Tendli Pickle or Tindora

While talking to my cousin in Brampton recently, she reminded me of this wonderful pickle made from tendlis or gherkins, how they are known in the West.  Frankly, I’ve never seen this vegetable in mainstream grocery markets but I suspect that Indian grocery stores worldwide carry them.  I remember the vegetable itself is quite bland but when cooked up with coconut and spices, made for a tasty vegetable.

Mae and Santan both made this delectable pickle from tendlis and I remember going into this darkened pantry off a little room entered from the kitchen.  Straight ahead of the door was this dark cool room, a cold storage of sorts where Mae stored pickles in earthenware jars and large crocks.  She also kept different kinds of jaggery here.  How would I know that right?  Well, I did  get caught coming out of there once with dark stains around my mouth.  Mae scolded me but i doubt I got a whipping.   Mae was always too happy to see her grandchildren to be angry for any length of time.  Again, these pictures of tendlis or the recipe does not belong to me but some special goans on the web who are happy to share.

Tendlis are not to be mistaken for pickling cucumbers because they somewhat resemble each other.  NOT!  In this blog, I intend only to post the pickle recipe but please know that you can prepare many vegetable dishes from tendlis.  So, here is Kristina’s tendli pickle recipe.  Enjoy

Ingredients :

Tendlis (small gherkins) 100
Oil 2 cups
Green chillies 10
Garlic 3 pods
Ginger 3″piece
Vinegar 1 cups
Chilly powder 2 tbsp
Turmeric 1 tbsp
Sugar 2 tbsp

Preparation :

Cut the tendlis into quarters, add salt and hang overnight in a muslin cloth to let the water drain.

Mince the green chillies, garlic and ginger. Heat the oil over fierce heat, add the chillies, garlic and ginger. Fry well being careful not to burn it.

When well fried, add the vinegar, chilly powder, turmeric, tendlis and sugar. Bring to boil stirring continuously, then remove from fire.

Pour into sterilized jars making sure the pickle is covered with oil.

Bodiem House – Side View

If you were looking at Mae’s house from the side, the same side where the other Lobo’s house is located, this is what it would look like in it’s dilapidated condition. When we visited there as youngsters, it was in fine condition. It is sad to see it in this way but also a good memory. This photo is provided by Roar Kneppen.

My father always wanted to get there after retirement and fix up the house and live in it.  Unfortunately, he had to consider others and therefore did not see it through. What would our lives have been like, had he followed his dream?

Mae never had the money to deal with renos and after she died, Santan didn’t manage either.  I hope that by now, someone who cares has taken it into their hands to do something with this property.

Godshe from Goa

These days, I find myself thinking of Mae and all the special sweets she would make for us kids who had just arrived from the big city of Bombay.  Godshe was one of these sweets – yum.  For so long, I’ve been wanting to find a recipe so I could make it for my own little grandchildren and here it is now, thanks to GoanFoodRecipes.com.

I cannot find jaggery easily where I live now therefore, I resort to a combination of brown sugar and molasses.

1 cup rice

1/4 cup moong dal

thick and thin milk of one coconut (I use 1 can of milk – separate it into two and thin one portion down)

1/2 cup brown sugar 1/4 cup molasses

pinch of salt

Soak the rice and dal overnight and then cook it in the thin coconut milk.  Cook and stir occasionally until it is soft – use low flame.

Once rice and dal are a soft consistency, add the sugar and molasses, keep stirring until the mixture thickens and then add the thick coconut milk.  Stir, stir and add a pinch of salt taking care not to let it stick to bottom of pot.  When the mixture thickens enough to look like it could set, pour it into a pie plate and let set so you can cut it into soft wedges.  Some people like it warm like a pudding.

Bibique

Mae made this Bibique for us even when it wasn’t Christmas time.  All Coans made this this layered cake at Christmas but since us Lobos never went to Bodiem during Christmas, Mae would make it for us in May.  Bless that sweet woman who did everything in her power to give her grandchildren a good time.  I wish that I had got my recipe right from Mae but alas, she was gone before I got interested in culinary matters.  Priyanka Garpure has kindly supplied me with this one:

200 gms all purpose flour

10 egg yolks

500 gms sugar

Thick coconut milk from one large coconut

2 gms powdered nutmeg

200 gms ghee (clarified butter)

1. Extract coconut milk from the coconut by grating it and grinding it with water. Mix the flour, sugar and egg yolks with coconut milk and stir thoroughly till sugar has dissolved. In case you want layers of slightly different colors caramelize a little sugar and add to one half of the batter and use them alternately.

2. Now add the nutmeg powder and keep aside.

3. In an aluminum vessel, heat some clarified butter in a pan and pour in one cup of batter.

4. Bake this layer on low heat till it turns light brown in color.

5. Then add another spoonful of clarified butter and another cup of batter.

6. Once the bottom layer is done the heat has to be supplied from the top.

7. Continue to bake till all the batter is used up.

8. Once done, turn the tin upside down, remove the bebinca and cool before serving

Note:  I’ve tried this method by pouring batter into a springform pan and placing under the broiler (rack should be in the middle of the oven).  It’s effective!

The Bimbli Tree

Ahhh!  Remember the bimbli tree?  I’ll bet there was one right outside your Goa house.   This one is much like the one just outside the hall window in Mae’s house located in Boddiem, a little village in Bardez.

As soon as we arrived here for our summer vacation in May, we dashed outside to the Bimbli tree and helped ourselves to its tart and juicy fruit.

