Go fly a kite – Part 2

Hi there. I’m glad to say that our Punjabi festival is up and running and so far response has been pretty good. The dishes are turning out well and most of our customers are ordering from the festival menu. Most people looking in from outside will never realise what it takes to get a festival organised, but I guess that’s the same for most things.

Just as one example, we wanted to hang patangs (Indian fighting kites) in our front window and in our skylight but could not find anywhere to buy them in India. In the UK we could have bought patangs made from nylon or mylar but traditional ones are made from paper and then painted, so these wouldn’t really have looked right. So there we were, stumped and not long before the festival was due to begin.

Then Titu, one of our chefs, spoke up and said he’d make the kites if we would get the paper and bamboo for him. And he was really keen to do it because he used to fly kites back in India and, of course, he always made his own kites. We still needed someone to paint them for us and patangs are painted in all sorts of ways, with traditional decoration like ‘moth’s eyes’ on either side of the wings, like fighting cocks and other birds but they’re also painted according to the artist’s whims with political slogans, Bollywood stars – I even saw one with the profile of Alfred Hitchcock. Where would we find someone to do this for us on such short notice.

That’s when Pippa Graber came to our rescue. Pippa organises exhibits in many of the art galleries in our part of south London and she knows a lot of artists. It’s worth taking a look at her site – www.artdoglondon.co.uk - to find out about gallery exhibits, local artists and photographers.

Pippa put us in touch with Kate Pritchard, a Chelsea Arts graduate who does both sculpture installations and painting and she was happy to have a go at painting 14 kites. Her brief was to paint some traditionally and some with more local images. We couldn’t have been more pleased and delighted with the results. Along with a peacock, elephants and banana leaves, she also gave us the London Eye and a Damien Hirst ‘dot painting’. If you want to see some of Kate's work, take a look at her site: www.katepritchard.beep.com

Using kites as the image for the Basant festival has proved to be an idea with legs. The day we were hanging the kites, Pippa passed by and told us about the Blythe Park Fun Day, a family day out with food and events for children. The event is on Saturday 28 June and we’ll post more details in the next few days. We’ll be there and Titu Xxxx will be making kites and demonstrating how to fly a patang, Kate will be there with us painting kites and we’ll be serving some good Indian picnic food – our head chef Jiwan wants to do an enormous pot of biryani, some veg and non-veg kebabs and some cold snacks like chaat and puri.

Then we got a postcard from Lewisham Council about the Bike and Kite Festival on Blackheath which takes place Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 June and if we can, we’ll be there as well. More details on this next time as well. Thanks for stopping by again and we hope to see you, either at Babur or Blythe Park or maybe even Blackheath. You never know where we’ll turn up next.

5 May - 16 June

Hi there. We’ve been busy the past couple of months. Our celebration of Babur’s 525^th birthday was successful – our chefs gained a lot of confidence through cooking a cuisine they didn’t think they were familiar with. But as they were trying recipes for the festival, they realised there were interesting similarities (and some differences) with the Indian cuisines they’re more familiar with. We also raised over £400 for Afghanaid and their programme of replanting orchards in Afghanistan, some of which were first planted by Babur 500 years ago.

We’re about to start celebrating Basant – Punjabi New Year – with a festival of Punjabi cooking. Jiwan Lal, our head chef, has been wanting to highlight his home cooking for some time now and I think he’s really come up with some terrific dishes. He’s using noisettes of lamb to make dhungar lamb tikka which is marinated with smoked, crushed spices so the meat has a smoky taste from the marination as well as cooking in the tandoor. We’ve got some other Punjabi lamb dishes I never tasted as well made before like raarha lamb which is cooked in a tomato onion masala; and lamb patiyala which is a slow-cooked knuckle of lamb. But then are known for Punjabis having a good way with lamb.

What surprised me was just how much I liked some of the vegetarian dishes like the Punjabi wadi ki sab, white lentil dumplings with a nutty taste and a crunchy texture that reminded me of the gate kadhi, gram flour dumplings from our Rajasthani festival. But the veg dish I really loved was the sarso ka saag, mustard greens and spinach with corn-meal crisp bread. Being Bengali, I like mustard greens but I never tasted anything like this before and I thought I could be vegetarian on this dish.

