Ep12: June 2018: Downtime: Deliciousness at Home by Nadine Levy Redzepi

Shuttling between Panjim and Pune and then Panjim and Hyderabad is tiring. I’ve been flying back most weekends because my husband has out-station quizzes and someone needs to sit the cats

I’ve finally managed to spend a couple of weekends in Panjim and obviously have the cookbook club on my mind. I’d been talking to Sujit “The Sourdough Whisperer” Sumitran on Instagram and when I figured his daughter and h9s son-in-law, Neha and Vahishta were staying with them briefly, I couldn’t let the opportunity slide.

I got in touch with Neha and we met for drinks and to show her some books. We picked Nadine Levy Redzepi’s Downtime: Deliciousness at Home and fangirled a little. We almost even picked the same set of recipes to cook! I finally decided on a chorizo and clam broth along with panna cotta for dessert and she decided to do the hummus and anchovies as well as the mashed potatoes, cured egg yolks and some garden greens. Of course, there were her dad’s sourdough boules to go with.

Lunch happened at nearly 3 pm, as I woke up late, rode all the way to the Mapusa fish market to buy fresh clams and some green mussels, struggled to find a decent wine shop and finally got to their house to cook my broth and my panna cotta.

I first tugged at the mussels to rid them of their beards and them steamed them to open them up. I learnt that Goan choriz is quite different from Spanish chorizo, in that it is more tart and spicy, so I needed to alter the recipe on the fly a little bit. I also cracked two glass bowls while pouring in the caramel for my panna cotta and was quite embarrassed. But it tasted okay eventually, though not as creamy as my usual recipe.

Neha, meanwhile dropped some egg yolks in boiling water and made her anchovy hummus, adding more anchovies than called for to make the hummus nice and fishy. She and Vahishta had sliced some potatoes for crisps, so she fried those. We also fried some borage leaves. I’ve told them I’ll take some borage home and attempt growing it because it’ nice and sturdy and we don’t exactly have green thumbs!

Over all, albeit late, the meal was super yum! We also had Peter for company, whose farm Neha and Vahishta are ‘interning’ at. So there was a bunch of good food AND a bunch to learn!