that they can churn out. An Indian friend of Aditya’s at college had one wonderful curry dish that he’d whip out every year for the college’s annual International Bazaar. He couldn’t cook much else, but he had that dish down. I’m still kicking myself that I didn’t get the recipe from him (and watch him make the dish) when I had the chance.
3. Internet
   The internet is a great resource for people looking to learn new dishes. First of all, there are a bunch of great food blogs out there that lead you step-by-step (with plenty of pictures!) through making a meal. Two of my favorite food blogs that cover Indian food are Cooking 4 all Seasons and Evil Jungle Prince. There are also a bunch of videos that make my mouth water at Indian Recipie.org. If you’re looking for information about a particular Indian region’s cuisine, you might try checking out Wikipedia’s fairly comprehensive articles. Here’s the link to the article on Maharashtrian food for Veronica (Gondia is a town in the state of Maharashtra). Try checking Wikipedia first for other nations’ cuisines as well. Generally, though, google is your friend here: seek, and ye shall find.
4. Books
   A classic of Indian cooking is Sanjeev Kapoor’s Khana Khazana: Celebration of Indian Cookery, which has clear, simple recipes. I highly recommend it (and, perhaps more importantly, so does Maa). But I’ve generally found the best way to find a cookbook that suits you is to just head to the local bookstore or library and browse around ’til you find something you like. Some cooks prefer lots of pictures and detailed, complicated recipes. Others prefer simpler cookbooks that give tips that allow you to experiment on your own. A great example of this latter type is the massive Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison – I’ve learned a ton about cooking and the use of spices from this book.
5. Spice Boxes
   If you’re looking to quickly cook an Indian dish that tastes pretty good, and isn’t that difficult, your best bet is to use a box of mixed spices. When I’ve cooked (or attempted to cook) Indian dishes, I’ve always used MDH Spices and just followed the recipes listed on the back of the boxes. While the dishes may not perfectly authentic, or made from scratch, they’re always quick and easy, and taste just as good as what you get at your average Indian restaurant. You can these spices, or something very similar, at any South Asian grocery store.

Edit: Looking over the post, I realized that some of you might wonder why Aditya doesn’t cook his own dang Indian food if he wants to eat some. The quick answer is that neither of us knows much about Indian cookery, but that I have a lot more practice cooking all types of food, so I have a bit more intuition on what sort of spices will work well together, and how to improvise when things don’t turn out quite like you’d expect.

Does anyone else have suggestions for Veronica? Leave recipes or links in the comments if you have any good ones!

While a number of problems can arise from having two or more cultures operating in the same house, today’s focus is on the unadulterated good things that come from sharing a culture. The things that will remain perfect in my mind forever. Even if Aditya were to run off the squirrel that hangs out near the bedroom window (they were eying each other this morning) and break my heart, or declare a hatred for IKEA (and break my heart), I will appreciate our time together because of these three things:

Thums Up, as you can tell from the picture, is a cola. But it is not any cola – no, it is the pinnacle of colas. On first sip, a Coca-Cola drinker will just notice a slightly “off” taste – sort of like store-brand coke. But then the spiciness hits. Not spicy in terms of hotness, but zing, pizzazz, oomph. As the brand’s slogan goes, “thums up… taste the thunder!” It’s utterly addictive, particularly when consumed with food that has its own pizzazz. Or, you know, delicious rum – or so I’m told. Thums Up can be found in some South Asian groceries, although we still haven’t located a place in the DC area that sells it. (It’s been a sad, fruitless search – cue the world’s smallest violin.) There are plenty of Indian groceries in California that carry it, and some in New York as well.

Maggi is actually a brand name, not a particular product. But in our household “Maggi” always refers to the delicious, ramen-esque noodles that is a healthy (or so the packet says) meal any time of the day. It’s the seasoning packets that really take it beyond any other bag of noodles – the best flavors are curry and masala. Preparation also matters – so much so, in fact, that I’ll be posting on how to properly make Maggi in a day or two. (Also, most packets you can find in the US only have directions in Hindi or Bengali.) Luckily for Americans nation-wide, it seems every South Asian grocery carries an endless stock of Maggi. True, they completely rip you off – $1 or more per packet, when it costs maybe ten cents in India. It’s still a small price to pay for true love.