And the dish that delighted us all was the steamed shoulder of lamb, which is sort of like the Punjabi version of Peking duck. Thick slices of shoulder on the bone are marinated for three days in lots of spices then steamed slowly till all the fat melts and bastes the lamb and it falls off the bone. You eat it with roti and thin slices of cucumber and red onion. This dish came from Azra Ali who is the wife of Riaz Ali, one of the two brothers who have owned a series of very good Punjabi restaurants around London. Some of you may remember when they owned Mirch Masala in south London and 5 Hot Chillies and Nauroz, both in north London. Wherever you are, thank you. The recipe appeared about eight years ago in Tandoori magazine and this seemed like a good time to put it on a menu.

Steamed shoulder of lamb

10-12 portions

10 lbs lamb shoulder, sawn into wide strips (about 4”, 10cm) by butcher

4 Tbsps crushed red chilli

4 Tbsps red chilli powder

4 Tbsps salt

5 Tbsps cumin

6 Tbsps coriander

4 tsps ‘OUR OWN GARAM MASALA’*

large handful crushed garlic paste

large handful crushed ginger paste

250ml lemon juice

vegetable oil to cover meat for marinating

Mix all spices, oil and lemon juice in large bowl to get even marinade mix. Taste to be sure of marinade flavour. Mix meat in well to completely coat with marinade. Put in fridge and marinate for at least 3 days. Can be made extra hot with fresh green chilli.

Put in pot with oil and marinade on medium fire and turn over frequently for about 20 minutes as meat must not brown. Once marinade starts bubbling, seal pot with flour/water paste. Steam for 3 hours until meat is soft and falls off the bone.

Serve with tandoori roti, julienne cucumber, thin slices of red onion, sliced chillies, wedges of lemon.

*This is how the recipe appeared in Tandoori. Jiwan came up with his own blend that seemed to create the same taste but he was also being a bit cagey about exactly what the spice blend is.

Also, before I go I wanted to tell you about a couple of offers that will be starting when our Punjabi festival begins. We thought of this because so many of our customers want to come to our food festivals but we can’t always accommodate everyone who wants to come to dine between 7:30 and 8:30. We thought we’d offer a couple of incentives to dine early or late with us. So we have two offers for you: 7 by 7 – all main courses offered at £7 when ordered by 7pm; and Wine after 9, with a free glass of wine (matched to your main course) for orders placed after 9pm. Both offers are valid from 5 May to 30 June and for parties up to four persons. You can also view our Punjabi festival menu, see our offers and make a booking online at www.babur.info.

Thanks for stopping by and next time I’ll have some news about our summer festivals and probably some other things by then.

HAPPY 525TH BIRTHDAY, BABUR

18 February - 18 March

It’s now just over two years since we re-opened Babur and it’s been a good year. What’s been especially gratifying is the enthusiastic response everyone has shown for the new look of the restaurant.

We’re all very happy with the way the restaurant has turned out but it has taken some getting used to. We didn’t manage to do as many events last year as we would have liked to. And judging from your response to the events we did hold, we think you’d probably like it if we did some more. Our two main events last year were the Colours of Rajasthan and our six-week celebration of the restaurant’s 22^nd birthday with a tasting menu. Thanks so much for your support and enthusiasm.

This year, we’re going to try to host more food events (more on that in the next mail) and for our first, we thought we’d go back to our roots. Some of our customers who celebrated Valentine’s Day with us last year may remember that our menu was also celebrating the Emperor Babur’s 524^th birthday. Well, the name of Babur has done very well for us over the years and we thought it would be good to find out a bit more about him.

