Films and Farhsan

Who loves a good movie? What type of movie is your thing? I am lucky enough to have the National Media Museum on my doorstep. Spoilt for choice with films to watch and auditoriums to watch them in! 

For starters, there is the Imax which is the first of its kind in the UK, showcasing some incredible movies. One of my favorites is an amazing documentary called The Hubble   

Then there is Pictureville proudly claiming to be one of the best-equipped cinemas in the world.  Actually, that was the city's old Library Theatre.  I used to dance on its stage - much against my family's wishes. Love to dance! Yeah!  

I love salsa and old Indian classical traditional folk dance from Gujarat and Garba Ras amongst many other styles.

Then we have the Cubby Broccoli cinema. Cubby Broccoli was famous for making Bond Movies. 

But I wouldn't take broccoli to snack on at the flicks though, would you?

My first ever experience of hitting the flicks was as a child to see Mother India in the early 1970s.  Bradford became very famous for its Asian picture houses and our local was The Arcadian. Not always an Indian film cinema but that's how I knew it in the '70s. The Asian cinema house was demolished in 1987. I cried as I  watched the building tumble, such a sad day for me. 

A few of my favourites foodie films are Fried green tomatoes, La Grande Bouffe Chocolat, and A Private Function really  appropriate for this year's Diamond Jubilee

                     

Gosh, it was packed most nights. There was dancing, hands clapping ..... Oh! And that was just from the audience ..... talking right through the movie and shouting out the plot as the audience got carried away. If mobile phones had existed. I dare say lots of colorful ring tones would have joined in too! Not that folk seemed to mind.   All part of the excitement and occasion. As they joyfully watched.

My mother thought the pictures were for those with nothing better to do with their time and money.   "A respectable reputation may be lost if seen there too often."   So the only time she went to see a film was when she went to see Mother India.    She made an exception for that film because it had a good, moral story and was thus acceptable. 

It was never a dull moment.  Fahsan ( snack food spicy and crunchy) is usually all homemade and of course, washed down by a glass bottle of Coca-Cola.  The food was amazing: samosa, fresh chapati rolls (biri),  Bombay mixes of all types and descriptions, a whole variety of Indian snack bites, and roasted peanuts with chili. There was no end to the variety and it was such a great social affair.   Like one big living room!   You would see rows of families and friends passing around tubs of homemade goodies and sometimes the bowl tub would get past all the way down the row so you would get a bite of someone else s food.   My Mum's food was enough to impress anyone. It was even being offered in exchange for cinema tickets. She never took them up on it, but I did!

My favourites had to be samosa.  A treat to which I never said no. I loved them so much that I learned so much about them.  They took the best part of a day to make - preparing the mixture, making the pastry, filling them, and finally cooking them.  
we only made them as a treat food and on special occasions because it came from another region and took so long in the process. Indian food varies from region to region as much as Turkish food varies from Spanish.  Subtleties that we in the west have yet to discover and understand fully. Next time I will take through my recipe....

My love of pork pies - or until I knew better

Even though I have heard horror stories about what goes in em’ and eat very little meat these days they still cross my mind with delight in moments of needing comfort. Maybe, because I loved them as a child so much.

Not long ago I visited a place in Yorkshire called Morley which has a famous pie shop.   Apparently folk come from miles away making special journeys for these pies,   They have queues forming outside the shops most mornings.   So I thought I would try one!    It was hot. I dont really like eating  hot pork pies, pastry excellent I recall but a pork pie is almost a different pie eaten hot. I loved them cold. And I was rather disappointed as my attempt in trying it hot.

Now some may argue that the pork in a pork pie is as far away from meat as a good Hindu is away from beef steak. Others will tell me of their delightful ingredients of eye lashes and eye balls all died pink congealed in jelly that makes them irresistible but best not to dwell on it too much and enjoy the pies for how they taste and make you feel.  For me it was always the pastry that I fell in love with, quite like something I had never tasted before. Crispy case, crumbly and salty and if one was quiet enough when cutting into one you could hear the crunch of it being sliced. A girl at church called Catherine would ask me at our Sunday afternoon tea after service if I would swap her pastry for my jelly and pork which I gladly did, our delight at fair swap made us the "bestest friends". Well…. we never got pork pies at the temple God for bid! 

