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Apr
28
Yesterday was a lazy Sunday when we were cooking assorted things for the week. A green plantain came out of the vegetable crisper. The oven was already pre-heating for some bread, so it made its way in there and emerged as a mid-morning snack.
If you’re not familiar with plantains, please check out how a Plahnden is differend from a benana.
Confession #1
If you’re a true foodie from south India you are supposed to be unable to live without curry leaves.
Guess what, we didn’t get them in our local Indian store for three months. (There was a pest infestation that led to a ban.) And we did not miss them all that much.
For sour dishes like rasam, kaffir lime leaves work quite well. Take them out in the end, though, ‘cos they are tough to chew.
For other dishes, we use oregano, sage, basil, Thai basil or laurel leaves. (Laurel leaves are what we call ‘bay leaves‘ in the West. In India, ‘bay leaves’ refer to cassia leaves). Sage, to our mind, is the best substitutes. It doesn’t match the unique curry leaf flavour, but does lend the required “punch” to the dish.
Curry leaves are **gasp** dispensable in an Indian kitchen.
BAKED PLANTAIN CHIPS
Preheat oven to 425 F.
Peel and cut green plantains into thin rings. (1 large plantain will yield about 3 cups) We peel it lightly – not all the way to the flesh.
Put 2 tbsp vegetable oil on a baking sheet and add salt and cayenne powder to taste. Mix the oil and spices and put the plantain slices on the tray. Shake them a bit until coated and turn them over to coat the other side.
Bake for 25-30 minutes, turning once, until crisp and golden.
Heat 2 tsps oil (preferably coconut oil) in a pan. Add a few curry leaves. When they turn slightly crisp, add 1/4 cup dried coconut pieces. Fry until the coconut starts to turn brown on the edges.
Add the chips and toss them around, check seasonings, and serve.
Confession #2
This is how we like them. Plain, without things littered on top.
Blogging has made us superficial and obsessed with appearances. We made the chips plain, then added the coconut and curry leaves ‘cos we thought they make the picture prettier. B picked them out of her chips and added them to J’s. J picked them out of his chips, ate his chips first, and ate them just because they were on his plate.
They are superfluous to this recipe.
Now, it’s your turn.
Fess up. What useless things does blogging make you do?
Baked plantain chips with coconut, curry leaves and confessions go to dear Anh @ Food Lover’s Journey for Weekend Herb Blogging.
Filed Under: blogging, Coconut, Curry leaves, Plantain, vegan recipes, vegetarian recipes
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36 Comments
Things that blogging has made me do:
Usually its just having a parantha that’s gotten cold
.
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Or forgetting to add something as basic as salt (while all other ingredients are being measured to perfection)
Lovely chips, i love mine with an extra coat of chilli powder.
That looks pretty guys, even without the garnish:) and yes, blogging does make you do some weird things, like buying fancy stuff for the pics, opening the laptop first thing when you get the time to check for comments, and also watching your food turn cold while you finish taking 20 shots!:)D
but what the heck, I still enjoy it:)
The funniest thing I catch myself doing is pairing things up based on how good they look together in a photograph not how they taste together! Form over function
Like the plantain chips, although south indian food without curry leaves – arre baap re, Such heresy!
The chips look great. Things blogging has made me do is … make my husband wait till I take the snaps . he doesnt complain he is a sweetheart and does not mind the not so hot food.
How could u decorate the plantain chips with curry leaves. I am really jealous to see such a fresh curry leave simply sitting on your plantain and u re going to trash that precious leaves after the shot! I am buying some wilted curry leaves in BLACK market.Now where to hunt for the Kaffir lime leaves for my rasam and sambar?
kaffir lime leaves are available in thai and chinese stores. they last well in the freezer in a ziploc bag or container for six months or more. – b.
Thanks to blogging. Now my pantry is full of fancy plates, bowls etc. Before started to blog I wanted my food to be warm, but now I got used to eat them cold (due to the time taken for all those snaps!). I still enjoy it!
The plantain chips look fabulous. I remember my mom used to make them as an after school snack.