The Bagh-i-Babur (Babur’s Garden) was built exactly 500 years ago. The Kabul of Babur’s day was very different from the Kabul we see today on the news. He planted his 11-hectare garden (which he called the Bagh-i-Wafa, Garden of Fidelity) on the slope of a hill in the countryside with views of his citadel. In his autobiography, the Baburnama, he describes his garden in real detail and in a way that is surprising from a man who conquered an empire:

In the southwest portion of the garden there is a pool surrounded by orange trees and some pomegranate trees. All around the pool is a clover meadow. The best place in the garden is there. When the oranges turn yellow it is a beautiful sight.

He writes in amazing detail about the land and produce of Afghanistan, about the fertility of the country, saying that the apples from one district are the best, while another produces the best pears or grapes. He talks about the banana trees he had planted and when they fruited, or about the sugarcane and orange groves, or the almond and peach blossoms in spring.

The past 30 years have not been kind to this beautiful country. During the Soviet occupation, many of the orchards were cut down for firewood because there was no other source of heat in the cold Kabul winters. It might sound silly to say, but we felt we wanted to give something back to the place the man who gave us his name loved best.

Since 2002, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture has been restoring the walled Babur Gardens, including the simple grave open to the sky Babur requested for himself, and at the same time restoring one of the great amenities of Kabul to its people. Looking at what the Gardens were before and after restoration (which you can follow on http://www.archnet.org/library/sites/one-site.jsp?site_id=12541), it’s easy to see why Babur so loved Afghanistan. But there were many productive orchards across Afghanistan and these need to be replanted.

In 1990, Afghanaid began setting up nurseries of fruit and timber tress to help introduce new varieties and demonstrate better ways of planting and cultivating trees. By late 1994, a stock of 67,727 almond, apple, apricot, peach and other fruit trees had been grown for distribution in four provinces.

This is a large-scale, long-term project and we are pleased to be contributing towards this. To see what Afghanaid is doing, visit http://www.afghanaid.org.uk/events/baburs_525th_birthday.phtml. During the course of Babur’s 525^th birthday celebration, from 18 February to 18 March, we will contribute £1 for each party that orders from our festival menu. Customers who wish may make their own contributions.

We’ll be posting the festival menu and more information in the next blog entry and we hope to see you during Babur’s 525^th birthday celebration. Thanks for visiting.

22nd baburthday

Hi there. For anyone who’s not aware, we started celebrating Babur’s 22nd birthday on 9 July – a bit early but then it’s so unusual for a restaurant to be in business for that long we thought we'd make the most of it. The specials for July and August are all being presented as a tasting menu – a first for Babur - and the nenu was tried and retried and tried again. We did more tasting than we usually do to be sure we wouldn’t let our guests down with our first tasting menu and our birthday celebration.

We debated a lot over how to decorate for this 22nd birthday and in the end decided to keep it simple. We hung lots of pennant-shaped pieces of coloured card with the number 2 on both sides in upper part of our front window. The colours are similar to the colours of our signature piece of art, the kolum kari by Ajit Kumar Das that is built into the wall in our reception area. We’ve been pleasantly surprised with response to the tasting menu - we never did one before and were not sure what to expect. But so far the uptake has been about 30%.

If you’re on our mailing list you’ll have received your 22nd birthday voucher good for a £22 discount and if you’re not, you’ll receive one when you come in that will be good for a discount on your next visit.

Last week we took Jiwan and Rajendar Pandey (the head chef from my other restaurant, Planet Spice) to Rasoi Vineet Bhatia. We decided to go somewhere away from our kitchens because the chefs have been working hard and needed to wind down somewhere good for a reward. The restaurant is in Chelsea and has a Michelin star. We were very impressed with their service. The staff are mostly non-Indians and I quizzed them on ingredients of the dishes and their knowledge of the food was really very good. Along with our waiter, who was French, the sommelier also pitched in and, along with his knowledge of the wines, he also knew the food very well. We tried the tasting menu and also a la carte so that we tasted virtually the whole menu. There were dishes from across India, mostly presented in a European style and we enjoyed Vineet’s cooking very much.

Meanwhile, back at Babur, our two wine champions, Arjun and Rupom were very impressed with the Wine and Spirit Education course. Both want to go on and do the next level. Arjun went on to a cognac tasting class. They tried over a dozen different cognacs, including a taste from a very old bottle that $10,000.

