travel « Cheeky Chilli

I had not had a proper vacation in almost two years! Reaction to the difficult atmosphere around us has had me keeping my nose steadily to the grindstone. Slowly but surely, the strains of life had been building up and I didn’t even know it. Then there came this opportunity for a whole week of vacation in the form of an invitation from friends in Salt Lake City. It would be great to see them, it had been a long time. There was real snow to jump into that was calling my name. But before that, there was packing. I hate packing. That coupled with life in general had me in low spirits that Tuesday morning. On the plane, my fingers wouldn’t stop beating a crazy tattoo on the airline seat. I’d left the daily grind behind but the subconscious mind wouldn’t rest or relax. It is hard to turn all your thoughts off like a flip of the switch.

Then we got to Salt Lake City. It had snowed a couple of nights earlier and there it lay, a soft, white blanket covering the ground. It was a proper winter’s day; wonderfully crisp and bright, the ice crystals twinkling in the sun. There is a strange peace that reigns in the softness of it, and a hush, almost like every sound is muffled somehow.

Amey and Sanjeev have been friends even before Amey and I really knew each other. They survived college together, learned to play the guitar together, were in a band together. They have similar personalities yet each is very distinctly their own person. They argue, rib each other and criticize one another with ridiculous ease, one borne out of a long friendship that I’ll bet they never really talk about. Guys don’t do that kind of stuff. They hadn’t seen each other in almost four years. They talked, they laughed, they played guitar; two guitars in harmony, sounds I haven’t heard in a long while. They did this often at one time. But life has evolved to new adventures now. A wonder of this evolution is Sanjeev and his lovely wife Vandana’s precious little baby boy. A bundle of the most beautiful smiles you ever saw. A couple of hours spent in their beautiful home, playing with this engaging little person, and the buzzing of things in my head faded away. It was like taking a deep, deep breath and letting go. The relaxation was inevitable.

Aside from being fabulous hosts, our friends are also deeply interested in food and are great cooks. Of course, we’d started discussing a Thanksgiving dinner even before we all met up. There was some talk of turkey, but then we decided there wasn’t any need for a typical feast. In fact, the only thing typical of the Thanksgiving holiday meals was the sheer amount of good food that was cooked and consumed. We ate, and rested, then we ate some more. My only contribution to it was my poached pears. There was spaghetti that Amey made. The rest was all Sanjeev and Vandana. From the time we got there to the time we left, we were plied with delicious food. There were crisp salads, amazing bruschetta, a butternut squash and coconut milk dessert to die for (which I intend to share at some point soon), utterly delectable potatoes, and this amazing, hearty French Onion Soup.

Sanjeev collects about as many books as Amey and I do, which means he has a lot of them. Among his books is this varied and interesting collection of cookbooks. One of them is Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook, from which the recipe for this soup is derived. It is easily one of the best French Onion soups I’ve had, all about the onion, as it should rightly be. The recipe is simple, though requiring some patience, which Sanjeev had in abundance as he browned the onions on the stove top and prepped the croutons with a good amount of cheer. His energy was infectious. I rarely enjoy cooking with other people, I much prefer solitude for it. This one time was an exception. I didn’t talk too much, mostly listened as Sanjeev and Amey discussed music and the travails of high altitude cooking, intermingled with the sounds of Vandana playing with her adorable little tyke in the next room. Adding to the symphony were the rhythms of a knife on the chopping board, onions sizzling and sauce pots bubbling merrily away. There was a soothing serenity to it all. They say friends are the family you choose to let into your life. Never have truer words been spoken.

French Onion Soup
Adapted slightly from Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook
Serves 4

Sweet white onions – 4 large, sliced into thin slivers
Unsalted butter- 3 tbsp
Balsamic Vinegar – 40 oz
Pinot Noir- a couple of swigs
Chicken Stock – 1 1/2 box
Bouquet garni of dried thyme & bay leaf
Salt and pepper to taste
Baguette – sliced thick
Olive oil to brush over the croutons
Gruyère – 3 cups, shredded

- Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Sauté the onion for 20 minutes or so, until they go soft and brown evenly.
- Increase the heat, add the wine and vinegar and stir to deglaze the pan. Add the stock and the bouquet garni. Let the liquid come to a boil.
- Reduce the heat to let the soup simmer. Season with salt and pepper and cook for 45 minutes to an hour. Periodically skim any foam that rises to the top.
- Pre-heat your oven to about 400 F.

- Fish out the bouquet garni. Ladle the cooked soup into crocks.
- Brush some olive oil over both sides of the bread and place on a tray. Put the tray under in the oven (on a broiler setting if you have one) to toast the bread for about four minutes, turning over the slices about halfway through.
- Place a couple of the toasted slices of baguette on top of the soup crocks and cover with generous amounts of grated Gruyère. Place the crocks into the oven in the top shelf until the cheese bubbles and browns.

Serve right away.

