Crab Soup with Leek

This is one more of "end of market recipes." What can you pick out at the market near the end of the day, and still turn into something edible. Kind of a challenge that you put yourself in utilizing whatever odd and ends that would surely have got wasted next day.

Picked out these crab legs. While the crabs were still fresh, the fact that most of them had broken their claws fighting surely meant that they would have gone out with the trash the next day. Since I am still not confident on cleaning whole crabs, I somehow managed to convince the counter guy just to sell me the legs. Here's the recipe for a light fragrant soup with crabs legs and leek. Lovely for those rainy evenings when you are soaked to the bone.


Ingredients (Serves 4):

• Crab legs- 8oo gm
• Leek- 400 gm, chopped
• Onion- 1 large, chopped
• Ginger- 1/2 inch shredded
• Garlic- 3 cloves, shredded
• Turmeric- 2 tsp
• Red Chilli powder- 1 tsp
• Pepper- 1/2 tsp
• Salt- To taste

Preparation (Cooking time 1.5 hrs):


Clean crab legs in fresh warm water. Crack them lightly. Boil with turmeric, chilli powder, salt for 1 hour. Add in chopped leek, onions, garlic, ginger and pepper.

Simmer for 1/2 an hour on low flame. Serve hot.

Paella de Marisco (Seafood Paella)

An eternal favourite. Sea food lover, spicy food. Spanish cooking, just homemade comfort food, or for the dinner date you want to impress with your cooking skills (mind you keeping a bottle of wine comes in handy if you hope to keep the evening going).

Been planning to put up my own take on this for quite some time, and today finally did it. Kind of a celebratory Eid lunch with one of my best mates from school- That's him as the sou-chef in the pictures.

Interesting trivia- The Catalan word 'palella'  is derived from the Latin root- 'Patella' which means pan- just like the old Hindi word, "Patila".

Ingredients (Serves 4):

Great thing about living in Oman, you end up getting the freshest sea food you can imagine,. The Fish market at the Corniche in Muscat is a foodie's delight.

Rice (Arroz)- 2 cups, preferably brown; suggested that you soak rice overnight for faster cooking.
Tomato- 5 ripe medium sized
Octopus/ Squid- 300 gm, chopped small
Shrimp- 300 gm
Mussels- 200 gm, shelled
Fresh clams- 500 gm, cleaned in shell
Garlic- 6 medium sized cloves, shredded
Red chilli- 6 large, dried
Pepper- 2 tsp peppercorns
Chilli powder- 2 tsp
Bay leafs- 5 large
Olive Oil- 5 tbsp
Chicken/ fish stock- 1/2 cup (Not a strict requirement, but does add flavour to rice).
Salt- To taste



Preparation (Approx 1.5 hrs):

Clean clams and boil them on a medium flame for 5 mins. Chop tomatoes finely. Puree in blender to a fine slush.

Fresh clams- almost right off the boat

 

Remove clams and replace with chopped octopus for 10 mins. Remove and preserve stock for later. Heat 3 tbsp of olive oil on medium flame. Add shrimps, once they start  getting soft stir in the mussels. Cook on low flame for five mins. Remove shrimps and mussels from fire, throw in the garlic. Lower flame and keep stirring till garlic turns translucent. 

Add in tomato puree. Keep on medium flame for ten minutes. Add rice, chicken stock, cover and cook for twenty minutes. Add chopped octopus along with 1 tbsp olive oil. Adding oil at this juncture, helps trap the flavour of the octopus in the broth rather than let it escape with the steam.

Cook on low flame so that the rice can absorb the flavours from the other ingredients. Keep the mixture flowing easily, if required add the stock from the clam and  octopus. After about twenty minutes add in the shrimp, mussels and clams. Add pepper, bay leaves, chilli powder, remaining olive oil.

Voila! And we are all ready to go.

 

 Cover and let it simmer for ten minutes on a low flame. Serve hot.

Tips:

• As I mentioned earlier a bottle of wine adds something to it. My current favourite- Rioja Tinto from Spain. Else you could always take it easy with 'clara' (more about  this in the upcoming blog on easy-on-the-fly cocktails), a glass or two of 'Sangria' or even sparkling water.
• If you are really out to make the kill, suggest keeping a good CD on hand. Might I suggest flamenco. :)

Baked pranws in tomato/ coconut rum sauce

The genesis of this idea is from a fish dish I had at a Sri Lankan friend's place for dinner. With all due apologies to him, this one has nothing common with the lovely fish he served except the use of a coconut liqueur to marinate.

