Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings

Last night I attended a BIG b'day bash complete with brilliant music, flowing drinks and all the dancing to fill your heart. The event was @ Le Baroque, Chijmes and was chock-a-block with fellow Indians, and expat Bangaloreans in particular. Swapping stories, finding common acquaintances, and picking up some hot gossip (hehehe), it felt like I'd never been away.

Shagies, the fount of all that wonderful music are top notch. Apart from being talented singers and players, they are great performers - drawing in the crowd, getting everyone singing along, grooving and eventually even on the floor dancing (what to say, we are shy lah).

Of course, being desis (and very happy to be so, thank you), we head to Rupee Room, to finish off the night. There was the usual Bhangra hour (an hour too many IMO) followed by the more popular (at least with me) Bollywood music (no, Not "HINDI" film music but dhinn-chhik Bollywood music). Ah perfection.

So after all that halla-gulla of last night, and being perfumed by the stench BO (need I explain?) and malt in the air (JD and beer being the religion of the majority of last night's masses), this morning I needed a reprieve. Or was it just a longing for momma and daddy and home? To replicate the parental household, this morning I made venn-Pongal.

And what connection, those of you not acquainted with my parental stamping ground might ask, does this have with that?

Simple. Sundays was always, but always venn pongal brekafast day at the parent's. Picture this: Saturday night party scene in Bangalore. All the beer in the world, all the hard rock and metal, followed by a spot of dancing somewhere (there is always someplace). You totter home minutes before the milkman (ah the good ol' blr days), worn out with all the chilli vodkas, the G&Ts, and whatever else have you's, more usually than not, followed by the lousiest-oiliest-spiciest-nastiest (it only tastes that way the next morning) post drinking trash that passes for food. You wake up feeling like the aforementioned food and REEKING of smoke and malt that seems to have fermented in your clothes. At that moment, salvation is served in the form of, thats right - Venn Pongal!

Here's my simple-dimple recipe for venn pongal. It's not the same as the homestead's (I don't have Puchka to do the chopping and grating and cleaning and korumbu making.)

Ingredients

1/2 cup moong dal

1 cup rice

1 tsp jeera

peppercorns

pinch haldi

pinch hing

1 tbsp chopped ginger

curry leaves

Method

1. Wash rice and moong dal in a cooker, add appropriate amount of water (2 and a 1/2 in this case or thereabouts), salt to taste and plonk it on the gas for 3-4 whistles (I like my venn pongal mashy.) After the 5 whistles, wait till you can open the cooker lid.

2. In a small sauce pan/takda pan/tadka spoon take ghee (can use oil but the taste of ghee does the trick here). Once the ghee is hot, add jeera, peppercorns, haldi, asafetida, chopped ginger, sizzle it all up till you can smell the ghee fried jeera smell, and the peppercorns start popping (1 min or 2) and pour this tadka into the cooker atop the rice and dal.

3. Mix it, mash it and eat hot.

The parents would never serve this without mendiya korumbu or at the very least tomato gotsu/gojju. In Tamil Nadu, restaurants serve it with coconut and other chutnies. In Karnataka, restaurants serve it with cucumber and onion raita. Feel free to eat it with whatever you like, only remember to EAT WHILE ITS HOT.

Shubha Bhojanam!

Calories from Soup Spoon

Since Singapore food stalls do not display calorific and nutritional value of the food they sell, I've tried to find some of that information by emailing a few people.

One of the foremost restaurants/food stalls I contacted for this information was The Soup Spoon - makers of delicious soups, sandwiches, mini brownies and salads. I am fairly a regular there, so knowing the nutritional value of something I consume regularly, can only help, right?

Many thanks to Anna Lim from Customer Care @ The Soup Spoon for this information.

SOUPS	Carb	Fat	Protein	Calories
Roasted pumpkin	23.7g	3.7g	3.2g	130.7
Tangy tomato	27.7g	10g	4.1g	266.8
Mushroom	24.2g	13g	4.9g	252.6
Beef goulash	27.1g	12.9g	22.4g	307.8
Tokyo Chicken	15.4g	4.3g	18.2g	177.2
Meatless minestrone	22.9g	6.3g	11.8g	194.3

OTHERS	Carb	Fat	Protein	Calories
Smoked ham and cheese	52	30.7	30	700
Roast beef wasabi	55	28.2	40	670
Chicken Caesar	60	27	41	720
Tuna mayo	51	44	26	720
Falafel wrap	90	17.6	21.3	635
Prawn wrap	81.9	15	26.2	590
Chicken tikka wrap	83.1	14.2	37.5	600
Caesar salad	34.6	12.6	20.7	462

Healthy eating!

