帰国報告
その1 India! India!
その2 Kochi Day 1
その3 Kochi Day 2
早起きが気持ちのいいコーチンの町。
この日はイースターサンデー。
ステイ先のホスト曰く、日曜日はよくお肉料理を作るのだとか。
そこで決定。『日曜日はビリヤニの日！』ということで、今日のお料理教室はビリヤニ。
しかもマトン・ビリヤニを教えて頂けることに。わ～い！
われらがホストファザーがマーケットから新鮮なマトンを用意してくれていました。
ビリヤニはいわゆる炊き込みご飯と言ったところでしょうか。
お米とスパイス、そして具はお肉やお魚、野菜など様々。
日本の炊き込みご飯のように、生米から具と出汁で炊く、という方法ではなくて、お米と具は別々に調理してからそれぞれを層にして作ります。ビリヤニポットと呼ばれるビリヤニ専用の大鍋で、大量に調理するからおいしさも一段と深まり、そして大勢で食べる楽しさも加わります。
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| A fisher man in the morning. |
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| Morning chai. |
ビリヤニを習うのはお昼なので、朝はマサラドーサとチャトニ2種類を習いました。
ドーサは米とウラドダルを発酵させた生地で焼くクレープ。マサラドーサは、スパイシーなジャガイモの炒め煮を中に折り込みます。チャトニはトマトとココナツの2種類でした。
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| Dosa and chutney |
それにしても連日食べ通しです。
暑い上に動き回っているので、お腹はきちんと空くのですが、運動らしい運動はしていないのでなんとなく体のなまりを感じ始めていました。
朝食後、スパイスの買い付けをしに、ホストファザーがお勧めのスパイス屋さんに案内してもらいました。全て契約農家のオーガニックスパイスだと、何度も強調してくれていました。
スパイス屋さんは歩いてすぐの場所にありました。
温度差や湿気に弱いスパイス。きちんと空調が効いて、管理されたお店でしたので安心。
若くて目のキラキラした、いかにも誠実そうな青年が次々にスパイスのサンプルを出してくれます。
AyamiとAcoはスパイス、そして料理のプロですから、お店に入った途端に仕事スイッチオンの状態。本場のスパイスの香り、色、味の濃さや艶めきに感動。
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| The spice shop |
シナモンは一切れ噛むと、お砂糖菓子のように甘いのです。こんなシナモン、今まで出会ったことがありません。
クローブは一番摘みと二番摘みがあるということも、初めて知りました。日本に入ってくるのは全て二番摘みなんだとか。一番摘みの爽やかでいて鼻を貫ける若々しい酸味といったら！こぼれんばかりの香気を放っていて、この香りを嗅げば、クローブがまさに花の蕾そのものだと感じられます。
私はまだまだスパイス初心者の部類なのでそれぞれ500グラムもあれば十分かな、と欲しいものを一つ一つ選んでいきました。しかし2人の魔女はキロ買いです。お気楽な私とは気合が違います。ルルモールでの生地の買い付けの時は、立場が逆でしたが…。
スパイス屋さんで1時間半はたっぷり居ました。
大量に買い付けて、当然のごとく値段交渉に入ったのですが、Ayamiの交渉術には頭が下がりました。道行くインド人たちをたちまち虜にしてしまうあの笑顔で、一歩も引かないという単純ながら最も効果的であろう戦法です。あの笑顔でじっと見つめられると、ついつい『ええい、持ってけ泥棒！』と言いたくなってしまうのです。スパイス屋の青年は『頼むからそんな瞳で見ないでくれ～…！』と弱っていました。彼の一存で値引き率を決められないからなんだと、ボスに電話で相談をしていました。
そのやり取りを見ているのは楽しかったです。
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| Ayami picking star aniseed. |
スパイス屋さんでの買い付けが終わり、ほっとしました。
帰り道にあった小さなお店で少しお土産を見て回りました。
私はお部屋に飾るちょうどいい絵が見つかったので、スカーフや銀のアンクレットと一緒に買いました。白い象と黒い象、そして戸口に飾るという魔よけの神さまの絵です。
B&Bに戻るとマトン・ビリヤニを習いました。ああ忙しい！
出来立てのビリヤニは香り高く、やさしい旨みがあって、ビリヤニってこんなに美味しいものなんだ、と初めて食べた私は大満足。
2人の魔女も嬉しそうでした。
昼食後はカレーリーフの巨木から葉を摘んで、干す作業に取り掛かりました。
カレーリーフはカレーを作る際に用いるものなのですが、日本では生では売られておらず手に入るものはドライです。生葉を使いたければ、苗を買って育てるしか今のところ方法がありません。カレープラントとは全く別物です。
私たちのステイ先の裏庭には立派なカレーリーフの木がそびえ、お料理する時にそこからわさっと枝ごと採って来ては、ぜいたくに使います。ああ、なんてうらやましいの…。
生木で日本に連れて帰るのは無理なので、せめて少しでも本場のカレーリーフをもって帰りたいという思いから、カレーリーフを干すというアイデアを提案したとことろ、AcoもAyamiも大賛成してくれました。そして、ついでに裏庭のマンゴーも、チャトニかピクルスにして持って帰らない？とも提案。これも快諾。私たちのホストは本当に懐の深い方々でした。
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| Afzal, picking some curry leaf branches from a rooftop. |
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| Little Niya, helping her dad. |
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| A great mango tree. |
イースターの日曜なので、ルルモールへ買い物へ行くというホストファミリーに、夕食はどうする？と訊かれ、自分たちで何か探しますとこたえ、3人で夕方散歩へ出かけました。
町の小さなお店を見て回り、今後の計画などの相談をしたりしました。
夜になり、観光客向けっぽいところを避けながら夕食を食べれそうな場所を探しましたが、イースターの日曜なのであまりお店が空いておらず、思いついてリキシャ―を捕まえ、屋台に連れて行って！と頼みました。屋台で夕食を買う間、待っていてもらって、B&Bまで乗せて帰ってもらうという計画。
連れて行ってくれた屋台がこれ、ビンゴ！という感じの大衆食堂。インドではこういうお店をホテルと呼ぶようです。私たちが連れてきてもらったのはその名も『ホテル シティライト』。色々と目ぼしいものがあって写真を撮ったり、インド人のおじさまたちに愛想を振りまいていたら結構時間がかかってしまったのでチャイを注文して、リキシャ―のお兄さんにもチャイを奢らせてもらいました。実は、このリキシャ―のお兄さん、私好みでとってもかっこよかったのです。
結局その食堂はB&Bのすぐ近くだったのですが、夜なのでリキシャ―に乗って正解。