‘at least put some salt on it’ Santan would yell and hand us spoons of salt which we held in the palm of one hand, leaving the other one free to pluck bimblis and dip them into the salt before shoving them into our mouths.

‘leave some for mae to make pickle with’ Santan would yell from the window laughing at our puckered mouths and shaking heads.  So, we quit eating all the fruit and left some for Mae to make pickle with because each day, the farm hands who left at break of dawn without breakfast, looked forward to their kanjee with pickles.  Out of the two or three pickle selections that Mae let them eat with their kanjee (also spelt like Congee), one of the selections was the bimbli pickle.  In case any of you have forgotten or don’t know, kanjee is a thick rice porridge made by boiling less rice with a lot of water and a little salt.  The result is this thick blandish soupy mix and generally accompanied by a piece of fried or pickled fish.  Pickles are nice with it too, the fiery taste of lime or raw mango, nicely complimenting the bland taste of kanjee.

Travel from Mapusa

These vehicles rock but make sure that your driver’s eyes are clear and that he repeats the directions to where you want him to take you.  Beware of the driver who has blood shot eyes and especially beware of the one who wears shades.

On my last trip, I was too tired to follow my own instructions, I got into the first rickshaw that offered to take me to Granny’s village into the interior.  My mouth had hardly closed from the tired yawn when the vehicle yanked me forward and my teeth were clamped onto the driver’s shoulder.  No, I’m not a vampire, I assured him.  He laughed and carried on driving like a madman sprung loose from an insane asylum.  I was too tired to feel any fear.  This is what it must be like to truly let go, I told myself.  Let go and let God.  It was a nice feeling.  Freeing.  I even slept, if you can believe that because the vehicle rocked from side to side, hit every pothole on the roads and bidi smoke from the driver’s incessant habit, filled my nostrils.

I didn’t even wake when he deposited me at the base of the village from where I’d have to walk.  He said loudly

‘you have to move from her miss.  I cannot drive up those rocks’

Startled out of my dreams of sorpotel and bibique, I blinked and surveyed my surroundings.  Nothing looked familiar to me.  After all, the last time that I had visited Granny’s village had to be at least ten years before that or more.   I gave the driver his fare, dragged my bag out of the vehicle and watched as he drove off in a cloud of dust.

Sorpotel and how it got to be that

So, folks, if you don’t know it, this is a Goan delicacy called Sorpotel.  I’ll post the recipe at the bottom but I’d like you to know it isn’t a great favorite with me.  For me, it brings up the issue of our granny’s pet pig and how it got slaughtered when we went to visit for our summer vacation.  I know that granny wanted to celebrate our arrival and all but man!  For a whole 3 or 4 days, Soares was our pet.  No one, at least not us little guys, thought that Soares was going to wind up in a dish. We followed him all over the place ‘soares, soares!’  Soares the pig had a tendency to hide in the thrush behind the water well.  Granny didn’t want us going anywhere near the well which was a huge hazard.  I’ll have to post a picture of a Goa house well and you can decide if you would let little children near it.  Anyway, we had a lot of fun with Soares.

Imagine my horror when I woke to God awful squealing, screeching and screaming.  I thought the world was coming to an end and ran to the window in time to see Soares being hauled away.  His hind legs were tied to a wooden pole and his forelegs to the other end of the pole.  Two men had each end of the pole with Soares dangling in the middle and when I tried to run after them, Mae (granny)  held me back.  She tried to distract me by dangling these sticky goan sweets in front of my face.  I’m ashamed to say that it worked.

On the feast of St. Anne, everyone in the village celebrated and it was an amazing food fest.  All the Goan delicacies that we city folk were missing was at our disposal.  I never went near Sorpotel because it was made from …. I don’t even want to utter his name.  The main ingredient in Sorpotel is pork.  I found this recipe online and have tried it.  It looks as close to the one granny made but I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pool.  Goans rave about it and you might like it.  Soares R.I.P.

Sorpotel

ngredients:

1 kg boneless pork

1 pork liver, 1 heart, 1 tongue, 2 kidneys

3 cups water

12 dried red chillies/peppers

12 peppercorns

12 cloves garlic

1 inch piece ginger

1 tsp cumin seeds

8 cloves

2 one-inch pieces cinnamon

¼ cup vinegar

½ cup oil

1 peg coconut feni

Salt to taste

6 green chillies/peppers, chopped

4 medium onions, chopped fine

Method:

Wash and pat dry the meats. Put in a deep pan with the water on medium heat. Cover with a lid and parboil the meats, (approx. 20 minutes). Remove from the fire, cool and dice the meats fine. Keep aside the water.

Put all the spices except the green chillies/peppers and onion, into the blender/grinder with the vinegar and grind to a fine paste. Heat the oil in a deep pan on medium heat and lightly fry all the diced meat, stir frying continuously till it is lightly browned. To the fried meat add the ground spices in vinegar and stir fry for 5 minutes. Add salt to taste, coconut feni, any remaining vinegar, the stock of the boiled meat , chopped onions and green chillies. Lower the heat and let the sorpotel simmer fro 45 minutes or more. Take care to stir it occasionally. When the oil comes to the top and the sauce is thick, remove from the heat.

Remember the sorpotel tastes better on the 3rd or 4th day, after it has been warmed up once a day till the day it is served. It is customary to serve sorpotel with sannas for special occasions.

This recipe is from www.goacom.com – Jerry’s Recipe Corner

Enjoy