#kangsoi

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Looking forward with the green vegetables #Kangsoi (at Manipur University)

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#Kangsoi #Kangleipak #cuisine #Kangleipakfood #Pea #Potato #Parkia (at Manipur University)

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#Kangsoi #Kangleipakfood #Kangleipak #cauliflower #Tomato #Pea (at Manipur University)

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Sougri kangsoi

Sougri kangsoi is a simple dish.... simple to make with only a few ingredients. But I have to confess that I was never satisfied with, what I thought was, my preparation of sougri kangsoi. It never managed to match the balance of flavours that my mom's sougri kangsoi had achieved... or for that matter, those made by other seasoned and experienced ladies... (men rarely indulge in preparing kangsoi... RARELY, though not never).

After getting married I was cooking more of the traditional dishes and I was determined to get them right. That's when I started observing my mother-in-law's cooking. I was using the same ingredients as she was but her kangsoi had the balance while mine was always a little off. The lack of balance was subtle, and it bothered me more because it was so. It is fairly easy to catch a mistake in the recipe if the thing that is off, is significant... but it takes an amount of concentration and observation to pin a mistake if it is so subtle. Almost like trying to cut a very thin slice of cake... bad analogy, is it? 

Sougri, also known as deccan hemp or kenaf, is of the malvaceae family. The leaves are the only part of the plant consumed in the meitei cuisine except for the silhot sougri variety (roselle) of sougri, in which case, the sepals are also consumed. The leaves and sepals are sour to taste. The sourness and its availability make it a summer vegetable which is light and easy to digest. 

I always thought that sougri leaves look a lot like marijuana leaves... anyone with me on this?

Almost every household in Imphal has a few of these plants growing somewhere in the vicinity... and by "somewhere", I mean "anywhere". These plants are very hardy and they will grow almost anywhere... I had seen two of them growing on an abandoned terrace where a small pile of sand had been left standing for some time.

A few of them are growing in our kitchen garden too and Korou had suggested that I started my post from the garden itself where the ingredients are fresh and alive!

I know that the way to harvest them must be common sense to most of us but some of us have lost touch with our traditional cooking so much so that it can be quite confusing when someone asks us to go to the garden and pick some vegetables. And in our ignorance, we often harm the plant while trying to harvest them. Sougri is a tall plant and could reach several feet if it gets the required nutrition. That is why we pick only the leaves that grow out on the stem and never the bud at the top end of the stem in order to keep them standing tall and healthy. 

And while we are at it, I should touch on how to harvest maroi napaakpi too as it is one of the ingredients in this recipe . Unlike maroi nakuppi, which is cut whole and left to sprout again from the stub, napaakpi is harvested one leave at a time working from the outermost layer.  

Now getting to the recipe....

For this kangsoi, you will need:

a bunch of sougri leaves (adjust the amount according to the sourness you want).

a medium sized ngari.

2-3 pieces of smoke roasted fish.

a medium sized potato.

a few green chillies (according to the hotness you want).

fresh kidney beans.

5-7 maroi napaakpi leaves.

salt to taste.

The kidney beans I got for this recipe are locally grown. The vendors were selling them fresh off the pod. I love how they have those markings on them. The store bought dry ones don't have them... at least the ones that we get in Imphal don't.

Remove the stalks off of the leaves. 

Chop the maroi nakuppi and crush them with your hands. Crushing them helps release the flavour more effectively. 

Cut the green chillies into halves.

Slice the potatoes... not too thick not too thin. Slicing it up so will help the potato to cook faster. Peeling the potato is not necessary if you wash it thoroughly.

Roast the ngari on an open flame. This helps remove any impurities like occasional jute fibres as the flame burns them away. It also enhances its flavour by adding a smokiness to it.

We don't need to char the ngari. Just softening it a little will do.