さてB&Bに戻り、食べようとテーブルに戦利品を広げたところで、皿がない！ということに気付いたのです…。ホスト達は出かけていないし、彼らがいないとメインの建物にあるキッチンは使えない。ビニール袋に入ったカレーをこぼれないようにするのが大変でしたが、何とかうまく食べられました。
調子に乗って色々と買ったのはいいのですが、アツアツではなかったのと、作られてから時間が経ってしまったプットゥは固まってしまって本来の美味しさではなかったのだろうなと思いました。
でも、とっても楽しい夕食でした。
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| Hotel City Light |
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| A lovely guy who loved our camera. |
つづく…
Coming home
Part1India! India!
Part2 Kochi Day 1
Part3 Kochi Day 2
Their cinnamon and clove amazed me the most of all.
When I bit a piece of cinnamon, it's sweet like a sugar candy. I'd never met any cinnamon like that before.
Clove has a first picked and the second picked, which I didn't even know. All the cloves which we buy in Japan are the second picked cloves, I heard. The first picked cloves has blooming fresh and sour smell which tunnel through your nose trills. I can't describe how gorgeous it was! Its aroma is spilling out all over. Once you smell it, you can be easily convinced that cloves are actually flower buds to bloom.
I'm still belongs to a beginner of spice so I thought 500g is enough for each spice for me. I chose what I need one by one. However the other two witches were buying few kilograms for each. They were not like me. When we were at the Lulumall and buying fabrics, our positions were completely reversed though...
We spent at least good 90 minutes at the spice shop.
We bought loads and we worked on price negotiation, I took off my hat to Ayami on this business. She had this gorgeous smile which makes every Indian guy turn around to her and once she set her goal, she never budge an inch. It's very simple, but the most effective strategy. If you were stared by her lovely eyes, you just want to say "Oookaaay, take it!!" in the end. The young guy at the spice shop was completely perplexed and pleaded with her not to stare at him like that. It was his boss to make the decision about discount and not him, so he kept making phone calls to ask his boss about our prices.
It was quite entertaining to watch him doing all that.
We all felt relieved after buying spices.
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| Washings... |
It's so refreshing to wake up early in Kochi.
This day was Easter Sunday.
Our hosts said that they usually cook meat on Sundays.
So we decided. "Sunday is a Biryani Day!" So our cooking class menu was biryani.
And it was mutton biryani. Whoohoo!
Our host father prepared fresh mutton from a market for us.
Biryani is a sort of Japanese takikomi gohan, or mixed rice.
It's made with rice, spice and something like meat, fish or vegetables.
Unlike making takikomi gohan, rice won't be boiled with other ingredients in dashi, or soup stock. Biryani rice and other ingredients are cooked separately, and then they are put together in layers.
Biryani is normally cooked in a big "biryani pot", a special cookware to make biryani. So when you make biryani, its quantity is naturally a plenty. So it's more tasty and also it's shared with many people and that is fun too.
We were going to learn biryani for lunch, so we learnt masala dosa and two different chutneys in the morning.
Dosa is crepe made with fermented dough of rice and urad dal. Masala dosa has stir-flied and boiled potato with spice inside. Chutneys were tomato and coconut.
I felt like we'd been eating since the day we left Japan.