Heaty and Cooling Foods

By Ruth Tan

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), 'heaty' and 'cooling' are common concepts related to the balancing of ‘yin’ and ‘yang’. Most people, especially the Chinese in Asian countries such as China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singaporeans are familiar with this notion of heaty or yang, as opposed to cooling or yin, as it is a Chinese form of expressing certain set of symptoms or sensations often associated with emotional or physical reactions.

These are symptoms of heatiness:

• Irritability

• Short temperedness

• Fever

• Constipation

• Flushed face or cheeks

• Dark yellow urine

• Sore throat

• Nose bleed

• Outbreak of pimples and acne

• Rashes

• Mouth ulcers

• Indigestion

Excessive 'cold' energy in the body, on the contrary, makes us feel:

• weak

• lethargic
  
  
• tired
  
  
• restless

The constitution of each person is influenced by congenital factors as well as the acquired lifestlye (e.g diet, stress level, amount of exercise and sleep, living environment), and this varies from person to person. In other words, different foods act upon the human body in different ways and affect our state of health. The body's metabolism, functioning of organs and organ structure all combine to determine our susceptibility to these heaty and cooling effects of foods.

Cool (yin) Foods:

Bamboo shoot, banana, bitter gourd, clam, crab, grapefruit, lettuce, persimmon, salt, seaweed, star fruit, sugar cane, water chestnut, watermelon, lotus root, cucumber, barley, bean curd, chicken egg white, marjoram, oyster, pear, peppermint, radish, strawberry, tangerine, and yogurt, broccoli, cauliflower, zuccini, corn, tomatoes, pineapple, turmeric.

Neutral (balanced yin and yang) Foods:

Corn, abalone, apricot, beef, beetroot, black fungus, carp, carrot, celery, chicken egg yolk, cuttlefish, duck, fig, honey, kidney bean, lotus fruit and seed, milk, olive, oyster, papaya, pork, potato, pumpkin, radish leaf, red bean, plum, sunflower seed, sweet rice, sweet potato, white fungus, yellow soybean, brussels sprouts, snow peas, sweet potato, taro, dates, figs, raspberries, raisins, sage, rosemary, thyme, brown rice, apple.

Heaty (yang) Foods:

Pepper, cinnamon bark, ginger, soybean oil, red and green pepper, chicken, apricot seed, brown sugar, cherry, chestnut, chive, cinnamon twig, clove, coconut, coffee, coriander (Chinese parsley), date, dillseed, eel, garlic, grapefruit peel, green onion, guava, ham, leaf mustard, leek, longan, mutton, nutmeg, peach, raspberry, rosemary, shrimp, spearmint, sweet basil, tobacco, vinegar, walnut, jackfruit, durian, leek, shallots, spring onion, , apricots, blackberries, black currant, mangoes, peaches, cherry, mandarin orange, grape.

How a food is prepared also matters. For example, Prok is considered as neutral, but if you have it deep fried or grilled, it would be considered as heaty. In addition, there are some interesting broad guidelines to determine whether a certain food is heaty or cooling.

Heaty/yang foods:

• grow under the hot sun

• are sweet

• have lots of fats

• rich in sodium

• are hard, dry or spicy

Cold/yin foods:

• grow in little sunshine

• are salty

• are lean

• rich in potassium

• soft and wet

The heatiness and cooling effect of foods refer to their capacity to generate sensations - either hot or cold in our body. They do not refer to the state of the food but its effect on our bodies. For example, tea is a cooling food. This means that it generates cold energy in our body.

To seek a balance in diet, we can classify food as predominantly yin or yang. Hence, if you eat predominantly yin foods, your body is capable of producing only cold energy, in contrast, eating predominantly yang foods produces hotter energy. If a person suffers from cold rheumatism, eating foods with a warm or hot energy would be helpful. If a person suffers from acne eruptions due to consumption of fried foods, it is beneficial to eat cooling foods to counter heatiness and relieve symptoms.

Source: www.benefits-of-honey.com/heaty.html

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ruth_Tan