About Avi Kramer
Avi Kramer is a freelance writer and editor. He has lived in Chile, China
and India and currently resides in Portland, Oregon.
Recent Posts by Avi Kramer
A Place Called Ooty
March 1, 2009 by Avi Kramer
Early last week I spent a few nights in the rural Tamil Nadu town of Ooty. There’s a horse racetrack in the town center and quiet villages in the surrounding hills. In a very small village called Pudumundo, I noticed this shop owner at his roadside stall.
Nagrash came to Ooty from his home in Karnataka in the early 1970’s to work in a hotel. He met his wife here and stayed. Now, he and his son Ramesh are building a restaurant onto their shop and a second room for the family now that Ramesh’s family, his wife and two children, all live with the grandparents. Below is Pudumundo village.
The family grows vegetables behind the shop. Nagrash is up at 3 a.m. and finishes all of the day’s cooking (he serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner), cow milking, and other morning chores by 7 when villagers start arriving for tea and breakfast, which is usually a cup of chai and one or two dal vadas: see below, these are chickpeas blended with curry leaves, onion, green chilies, and mustard seeds, flattened into cakes, and fried like hash browns.
Later, Ramesh will take over running the stall while his father sleeps off a good portion of the afternoon.
Kitchen Policy: No Shoes
February 27, 2009 by Avi Kramer
[Note: This is an older post written on 18 Feb in Jaipur]
On Station Road (below) the busiest restaurants serve the Rajasthani specialty, Dal Batte Churma.
The Dal portion of dal batte churma is of course the same one served all over India: lentils cooked until soft, with turmeric and garlic, and tempered with whole spices and onion fried in oil. Batte are wheat- and millet-flour balls first boiled and then roasted on or below hot coals and served crumbled with a spoonful of ghee on top. While churma refers to the sweet version of this dish, as the batte can be served with both ghee and sugar.
In many parts of the province, the batte are cooked over the embers from cow dung cakes (see photo below) the most common cooking fuel in rural Rajasthan. They are pressed flat and left to dry in the sun.
At Shri Shankar Restaurant, fifty rupees, or a little more than one U.S. dollar, buys you an all-you-can-eat tray of dal batte churma. To ease recessionary woes in the States, don’t turn to Campbell’s soup; instead, move to India, where the rupee is at an all-time low against the dollar.
In addition to the dal, there are two vegetable curries, kadhi (a spicy buttermilk-based soup thickened with roasted chickpea flour and tempered with spices), a salad (sliced cucumber, carrot, and onion with lemon wedges for dressing), and a spoonful of tomato chutney. The center of the tray holds the crumbled batte, and you mix in dal, one or both vegetable curries, the kadhi, and the chutney.
It is said (notably by people very fond of their province’s regional specialty, so exaggeration here is not ruled out) that places like Shri Shankar — favored by locals and in close proximity to both the bus and train stations — serves up to 10,000 of these meals each day.
Above center is a potato-cabbage curry, and on the left yellow lentil dal. The kitchen is dark and feels like a dungeon, except instead of damp and moldy it is very hot.
Big, bare-chested men stir vats of dal; boys knead the dough for making the batte and keep the clay ovens filled with hot coals. They use big iron tongs to turn the batte as they roast below. Everyone is barefoot.
I spoke with the owner, Mr. Kishor Kumar, at one of the tables in the dining area.
He keeps a desk right out in the restaurant and sits there most of the day, periodically visiting with customers and checking on things in the kitchen. I asked Mr. Kumar about another specialty of Rajasthan, the most popular street food called kachories.
I wrote about these in Jaisalmer, but they are made a little differently in Jaipur: fried bread (chickpea-flour dough) stuffed with a chickpea curry, diced red onions, and spices and topped with yogurt, sweet chutney, and mashed fried green chilies.