Throw in the potato, kidney beans, ngari, smoked fish, maroi napaakpi, some water and salt in a pot. Now this is the step where I was going wrong. I would always save the maroi napaakpi for later. I thought that adding it later and leaving it half cooked preserved it's fresh colour and made the dish look pretty. But that tipped the balance in the flavour. Adding the ngari and the maroi napaakpi at the same time helped fuse the two flavours. The maroi napaakpi negated the pungent fishy smell of ngari while the ngari balanced the garlicky smell of raw maroi napaakpi. And adding the maroi napaakpi later somehow prevented the two flavours to mix together and hence produced a dish with the two unpleasant flavours managing to stay separately and noticeably. 

Put the pot on a flame and keep the lid covered to get it to a boil fast. 

Once it starts boiling, put in the chillies. Put the lid back on and let it boil a little more.

Check if the potato is done.

Once the potato and beans are done, throw in the sougri leaves. Notice how fast the leaves are cooked. They turn olive green as soon as they touch boiling water.

Cover and boil for about 30 seconds to one minute to allow the leaves to lend its sourness into the liquid.

Now put off the flame and it is done.

Look at how the roasted fish gives a nice milky texture to the liquid.

Sougri kangsoi tastes best with brown rice... should try that!

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Chicken kangsoi (with lomba)

I have just finished reading One Straw Revolution and it has been making me extremely hungry. Masanobu keeps talking about natural foods and how natural foods don't require elaborate cooking as they are full of flavour in themselves. He talks about natural whole rice (brown rice) and natural local eggs. All his talking about these simple recipes made me long for Meitei yen (local chicken breed). So, I decided to try out this yen kangsoi (Manipuri chicken soup) which Korou has been telling me about. He had it in Major-khul during the Gang-ngai festival. I am following the recipe that he had described. 

The ingredients are as follows:

300 g chicken (avoid the soft and tasteless broiler and use hardy tasty local breed if you can). 

a small potato sized ginger.

18-20 lomba heads (you can substitute it with lemon grass as they taste similar).

a few sprigs of coriander leaves for garnishing.

a few green chilies (optional).

salt to taste.

I have been searching around for english (or alternate) names for lomba but couldn't find any. They are the dried stalks that you see in the picture above. The heads are used for garnishing eromba and morok metpa most of the time. But I have also come across many recipes that use lomba in cooking. These recipes usually belong to the hill tribes of Manipur and around. 

Pound the ginger, chop the coriander leaves and remove the husk of the lomba from the stalks. 

Cut some green chilies if you like. 

Heat a pan and toss in the chicken pieces. If you are using meitei yen or a local hardy variety, make sure the pieces are small. The meat of local breeds tend to be less tender than the commercial broiler. Cook the pieces for a few minutes till the color of the meat lightens a bit. It will take no more than a few seconds.

Then add some water. The amount of water depends on how soupy you want your kangsoi/soup to be.

When the water starts to boil, add the pounded ginger and let it cook for 20 minutes. Add the salt too.  

Now, add the lomba husk and the green chilies. And let it boil for another 15 minutes. If, in case, you couldn't get a local breed and are using a commercial broiler instead, you can make do with 10 minutes instead of 15 as broilers get cooked faster. 

Turn off the flame and garnish it with the coriander leaves. I have used local variety of those too as they are more aromatic than the imported ones.

Enjoy the yen kangsoi with a bowl of hot rice. 

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Cauliflower / kobi kangsoi

Kangsoi is the most basic and loved dish in Manipuri/Meitei cuisine. It is healthy (I suppose) and requires no fuss in cooking. It can be defined as an assortment of vegetables boiled with ngaari  and ginger and garnished with cilantro (this is a must). Sometimes, smoke roasted fish is added to it to enhance the taste. 

However, with more and more Manipuris settling/studying outside Manipur, there has been an array of innovative dishes in which ngaari is replaced (because of its unavailability) with a meat or simply with fried fish. Slowly, these dishes have also started coming under the umbrella name, kangsoi. Though, I would like to think of kangsoi as a fish dish only, we now have chicken kangsoi, beef kangsoi, fried fish kangsoi, vegetarian kangsoi and so on. The ingredients, then, that makes a kangsoi a kangsoi is the ginger and the cilantro. I think these two ingredients are very very important as they add the slightly tangy, slightly garden-y (if I may say so) taste in a kangsoi. 

