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Men can cook: The precursor to pulao

Would you call a pualo a pulao if there’s no vegetables in it? I would.

Not.

This isn’t exactly a pulao. This is like a weird kushka, masala bath type rice dish. The name doesn’t matter. It’s just really tasty and you should try it.

Bathe a cup of rice in cool and clear spring water flowing in the direction of the wind. If you don’t have a stream handy, regular tap water will do. Soak this rice in clean water.

Then you go gather some stuff lying around in your kitchen.

A cardamom pod, some cloves, an inch of cinnamon stick, jeera, fennel seeds, pepper, bay leaf. Yeah that should do. It’s okay if you can’t find all of these, but you should have at least some of these things.

One medium size onions, handful of mint and corriander leaves, 2-3 green chillies, garlic-ginger paste. Chop them and grind them to a fine paste. You’re going to grind them anyway so don’t worry about them being finely chopped. Just run your knife through it roughly and that should be good enough. As long as you don’t cut your fingers in the process.

Chop one more onion and a tomato. You can chop these finely, you can chop these roughly. Whatever's easy for you, man.

Fire up the stove and put a cooker on it. Add one tablespoon of ghee and two tablespoon of vegetable oil and wait till it heats up. Add the dry spices, and fry them for a bit, till they become aromatic.

Then add your onion. Fry till it becomes the shade of the thin veil of Giovanni Strazza’s sculpture. You know what I’m talking about. 

Add tomatoes and cook till they soften.

Dump the green paste and fry till it loses the raw smell of greens. Add some salt - this apparently keeps the green from turning a nasiter shade of green. At this point, you can add some chopped vegetables and turn it into a pualo. If you’re lazy, then chill. Chips are made of potatoes and potato is a vegetable anyway.

Once it becomes pleasantly aromatic, add the rice and stir around for a bit. Add 1.5 cups of water. Give it a good mix. Shut the lid. Put the weight. Keep it on medium flame and wait till the cooker yells bloody murder twice. If you smell something burning then you turn off the stove and pray that your mother won’t notice the burnt bottom of the cooker.

Now WAIT for the damn thing to cool down. Should take you some 10 minutes.

Once you remove the lid, you can fluff the rice with a fork/spoon or you can be a savage and eat straight from it. I’m not going to tell you how to live your damn life.

There. Enjoy. 

Comments

  1. Here i go again, J, u shud write more, of course u write all the time but m not talking about "writing for living", m talking about this "writing to chill, to make people laugh, to entertain dem, to make dem ponder, to make dem go to google n search things", lol. Looking forward for more of ur write ups. A fan!!

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