I Am Trained in Bombay
February 21, 2009 by Avi Kramer
[Note: the three posts below -- from the 17th, 19th, and 21st -- are all new as of today]
Jardan Ashram is located about 250 kilometers west of Jaipur and encompasses over five hundred acres. (An ashram is a community and retreat for the practice of yoga, meditation, and other Hindu disciplines.) It includes a central prayer hall (the main ashram); two buildings for lodging, yoga practice, and community activities; a school and hostel; and farmland. Below is a photo of the temple guru, Swamiji:
There is also a reservoir for the community’s water needs — in the desert, where Jardan is located, water is scarce and precious — and two new and very big projects under construction: a second ashram and a hospital.
There are three kitchens. The first is well equipped and modern — long clean steel counters, pressure cookers, two wall-mounted ovens. The boss is Chandra Puri (his Hindi name and the only name he goes by; it means “The Moon”), the resident Hungarian chef.
The second kitchen is across a small courtyard with a central fountain and a peach-colored arcade on two sides. This is the very traditional Rajasthani kitchen: on a stone floor two women from Jardan village cook on the floor over open fire.
The third kitchen is part of the boys’ hostel: the ashram supports a 150-student school, and the boys who attend the school live in the attached hostel. When I visited the hostel the cook Raju (“I am trained in Bombay,” he said) was making a coconut sweet with milk, sugar, and desiccated coconut. While Raju and the kitchen staff was busy working on dinner, the hostel warden and former army major Laxman Singh was having a late lunch. He eats what the boys eat: dal, one vegetable dish, and chapatti.
Raju, above right, set to work on the sweet. Rajasthanis say that they are crazy about sweets, and these are usually taken as between-meal snacks instead of dessert. No visit to a local home is complete without an offering of tea and a homemade treat. (Note: Indians make their sweets very sweet. In the below recipe, the cook used the same amount of coconut and sugar — one kilogram, or 2.2 lbs., of each.)
To make these coconut bars, Raju boiled water, milk, and sugar. Because their sugar is unrefined — basically just harvested, ground-up sugar cane — the top must be skimmed as it cooks. After boiling for ten minutes the mixture had turned syrupy, and Raju stirred in some “edible yellow color,” as he called it, but it wasn’t turmeric, which is usually used for coloring. Anyway, he removed the pot from over the fire and added the coconut as well as almonds, cashews, and raisins, stirring well. The mixture was spread on a two-inch deep tray, gently packed down and topped with ghee. It cools and settles for a few hours and is then ready to cut into brownie-sized bars and served.
Sand Dunes Festival – Jaisalmer, Rajasthan
February 19, 2009 by Avi Kramer
Before sunrise in Jaisalmer a roadside vendor makes chai.
Later, a delivery of milk. Across rural India milk comes fresh every morning and is always boiled before serving.
Jaisalmer is 600 kilometers west of Jaipur and less than an hour from the Pakistan border. It is a small desert city with an ancient fort that sits atop a plateau of sand dunes.
The above photo shows just a small section of the fort, but it is truly massive and one of the only inhabited forts in Rajasthan. (Most other cities — Jaipur, Jodhpur, and Udaipur — have forts as well but people no longer live in them.) On the periphery of Jaisalmer most people live in stone and mud shacks sheltered with tarps.
From the city, the annual sand dunes festival is set up an hour’s drive into the desert towards the southwest.
Indians come from all over the country for this very popular three-day festival. There are camel rides and races, wrestling matches, beauty contests (including one for best mustache), and traditional singing and dance performances.
There were rumors of an elephant polo match, but I didn’t see it. The cooking in Jaisalmer and at the festival was very basic and good: some highlights were kachories, a chickpea- or corn-flour bread stuffed with a spicy chickpea and onion mixture, deep fried, and served topped with a sweet mint chutney and plain yogurt. Men congregate around a kachory stall early one morning.
