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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Secrets of the shadow man
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Secrets of the shadow man

Is it possible to make a fine kebab at home, and a healthy one at that? Yes, of course

Home-made tangri kebabs. Photo: Samar HalarnkarPremium
Home-made tangri kebabs. Photo: Samar Halarnkar

You are a shadow of your former self." Whenever she wants to needle me, my wife likes to fling that line. It works, of course, because no Halarnkar likes to be told he is not eating or drinking enough. Some bit of the accusation is true enough.

As the poets said, “and then one day you find, 10 years have gone behind". So, the day came, and I found myself eating and living very differently than I did before. This is no bad thing. At 50, I am healthier than ever, despite—or because of—that cardiac blip last year. I have lost 10kg, I exercise six days a week, I bound up stairs instead of taking the lift, I walk wherever I can and, about that eating, I’ve learned to make adjustments.

If I began my day with four toasts/four dosas with leftover kheema and omelette before, I now start with three oil-free dosas and coconut-free chutney. A two egg-white-omelette and two toasts come later, after a 20-minute run and 20-minute walk. A bowl of papaya, and I am ready for lunch. The days of eight chapatis are, admittedly, over. So too are the days of mutton and pork curries. I eat no more than four-five chapatis, vegetables, salad and fish. If I have chicken, I stick to two pieces, instead of six. You get the idea. An apple every evening has, thus far, kept the doctor away. My boozy indulgences are few: two glasses of red wine a week, sometimes two large pegs of rum instead. The four pegs every evening are history.

And so it goes, and so things change. Hardly a shadow, I would say, merely an adjustment to life’s changed path.

While travelling this new road, I have written before about my quest for healthy food outside home; how even innocuous kebabs are basted in ghee and whole-wheat pasta is drowned in oil. My conclusion is that there is no food like home food. Yet, I always thought some things just couldn’t be done at home, such as kebabs. Don’t you just need that restaurant succulence, that charred perfection, that red hue (and never mind the food colouring)?

You really do not.

I demonstrated this to myself in ample measure when my younger brother, a Halarnkar who has made, shall we say, fewer adjustments in life, visited last week. A hearty eater and drinker, he came over for an early dinner. It was 6 on a balmy Bengaluru December evening, too early to order kebabs. The neighbourhood restaurants had not fired up their tandoors, and the only place that previously did, an old favourite, a Dakhni-Mughlai place called Zouk, had mystifyingly converted itself to Olive Garden.

That gave me an opportunity to make my own kebabs. I have been presented with table-top grills and other kebabi paraphernalia, but my culinary operating zones are limited to gas stove and oven. They are always there. I don’t have to pull them out of storage. I hastily plunged four frozen chicken drumsticks into water and once they lost their ice, I used a simple marination (see below).

I recently rediscovered the wonders of good Kashmiri mirch; bright red, bursting with more flavour than spiciness, mild enough even to infuse into my daughter’s fish curry. I needed no food colouring, no oil/ghee or other external aids. My masala box was enough to supply me with marination ingredients, and my daily experience with grilling meats without oil—the trick is to seal them in foil and let them stay moist in their own juices—came in handy. The kebabs weren’t really charred, but that’s just as well because we are now being told that charring meats releases carcinogens.

The final taste test was left to my usually laconic brother and kebab aficionado, who, after downing five beers said, “Samar, the kebabs are very good." Considering that “good" is his adjective of praise, I had just been given high praise. But don’t take his word for it—give the oil-free kebabs a shot.

Dinner came from outside, and while the biryani (from a local hot spot called Richies) was delicious—soft chicken for me and soft mutton for my brother—did not have visible oil, it was too good to be free of ghee. As for the one who accuses me of being a shadow, she had a bowl of rice, baingan bharta and dal. Shadow indeed.

Oil-free Tangri Kebabs

Serves 2

Ingredients

4 chicken drumsticks

1 and a half to 2 tsp Kashmiri mirch powder

Half tsp cumin powder

1 tsp coriander powder

Half tsp turmeric powder

2 tbsp yogurt

2 tsp coriander, chopped

Half lime

Salt to taste

Method

Make three slashes on the drumsticks, so that the marination can seep in. Mix in all the spices, salt and yogurt with the drumsticks. Keep aside for an hour. Place the drumsticks in an oven-proof dish and seal with foil. Bake at 170 degrees Celsius for 40 minutes. Remove the foil, increase the heat to 230 degrees Celsius for 10 minutes, taking care to baste the chicken every 3 minutes with the liquid you will find when you remove the foil. Place in a serving dish, sprinkle with coriander and squeeze lime.

This is a column on easy, inventive cooking from a male perspective. Samar Halarnkar also writes the fortnightly column Frontier Mail for Mint.

Read Samar’s previous Lounge columns here.

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Published: 11 Dec 2015, 11:59 AM IST
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