Hi All, how have you been, again after a break I am back with one more popular Kolkata recipe. You must be wondering why such random spells of no posts. Blame it on my zodiac but this is how a Gemini works. There are long spells when I feel very passionate about certain things like social media activity, frequent editing posting interacting and then come a spell when I happily give up all these and just enjoy some not rushed time for myself. Just to clarify I am still very much in love with eating and cooking and I quite often experiment with new dishes too, its just that not always I plan to take a picture of it and create a post out of it. Today's post would also not have materialized had it not been for a special person asking me to do so. Having said that when you have to setup the entire backdrop, food prop, food thing after such a long spell of no activity, it seems overwhelming. Especially after slogging in the kitchen for half of my precious Saturday morning in the intense summer heat, when I have to push myself to be creative in food photography too I wondered how I used to put up with this on a regular basis a year back.  But I still do it - the whole 9 yards - adjusting ambient light, setting up backdrops, rummaging through my utensil box for the perfect bowl, fishing out some napkin props from the corner of my cupboard and finally taking 50-60 odd pictures so that I can find one decent photo to edit and post. Phew! And in the middle of all this chaos, I forgot to place the meticulously cut slices of boiled egg on top of my bowl of chicken bharta before taking the shots. The realization came when I was cleaning up everything - I saw those two slices of eggs sitting there like orphans in a bowl I had put aside. For a fleeting second I did think whether I should setup everything again, but then I convinced myself out of it as I was already tired with all the running around. So readers please don't judge the photos based on the missing garnish, it tasted good actually. 

Now coming to the recipe. Kolkata loves all kind of Mughlai food. There is a plethora of Mughlai dishes tailored to the palate of Bengali food connoisseurs which you can find in all small and big restaurants across the city. Chicken Bharta is a one such Mughlai delicacy prepared with shredded chicken and hard boiled eggs cooked in selected aromatics. Usually it is considered as a dhaba style dish which pairs perfectly with roomali rotis or naans. If you are in Kolkata just step out in your neighborhood in the late evenings and you will see a beeline of people waiting outside on the road in front of small food shacks for getting the chicken bharta, chowmein or biryani packed for dinnertime. Especially if its around the weekend the crowd is more. It has almost become part of the culture there to get these delicacies packed for home on the way back to office to start off the weekend food frenzy. And when you get it so cheap in the local restaurant why would anyone slog at home to make it. 

But people like us who are miles away form the city, if we want to enjoy these we have to slog in the kitchen - there is hardly any choice there. What I have understood is that everyone has their own little formula of success for a good chicken bharta. And there are mild variations of the recipe you will find all over the net. Most of the time you will see cashew paste or  poppy seed paste being added to the dish to up the creamy quotient, but since I am making this on a hot summer afternoon, I skipped it to make it a little lighter for the tummy. Taste wise it didn't compromise anything I can say. Also at time I have seen restaurants adding Kewra scent to this dish just to make it more 'Mughlai' but I really don't like it at all. The natural aroma of the spices with the chicken feels much more authentic to me rather than loading it up with unnecessary things. I hope you like this recipe. Do comment if you have nay suggestions to make it better. I had it with homemade naan which my mother made. Maybe i will also talk about the naan recipe sometime, its an absolute hit. 

Radha Madhav during Pushya Abhishek on 6th Jan 2023

First of all wish you a very happy new year. I have been away from blogging for a while now as I was visiting my hometown Kolkata and wanted to take things a bit slow and enjoy my time here. There are a couple of places I visited while I am in my hometown and will write one by one about them. One of the places I visited in the very first weekend of 2023 was Iskon Mayapur. This was on my bucket list for long as I had really enjoyed visiting the Iskon temples in Mumbai and Pune. So the beginning of the new year felt like a perfect time to visit this holy place. 

Though one needs to hardly do any planning for visiting the other Iskon temples, for Mayapur you need to have a proper plan in place if you want to get the complete essence of the place, especially if you are visiting Mayapur for the very first time like me. I read a lot of blogs, went through a number of videos to create a detailed plan and schedule of my travel. And you will know why planning is crucial once you go through all the details I have given below. Also I thought it would be good to make a complete summary of the travel plan so that anyone planning to visit Mayapur finds it easy to plan themselves. 

If you are visiting for the first time I would recommend you to stay for at least a night so that your itinerary is not very hurried and you can cover everything at a relaxed pace. I will be talking in details about the overall Mayapur experience in my next blog where we also covered Ghurni and Krishnanagar Rajbari on our way back. This post is mainly for capturing the entire details of Iskon Mayapur which will help you plan your trip. We visited Iskon Mayapur in the first weekend of January 2023, so all the details mentioned below are as per current information.

1. Where to Stay: 

Iskon has several stay options with various tariff ranges, within the campus itself. And without a doubt these are the best options for you, as everything will be within walking distance. Some of the most popular stay options inside the campus are (Rates are as of January 2023):

The full dome planetarium theater is a major attraction in Iskon Mayapur. Located close to Govinda’s restaurant on the ISKCON Mayapur campus, it’s twelve meters in diameter, has 108 comfortable inclined theater seats, and features a tilted dome to give audiences a 360-degree immersive experience.