The most common vegetable dish is spicy kachri curry. Kachri is a bittersweet gourd grown in Rajasthan; it requires very little water, making it ideal for the desert climate. Rajasthanis also use kachri to make a tangy chutney. Below, a cook peels kachri.
For a basic Rajasthani dal, this cook used two varieties of yellow lentils and boiled them for an hour with ample water. To season the lentils, in a separate pot heat a generous amount oil until very hot and add a half-handful of cumin seeds so they pop. After ten seconds, add one ladle of fresh garlic-chili paste (garlic and green chilies mashed together into a paste) and fry, stirring constantly for a few minutes. For dry spices, add one spoon of turmeric, two of chili powder, and three of coriander powder. Then salt and a few ladles of water from the lentils. Stir well for one minute and then add the full pot of lentils.
The Karni Mata Temple
February 17, 2009 by Avi Kramer
This temple near Bikaner, Rajasthan is literally crawling with rats.
I asked this man why he faced the rats instead of the goddess on the shrine, and he said simply to be closer to the holy animals. The kabas (rats) scurry in packs across the floor while visitors wait for hours to make offerings at the shrine. The line for the shrine stretches out of the temple and across a dirt square and out through the temple gate.
People crowd into the dimly lit and hot temple interior. The stench is overpowering; it smells of sweat and rat feces and rotting food.
They feed the rats homemade millet flour breadcrumbs and bowls of milk, so the rats are not just kept nourished, they’re well fed to the point of obesity. There is food everywhere, and the rats never stop eating, but they still fight for the food, biting and bloodying each other.
Outside, these men (above) were leaving the temple after making their offerings. Devotees believe that a family member who passes on is reincarnated as a rat in this temple. When a rat dies it is not removed from the temple but left to decompose in order that its soul will also pass on within these sacred walls.
Night Traffic, Tea, and Parathas in Jaipur
February 14, 2009 by Avi Kramer
Above: night traffic, Shyam Nagar, Jaipur, 13 Feb 2009.
To make Rajasthani chai boil half part water, half whole milk with loose black tea and sugar. Pour through a sieve into mugs and serve. For masala chai add none, some, or all of the following: black pepper (whole peppercorns or ground), ginger (fresh or dry), cardamom (pods or crushed), cinnamon (sticks or powder).
McAloo Tikki
February 7, 2009 by Avi Kramer
I’m back in India. Briefly, the trip from Zanzibar overland and sea and lake through Tanzania, into Uganda, and then Mumbai:
Bullfight in Jambiani
January 27, 2009 by Avi Kramer
I leave Uganda tomorrow, traveling through Nairobi and Doha, Qatar, and will be back in India early the next morning. Below is another saved post about our stay in Jambiani, the small beach town on Zanzibar’s quiet eastern coast. Landscape/people photos by Mattea; food ones by me.
On Jambiani’s white sand road, we sat in the shade and watched cows wrestle.
First dinner I made a green lentil dal and coconut rice and a salad of only tomato slices, very good with just lime juice and salt.
For dessert we saved some of the coconut rice — made with the flesh from tender coconuts — to mix with the honey-like sweetened condensed milk and have with pineapple. We made a pot of tea, Zanzibar-style, spiced with fresh ginger and cinnamon.
The next day before lunch I walked along the town road with its jeep and bicycle tracks, beyond the well and the primary school, the sun very hot and baking the sand, and bought more rice and vegetables to make a simple potato and carrot biryani, the easy-to-make and very good Indian rice casserole.
Biryanis are best with big pieces of cinnamon steamed in with the rice. We also made a simple cabbage and tomato salad, and in place of cold beer we sipped whisky and water. It was a very good lunch, and there was biryani leftover to have for dinner that night.
I work on the veranda of our cottage early every morning. At sunrise the tide is high and the only sounds are the water, the gulls, and the wind through the palm trees, and after a few hours the water has receded a few hundred meters and the women are out harvesting the seaweed from where the water was. Later they dry it in the sun.
