Another glorious summer is well and truly over. And was it ever a good one, with two records being broken for the sunniest, and driest July!

It’s the end of September and it’s already typical fall weather, grey and squally. Comforters and quilts are being aired and readied for the coming cold and we even had the heating on briefly one rainy day this week. It’s time to bring on the soups and stews – you know, hearty stuff to drive away the chill and damp.

And yet, what do I see calling out to me from the supermarket shelves like glowing warm beacons from summers past – passion fruit! At a few dollars apiece, it is an indulgence, but one I can’t resist for a quick-fix way to ward off some the bleakness of the darkening fall days. I can find bottles of passion fruit juice (Sri Lankan), jelly (from Hawaii, where the fruit is known as Lillikoi) and even frozen pulp at a store that caters to Indians from East Africa. But it’s the sight of the fresh fruit that really makes me long for a warm day with cloudless skies.

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When it comes to traditional home style food, and cooking, we most often celebrate our mothers, aunts and grandmothers. It’s not often that we hear of the men who make a mark in this department. This Kail Podh I’d like to give a shout out to three young Kodavas who are doing a great job of popularizing the cuisine of Coorg, each in his own unique way. Let’s hear it for B.A. Devaiah, B.K. Appaiah, and Lirish Chinnappa!

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This year, my jackfruit season began in July, in Vancouver, when the most delicious fresh, ripe jackfruit turned up in some local stores. It was so sweet and flavourful, it didn’t even seem necessary to indulge in a round of kulae puttu. Of course I saved the seeds to cook in various ways including adding them to sambar and making chekké kuru pajji.

Tender unripe jackfruit is available here in frozen and canned form throughout the year. This is cooked as a vegetable, and the famously “meaty” texture of the fruit in this stage is a wonderful medium for experimenting with cooking and spicing that would typically overwhelm more delicate vegetables.

I’d like to share a couple of recipes, one using the seeds and the other, tender unripe jackfruit.

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The large arrowhead shaped leaves of Taro plants (Colocasia esculenta) are a familiar sight by the paddy fields or near stream beds and marshy lands in Coorg.

The plants love moisture, and in the powerful winds and relentless rains of the monsoon, they thrive defiantly. If you have the opportunity, stand by a clump of Taro when it’s raining. You’ll be treated to a beautiful sound and water display, as the rain hammers down on and slides off the slopes of the giant leaves. Not quite as dramatic, perhaps, as a dive bomber attack on a battleship, but it does get pretty loud!

Possibly native to the Indo-Malayan region, Taro has made its way around the world. In Hawaiian culture, where the plants played an significant role in the early years of the Polynesian settlement of the islands, it is considered sacred.

Known as Kaymbu in the Kodava language, it is one of the most useful food plants, with its edible corms (kaymbu kandé) stems and leaves.There are several types of  Kaymbu that are commonly eaten. The two main ones are the green stemmed and red stemmed (chonde kaymbu) varieties. There is another thicker leafed variety, known as mara (tree) kaymbu, that grows on the sheltered branches of large trees.

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I first came across morels in Kashmir when my parents were stationed there. Having grown up eating a variety of wild mushrooms in Coorg, this was an entirely new and exciting find. With their deeply wrinkled and pointed caps they looked to me more like some sea sponges, or coral plucked from a reef, than any mushroom I’d  ever seen.

We were fortunate to have the most wonderful Kashmiri cook through whom I was first introduced to the marvels of Kashmiri cuisine. He cooked these gucchi, as they’re known there, into a delicately seasoned pulao, full of meaty chunks of the mushroom. He used dried morels, mutton stock, and rice seasoned with the black cumin commonly used in Kashmiri cooking. Also known as kala zeera* or shah jeera, it lends a subtle peppery, smoky quality to foods and is quite the perfect complement to mushrooms.

Morels can be a pretty expensive indulgence, even when they are in season here in Vancouver, but many varieties of excellent mushrooms are available throughout the year. And if you dry them, even the most seemingly dull mushrooms acquire exciting new depths of flavour. With the wonderful wild mushrooms the Coorg monsoon throws up, perhaps this is just the time for some mushroom pulao!

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Leftovers? You love them, you hate them!

Sometimes it’s all about those pesky little containers of dribs and drabs cluttering the fridge. Should they stay or should they  go? If there are more substantial leftovers, there’s the question of how many more times you can bring them to the table without facing a rebellion. Can they be frozen to provide welcome relief from cooking on a tiresome day, or as a “go to” for a quick snack? Is there room in the freezer? It goes on.

Then, there are some dishes that go so smoothly from superb first serve to an excellent, crisp return. (Yes, Wimbledon just ended a few days ago!) You gladly welcome anything that remains uneaten. Take the last lonesome nuuputtu, for instance.

When I think of nuuputtu, it’s not always an image of soft, steamed heaps of long, delicate rice noodles that comes to mind. Among many favourite snacks my grandmother rustled up at tea time, was a treat made from nuuputtu at the other end of the spectrum – sun dried, broken into short lengths, then deep fried to crackling crispness and eaten with grated coconut and sugar.

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