Although, kangsoi is a boiled dish, it can be started off by frying some onions in a little bit of oil. I prefer it without the oil but even otherwise, the oil shouldn't overwhelm the dish. 

For this recipe, you will need:

1 small cauliflower (200 g).

15-20 snow peas.

1 cup cherry tomatoes.

a few sprigs of green onions.

2-3 ngaari.

a piece of ginger.

cilantro/coriander leaves for garnish.

salt to taste.

Don't throw away this part of the cauliflower. I know some do. It can be used in fried rice or stir fried with other vegetables. It is very much edible.

This is a bad close-up picture of ngaari. It is a kind of fermented fish that we use in our cuisine. It has an odor which many people will not find pleasing. After all, it is a fermented dead animal. In spite of that, many non-Manipuris like kangsoi made with ngaari. Its taste and smell is milder when used in kangsoi as only a little amount of it is used in it. But, if you learn to appreciate its taste, it can be one of the tastiest things to eat. It is loaded with umami.  

Cut the cauliflower into bite size pieces, the tomatoes into halves and chop the green onions. The ginger needs to be cut into thin slices cross-section-wise.

Bring around 3 cups of water to a boil and add the cauliflower. 

Once it starts boiling again, add the snow peas and let it boil for 1-2 minutes.

Meanwhile, lightly roast the ngaari in a flame. This is for enhancing its taste by giving it a smoky flavour. 

Then, add the ngaari, salt and the green onions and let it boil for 1-2 minutes. 

And now, add the tomatoes and the ginger and let it boil for another minute.

Turn off the flame and garnish it with cilantro. Your kangsoi is done.

It is traditionally served with hot steamed rice and eggs/fried or roasted fish. But you could have it as a soup too.

Hindsight: None. Perfect!

Serving: 2-3

Calories: 120 (only!...can you believe that?)

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You can rarely go wrong with anything that is garnished with ginger and cilantro.

It's refreshing!

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Khamen asinba (tomato) kangsoi

Kangsoi is one of the easiest Manipuri dishes to make. It's healthy and very hard to mess up. It is basically vegetables boiled with smoked, fermented or sometimes fried fish. The dish is completed with a garnishing of ginger and coriander leaves. Everyone has their own unique way of making kangsoi. Some even like to put a little bit of oil. I will try to put up as many varieties of kangsoi as I can. For a start, here is one very simple tomato kangsoi that one can make with very minimal ingredients. It should not be hard to find these ingredients (or their substitutes) in any corner of the world.

The ingredients needed are,

1 potato

3 tomatoes (or more, if you like it very sour)

some green chillies (according to preference)

some smoked fish (can use ngari*, dry fish or even fried fish)

a small piece of ginger

coriander leaves

I haven't peeled the potato as its skin is a healthy source of fiber, vitamin C, iron, and copper, among other things. Usually, for kangsoi, potatoes and ginger are cut into disc shaped pieces as shown in the above picture. One can always experiment with different shapes of cutting vegetables. However, the ginger has to be cut into thin pieces as a chunky piece would be unpleasant to be discovered while chewing. I have cut the tomatoes into large chunky pieces as it will help the inside of the pieces to remain considerably raw and I like the taste of half cooked tomatoes. One can chop thinner long slices to prevent the half cooked taste of it. The green chillies are halved lengthwise and the coriander leaves are chopped for garnishing.  

Take the potato slices in a pot and put in just enough water to submerge the slices. More water takes more time to boil and we want to be efficient while cooking the potatoes first. Boil the potato until it is just cooked.

Add in the smoked fish and let it boil for another 3-5 minutes in low flame.

Now add the tomatoes and the green chillies along with salt (according to taste) into the pot. Put a cup or two of water into it depending on how watery you want the kangsoi to be. 

Increase the flame and let it be till it boils. Now add the ginger in it and let it boil for another 5 minutes. Turn off the flame and garnish it with coriander leaves.

Hindsight: None...perfect again.

Serving: two

Calories: 150 (75 each approx.)

* Ngari is a kind of Manipuri fermented fish.