Food that looks good, tastes better!

That combination of gold and white. Steaming little yellow cubes or even circles on white rice. That aroma which fills the room and make you asking for more. That taste that cannot be replicated and should be had only on special occasions. Such is the power of one of my grandma’s signature dish. Shorshe or Bhapa Chhana or Paneer in Mustard Sauce is what we call it. Yes, one of her many signature dishes that not even the best cooks and Mom can recreate.

Cooking is an art and you need to develop that skill and talent to cook the best food. It is not easy to get that right amount when someone asks you to add pinch of salt to the food or according to your taste, or even the spoon sizes don’t match when they talk about adding masalas to your food. But for my grandma, these didn’t matter. Practice and long years of cooking with love and care made her perfect. No wonder she was the ultimate decision maker when it came to kitchen and what everyone in the family will eat. Although everything she cooked tasted out of the world, her signature dishes were only meant to be cooked on special occasions such as birthdays of her sons and daughter, grandchildren and Jamai Shashti. Bowls of different vegetarian curries along with rice and dal will be put in front of the special person.

Being a vegetarian family, we have successfully replaced the non-vegetarian versions of dishes with vegetarian ones. Shorshe Paneer or Bhapa Chhana is one such example. For non-vegetarians, it is the shorshe ilish or shorshe chicken. For us, it is this delicious version.

When I received the mail from #IndiBlogger regarding this contest My Beautiful Food! from Borosil, I was thrilled. Although I am not a food blogger yet, I have been toying with the idea from the time I have started cooking and trying out new recipes. Participating in this contest is only my way of embarking on this new journey. Since this is part of Round 1: Alphabet Soup of #BeautifulFood and requires posting of no images, I am only sharing the recipe that we follow.

You can make Shorshe Paneer this way:

• You need to prepare 2 tablespoons of mustard paste by mixing mustard powder in water and keeping it for 10 minutes or by making a paste with soaked mustard seeds for 10-20 minutes and mixing it in a mixer. In the meantime, chop paneer into cubes (about 20-25 pieces).
• To the mustard paste, add salt according to taste, 3 tablespoons of curd and 2-3 green chillies and mix well.
• Keep the paneer for marinating in the mustard paste and leave aside for a while.
• In a non-stick or heavy bottomed wok which has a fitting lid, add 2.5 tablespoons mustard oil and heat it up properly.
• Add the marinated paneer and stir properly. Bring the heat down to low heat level and keep the wok covered with lid for 4-5 minutes.
• Open the lid and check the water that has been released from the curd. Stir the paneer again and add salt, if you feel is required. Cover the wok once again for about 3-4 minutes.
• Open the lid and cook for about 1-2 minutes and stir to mix the paneer properly. Turn off the heat and serve in a beautiful glass serving dish from Borosil. Serve with hot plain white rice.

PS: Serving is as crucial as cooking the food. You can check out different kitchen glassware from Borosil here. 

When Shankar walked to the Chander Pahar!

Ask anybody around you, what does he/she would like to do given a vacation or has a break, one of the inevitable answers would be traveling other than sleeping. To see places, visit them after you have read so much about them and witnessing a dream come true, it is always special. And to watch your favourite hero doing a film which is so similar to the above mentioned lines, I definitely felt he lived a part of my dream.

Chander Pahar or Mountain of the Moon, a Bengali movie produced by Shree Venkatesh Films and directed by Kamaleshwar Mukherjee had Dev in the leading role as Shankar Roy Chowdhury. Based on the novel penned by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay in 1937. The novel chronicles the adventures of Shankar in the forests of Aftrica along with his Portugese partner, Diego Alvarez. 

Photo credit: Wikipedia.org

Yearning for adventure in life and liking for animals, Shankar wished to follow the footsteps of explorers like Marco Polo or Mungo Park. And as luck would have had it, Shankar lands himself a job as a clerk in Uganda Railway through references and let’s himself land in Africa without thinking too much. Africa or his employer did not give me too much official work to do except for wave the flag to let the train pass. But what it offered was more than what he would have expected or dreamt of. Fighting the lion after a fellow colleague gets brutally killed, deciding to explore Africa and especially, Mountain of the Moon along with Diego Alvarez, a middle-aged Portugese traveller and a diamond or gold prospector, every other adventure throughout his journey was a complete visual treat. 

Although I am not much of animal lover, watching the African jungle, its elements and the ultimate mythical monster, the Bunyip blew me off. Shankar's road trip with Alvarez to explore and locate Richtersveldt where Chander Pahar is, also was beautifully captured.

Regarding the casting of Dev as Shankar, I was personally excited. One, because, I liked Dev's earlier commercial flicks like Paglu series and the many others, and two, he looked apt for the role with the kind of physique that he has. Quoting his own lines, Dev said "Chander Pahar is going to be the biggest challenge in my life and I'm not afraid. Being afraid will mean no shooting for the project". It was certainly one of his most ambitious projects and also for Tollywood for it has taken the standard of Bengali films to a height that is at par with other film industries across the globe and this is a sincere and honest confession.

Chander Pahar is like Life of Pi. You need to watch on the big screen to enjoy it completely and I watched it at a theatre in Bangalore amidst a huge Bong crowd. It was a fun experience that was almost like watching the movie in Kolkata itself. Expecting more of such movies to hit the screens in this years and many more years to come. 

Reborn to live the past!

 An awesome year for Bengali movie industry and for movie buffs like me, 2013 witnessed some of the best works.  Following its predecessor’s footsteps, 2014 began with the blockbuster nationwide release of Jaatishwar. This was a movie I watched with my mother after a long time in a theatre in Kolkata. Although both of us keep watching movies now and then and discuss them over, it was after quite some time that we were each other’s movie partners.

Starring Prasenjit Chatterjee as Kushal Hajra, an associate librarian at Central Library in Chandannagore, Jisshu Sengupta as Rohit, pursuing colonial history studies in Portugal and chooses to a Portugese Indian poet as his dissertation subject, Swastika Mukherjee as Mahamaya, a RJ at Radio Mirchi who proudly voices her love for the language and need to reach out to people through songs that are long lost in people’s memories, Jaatishwar was quite an interesting watch for me.

Srijit Mukherjee’s fifth offering after blockbusters like Autograph and Mishar Rahashya, expectations were sky-high from the time the movie was announced. Curiosity peaked when the trailer got released and Kushal Hajra announced, “Ami Anthony Firingi” (I am Anthony Firingi). Now that we knew it is going to be a re-incarnation of Heynsman Anthony or Anthony Firingi in this life, it got added to the list of “have to watch” movies.

Photo credit: Twitter.com

A character lesser known, Anthony in 19th century Bengal had impressed people with his musical talent in Bengali as he learnt the language by reading Hindu scriptures and by understanding the meanings of folk music and lyrical compositions. He participated and won many of Kavigaan concerts. But what made him reborn as Kushal in this era was the question that tickled the mind throughout the movie and the director made a commendable job by revealing the answer right in the end. An interesting method of making your audience stay glued to the scene and not concentrate anywhere else, the idea worked brilliantly.

The next high point was its music composed by Kabir Suman. Some master compositions by the musical genius after a long time, the music got equally lauded alongside the brilliant acting from the actors.

The transition in Prasenjit Chatterjee’s characters of both Anthony and Kushal was unique. To get away from the trauma of living a past life and losing balance in his present life, Kushal narrates Anthony’s life in sequences. 

With movies like these, I do not think there could be any other way of entertaining myself most of the time. A treat for eyes, mind and ears, Jaatishwar gave a good and entertaining start to the year.