Lastly, we have Coffy Bite. Ah, Coffy Bite – a piece of candy combining the tastes of coffee and toffee into a wondrous whole. Everyone I’ve shared this treat with has loved it, yet the candy remains so unknown in the Western world that there is no wikipedia entry for it. This is a tragedy. Also tragic: we are down to two coffy bites in the house. TWO! We started with a 500g bag in January, and have been rationing carefully since, only offering it to true bosom friends. Aditya’s parents will resupply us when they visit the US this summer, but May is a long way off, and you just can’t find Coffy Bite in the US. I’ve tried. A lot.

I love this candy so much that when Aditya proposed to me he gave me a ring and a bag of Coffy Bite that he had kept hidden as a package deal – if I wanted one, I had to accept the other. I believe this was his way of insuring against a rejected suit. He’s a smart boy like that.

The photo of my family chowing down demonstrates the two main things you need to know about eating Indian food: it’s traditionally done with your hands (mostly the right hand actually – more on that in a bit) AND it’s okay to not be traditional. If you’re uncomfortable eating with your hands, then don’t. No one will look down on you, or think less of you if you ask for silverware.

However, for those of you interested adventuring outside of Western-style table manners, I have a few hard-learned tips and tricks to help you chow down politely.

One: The Left Hand Taboo

The only strict, do-not-break rule of eating in India is to only use your right hand to touch any food. In India, like in many other non-Western countries, the left hand is considered unclean – a conclusion which follows logically enough from its typical use in the bathroom.

Your highest goal should be to avoid any use of you left hand once the meal starts – consider it superglued to your lap or the side of the table, if you can. In practice, just keep from touching any actual food or a communal bowl with your left hand. Of course there’s a bit of a trick to this: what do you do when you’ve got bits of sauce and bread crumbs stuck to your right hand, and you need to grab your water glass or some more lamb from the pot?

The answer is that it, well, depends. The best option is to wipe your right hand on your napkin – that’s what it’s there for after all! If your hand is seriously coated with your curry, you might try wiping it on your bread first, both to save the delicious sauce and keep your napkin from being soaked through. If a napkin isn’t an option, or you need a drink right now because the lamb vindaloo is burning through your tongue, it’s okay to grab your glass with your left hand. Do try to avoid using the serving spoon with the left hand, though. If you do, well, c’est la vie – give a quick “oops, sorry” to the table, and leave it at that. Generally, as a non-Indian you shouldn’t worry much about committing a minor faux-pas like that. If you can avoid touching actual food with your left hand you’re doing well.

Two: Dealing with Bread

North Indian meals – and to a lesser extent, other areas of India – typically include some sort of bread as a staple ingredient. There are many types of Indian bread, ranging from very fluffy naan to heavy, flat paratha (which is often stuffed with vegetables or cheese, making it even heavier and more delicious). The main function of the bread is as a barrier between your hand and the piece of meat or vegetable you’re picking up. It is also useful for sopping up any stray sauce you may have on your plate.

The main difficulty for non-Indians in using bread is in tearing off a proper-sized piece to use. Remember the no-left-hand rule? It’s still in effect here***, so you’ll need to tear the bread using only your right hand. The secret is to pin the larger portion of the bread to your plate by planting down your ring and pinkie fingers, then use your thumb and other two fingers to tear away all the bread up to the two planted fingers. This takes practice, particularly if you have tiny hands like me. Get too much, and, well, you won’t be able to stuff it into your mouth. Get too little (my usual problem) and you won’t be able to pick up much more than a pea.

Once you’ve secured a good-sized piece of bread, use it to scoop up some food and sauce. Think of the motion as either a shovel action, or, if you prefer, the way you’d pick up something with a tissue. It’s okay if you get some sauce on your fingers: just lick it right off (but don’t make a production of said licking), or use a napkin. Some breads are easier to work with than others: I find both roomali roti (handkerchief thin bread), and paratha quite difficult to manage, both in tearing and scooping. If you’re having problems, just keep on trucking – it gets easier with practice.

Part II of how to eat Indian food will be up in a couple of days – we’ll be tackling my nemesis, eating rice with your hand, among other things.

***Actually, Aditya’s brother (Dada) uses both hands to tear his bread because, as Aditya puts it, “he’s a lazy bum”. It’s better if you don’t do this – however, if times get desperate, consider excusing yourself (“I know I’m not suppose to use my left hand, but I just can’t tear this naan…”) and go for the gusto.