Yum, Yum, and more Yum! Love plantains and this sounds like a version that I would love! What does blogging make me do? Cook & bake things I never would have before, plate things different, look for backgrounds, finish dishes at certain times of the day, photograph foods and products before I use them instead of just after…and I am sure many other things. Funny how it makes you change your ways!
The plaintain chips are mouthwatering..I make my husband wait before I click snaps for my blog..And he doesnt mind that..Before he starts eating something he makes sure I have taken the pics
I ask myself that q often enough! I think one of the things is Photography..I fuss now about how my photos come up which was something unheard of before with me…
But am still not into exposure,tripod,taking 20 before choosing that one Pic! Mine is usually totally 5 – 6 and yes they r mostly step photos which I display. But the day that i follow all these is not far off , am so sure!
We dont get curry leaves here too nowdays and I was surprised to realise that I indeed could survive without that!
Good recipe and great photos as always
I am thinking of making the last statement my signature when I type something out here cos I know I sure will say that everytime I come here
[ I think I wrote off a Novel in here instead of a comment!]
I too don’t get curry leaves and just can’t clip the sprigs of my curry leaves plant. so we are surviving without curry leaves. but still, I do crave for the fresh curry leaves. So I am reluctant to say they are dispensible.
loved the plantain chips. will try them soon.
Because of blogging, I got ingredients that I had never used before like mustard oil.
Oh, & we are used to eating cold food, melted ice-cream etc…because I keep taking pictures.
& I try to put some garnish always just to add some color contrast!
I have ended up purchasing some fancy plates only to realize I have some fine china and fancy plates sitting in storage boxes. I do an extra garnish to my dishes just for the sake of a picture.I used to always want a good presentation, but not obsessed with it as much as I do now:)
I began buying pretty dishes till I soon, mercifully, realised the photos I took came out best in white! And stopped buying stuff. I also bought some granite and marble slabs to use as background but they’re somewhere in the bowels of my house now.
Buying strange stuff… from veggies to bowls. Just for the look of it
I tries something similar a little while ago and loved it
Lovely looking chips.
Oh..the things that we do for blogging..apart from the usual ‘letting the food go cold’ while we are busy taking snaps, I also have had episodes of my tadka being burnt while I am taking the step by step photographs. Another one is adding tomatoes instead of the tamarind pulp in some dishes just because the colours look nice!
The latest one for me is pestering the hubby with questions about which veg will look good for the Au Naturel event!
The funniest thing I did was to actually move a huge, heavy table out into the sun to take a photo. Then realized I didn’t like the table, climbed up onto a chair to get an aerial shot, and trying to suspend a plate onto thick plant leaves, while I took the photo! oh lol!! what a fantastic question – now i realize how crazy I’ve become!
My confession – I sometimes make things for dinner and then photograph them the next day cold from the ‘fridge. And our dinners used to be special but because the light just isn’t right, our lunches are now super! lol!
I used to just cook by instinct most of the time…now, I try to write down how much of besan was mixed with how much of atta…and how many servings did it yield… Now my family thinks it strange if we all sit down to a meal without the camera having been taken out! It’s great to shock them sometimes.
That’s all I’m fessing up to…
PS: Nice chips BTW; the plain ones.
Good you brought this topic up. I have always wondered how these bloggers savour their food (specially indian recipes) in such fancy plates. I still like my food in steel plate. But they do post such fabulous photos which is a feast to my eyes. Thanks.
BTW the mint that I thought that I grew from stems, rotted. It sprouted some leaves and all of a sudden the whole stem started rotting. Sad. Sorry for the claim that I made in my last comment.
Hey B&J,
I am a long time reader of your blog, but dropping a comment for the first time. Now please don’t roll your eyes about how I have been so ungrateful for never dropping in a hi or expressing my gratitute. I sent a lot of good vibes you way if that means anything
Anyhow, I had been waiting to finish my thesis so I could have more time to leave comments on all the blogs that I love to read. The good news is that the job is done and now I can do just that!
