Tiny Little Fractures

Now I’m no Pradeep Jeganathan, nor do I have the skills of the Domestic Goddess, but I can cook…a bit…

On 07/07/07 as part of a Flickr initiative I wandered down to Santa Monica and Venice Beach with P and A to take some hopefully arty pics. While my primary focus was initially the farmers market in Santa Monica I ended up instead getting most if not all of the pictures for the pool from Venice Beach. 

I did however pick up these nifty little multi-coloured potatoes from the farmers market, together with some delicious blueberries sold by an equally delicious looking young lady (what, I can’t help myself sometimes!). The potatoes were tiny compared to the genetically modified behemoths one usually finds at the supermarkets and they were obviously descended from the multi-coloured brethren found in the Andes. I had a pleasant chat with the potato selling man who had a farm in San Luis Obispo, took some pictures and bought myself some teeny taters.

Potato selling man (unfortunately selling carrots in the picture)

After contemplating on whether I want to wander around my neighborhood zoo in the mid afternoon or do some cooking today I decided, taking a squinted peek outside that I would do the latter. I have a tried and tested method for making my ala thel daala. I grab a bowl, chop up an onion, cry a bit and put it into the bowl. On top of that I add some chillie powder, curry leaves, bit of cinnamon, turmeric and some chillie pods broken up. I also add a dash of my grandmother’s curry powder which is smuggled into the country regularly for the family’s benefit.

Spice bowl 

I then boil the potatoes in the microwave and chop them up as so.

Boiled, chopped potatoes

The rest of the procedure is very simple, a bit of olive oil in a saucepan, high heat, throw in the spice bowl, cry a bit from the resulting mini nuclear explosion of spices, regain composure and start stirring the mixture. After everything’s nice and fried, I throw in the potatoes and go back to stirring with the avidity of a Macbeth witch.

Into the frying pan 

After a while I take a deep sniff, clear the sinuses and tap a couple of the taters to make sure they are good and cooked (I actually forgot to do this on this occasion, hence the potatoes are a tad hard, but nothing a good microwave zap can’t fix). Add some salt to mix, give it a vigorous stir, which results in some turmeric flying out of the frying pan onto the pristinely white t-shirt I always somehow end up wearing when cooking and voila!

Mult-coloured ala thel daala

P.S. I apologize for the shoddy food photographs; I was too lazy to switch out my 70-200mm lens and ended up taking pictures from a couple of miles away.

Sigh…the problem with bringing your favourite type of chocolate all the way from Sri Lanka to this household is it never lasts long enough, especially when from the mater to the schizo schizu (pictured in all his innocence below) are all chocoholics. Admittedly this maybe a bit of the pot calling the kettle black, amongst my many addictions from Old Reserve, Gold Leaf and pretty Sri Lankan girls, superblende ranks pretty damn high, even higher than the gastronomic orgasm that is La Maison du Chocolat.
 

But this is the last of the wonderful chocolate milkiness of the superblende, at least this time I had most of my stash to myself. Last time I brought the stuff back I foolishly left my suitcase unzipped and the damn Schizu mauled around 78% of my supplies. I watched him avidly for a few hours in the sadistic hope that he would keel over from sugar shock or whatever it is that causes canines to decease from the consumption of chocolate, but to no avail. He is truly part of the family, a mutant mutt that can eat his own weight in chocolate and suffer no ill-effects. He can also, somewhat like me, both hear the opening of a chocolate wrapper from half a mile away and smell it, with a following wind, from about two or three miles. 

The chocolate is going to be sorely missed; I still remember how the twenty slabs that Chinky Pinky brought me in the summer of 2004 to London helped me keep my fortitude in writing up my M.Sc. thesis. I subsisted then on a daily diet of a prawn sandwich, two slabs of superblende and around 11 pints of beer. Needless to say after that summer I was hardly a picture of glowing health, but it was still entertaining at the time, despite suffering alternatively from sugar shock, alcoholic highs, nasty hangovers and headaches from staring at a computer screen all day.