Ingredients (Serves 2):

• Prawns-  400 gm medium size; de-viened, shelled
• Tomato puree- 1 cup
• Garlic- 4 cloves; finely chopped
• Pepper corns- 2 tsp; coarsely crushed
• Butter- 2 tbsp
• Vinegar- 3 tbsp
• Coconut rum- 4 tbsp (I used Malibu, better would be if you could find vinegar made from coconut arrack)
• Red Chilli's- 2 large (coarsely crushed)
• Salt- To taste

Preparation ( Marination overnight + 30 mins cooking time):

Clean prawns, add half the chopped garlic, 2 tbsp rum, vinegar, salt, half the chilli flakes and half the pepper. Cover dish with foil and let it marinate overnight.

In an oven proof dish, add the tomato puree, remaining, chilli, pepper, garlic and the prawns. Add salt to taste. Bake in oven at 220 C for 30 mins. Fold in the butter, and the remaining into the prawns,  and leave in the still warm oven for 5 mins.

Finally. In background you can see my laptop as I am updating this blog entry

Serve hot with with rice or unleavened bread. The coconut rum/ vinegar gives a normally garlicky dish a mellowed earthy taste. Bon appetite.

Tips:

Great for wintery days where the tomato base warms your tum. If you want, by adding an additional cup of tomato puree and using smaller prawns you could convert this into a ready soup.

Bhapa Chingri (Steamed Prawns in Banana Leaves)

Prawns, rather shrimp, steamed in a mustard-chili sauce was one of the favourite holiday dishes when we were growing up. Normally, what Mom would do is seal the shrimp with the spices into a small container and put it into the bhater hari (rice-pot) once the rice was half done. The shrimp would get cooked in it's own juices on slow heat over an hour or so. And when at lunch it would be opened, you would have fragrant steam rising mixed with the pungent mustardy, chilli smell. Ahhhh.....Heaven.


Miss those rainy afternoon lunches when we would sit down for long slow lunches. Anyway, here's my personal adaptation. It's extremely simple to make, relies on the natural flavours of the spices to make the dish stand out and is great if you have a cold. Let me know if you try it.

Ingredients (Serves -2, Approximate cooking time-1 hr)

• Prawns (shelled and deveined) - 250 gm
• Mustard seeds- 4 tbsp (more if you are adventurous)
• Green chillies- 8
• Mustard Oil- 4 tbsp
• Grated coconut (optional)- 3-4 tbsp
• Salt to taste
• Banana leaves- If you can get them for wrapping the prawns-2 large

Preparation:


Soak the mustard seeds in hot water for 2 hrs. Grind half of the chillies to a paste. Add salt and the mustard seeds. Grind to a smooth paste.

Mix the paste into the prawns and set aside for 15 mins. Now wrap the prawns in the banana leaves along with the mustard paste. Sprinkle on a little bit of salt, 2 tbsp mustard oil, and two of the remaining green chillies chopped into small pieces. Use the second leaf to make a waterproof parcel as shown below. If you want, you could seal in even this pack in a length of aluminum foil so that you have no messy drips in the oven.

Bake in the oven at 200 C for 30 mins.

Remove the foil and unwrap the banana leaves. Add remaining chopped chillies and mustard oil. Serve hot with rice.

Tips:

• Picked this one up from my cousin. When grinding the mustard seeds, it is recommended that you add a pinch of salt as otherwise the paste takes on a bitter taste.
• If you want, you could add a pinch of turmeric and red chili powder with the marinade in the beginning. Lends colour and masks a bit of the fishy smell.
  

Hilsa baked with mustard

The perennial Bengali fishà Hilsa is back again. Strange that even in Muscat, you manage to find Hilsa. As my fishmonger Nizam put it, “Bhai, absolutely fresh from the Padma. Only two months on ice.” But then what else could a Bengali guy do when faced with Hilsa.

To top it all, there’s this new chappie in office, who had been eating my ear’s out with stories of home cooking, lau-chingri, posto bata, sukto, einchorer dalna, note shak bhaja. So there I was standing with a kilo of tucked under my arm and no idea of what to cook.