The theater is currently hosting two films. The first, entitled “The Churning,” offers a unique look at the Srimad-Bhagavatam pastime of “Samudra Manthan,” or the churning of the Ocean of Milk by the demigods and demons to produce Amrit, a nectar that would make them invincible. This show utilizes classic paintings from Srila Prabhupada’s books mixed with 3D graphics.

The second film, 9 Steps to Eternity, explores the nine islands of Navadvipa, and the corresponding nine forms of devotional service to the Lord. It uses parallax motion effects against a surreal computer-generated cosmic universe. However when we visited in Jan 2023, the second film show was suspended.

 

Last year when I was in Kolkata for my annual vacation time, I could spend prolonged time at my hometown. Because of the work from home policy, for the first time after I left home for my job, I could spend so much time back at home. And once you stay for so long you start understanding what you have been missing staying away from your home state. Like almost every weekends we would go and spend time at my relatives, there would be long adda sessions just like the old times when I was in my teens. It would be so good spending time talking with others instead of being glued to the phone or laptop. 

Then there would be the trips of the local produce markets. Kolkata has undoubtedly some of the best produce market in the whole country. The moment you step into one you will be bedazzled with the vast variety of fresh vegetables, fruits and fishes. The sheer variety of leafy vegetables itself is such a temptation, mainly because in Pune where I live, the variety is limited to maximum 3-4 varieties at a time. I think more than going out for sightseeing in Kolkata I love visiting the produce markets. For a foodie like me, they are literally a temptation central. 

The third thing is definitely the availability of infinite choices of street food. You would get the most exotic flatbreads and curries even in your neighborhood food shack. I would often get rumali rotis and chicken chaap packed from my nearest food shack and it was super delicious. You are really spoilt for choices I food when you are in Kolkata. I wonder how people manage to maintain their weights, because the moment I see all those street food I am tempted to eat them all! And best part, it is cheap. Street food in Kolkata would not burn a hole in your pocket but definitely make you full. 

And not only street foods, since you have so many relatives around whenever you visit their home you get treated to delicious home made food. Some of them which I had not had in like million years. Just like the dish called Muri ghonto - a signature dish in Bengali cuisine. Muri or Muro in Bengali means fishhead. So Muri ghonto literally translates to fish head medley. Traditionally there are a couple of ways to make it - either the crispy fried fish head is cooked with rice like a biryani or it is cooked with daal. Muri ghonto is typically considered to be a side dish and is had along with rice. So in yesteryears it was also made with chide or poha (flattened rice) instead of rice. I think the recipe originated to utilize the leftover fish heads in the household in older days. Our great grandmas and grandmas were really pro chefs who could think of making such amazing lip smacking dishes from even leftover ingredients. And Bengali cuisine is full of many such traditional recipes which were born out of the need to use leftover produce. 

To be honest, I had only head about muri ghonto before but never got the chance to taste it. Since the cooking process for this recipe is a little elaborated and many a times the fish heads are the most under rated things, gradually not many households used to make these old elaborate recipes on daily basis. So last year when I was visiting one of my masis home and she informed that my dida (grandma) was making muri ghonto for us that day I was really excited. And I was so ill informed about this dish that I had thought muri ghonto was like other ghontos where you would make a medley of some veggies and masalas and add the fish head to it. But at the lunch table when my dida served the muri ghonto, to my surprise it had rice in it.  I was a little flabbergasted for a few seconds, I was trying to understand how to eat a rice dish as a side with steamed rice. But then I decided what the heck, let me just try it on its own first. So i took the very first spoonful of it and was totally taken aback by the flavourful dish. Rich in spices, the flavour of the fried fish head was like the perfect match with the aromatic gobindobhog rice. To the uninitiated the combination of fish head in rice might sound a little weird but believe me it was really a match made in heaven and you wont understand how good it tastes unless you eat the version made by someone's grandma. Yes that's right, you just cannot bring the magic into this dish that your grandma would! 

But I was not gonna let that deter me from making this myself. So once I was back in Pune I asked my mom to get the recipe from grandma once again ( because I had forgotten when she had told me) and decided to go all in for it. How bad can it be was what I was thinking when I made it. And surprisingly it turned out amazing even at the first try. I was so overjoyed by it that I made it again a couple of times and each time loved it more. So I am now sharing this recipe with you all. While I would still say this definitely would not measure upto what your grandma would probably make but still it is worth the try - at least you will be able to keep a traditional recipe going and help it not get lost in the folds of time. I have added raisin and cashew in this recipe because I liked the taste. But traditionally they are not added so you can skip it. Also if you would have noticed from the title itself this is a pressure cooker method I have used just to make your lives easier and believe it the consistency turned out great. But if you have enough time at hand then go for a kadai method by all means. At the last step instead of pressure cooker use the kadai and cook it.