Cook’s notes:
The marriage of this onion soup and the Gruyere topped croutons is a match made in heaven! You crack into the crispy crouton on top and eat spoonfuls of soup with dunked cheesy croutons, it makes for scrumptious mouthfuls. You can use your home-made chicken stock if you make it yourself. Sanjeev used boxes of stock which worked very well, so don’t be afraid to use good store bought stock. Just check for salt content and season accordingly. The onions are the heart of the dish so they need to be evenly browned and well-softened. The time for the browning in the recipe is a guideline. You might require a bit more or less depending on what you are cooking in and where. We were a few thousand feet above sea level. So my timings may or may not work for you.

Good oven-proof bowls are required for this soup. Crocks are best but deep ramekins will do too. You can find these cheap at restaurant supply stores. Try and get good Gruyère. The flavours of this soup are simple. The quality of your ingredients will really come through.

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving surrounded by friends and family. Because of our good friends, we certainly did. An amazing weekend we are very thankful for.

We went to LA for a three day holiday recently. Most people would be incredulous that LA is my idea of a holiday. But it is. I’m a city girl. I grew up in the midst of a thriving metropolis and feel most at home and at peace with myself when I’m around the cacophony of traffic and the hustle-n-bustle of a city. Not necessarily in the middle of it, but around it. In its absence, I feel like something is strongly missing from my life. It’s the same feeling I get when I can’t see the ocean too much, or smell the salty spray, only this is more intense. The two years I lived outside of an urban environment had me climbing walls. If I ever have to move out of the city, I would need to return to it often, every other day, like a swimmer surfacing for air.

LA delivers the big city like no other on the West Coast. Of course, San Francisco is prettier in its setting, but it is smaller, very definite. Step out of it and you know you’re out. LA feels like it has no boundaries, one big gritty and interesting melting pot of city and ‘burbs. This time I got to visit places that I haven’t been to before, like the Getty Center and the Griffith Observatory, both of which offer wonderful vantage points to the sprawling behemoth that is Los Angeles. If you haven’t been to LA, put both these destinations on your itinerary when you visit. The Getty Center has beautiful views and even better architecture, with beautiful courts and iridescent buildings dressed in travertine. The combined wallop of the art and architecture raised my spirits. This place radiates a contagious vitality. We had a mixture of lunch and dinner in a lovely little Mexican taqueria that served the best salsa I’ve eaten anywhere, that topped these delicious chicken tacos cooked in a fantastic peppery sauce. LA really has great Mexican food.

The observatory is a study in contrasts. This almost octogenarian building is gorgeous in it proportions and set on what must be one of LA’s most spectacular sites. It has a wonderful planetarium that was both educational and entertaining. The views here are gorgeous in the day time. But it was at night that I had the defining experience of my visit here, probably not an intended one. The sun goes down and the lights come on, studding the cityscape with sparkling dots and dashes that twinkle through the haze that LA is wont to be covered in. The stars in the skies are outshined by the ones on Earth. Nothing else I’ve seen puts the extent of light pollution on our planet into stark reality so definitively, except maybe Las Vegas. Strange, isn’t it? This place exists to search the skies and shed light on the mysteries of space.

Our interest in food never wanes, even on short vacations. So when a local friend told me about the Grove, the Farmers’ market in downtown LA, it was put on the top of my places to visit. I’ve already waxed lyrical about my love for the Farmers’ markets here in San Francisco. The Grove is a good Farmers’ Market with some delicious food. However I thought it paled in comparison to the abundant and gorgeous produce of the Ferry Building Farmers’ market or the Berkeley Bowl. Also, it didn’t help that the experience kept getting interrupted by an over-zealous security guard who came up to us, several times, in the half hour we spent there. He didn’t seem to want to tell us to stop taking photos but he didn’t seem too happy that we were, in a vague fashion. Then apparently someone complained to him that we were taking photos. Someone.complained.we.were.taking.photos. In a public place. In LA. You would think this was one place on the planet that people with be familiar with a camera. Someone had a problem with me shooting monkey bread and pies. I can tell you it soured the Grove for us and we left it thoroughly confused and a bit miffed, leaving us with a bitter taste that overpowered the wonderful falafel we had for lunch. Made me long for home. No one cares about people with cameras in San Francisco. (I’d say the same for the rest of the world, everywhere except LA, but that would be spite. Gah!)

Anyway, the episode didn’t completely ruin our trip there. The spell of the sun and gorgeous day washed away the annoyance. We also quite accidently discovered this beautiful Indian temple on our way to Malibu which was just icing on the trip. So pretty and white, all by itself, tucked away in the mountains. It quite made up for the morning. There was a serenity reigning over the compound in stark contrast to how noisy and crowded temples can be in the Bay Area.

Before we left SoCal, we had some wonderful tapas in a small California-inspired Spanish restaurant. The tapas were delicious and small, but so filling that we weren’t able to satisfy our interest in the enticing paella photographed in the menu. So today, on this fairly hot San Francisco day, Amey and I decided that we’d try making our own paella, toasting to the memory of our wonderful little trip.

