Tomato Soup

I have loved tomato soup ever since I was a child. Steaming hot soup with lots of croutons, a swirl of cream and generous sprinklings of freshly ground black pepper.. yum! Hotel Darshan in Pune at the intersection of Prabhat Road and Karve Road used to serve really good tomato soup. In Austin, Romeo's serves a really good tomato basil soup. Tomato enthusiasts know that the best tomatoes are available here in summer, but this is a great way to eat some tomatoes in winter too. This is also a great lunch option with some crisp toast instead of the croutons.
However I am not a big fan of tomato soup loaded with cream, it takes away from the natural taste of the tomato. I much prefer a lighter soup with a more concentrated tomato taste. The addition of cream is basically for thickening the consistency and to give it a smoother texture. One way to get round this is to add cornflour, but a better way is to add boiled carrots or potatoes. Carrots are preferable for the color as well as the taste they add to the soup.

Start by washing 4-5 big tomatoes, usually Roma. Cut a cross shape at their stem end to make it easier to peel them later. I take 2 carrots, wash them thoroughly, cutting the carrots into 2-3 pieces each. Set some water to boil, enough to cover all the tomatoes. After the water comes to a boil, add the tomatoes, stem end up, along with the carrots.

Let the water boil for some time, till the skin of the tomatoes starts shrivelling and the carrots turn a little soft. At this point, turn off the heat and remove the tomatoes and carrots from the water with a slotted spoon. I save the water to add to the soup later. I usually wait till the tomatoes cool down before peeling the skin. Blend the peeled tomatoes, and carrots in a blender to a smooth puree, adding some water from the boiling pot if needed. Pour the puree back in the boiling pot. Add about 2tbsp of butter, 4-6 peppercorns, some salt and some basil if desired. Bring back to a boil. Allow to simmer for 5-10 minutes before tasting for salt. Add a little sugar if desired to balance the tomatoes. Simmer for 5-10 minutes more and tomato soup is ready!

Tomato Pickle (tomatoche lonche)

Tomato pickle is a finger licking good relish, which both I and R love. Lots of tomatoes, garlic, and chillies, sort of like an Indian version of a cooked salsa. My mother made this frequently and I always ate it more like a bhaji (vegetable) than a lonche (pickle). I love to have it with some simple amti bhat or varan bhat. Though earlier I used canned sliced tomatoes for convenience, I have come back to dicing tomatoes myself, even though it is a fairly laborious task as a lot of raw cut tomatoes yields a comparatively small amount of the cooked pickle. Although the preparation time is not much except for dicing the tomatoes, it does take quite a long time to finish cooking. But being patient pays off when you taste the saturated hot garlicky tomatoey taste! When I recently saw the theme of Regional Cuisine of India - June hosted by One Hot Stove, I knew what my entry would be. This is my entry for RCI June: Maharashtrian Cuisine.

Recipe
About 2.5-3 cups of diced tomatoes.
5-6 green chillies, diced into rounds
5-6 cloves of garlic , sliced thin
salt to taste
some sugar, if needed
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 1/2tbsp oil
5-6 kadhipatta (curry) leaves (optional)

Heat the oil in a kadhai / wok. Add the mustard seeds after the oil is hot. After the mustard seeds splutter, add the garlic, green chillies and curry leaves. After the garlic turns golden and slightly crisp, add the tomatoes. Stir the contents of the kadhai, add some salt.
Leave on medium heat, till all the juices from the tomatoes evaporate and you can see the oil separating from the mixture. This part takes a fairly long time. Taste the mixture and add some sugar if the tomatoes are very sour. Turn the heat off and let it cool down for some time.

Climbing The Mango Trees

Just finished reading "Climbing The Mango Trees - A Memoir of a Childhood in India", an autobiography by Madhur Jaffrey which recounts her childhood and adolescence years growing up in India. I have been a big admirer of Ms. Jaffrey's cookbooks ever since my mother bought "Eastern Vegeterian Cooking" more than ten years back. I really like her writing style and for the longest time, I used to read the narrative accompaniments preceding the recipes rather than the recipe itself. My mother then increased her collection of Madhur Jaffrey's books to include the "Far Eastern Cookery" and "Madhur Jaffrey's Cookbook - Food for Family and Friends". I read all of them, they would be my introduction to hummus, tabbouleh, and satay ayam. To a girl growing up in Pune, these were exotic recipes indeed and later after moving to the US, I had a very definite idea of all that I wanted to try eating. In fact, I carted these books to the US with me and my brother gave me " A Taste of India" as a wedding-going away gift. I still had not read the recipes, quite far away from trying to cook any of them. It would still take a couple of years for me to start cooking from them , though my mother had already tried out many of the recipes to great success. Still, I was surprised at how easy it was to follow the recipes and somehow the narratives with each recipe gave me a much better idea of what I should expect the end result to be (a very helpful factor in case one has never tasted the food item before).

So when I saw "Climbing the Mango Trees" on Amazon, I knew I had to buy it. It chronicles Ms. Jaffrey's years growing up in Dehli. What I really liked and which was a natural extension of the narratives which I used to like before, was the writing style which interwove the story of growing up in north India in pre-Independance years, with the eating rituals which seem to be a staple of the Indian culture across geographies and time. The book evokes the varied experiences of life in India, the most poignant perhaps being the one about anticipating the monsoon. The emphasis on seasonality and fresh home cooked food would also be a constant in my childhood although it would be the 1980's then and I grew up in a totally different part of India. Perhaps living in the USA where I see the same vegetables year around and people loading grocery carts with ready made frozen food makes my hyper aware of these facts. Growing up, my mother rarely let us eat leftovers, at the most the next day, but food was cooked to be sufficient for one or at the most two meals and if there was any left over, it was inevitably thrown away. I still do not like to eat food left over from more than a day, although there is not much one can do at times about that. Cooking fresh for each meal also meant a huge variety of food, prepared in different ways. R never likes to see the same dish for more than 2 meals.

The only complaint I have with this book is that it stops too soon,I would have loved to know more about Ms. Jaffreys prolific career, both theatrical and culinary. Hopefully there's another book coming out soon.