Skip to main content

Iron Chef meets Iyer n' chef !!

By
Edit

Iron chef meets Iyer n' chef..

by Panfusine on Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 11:22am
Ever have those moments when someone mentions something, anything & it sticks to your mind with a crazy glue like strength?.. One such thought was when my friend Shailaja Venkatasubramanyan once wrote to me about Onion Sambhar & a potato roast curry.. Well this is one such thought byte for me personally. So when I was watching a recent episode of 'Cook like an Iron Chef' by Chef Michael Symon, which featured a dish with potatoes & Pacific cod, It was Shailaja that came into mind & I just HAD to act on it..

Traditional (tamil brahmin) Tam Bram festival fare involves a full three course meal each with rice as its focus, accompanied by about 5-6 vegetable dishes prepared in different styles. Very different from a typical western sit down lunch or dinner. The first course is rice with Sambhar, a thick lentil gravy seasoned primarily with Tamarind and a coriander seed influenced spice blend. The chef is free to use their creative skill & include almost any vegetable of their choice. A very common combination of dishes for this first course include a potato 'roast' & Usli, a chick pea batter stirfry with a wide choice of greens.

My inspiration from Chef Michael Symon's presentation from his show 'Cook like an Iron Chef':

(For those of you interested in the original Recipe here's the link: http://www.cookingchanneltv.com/recipes/michael-symon/potato-wrapped-pacific-cod-with-a-grilled-leek-red-bliss-and-purple-peruvian-potato-and-lobster-salad-recipe/index.html

Sambhar rice & Usli in a baked potato roulade served with a side of sweet & sour Mangai Pachadi.

The possibilities of variations are a plenty. The Usli ensures that the dish is well rounded nutritionally & not exclusively carbo loaded.

For this you need:
 Any type Sambhar rice or even prepared Bisibela.
Usli (feel free to use any kind, I used a Rappini (Broccoli Rabe) usli
1 potato, peeled & sliced thinly Lengthwise.
Curry leaves.
A blend of Salt, Red Chilli powder, a pinch of turmeric & Asafetida as per taste
Oil for blanching & Sauteing.

Method:
 Heat oil in a skillet & fry the potato slices till blanched (cooked till just soft). Remove from oil &  drain on a paper towel
Arrange the potatoes slices on a cling wrap sheet as shown


Layer the sambhar rice & usli on the potato.


Roll the potato slices around the rice & Usli, taking care to ensure that the cling wrap does not get entangled in the roll. At this point you may refrigerate to roll to prepare later. This also ensures that the potato starch adheres between the slices to form a firm covering that will not fall apart.


Sprinkle with the salt, turmeric, chilli powder blend. Adjust the seasoning as per your personal taste



Preheat oven to 300 F
In a non stick skillet (this is one place where I prefer investing in a  good non stick skillet with a metal handle that can be used in the oven) heat sesame oil and gently place the potato roulade.
Add the torn curry leaves on top of the roulade. Keep spooning the oil from the skillet onto the top to release the flavors from the spice blend & curry leaves .
Pop the skillet into the oven for ~ 20 mins until the top surface of the roulade is golden.
Cut & serve warm with a side of Mango pachadi.


Bon appetit!

Comments

  1. GBOctober 26, 2010 at 5:54 PM

    So innovative!It looks delish! :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. ShailajaJune 2, 2015 at 2:00 AM

    So honored that something I wrote sparked your imagination. Reading this made me hungry!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to hear feedback from you, your thoughts, ideas and suggestions.

Popular posts from this blog

Sputtering back....

By
I seriously feel like this scene from the movie 3 idiots .. remember this one? The way I kept racking up drafts and eventually stopped doing that as well. Lulled into complacence by the quick high from Instagram posts. Recipe measurements hastily scribbled into a Moleskine notebook faithfully depending upon my moods. The truth is that I keep over thinking the backstories needed to make the post more interesting while in reality the truth is that ideas and inspirations just occur spontaneously (like little itches , sneezes or twitches) whenever the opportunity happens to strike. Some really cool ideas that scare the beejeezus out of me and yet prove to be utterly delightful and simple in the end. Others, that seem so trivial that I feel it wouldn't be worth crowing about -- even if there are enough other recipes in that genre that get so much publicity simply because the author happens to have the right marketing knack. So in the past 4 years that I've been...
3 comments
Read more

Unusual Ingredients - Unripe Blueberry Achar

By
T'was just another Summer afternoon, The kids were home for the summer holidays, getting bored, there's only so much summer reading you can force them to do, and the Indian mommy in me could no longer caution them against going out in the afternoon  (I've solemnly refused to use that horrid excuse of 'You'll get a dark tan if you stay out in the mid day sun'), and so we decided to head out to Terhune orchards for the blueberry picking. The kids never say no to outings to the orchard, they LOVE the trip there, the cute yellow dogs and the cats,  the chocolate crinkle and Snickerdoodle cookies, and they positively trip over grabbing buckets and heading joyfully towards the berry bushes... ... And there it ends, the younger one loses herself in her delightful imaginary worlds where she probably thinks she's hacking her way through virgin Amazon jungle, sighing at every branch that brushes against her legs, picks 2 or 3 berries as if they were a new as ...
6 comments
Read more

Product Review: Ninja Mega Kitchen system and a recipe for Masala Dosa

By
 One of the biggest reasons for attending conferences is the priceless experience of meeting fellow bloggers and get an invaluable exposure to all things  culinary. This includes vendors with new products to savor and get inspiration from. I had no complaints about whatever appliances I had for making traditional Dosa (Traditional South Indian rice & lentil crepes) batter, a sturdy tabletop stone grinder that you could add the Urad dal, turn the timer on , and 30  minutes later, come back to a container full of fluffy, batter with the consistency of whipped egg whites. The The cons of this is the cleaning up, of the various parts, the roller, the grinding bin, the multiple trays on which the rollers need to be placed while transferring the rice & lentil batter, the invariable drips of thick batter on the counter.... you get the point, It takes quite a bit of time. I was pleasantly surprised when the appliance company, Ninja asked me if I'd like to try an...
14 comments
Read more