Neither of us is too familiar with cooking Spanish food so we turned to the Internet for explanation. What we found was that onion, garlic and tomatoes form the sofrito or base of this dish, as they often do in Spanish cooking, which put me back a bit in my comfort zone. These three form the base of many an Indian recipe as well. But then there were recipes that included parsley in the sofrito. Problem. Parsley is not one of my favourite herbs. In fact the only parsley dish I ever actually liked was some chimmichurri I had once. Mostly parsley tastes like soap to me. I’ve found the world around me is often divided into parsley lovers and cilantro lovers. Many a parsley lover has told me that to them, cilantro tastes like soap. Those exact words. Weird, no? But I digress..

We also found that recipes often call for all kinds of meat and seafood in the one recipe. This was another problem. Like that little kid who doesn’t like his food touching other food on his plate, I don’t like all kinds of meat playing along in one single dish. But Amey wanted there to be some in this dish, for a contrasting bite to the veggies, so we compromised on including two kinds of sausage instead of several meats. After agonizing over recipes, we decided we needed to make up our own, based on several variations. The result is what you see here.

Paella with sausage and veggies
Serves 3-4

Spicy Italian sausage – 1 link, cut into 1/4” rounds
Sweet basil and roasted garlic chicken sausage -1 link, cut into 1/4” rounds
Yellow onion – 1, diced
Garlic – 6 cloves, minced fine
Cilantro – handful, chopped fine
Green bell pepper- 1, cut into strips
Red bell pepper-1, cut into strips
Carrots – 2, diced
Canned whole tomatoes – 8 oz
Valencian rice – 2 cups OR Bomba rice – 1 1/2 cups
Green peas – 1 cup
Smoked paprika – 1/2 tsp
Saffron – a pinch
Olive oil – 3 tbsp
Water – 2 cups
Chicken stock – 2 cups
Salt to taste
Lemon – 1, cut into wedges

- In a large pan (the more flat surface area, the better), add the oil and the sausage cuts. Brown the sausage and then remove to a paper towel covered plate.
- Add the onion and saute for a while until it starts to caramelize. Then add the garlic and cilantro and fry some more.
- Add the pepper strips and carrots. Saute until for 5 minutes.
- Hand crush the tomatoes and add to the cooking pan. Saute the mixture until it starts to brown or caramelize.
- Fold in the rice into the tomato mixture. After completely folded in, add the water and stock. Keep stirring slowly to cook the rice gradually, about 10 minutes.
- Add the peas. Move the cooked sausage back to the pan.
- Take a few tablespoons of hot liquid out into a bowl. Soak the saffron in this for a bit and return the liquid to the pan. Mix to incorporate. Cover the pan and let cook on medium low heat until the rice is cooked through.
- When almost all the liquid has gone, turn the heat up to caramelize and toast up the bottom layer of rice.

To serve, plate some rice including some from the bottom of the pan. Serve with lemon wedges for squeezing over.

Cook’s notes:
Traditionally, the Spanish use a paellera; a flat, shallow pan took make paella. I don’t own one so I went with the largest shallow pan I had. You can substitute arborio rice for the traditionally used Bomba or Valencian rice (we got ours from The Spanish Table in Berkeley) but paella does is supposed to have separate, distinct grains, different from the texture of risotto. At any rate, do not use a long-grain rice like Basmati. It will probably turn to mush. The two kinds of sausage were amazing in this recipe, infusing their flavours into the oil. Even so, I think a vegetarian version would be pretty good too. Just leave out the sausage and use veggie stock.

Several recipes said that food colour is substituted because saffron is expensive, but that saffron is the heart of the dish. Every bite had an almost-floral afternote because of the saffron. I would not substitute it with anything else. Saffron is pricey, but so strong that hardly any recipe calls for more than a pinch at a time. If you store it well, tightly capped in a cool, dry and dark place, it has a long shelf life.

We decided to substitute the parsley we read about in some recipes with cilantro. I’m guessing this isn’t quite authentic, nevertheless, it worked brilliantly. This rice dish was piquant and satisfying at the same time, the twist of lemon at the end giving it a fabulous tang. I think the only thing I might try the next time I make it would be to use fresh tomatoes instead of canned ones. It did seem to have an excess of tomato, never a bad thing in my book, but it did tend to overpower the other flavours a bit, so you had to hunt for them. And remember to dish out a bit of the toasted rice in each helping. It really adds to the flavour of the meal. Anyone who has had caramelised onions on a biryani would understand. It is a similar layer of flavour.

The sunshine in San Francisco today echoed the intense heat in LA from our trip there and paella was a culmination of sunshine on our plates. I raise my glass to the West Coast. Right now, warm plate in hand, gazing at an azure sky, I’m exactly where I want to be.