In the end I decided on “Illish Paturi”. Back at home, the hilsa would have been swathed in layers of fresh banana leaf and left to cook in the embers of a dying wood or coal fire, but Muscat being as removed from Calcutta as fish from the desert, what follows is my modified version.

Ingredients (Serves 1):

• Hilsa- 250 gm
• Mustard seeds- 3 tbsp
• Green Chillies- 6 large
• Mustard Oil- 2 tbsp (You can cut it down for a diet h ilsa bake, but it does leave something lacking).
• Salt to taste

Preparation (Processing 10 mins+ Baking Time 25 mins~Total Time 40 mins)

Soak mustard seeds in warm water for half an hour. Cle

an fish in fresh water. Grind mustard seeds, 4 green chillies to fine paste. Add mustard oil and salt to the paste. Spread this paste evenly on the fish. Slit and place the remaining green chillies on top of the fish. Wrap the fish in double layers of aluminum foil. Seal the packet from the edges, as you see in the pic below, so that steam does not escape. Do not wrap the fish too tightly as otherwise the pack may burst in the oven.

Set oven to 250 C and bake for 25 mins. If you have time on your hands, I would recommend cooking at 150 C for 40 mins. The longer time you can give it low temperatures, the better do the flavours mingle.

Serve hot with rice.

Tips:

• Though we are using a lot of mustard and green c hillies, the baking process tempers down the spices. So if you want to have it really spicy, I would recommend serving green chillies on the side for accompaniment.

Grilled Tuna and Vegetables

Well, you can eat Maggi in only so many ways day after day. But what do you cook up that’s healthy but can be done in 40 minutes flat with little intervention. So despite being bone tired after a day’s slugging it out with clients and the production team, here I was at Carrefour buying Tuna fillet.

And man, it turned out great. So here’s the recipe for the day- Grilled Tuna with veggies. Takes only about 40 mins. You could customize it and drop the baked potato’s to make it into a leaner meal.


Ingredients (Serves 1):

• Tuna fillet- about 200 gm
• Broccoli- 1 small floret • Baby carrots- 1 handful
• Potatoes- 2 medium sized one
• Button Mushrooms- 4 or 5 medium sized ones
• Butter- 20 gm
• Lemon- ½ a small lemon
• Rosemary
• Pepper corns- ¼ tsp whole
• Salt to taste

Preparation:

1. Pop the potatoes into the oven. Bake for 20 mins @ 200 C.

2. Clean fish, make small incisions, dress with lemon and salt.

3. Clean the veggies and separate the broccoli into bite sized morsels.

4. Once potatoes are pre-cooked, braise fish & mushrooms with butter. Put in dish with potatoes, veggies, mushrooms. Place the broccoli, carrot near the bottom where they can be stewed in the juices release by the fish. Sprinkle a few sprigs of rosemary and the pepper on top and pop into the oven.

5. Cook for 15 mins @ 200 C. And your dinner is ready.


Tips:

• A glass or two or three of white wine wouldn’t spoil the dinner. ;)

Star Fruit and Shrimp Salad.

I am in one of those “Eat Healthy” phases. For the past few days my lunch at office has been fresh fruits or salads, of course rounded off by the once in a while pizza. While thinking of new salad ideas thought up this one, and seems it turned out not to bad. For those of you wondering whether or not I tried it out myself, well, I have. ;)

It’s a pretty nifty one. Refreshing on a hot summer’s afternoon or as a cold snack when you return from office.

Ingredients:

Star Fruit/ Carambola (or ‘Kamranga' as we call them in Bengali)- 1 green, the more tender the better the tart taste.

Shrimp- 200 gms, shelled and boiled in salt water with Paprika.

Paprika coarsely ground into powder- To taste.

Salt to Taste

Preparation:

Slice the fingers of the Carambola lengthwise, leaving behind the core which contains the pips. Chop these into small triangles. Sprinkle a healthy dose of paprika onto the shrimp. Salt to taste. Toss with the Carambola slivers. Chill. Serve.

Tips:

• Originally thought of making a dressing with 'Saké, and 'Wasabi'. Marinade the prawns in this pungent mix. And post marinade, you could mix in a little more sake and pour over the salad as dressing.
  
• To increase volume you can add shredded salad greens.