Sigh….no more superblende…guess its time to hit the gym…

How do you eat an egg hopper? For the hopper neophytes out there a hopper or Appa in Sinhala is made from a fermented batter of rice flour, coconut milk and apparently a dash of palm toddy (though I doubt this happens very often in my house). It is crisp on the outside and soft in the middle, my personal favourite the egg hopper is cooked with an egg in the center. Over the last 25 and a half years of my existence I have perfected what I would like to think is the ideal way to consume the gastronomic delight that is an egg hopper.

You need the following ingredients, one egg hopper and two regular hoppers, preferably both steaming slightly fresh off the stove. The other essential ingredients are a spicy parippu (or dhal) curry, redolent with turmeric and a whiff of garlic, a good sharp katta sambol and a meat curry of some sort. The poison I picked for myself today was a lovely, orangey prawn curry. What I like to do then is rip an end of the crispy shell and carefully, with surgical precision work the rip down to where the brown of the appa meets the gooey whiteness of the egg, glistening with minute salt crystals and spotted with black pepper. I then further this incision about half a centimeter into the egg white, take a right angle, a few more centimeters and then another right angle and up. This gives me a rectangular piece of hopper with a sliver of egg white which I then, with a pleased chuckle to myself, proceed to dip into the parippu, diluting the egg white into a dull yellow, brightening it up with a bit off the red katta sambol, wrapping the whole parcel around a curled up shrimp and popping the result into my mouth.

I repeat this process until all the crispy part of the hopper is gone, leaving a disembodied yellow yolk floating in the white of the egg. Grabbing a new hopper I continue the process, scything away at the egg white until all that’s left is the yolk, shivering in its transparent sheath. That of course is when all the fun starts; with a fresh piece of hopper I dig a crispy dagger into the heart of the yolk. I time my consumption so that by this time all the prawns are gone and all that is left on the plate is the gravy from them, mixed in with the remaining parippu and sambol. Once all the yolk flows into this mix I dab the hopper into the yellow mass in the middle, gouging out pieces, sop up the mess at the bottom of the plate and continue contentedly munching away.

That is the way I eat every egg hopper that I am ever served. It usually gets me odd looks from the relatives at family functions and exasperated snorts when they realize they can’t leave the table because I take twice as long to eat my food as normal people. Not that I really care though, the hoppers are usually far too good for me to even acknowledge the disapproval. So that’s my technique for tackling the egg hopper, how do you eat yours?

Ok here goes more reviews of places in Sri Lanka. Went to Tantra on Sunday, I have to rate this as one of my favourite places to hang out on a Sunday. The mix of chilled out live music (as opposed to the headbanging crap you get in most clubs), a nice outdoor setting with fresh air and a setting sun, beautiful people and best of all the ability to wander around in shorts and sandals. The service from the old Glow staff is excellent. Haven’t really been here on weekdays but for an awesome way to chill on a Sunday evening Tantra is excellent. I really hope they can extend their lease somehow and they don’t have to close down like Glow.

And now onto Lagoon, the seafood restaurant at Cinnamon Grand, ambience is nice if a bit noisy and a bit too brightly lit. The food was excellent if a bit heavy, wish the chillie crab was mashed up making it easier to get to the meat. You get to choose your food just like the Cove with the exception the food isn’t alive when it’s chopped up. The sushi starters were so so, the wasabi lacked a bit in flavour, but was still nice. Desert was good as well, the excessively chocolate dessert that I had was excellent. The service was attentive and surprisingly knowledgeable. Not entirely sure about the prices because I didn’t pick up the tab, but it was fairly expensive, though we did have starters, three dishes and dessert split between two people, which was a bit excessive. The nice thing about eating at the Lagoon is that Breeze Bar is right there, making it an excellent, intimate and quiet post dinner place to hang out.