I’ll leave you now with a recipe from one of our chefs who hasn’t been featured yet, Sanjay Kumar. Sanjay is a very diligent worker who knows his cooking but he’s so very quiet I’m afraid he’s been overlooked until now and wanted to give him a moment in the spotlight.



LAMB PATIALISAHI

Serves 4

Ingredients
1kg lamb a mix of boneless diced and lamb on the bone
250g chopped tomatoes
300g sliced onion
4 green capsicum (diced)
125ml vegetable oil
Salt to taste
25g ginger paste
25g garlic paste
4 black cardamoms
5 whole cloves
2 bay leaves
2 sticks cassia
1tsp whole black peppercorns
2tsp red chilli powder
1tsp turmeric
4tsp coriander powder
2tsp cumin powder

Method:

Clean the lamb in cold water and put in a strainer.

Heat oil in a handi or in a deep pan and add all the whole spices.

Add sliced onion and stir for a while. When it turns a light golden colour, add ginger and garlic paste and bhunao (cook over moderate heat until the liquid evaporates).

Add lamb and stir it continuously for 20 minutes. Add a little water then add all the powdered spices and salt. Cover and let simmer on a low flame until meat is tender, stirring occasionally.

Add tomatoes and let continue cooking untill meat is completely done.

In a frying pan heat 1tsp of oil and add diced capsicum and cook for 1minute then add into the lamb curry and mix well.

Serve this lamb curry with naan or pulao rice

Work and wait patiently

Hello there. Glad you could stop by.

Sometimes you have to take a long view of things and just wait and work patiently. That’s how it’s been for our two wine champions, Arjun and Rupom. Way back in March when we were trying out wines to go with our Rajasthani festival menu, Peter McCombie MW (our wine consultant) said that for some people, the idea of a sommelier is a bit intimidating and that he liked the idea of a wine champion. This is someone who is interested in wine and how it works with food, someone who can talk with customers about the flavours and how they will best work together.

For many of our staff, who are Muslim, this isn’t really practical, but fortunately for us, Arjun and Rupom were really enthusiastic about combining wine and food and – as Hindus – drinking wine is not a religious problem for them. Peter suggested that the Wine and Spirit Education Trust courses would be good to help them along and make them feel more confident in talking with customers.

Since then, they’ve really taken hold of their role as our wine champions. We had quite a bit of wine from our old list that was no longer available from our suppliers. But there were mostly odd bottles and suppliers will only take back whole cases, so we thought to sell them as bin ends at a reduced price to our customers. They were good wines and we would have kept them on if they were still available and it seemed that they were all sold in no time at all and when I saw how fast they were going, I held on to a few bottles as gifts for some of our customers.

We subscribe to Harpers, the wine and spirits trade magazine and they always get hold of it as soon as it comes in. They read over everything, take in what’s written about the wines – they’re really teaching themselves about wine. So on Monday they both go for their first course at WSET and they’re both looking forward to it. They’ve already been so good at it, I can only imagine what they’ll be like once they’ve gone on the course. I think they’ll want to carry on to the next level, but we’ll see.

Our chefs have given me their first draft of our 22nd birthday tasting menu. I think it’s about 40% there, but thought I would share it with you and if anyone has comments, please post them to the blog. Of course, customers can order from these specials as they normally do, choosing whatever dishes they want, but we’ll also offer the entire specials menu as a tasting of each dish.

As I said last time, we’re celebrating for the entire month of July and are sending out £22 gift vouchers to all the customers on our mailing list. But we’ll also give vouchers to new customers who come in to dine and they can use the voucher on their next visit.


TESTING MENU FOR JULY

STARTERS

Green spice marinated guinea fowl tikka with cucumber and garlic salsa

Indian style crab spring roll with coriander and ginger sauce

Lamb pattice stuffed with Iranian dates

A tangy combination of potatoes with crispy flour pancake


MAINS

Smoked skewer of lamb mince wrapped with brown thread

Chicken cooked with yoghurt, green chilli and cardamom

Kashmiri style ox tail rogan josh tempered ratanjoyt

Lotus flower, cottage cheese and green peas cooked with creamy tomato sauce


SIDES

Yellow moong dal tempered with cumin seed and clarified butter

Sweet corn and baby corn with spinach and coconut


DESSERTS

Pounded rice pudding with Alphonso mango

Rose petal crème caramel


What do you think?

