Masala Eggs...

Where to begin?
The laziness that comes from idling away days seeps into the act of blogging too. In the last few weeks, every time I faced a delectable food made by someone, words would stream into my head to share it here, thinking how best to present it, how to photograph it, how to describe it, how to simplify the recipe... well, I didn't do anything at that time since my hands were full with a hyperactive baby and now only the memory of how much I enjoyed it remains.:)

Let me start with the simplest recipe that I encountered.

One of the first things as a bride after the wedding is to visit aunts and uncles as the demure(!!!!)spouse and politely eat whatever is placed in front of you.
No excuses of being full or just having had tea,lunch etc will ring true and rescue you.
I did my fair share of this sometimes fun, sometimes-a-chore ritual a long time ago. After our wedding, we drove down to the town/"naadu"/village for a day full of social visits. We visited a lot of my better half's relatives on his father and mother's side in that one day and ate and drank from many houses. Having to remember all the relatives that were newly introduced to me proved impossible and stressful for me. Hence I tried to remember each relative by what food I ate from there..... K's eggs, A's Unnakaay, Ammai's Neipathal...and so on. Though now I am better acquainted with the people, we still refer to each relative by their specialty foods when we want to clarify who we are talking about.:)

Some food get gulped down and some you relish. One of them that I loved and recalled easily were these Masala eggs. They are too simple to be called a delicacy and yet, they are yummy to me. They are hard boiled eggs marinated in a semi-watery paste of red chili powder, turmeric and salt and then deep fried. It could be shallow fried too. That's the recipe itself. How much of each is up to you. The exterior is crisp and spicy to counter the blandness of the eggs. Could pass off as a snack or a side dish too.



In the flurry of visits to multiple aunt/uncle houses at that time, I did manage to confuse the actual house that I ate these eggs in and for the longest time, I thought my better half's grandmother made this. So at this vacation, while I tried to get the recipe from His Grandmother, I was ribbed and set straight by his aunt K who is the actual author of this recipe. Apparently she made it in a hurry when we visited her, as an instant snack/"palaharam" with tea. :) And here I was thinking I finally know everybody!!

Later in the vacation, when we went over to her house for a dinner, we were served these masala eggs with a lot of teasing and hearty story telling. There was an array of other good food..but these...for me, they still ruled..still had the same taste and texture. Needless to say, only politeness prevented me from overeating.:)

Side Note:
The only time I have used these in a recipe is as a garnish for Egg Biryani. Mishmash makes eggs as a garnish for her Egg Biryani. She uses a different masala but when I made her egg biryani, I used this red chili-turmeric-salt as the marinade and it was great.
So try these as your next appetizer and see.

Happy Independence Day!!

A rain drenched scene from Kerala.



Happy Independence Day to all my readers. With a thousand fish fries and chicken fries from the hometown(it seemed like a thousand!!) snugly settled in my belly and the ones left over tucked away in my consciousness, I am back.

Well, to be precise, my mind and body still thinks it's in Calicut... still groggy from the time difference, waking up with high energy just before the sun rises and then waning down to uselessness by evening. And like an conversation left unfinished, the mind continues to take me back to the midst of the family and chaos each time I close my eyes!! To be living as a nuclear family here and then to go there into our parental families..there's a lot of conversations there that can be replayed endlessly.

Our minds are attuned to the time of the day in our choice of foods. So when the time zones are reversed, the food preferences also are reversed. Why else would I feel like eating Naan and curry at 7am and cereal at 9 pm?:)Should be able to eat the yummy non-veg nadan breakfasts now..

Anyway, now that I am finally sitting in front of a computer after a month of detoxification from the Internet, don't know where to begin writing. It was a month where I just observed the masters at work and ate instead of cooking. For a welcome change, I was relegated to the role of chopper and stirrer with the mothers doing the master planning. So I had more fun in the kitchen chatting without worrying about the end result of the cooking.

So what did we do on our vacation..nothing much..just eating, then napping to work off the heavy food and then wriggling our tummies to make space for the next meal!! I thought I was food obsessed but I was not alone there.."what's the next meal" is the thought running through every mind irrespective of what was just eaten. There was so much enthusiasm to do the next round of cooking. No recipe is too long winded or daunting for them, no meal is a slap-dash effort..(no pasta salads there!!)All made in the traditional labor intensive way. Hats off to the real cooks.

At the risk of offending some,we had so little time and so much to try out.. home food, hotel food, salkarams, weddings....wish there was a way to rent a stomach for just the vacation.:(

Now that I am back in my kitchen, I am slowly shaking off my laziness and getting back to the cooking mode. But when I am cooking, there are some voices stronger than others.... coconut oil, shallots and curry leaves are subtly murmuring in my imagination, asking me not to forget them...And my better half is pointing out that I am reliving my food experiences in my attempt to recreate the nadan food. Well, what better way to learn new recipes?

No recipes as yet, but I will give you a glimpses of Calicut soon. Let me catch up on the photos and I shall post them soon. Thought I should say hi first!!