India

Passport & Plate - Kothu Parotta

India | Saturday, March 7, 2015 | 5 photos

Ingredients
Black mustard seeds
1 tbs oil
Half a medium onion (preferably red), chopped
Curry leaves
1 tsp minced ginger
Chopped green chillies
One medium tomato, chopped
Garam masala and chaat masala ¼ tsp of each
Salt and chilli powder to taste
3 parathas, chopped
2 eggs

 

How to prepare this recipe
Paratha is an Indian flatbread here I have used ready made, which are cooked beforehand, they are used here as leftovers and work better if a little stale. This makes a fantastic breakfast or brunch. I'm lucky enough to live in Tooting, London, where these ingredients are readily available, however many big supermarkets now stock things like dried curry leaves.

Heat the oil, add the mustard seeds, once they begin to ‘pop’, add the curry leaves then the onion and cook until translucent.
Add the minced ginger and chopped green chillies and the tomato, then the dried spices. Keep stirring.
You can add your own combination of spices, ground cumin, coriander also work well. Whatever you like or have to hand.
Add the paratha and combine, until they are slightly softened.
Finally add the eggs, and stir until they are just cooked through, or however you like them. You can really adapt this recipe to taste, adding more or less spice and/or heat.

You can also add chicken or any other meat.

 

The story behind this recipe
This is a 'street food', the type of which can be found in many vans on London streets, but I had this in the middle of Tamil Nadu. January 2008 to be exact. We were racing motorised tuk-tuks from Chennai to Kanyakumari, the Southern Tip of India for charity and were being filmed for SSTV, the Tamil Nadu equivalent of MTV. Now driving in India is not recommended at the best of times, it is hot, dangerous, and the Highway Code, well they ripped that up years ago. Having said that driving a tuk-tuk through places where they may have only seen one white person in months, is a unique and liberating way of seeing the country. Everything is right there: the smells, the noise, the chatter of old men at tables playing cards, corns being laid in the road so passing 'traffic' does the threshing for the local farmer. True agricultural life. And this recipe takes me right back to the thick of it. The roadside cafe which was suggested by the crew, this is where they would eat. It was nothing more than a shack with tables. We, being three white ladies, accompanied by said film crew, had a couple of odd looks and we secured a 'prime' table (read not by the loo - it seems restaurant etiquette is the same the world over!) The man cooking chopped the red onion into perfectly even slices with an enormous cleaver. On a log. WITHOUT LOOKING AT IT. I swore he was going to lose his hand at one point. We were mesmerised. We watched as he used an upturned metal cup to combine all the ingredients on the vast metal sheet which served as a hotplate. The smell was incredible. We ate off bananas leaves with our hands and I kept having to be reminded that you eat with your right hand as you wipe your hand with your left (and I'm left handed....awkward). We had many meals in India in much more salubrious surroundings, but this one was the one that stands out. I am writing this from memory seven years later.