Fancy that… a pork pie bringing us together! Now Auntie Mary - well she wasn’t really my Auntie but that’s what all the elders were referred to at church - would quiz me about Indian food and why I loved the pork pie so much? She also quizzed me about my gold earrings which did not meet with her approval.   So along with my pork pie she sat me down and sent me to the prayer room so that I could ask Jesus if it was acceptable for me to wear them at church.   Thinking “My mum will kill me if these gold earring are removed.” I prayed and holding a pork pie in one hand and my tiny little gold earring in the other I asked Jesus if it was OK to wear them??? I also felt terribly guilty about the pork pie so asked the Indian Gods to forgive me.  After my ten minutes to reflect about it all she asked me what conclusion I had come to and what Jesus had said to me.   My response was “I really don’t know as I could not hear him!”

She did not understand that most Indian girls - including me although British by birth but Indian by descent - had our ears pierced before our 1^st birthday.   It was a disgrace and indecent to have bare holes in your ears - "undressed and undignified." Most of the English girls wore very little jewelry at church if any and had never eaten Indian food.   Auntie Mary had yet to try one of my curries to really understand why I loved them so much.   Pork pies were the one food I never spiced up, nothing but some HP sauce would do for me. HP sauce stands for Houses of Parliament after the sauce was being served in the restaurant over 150 years ago.

 It was though I knew what Heaven was like when I bit into one.  Which led to the old saying in our home, “When are we having English?” As 95% of the food we ate was Indian.

Auntie Mary, by the way, did let me have a tune on my other love: the piano.   My parents could simply not afford lessons for me so I used to sit on the fence/hedge of our piano teacher's house, watching others learn, in hope that some of the teaching would rub off onto me..

Anyway, later, my friend, Catherine, asked to have her hears pierced too.

I decided that neither the church nor the temple were for me. But remained friends with Catherine.  So at the age of 12 I went back to my skateboard and enjoyed the rest of the summer.   Much to my mother’s disapproval for several reasons..   First, I had given up both church and temple.   Secondly, skateboarding was very unladylike indeed.   It was not something she ever dreamt of for her  Indian daughter.   Thirdly she worried about what our relations would think.   Most of my extended family lived abroad but for my poor mum they lived in her head.   She often could not understand why I was into skateboarding.   She knew of no other Indian girl skateboraders in Bradford. She really did  not understand the scene.

  But for me it was a fearless freeing fantastic sport than help me think and focus on so many things.   For instance, why my parents were the only two members of our family who had left India in early 1950's out of 14 brothers and sisters between them . What India must have been like.   And what my folks back there must have been like.  

Impressions of Thailand

     Central Bangkok                                                                                               

No more fish in the sea Courtesy Old Man Pie

                                                           

                                                                   

Mangoes for this lassie

Street food

                             

You wont find any of these in the supermarkets but boy do they sell! Sold by the bucket or for those with a delicate stomach you could just buy for a try.Bugs.

Golden Buddha

                                                                       Grand Palace

                                                                       Red Pears

Lotus Flowers

                                                                   Pea green Aubergines

                                                                  Sweet Tarmirand

  

Fish cakes made by yours truely

Ingredients for prawn massaman

                                                            Papaya Salad "Som Tum"

                                                            Cooking in Bangkok

 Window shopping model menu, you choose your dish out side the restaurant and order by number inside.

In memory

Today I'm eating Eccles cakes  in memory of someone very special.   
For those of you in the great Wen, an Eccles cake is not  a cake at all.   More a pastry stuffed with dried fruit  They are very rich - butter pastry, brown sugar and raisins.  Mmmm. 


Eccles cakes are comfort food like pork pies.  In many ways an Eccles cakes is the dessert equivalent.   Both have pastry and rich, succulent fillings.   The best Eccles cakes are packed with raisins.   Some people call Eccles cakes flies' cemeteries.   


Both are snacks that you can graze on the run.   Something you can munch at a football match.   


This special person liked his football.   Being a Mancunian he was a big  City fan.   He would have have been overjoyed at today's win.   Beating  the Reds.1-0.   United has a big following around the world.   But City is big in Manchester.   I wish all those United fans at Ringway airport, Piccadilly station and on the M6 a good trip home.   Don't forget your Eccles cakes lads & lasses   In case you didn't know, Eccles is in  Salford.

Me and English Food

When I was toute petite gosse at Bradford (or as we call it “Bratford”) I wer' a dinner monitor - that is to say, it was my job to dole out school lunches to the other kids on my table. Most kids hated school dinners. I loved them.