There are some additions I want to make to this menu, like patraani machi – a classic Parsi wedding dish of firm white fish fillets with coriander and mint chutney steamed in a banana leaf. It’s on our specials this month – we make it with turbot and it’s very popular - almost as popular as the black cod dish from our Rajasthani menu, which was our most popular specials dish ever. That was made with a mustard seed sauce and mustard mash and it was so good I could eat it every day and never get bored.

And whatever we might change, the dori kebab will definitely be on the menu. This is a dish devised for the Nawabs of Lucknow. It’s a bit like gilauti kebab – finely minced lamb patties tenderised with green papaya. Dori kebab is shaped like a seekh kebab but comes on a square profile skewer, wrapped in string and to serve it you pull out the string to release it from the skewer. It will make a nice bit of tableside service. One other dessert I want to add is sugarcane and ginger sorbet – we have someone who makes sorbets and ice creams (like our chikoo ice cream) for us and he also makes for a lot of good Indian restaurants, like Benares. I think it will be very refreshing and cleanse the mouth between the main courses and the other desserts.

Well, thanks for stopping by and hope you’ll come back for a look next week.
l

Cooking with gas

There’s something I’ve been thinking about for some time and wanted to share with you. We’ve been getting such good response on our food and so many kind words for our chefs and we’re really pleased about that and thanks to all our customers for saying so.

But, as I say, that made me think about customers coming into our kitchen for cooking lessons. I know that at Café Spice Namaste Cyrus Todiwala does cooking lessons and they also offer cooking lessons at Chutney Mary and Andy Varma, the chef/owner of Vama, also offers cookery classes. So we’ve been talking about this at Babur.

We’d like people who come to our cooking class to be able to be as hands on as possible because you always learn and remember better by doing. So for preparing mise en place and cooking, people in the class will be guided by our chefs. From our other restaurant, Planet Spice, chef Raj Pandey has already done classes so he might lead the class but our Babur chefs, Jiwan and Pravin, will also be there and they can also guide customers through the learning.

The classes would have to be on a day when the kitchen isn’t so busy because our kitchen just isn’t big enough for extra people at busy times. We were thinking about Monday afternoons. Then, after the class was over and the food cooked, people in the class would sit down to eat what they had prepared. Any comments?

Also, we’ve been trying to come up with a name for our Babur takeaway. We’ve tried to think of an alternative to ‘takeaway’ and then thought that our customers might be able to help. So if you have any ideas about this, please post a comment or send us an email. We’ll give a dinner for two to the person who suggests a name we use.

And lastly, this week’s recipe for Tawa-Griddled Pomfret comes from another of our chefs, Sheik Unus. We want everyone to get a bit of the spotlight and hope you enjoy his recipe.



TAWA POMFRET
(Serves 4)



Ingredients:

4 small pomfret (about 150gm – 170gm)

For the marination:
2 Tbsps ginger garlic paste
juice of 2 lemons
salt to taste
2 tsp ajwain (carom) seeds
1 tsp red chilli powder
½ tsp turmeric powder
100ml mustard oil
1 tsp cumin powder, briefly roasted in a pan
1 tsp gram flour

Method:

Wash the fish in cold water, pat dry then make three deep incisions on each side of the fish.

Mix all the ingredients for marination in a bowl.

Apply this marination to the fish and leave it for 30 minutes.

Heat one deep frying pan put some mustard oil then add the fish one by one to the pan and carefully cook about three to four minutes per side.
Remove from pan and serve hot.

Cobra Good Curry Guide

Well, we had a good surprise this week. On Wednesday, our copy of Pat Chapman’s Cobra Good Curry Guide 2007 arrived and there on the front cover was a photo of Babur - our restaurant. It was a picture of the sandstone wall in the rear dining room. Besides that, there were photos of our dishes throughout the inside as well.

