Salmon (Happy Valentine's Day!)

Dear readers,

Valentine's Day is coming up! I have always loved pink and hearts, so this is my favourite holiday! To celebrate this year, I will be going to a special Valentine's Day party at the playgroup I often attend. Everybody brings special food - the kind that's fit for kids, you know! So that means there will be lots of decorated sugar cookies, cupcakes, cake, and so on.

I love my sweets (especially when they are decorated with pink frosting!!) but I decided to do something a little different for my food item; I am calling them "Wild at Heart Salmon sandwiches"! (it's wild Alaskan salmon, or at least so the tin claims). Cute, eh? I used a heart-shaped cookie cutter and cut little white bread hearts out of each slice to make my pretty sandwiches. It wasn't as easy as it sounds - the bread was soft and delicate as tissue paper (and about as nutritious!)

The Carling Avenue connection? The mayonnaise is from Damas Middle Eastern store and the bread is from the shiny new Shopper's Drug Mart on Carling Ave. Surprisingly, for a drugstore, they have a good grocery section, with bacon, organic pasta, and gourmet choco-hazelnut spread. And the best part is, they're open 'til midnight!

I mixed the salmon with coriander, onion and lots of mayonnaise (that's why those commercially made salmon sandwiches taste so good - lots of fat!). Dill would have tasted sensational, but they are still very tasty with the onion and coriander.

So there I was at 10:30 pm, cutting little hearts out of white bread - I wonder how many other moms were up late at night making Valentine's Day treats for school parties tomorrow? Ah, it is well and truly happening - I am a mom!

Now, I just wonder if those kiddies tomorrow will like salmon...

Enjoy your Valentine's Day!!

Jilebis

Is there a sweet anywhere that is stranger looking than a jilebi? I don’t think so.

And yet, this crisp orange delicacy, deep fried, dropped into hot syrup, designed to explode in your mouth and release rivulets of rose-scented liquid, is my favourite Indian sweet.

My earliest memory of jilebis comes from when I was a child visiting New Delhi. Our bearer went to the market and brought back a small paper bag of jilebis for our tea. The bag was soaked in syrup and looked unappetizing, but the jilebis were fresh and sensational.

In Ottawa I had fresh jilebis once - at the Indian High Commissioner’s Independence Day garden party. They had hired a person to make fresh jilebis on the spot! I recall that I was wearing a pink and white outfit with cute pink suede sandals. It is a mark of my love for these sweets that when my jilebi dribbled syrup onto my pink shoes, I didn’t mind a bit!

What makes jilebis so special? I think it is their unique construction. It seems like a recipe a child would dream up: take some neon-orange batter, make squiggly shapes with it in hot oil, remove the fritter from the fat, and dip it in hot syrup. Through some alchemy, the squiggles become hollow inside. When dipped in the syrup, the tubes fill up with the liquid. Biting into them – ah, a taste sensation!

I tried making jilebis once, and it is not as easy as it looks. I made them from a mix, and the results were disappointing to say the least. They came out golden, not orange (need more food colouring!), the tubes were too thin and, worst of all, when I bit into them, my mouth filled with oil, not syrup. Blech.

When I visit Indian food stores, there is habitually a tray of jilebis placed tantalizingly by the cash register. I know they won’t be good, but sometimes I give in and buy a small piece. How do they taste? Let me give you a hint: the jilebis sold in the stores are not made in Ottawa. I asked the shopkeeper at Vaishali and she told me they are shipped here from shops in Toronto in large cases. She keeps them in the fridge and brings them out a tray at a time, over a period of a few weeks! The results, while not exactly blech, are not quite stellar either. The sugar syrup crystallizes, they lose their crispness and become rubbery. Oh well.

The desirable qualities of a jilebi, as you can tell by now, are: crispness, sweetness, glossy appearance (okay, I hadn’t mentioned that yet), and overall quality. But don’t take my word for it. Apparently, researchers at the Department of Sensory Science in the Central Food Technological Research Institute in Mysore, India, have done tests to determine this. Who knew? Undesirable attributes are: porous, and heated oil taste. They concluded that “Crispness of jilebi had high positive correlation with OQ and texture (shear value).” You see, I knew there was something special about those jilebis.

But enough of the science behind jilebis. I know you are really wondering - what was my best jilebi? Ah, friends, my very favourite jilebi experience came at my wedding! I got married in Mysore, India, in a lavish and colourful celebration organized entirely by my wonderful inlaws. Unlike weddings in the West where the bride (and occasionally, the groom) agonizes over chair covers, centrepieces, the song list, and intricacies of wedding favours, all I had to do was show up. My inlaws sent me a list of the menu for the wedding, but I didn't know what any of the items were (wobattu? majige houley?) so I just gaily agreed to all of the suggested items.

One menu item I did ask for was a wedding cake. Alas, that was difficult to arrange, so I asked for something that I had had in my mind for a long time...

"Could we", I asked my fiance, "have somebody at the wedding making fresh jilebis?"

"Of course!" he agreed. "Now is the time to satisfy all of your food fantasies!"

Woo hoo! You see, I had to marry this man!

And how were the jilebis? Dear reader, they were amazing. Instead of vegetable oil, they fried the jilebis in ghee. Instead of sugar syrup they used honey (special - for a wedding!), and you could tell they had been made with extra special care. The jilebi maker sat on an elevated perch and dripped and drizzled all night long. I only got to eat one jilebi, but I can remember just how delicious it was!

It was a sweet way to start a marriage!