“Ugh! Gita!” I hear you say “What’s wrong wi’ya, lass?”


Learning the art of using a knife and fork my first lesson at the age of 4, impossible so I used my dessert spoon particularly for the peas rolling around my plate to be honest I really thought eating peas with a fork was load of nonsense until I discovered mash the perfect solution for peas being eaten more easily with a fork, my primary teacher Mrs Knight who was near to retirement taught me the skill of eating  with a knife and fork and would not let me leave the table until I had mastered it. I was scared off by putting fork in my mouth - it looked dangerous! More like a garden tool. But later they came in good use for eating our weekly portion of fish and chips and of course with introduction to parsley sauce which all the Indian children loved. 

Well if you come from a Gujarati home as I did where everything was cooked fresh and to perfection and beautifully spiced, you can have too much of a good thing. Spam fritters although forbidden at home  and good old cheese pie were as exotic to me as anything out of the Auberge de l’Ill would be to you.

 I particularly enjoyed the puddings. Spotted dick, jam roly poly, trifle, 

lemon meringue and rice pudding with Demerara sugar and jam and parkin. 

which I took to easily all sweet and tasty, as we got nothing of the sort at home bar fresh fruit and a glass of milk after dinner . My siblings and I introduced our mum to these delicacies and even today she says “હું custard પ્રેમ” (“I love custard”).

 When I was in middle school I started cooking lessons and learned to cook cheese soufflé (which was the most delicious food I had ever tasted) and Chelsea buns.I found I had a flair food creation which excited me more than following recipes

Along with roast dinners which my father would not touch unless the meat was spiced and the gravy pepped up, never of the beef kind being a Hindu but "who really makes good vegetarian gravy" I used to say.Flat caps and beer were taken on well by Dad and Guinness by many of the  Indian woman but not my mum who neither ate meat or drank alcohol and for me the pork pie was a delight from our local butctchers which had to be hidden well away from my Dad's keen nose around the house he as he would have gone barmy and sometimes did if he saw my delight at cutting into one. I remember it well , misjudging the timings of his return home; I jumped down from the red formica table in our kitchen, having saved all my pennies for my Saturday morning treat I wanted to enjoy it, as he caught me out and entered through our front door,  I was on watch of the back door, we very rarely used the front door reserved only for guests and visitors, if the HP sauce was out... a pork pie was not far behind, so I snatched the bottle and from his sight, in his opinion even the kitchen knifes were unusealble if it had been used for pork or beef let alone eating the meat(s) only if he really knew what was being eaten at school and yummy too!

And that’s when I started cooking for others at the age of 13. On a piece of A4 paper I wrote out multiple times “Have a Gita Mistry curry in the luxury of your own home.” My first customer had a lovely curry. But he did have to wait for it because it took me 4 hours to prepare. I think I served up at 23:00.  And was it spicy? It nearly blew the more man's head off.  You could have run your lurry on it.

I’ve cooked Gita Mistry dinners in Holland, Poland, Washington, Paris, Alsace and even India.. and love creating today with what ever ingredients I have rather than following recipes, although that would not exactly work for cooking cakes and desserts as that is simply a science/formula which I found out when I wasted my mothers whole weeks egg allowance... why because we did not own weighing scales as every thing she cooked was measured by eye and judgement which has been passed down to me.  

Spelman denies Bread Shortage

Hot on the heels of the fuel panic the government has gone to the other extreme by covering up an imminent bread shortage.  The problem arises from plans to divert yeast from baking to industrial alcohol production to beat a possible fuel strike.

“Talk of shortages and rationing is dangerous nonsense” warns Food Minister Caroline Spelman. “In any case we are talking about a breakdown in distribution not production.”

Be that as it may the news does not seem to have filtered down to Bradford.  There were long queues outside the Pakaram and Gulab Bakeries.

“Don’t know what’s happened” says Nusrat from Bradford West, “I’ve been queueing for hours all right round t'houses. It’s only happened since that George Galloway got in.”

Fanny Maude from Shelf had a different view.  “I blame Council, me.” She said.   “All they can do is dig a great, big pond in t' bloody centre. It’s not been the same since that nice Mr. Pickles was in charge.”

Tory Party Chair Baroness Warsi wondered what the fuss was about. “Let them eat chapatis which don’t need yeast” she said wagging her finger for emphasis. “It’ll do ‘em good.”