The dispensability of curry leaves in your kitchen made me chuckle. I fell in love with a man 2 years back when I joined my graduate program. I am Indian and he (W)is American, however the cultural gap was not much since he has travelled widely in India and is familiar with Indian cultures. I belong to a Punjabi family with an Iranian mother, so I grew up on something like fusion cuisine and thats what I cook – Rajma with sabzi pollow and other such combinations. My mother’s best friend is Keralite and last year I visited her for 2 months and she packed me a huge parcel full of delicacies from Kerala. I returned to the USA and brought back my parcel which included some foods that had curry leaves in it. Now since the time W tried curry leaves he wants it in food EVERYDAY!! And he begged of me to ratch up my cooking a bit (read: a lot) by learning how to cook South Indian food. Now I prepare many dishes from the south and thanks to some wonderful blogs like yours, I think I have become good at it. So to make a long story short, curry leaves are totally is indispensable in my kitchen.
Cheers!
welcome, sonia. hope W doesn’t get addicted to kaffir lime leaves, ‘cos those are bloody expensive!! – b.
Love the chips – and sooo fuss free compared to the frying method – use this method for everything from yam to arbi!
Forget me, what blogging has done to my husband is that he stops midway on the first spoonful of food to check whether I have taken my pics!
Miri
All of the above
Plain chips! love those.. wouldn’t mind them with an extra dash of red chilli pwd!
We do get curry leaves here in the Indian store.. not too fresh.. but..
Taking umpteen pics(none spectacular) while the food gets cold!
Wake up early morning and check blogs ( so the world is on fire…. that can wait!)
hi sapna, mint does grow from the stem.
nendran chips look yum.
Um..take pictures while the food gets cold on the table?
Good lookin’ chips, these.
Hmmm….yep, all of the above! In addition I have also arranged the top layer of veggies in a subzi.
I try very hard NOT to cook things with the blog in mind, and just wander aimlessly following my pre-blogging foodie interest in order to maintain a certain integrity. Try being the key word there…
Curry leaves…[sighs]. I bought two bags right before the ban, used one and froze the other. I’ve been hoarding the other, but they need to be used soon before all of the flavour dissapates, so…
err…I pot mint stems all the time to propagate them. New leaves and roots sprout from the nodes. Just take the thicker stems, use the leaves, plop them into soil, and you shall have a mint plant soon!
*drool*. I could confess if I’m bribed with these chips!
The bowls I use to take pictures in are often not what I eat from! I often like my good old comfort bowl – I end up transferring the food from the picture bowl or plate once I’m done! Pretty lame, eh?
Shouldn’t the brain send a message like eat it on seeing food instead why is it sending a signal to take pictures? Wondering is it the blog?
.
Chips look good.
I’ve never found curry leaves here. I once bought a plant and had it growing in my herb garden, only to find out it was entirely the wrong things. As far as what blogging makes me do, all the above (eat cold food, write everything down) and more, like try the food on 3-4 different plates, cook things 3-4 times to get a good photo, and cook at night, then save the food to photograph when there is natural light. It’s pretty funny isn’t it? I’m trying to be vigilant about not wasting food though.
Curry leaves and coconut – what an ingenious combination with those chips
Hi! I was so amused reading your post because your experiences (obsession with food appearance, cold food, etc)with food blogging sounds like mine too! I have learned a lot from blogging though, like learning more ways to cook an ingredient, learning about different cultures through food, learning to take a decent photograph, learning the adobe photoshop, etc.
I love plantains! Thank you for featuring them.
Love it, love it, love it. Just now made them for lunch, but I don’t think there’s going to be anything left for having with rice. I tried the bitter gourd crisps also. That was also good, but this one is the winner. Thanks a lot for the recipe.
[...] J and B’s Baked Plantain Chips has become yet another favorite in our house. This is the 2nd time I’m making it. Before knowing this recipe I used to find plantains everywhere but I never used to buy it because I did not not know what to do with it. Then one day I found this recipe and believe me or not I couldn’t find plantains anywhere. I did not take pictures the first time I made it, because my husband was snacking it away and actually we did not have anything left to be taken with rice. This time I managed to take a picture before we could gobble them up. [...]
I bought my first ever plantain today, in a wonderful Indian shop that I don’t visit so often. It is a bit of a drive from my place, but I was in the area so popped in. I spent a heap of money on things I don’t get in my local Indian shop, some cooking equip, some dals, some flours etc, and 1 plantain – the only one they had left. I am so overjoyed, and think I will make your baked plantains.