Chickpea Crepes with Ginger and Hot Chiles (Chilla)

I always have chickpea flour (besan) in the cabinet - often for socca, sometimes for Indian dumplings, other times for breading okra before frying. When reading through Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking, I found my new favorite for breakfast - chilla. According to Sahni, "chilla is a spicy delicacy, a delightful breakfast treat form the eastern regions of India"

She had me at spicy and breakfast.

I mixed these together and pulled out our warped crepe pan for lunch Saturday. According to Sahni, "to best enjoy chilla, serve them with a lot of hot steaming tea, Indian-style," so I put a pot on the stove for my favorite chair recipe while the crepes cooked.

I adore this cookbook and am only through the tiffin section, but still need some urad dal in order to make the other recipes I'm interested in. Several of you asked for the recipe when I told you about it, so here it is as it appears in Sahni's book:

Chickpea Crepes with Ginger and Hot Chiles (Chilla)

1 cup chickpea flour
1 cup water
1 T chopped ginger
2 hot green chiles, chopped
1/8 t. red pepper flakes
1 t coarse sea salt
2 T light sesame oil or light vegetable oil*
extra oil for frying

1. Mix the chickpea flour and water and make a smooth, lump-free batter using processor, blender, or wire whisk. add all the other ingredients except extra oil mix well.
2. To cook the crepes, heat a nonstick frying pan over medium heat until very hot. Then brush the pan lightly with 1/2 to 3/4 t. oil.
3. Pour about 1/4 c of batter into the pan. Tilt the pan to coat it evenly with the batter. Cook the crepe until the underside is browned (about 2 min) Turn and cook the other side for 30-45 seconds. Pour on 1/2 to 1 t. oil during cooking to give the crepe a fried taste and texture. Remove and serve immediately or keep warm, while you make more crepes with the remaining batter. For a crispier taste, use 2-21/2 t. oil per crepe.

*Sesame oil is the Indian kind - light - (Til, I think it's called) - not the darker one found in Asian aisle of stores.

Hot Mango Chutney

In Paris there's a passage like Bangladesh - cardboard boxes weighed down with manioc and bitter melon beneath graying light and lunch specials. It was here that I first found knobs of turmeric huddling between splashes of coriander and white-striped aubergine.

We all have our alternate-life fantasies, our wish lists where we romanticize the lives of those who have less than us. When I was young, it was the horhound candies of Laura Ingalls Wilder or the soda crackers of this series of books of a handful of Jewish children on the Lower East Side at the turn of the century.

As an American in Paris trying her best to cook up the food she adores from the Bay Area, my fantasy is that of an Indian mom taken out of her homeland and trying to survive in a foreign place - popping mustard seeds in oil to fry up shitakes from the local market. A mother with piles of dough softening on the counter each night when her husband comes home - sometimes 1/2 atta other times, when that's run out, all-purpose flour, sometimes speckled with black pepper and oil added to resemble the flaky parathas she cooked at home.

It maintains, this alter-ego, as I prepare a dal with potatoes for a Friday night picnic on the tip of Ile St-Louis - dishes filled with warm lentils, topped with homemade tamarind chutney, yogurt and the most expensive hot mango chutney I'd ever seen. I didn't find it in the passages that I imagine are necessarily rank with an authenticity that I know nothing about, but rather in the chic aisles of Le Grande Epicerie (Au Bon Marche) - each jar wrapped in a plastic bag, stacked carefully above packets of Thai curry pastes and sheets of forest-colored nori in the Asie aisle.

There I was one day, trying to use up end-of-the-month cheques de restaurant, wondering if the price is high because of the trip from India or the ingredients (and hoping it's for the latter). Alas, we mothers of the diaspora, as I imagine us, in our world known only to white American women from fiction, we find 'home' wherever we can get it, claiming what might be ours, or not, as we make up our lives each day.