Our review is on pages 140-141 with a photo of our head chef, Jiwan, so he’s been showing off to all his friends, telling them to buy a copy of the guide. We were nominated for London Regional Restaurant – Mint Leaf won the category - but we were pleased to be nominated and went along to the awards a few months ago at the London Hilton on Park Lane. So it really was a surprise to see our photo on the cover.

Babur’s 22nd birthday is coming up in July and we’ve started working on it. We’ve been trying to come up with as many ideas as we can and this is what we’ve come up with so far. There aren’t many restaurants going for 22 years and we’re still going strong. In fact, we’re doing better than we ever have since we redesigned the restaurant.

We’re celebrating our birthday for the entire month of July. Normally when you see someone for their birthday, you bring them a gift. But I thought we would do something different and give our customers a gift instead, so we’re going to send a gift voucher for £22 to each customer on our data base. After all, our customers have been looking after us for 22 years so it’s time we look after them.

We’re coming up with a celebration menu for the whole month of July. I think we’re going to try something we’ve never done before at Babur - a tasting menu – so everyone can try all of our celebration menu. I think we’ll have four starters and three mains. We’ll split starters between the different areas of the kitchen so they don’t get overloaded; one will be pan-based, one from the tandoor and one fried and we’ll also serve a biryani (maybe our seafood biryani). We’ll serve the starters one at a time and mains together. Or we might serve some of the mains separately. That way, we can offer the option of wines matched to each dish – something else we’ve never done. Maybe we’ll offer a fish first, then chicken and a lamb dish. Then there’ll be three miniature desserts – maybe our beetroot samosas and tandoori pineapple.

Post comments to the blog if you have suggestions of what se should do to celebrate our 22nd birthday.

Even though we’re in May, we’re starting to plan our Christmas decorations. I have to admit, I got our decorations wrong last year – we did what we used to before our renovation – and a few of our customers complained to me that the decorations were letting the restaurant down. I don’t want to make that mistake again, so I got in contact with a few companies I saw in Caterer & Hotelkeeper – they had a review of Christmas decorators a little while back. This year we’re going to have the best decorations in our area.


And just before I go, I wanted to thank Jane Savage who said such nice things about my brother Enam’s Beef Xacutti recipe in her letter to Terry Durack (see previous posting). My brother, Enam, gave me the recipe just as I was about to log off, so here's Enam Rahman's recipe for Beef Xacutti. And thanks to all of you for stopping by to read this.










BEEF XACUTTI
(Serves four people)


Ingredients :
4 beef ribs
For Paste:
8 green chillies
15gm star anise
10gm peppercorn
10gm bay leaf
10gm black cardamom
15gm green cardamom
20gm coriander seed
10gm cumin seed
5 whole dry red chillies
5gm fenugreek seed
½ No. Nutmeg
5gm poppy seed
20gm dessicated coconut

For Sauce:
2Tbls coconut oil
2 red onions (finely chopped)
4 tomatoes (roughly chopped)
1Tbls ginger/garlic paste
1Tsp cider vinegar
Salt to taste
1Tsp turmeric powder
2Tsp red chilli powder
½ Tsp coriander powder
½ Tsp cumin powder
1Tbls tamarind puree



METHOD

Gently dry roast all the ingredients for the paste in a pan until you smell the aroma of spices, then keep it aside to cool. Put all the roasted spices in a mortar or mixer and grind, then add a mimimal amount of water to make a paste.

For sauce : Put a deep frying pan on the stove with vegetable oil then red onion, stir it for a while and when it becomes light brown in colour then add ginger garlic paste and keep stirring.
Add tomato and after a while add all the powdered spices and keep stirring for one mintue more.

Now add the prepared paste and bhunao (cook on a moderate heat until the liquid is mostly gone and the oil begins to separate) for a while then add beef ribs and let it cook on a slow flame till the meat gets very tender. Finish with cider vinegar and tamarind puree. Allow to rest for a moment or two and serve with steamed basmati rice.