It's hot and we'd been doing something all the time, so we did get hungry, but we hadn't been doing any proper exercises at all, so I felt my sense of body control was getting dull.
After breakfast, our host father took us to the spice shop he recommended for us to buy some spices. He kept saying the shop has a contracted farmers and the spices they sell are all organic.
The shop was just around the corner from our B&B.
Spice doesn't like having different temperatures or humidity. The shop was air conditioned and their spices were well looked after so we could trust the shop.
A young guy at the shop, who has this glistening eyes to tell his honesty, gave us different samples of spices one after another. Ayami and Aco, who are both professionals about spice and cooking, had already switched on their "working mode" as soon as they stepped inside of the shop. We all were amazed by the rich scent, colour, and flavor of the genuine spices.
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| Cinnamon |
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| Clove |
When I bit a piece of cinnamon, it's sweet like a sugar candy. I'd never met any cinnamon like that before.
Clove has a first picked and the second picked, which I didn't even know. All the cloves which we buy in Japan are the second picked cloves, I heard. The first picked cloves has blooming fresh and sour smell which tunnel through your nose trills. I can't describe how gorgeous it was! Its aroma is spilling out all over. Once you smell it, you can be easily convinced that cloves are actually flower buds to bloom.
I'm still belongs to a beginner of spice so I thought 500g is enough for each spice for me. I chose what I need one by one. However the other two witches were buying few kilograms for each. They were not like me. When we were at the Lulumall and buying fabrics, our positions were completely reversed though...
We spent at least good 90 minutes at the spice shop.
We bought loads and we worked on price negotiation, I took off my hat to Ayami on this business. She had this gorgeous smile which makes every Indian guy turn around to her and once she set her goal, she never budge an inch. It's very simple, but the most effective strategy. If you were stared by her lovely eyes, you just want to say "Oookaaay, take it!!" in the end. The young guy at the spice shop was completely perplexed and pleaded with her not to stare at him like that. It was his boss to make the decision about discount and not him, so he kept making phone calls to ask his boss about our prices.
It was quite entertaining to watch him doing all that.
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| Price negotiation.... |
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| "Give me a breeeeeeak!" |
We all felt relieved after buying spices.
On the way back to B&B, we stopped by a little shop for souvenirs.
I found nice pictures for my room so I bought them with a scarf and an silver anklet. The pictures were of a white elephant, a black elephant, and an apotropaic god which is good to put up on top of the doorway.
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| This is the biryani pot! |
Back to B&B, we learnt mutton biryani. Gosh, how busy we were!
Steaming hot biryani was full of fragrant and had mild "umami". It was the very first time for me to eat biryani and I was surprised how great it was.
Other two witches looked satisfied too.
After lunch, we worked on picking curry leaves from a big curry tree and dried the leaves.
Curry leaf is used when you cook curry. In Japan, fresh leaves aren't sold, but dried ones. If you want to use freshly picked leaves, you have to buy a young plant and grow it by yourself. Curry leaf is completely different thing from curry plant.
Our host has a great curry tree in their backyard and every time they cook something, they pick a branch and used curry leaves without any hesitation. Ah, how we wish we could do that....
It's impossible to take a tree back to Japan, but we wanted to take some of their curry leaves with us. So I suggested to dry their curry leaves. Both Aco and Ayami loved my idea. So I also suggested to make pickles or chutney with our host's mango. Our host said yes for both of our idea. We were so lucky to have them as our host.
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| Curry leaves. |
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| Washing off dusts and tiny eggs of bugs |
It was Easter Sunday, so our host was going to go to the Lulumall for shopping. They asked us what to do with our dinner. We said we'll find something and we went for walk in the dusk.
We looked around little shops in town and discussed about our next plans.
The night came and we looked for somewhere we could have supper, avoiding touristy places, but it's Easter Sunday and there weren't many places opened. We decided to grab a rickshaw and asked the driver to take us to any stall he knew for supper. And also asked him to wait for us while we were buying and take us back to B&B.
He took us to the place just like we wanted to find. It was a local cheap restaurant. In India, those places are called hotels. The one we were taken to was called Hotel City Light. There were many things we wanted to look, so we were taking lots of photos and smiling to local guys and it was taking us longer than we thought to buy our supper. So we ordered four chai and gave one to our driver. Actually the driver was really good looking and I liked a kind of face like his.
The hotel was very close to our B&B after all, but the street was dark in the night and taking a rickshaw was a right decision.
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| On the left was our rickshaw driver. |
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| Chai!! |
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| This man was soooooo cute! |
Back in our B&B, we took out our trophies on the table, and then we realized we had no plate... Our host had gone to the mall and we couldn't go into the mail building to use their kitchen. It was tricky not to spill our curry out of the plastic bags, but we managed to finish our supper.
We got carried away and ended up buying many things, but most of them were cold by the time we ate. Especially puttu became solid and dry. I think it could had been more tasty.
However, we had a very fun evening.
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| This is how you eat dinner without any plate. |
To be continued...
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