Why Mango Lassis are the Best Ever, or, an Abundance of Mangoes

(You guys! My column today at Serious Eats is on Avocado Chicken Salad. No joke, it’s one of the best things I’ve made this year. Thanks to Mrs. Micah for the idea and The Boyfriend for slurping it up like a team of ravenous little leaguers.)

Last week, I came into possession of two large, ripe mangoes. And let me tell you, folks - there are few things in life greater than receiving mangoes for free. They include, but are not limited to:

• free backrubs
• free concert tickets
• freedom from oppression

Alas, as we were invaded by horrible, six-legged Woody Allen cartoons, it took me awhile to get to the beckoning fruit. Four days after their arrival, they weren’t quite mushy, but had most definitely surpassed the salsa stage. (Meaning the mangoes could be chopped up, but wouldn’t hold their shape very well.)

Here’s the rub: when you search online for mango recipes, 99.9 of the first 100 bazillion are for mango salsa. Once you scroll 14,000 pages past those, there’s a severed link for mango chutney. But never fret. Because if you persevere, you will find, at the very end of the internet, next to an 8-bit porno from 1982 and an ASCII drawing of Homer Simpson, a recipe for mango lassis.

Mango lassis, to put it simply, are THE BEST. An offshoot of the regular lassi (seen here), they’re shake-like and fruity and sweet and filling and positively wonderful. Plus, they have magical powers. Bad things don’t happen when mango lassis are around. To wit:

• If Joss Whedon knew about mango lassis, Buffy wouldn’t have become so weird in the last few seasons.
• If the Hells Angels knew about mango lassis, Altamont would never have happened.
• If Kim Jong-Il knew about mango lassis, North Korea would be a flourishing democratic republic/vacation spot, welcoming of all races and creeds, where nuclear warheads would be used as in-ground swimming pools instead of weapons of mass ouchification.

This mango lassi is a lighter version of the one from the lovely Elise at Simply Recipes. Though it uses milk, you could probably substitute cold water and/or crushed ice based on your preferences. Cardamom is optional, but couldn’t hurt.

In conclusion: mango lassi. Get one.

Mango Lassi
Serves 2
From Simply Recipes.

1 cup lowfat plain yogurt
1/2 cup 1% milk
1 cup chopped mango, peeled and stone removed (about 1 large)
4 teaspoons sugar, to taste
A dash of ground cardamom (optional)

1) Get out a blender. Add  yogurt, milk, mango, sugar, and cardamom. Blend for about 2 minutes, or until everything is smooth and relatively chunk-free. Distribute evenly among your glasses. Serve super-cold.

Approximate Calories, Fat, and Price Per Serving
190 calories, 2.8 g fat, $0.92

Calculations
1 cup lowfat plain yogurt: 154 calories, 3.9 g fat, $0.70
1/2 cup 1% milk: 53 calories, 1.2 g fat, $0.11
1 cup chopped mango, peeled and stone removed: 107 calories, 0.5 g fat, $0.99
4 teaspoons sugar, to taste: 65 calories, 0 g fat, $0.03
TOTAL: 379 calories, 5.6 g fat, $1.83
PER SERVING (TOTAL/2): 190 calories, 2.8 g fat, $0.92

City Kitchen Chronicles: Cranberry and Blackberry Champagne Punch

City Kitchen Chronicles is a bi-weekly column about living frugally in Manhattan. It's penned by the lovely Jaime, and is a little late this week due to Kris' absence. Still, it's neato.

In my last column, on the misguided “cheap parties for rich people” meme currently taking over our newspapers, I mentioned my own upcoming soiree. And indeed, this past weekend, I invited a bunch of friends and a few strangers (read: cute boys I vaguely know) to what I called “birthdahousewarming.”

Yes, I moved into this apartment, oh, fifteen months ago, but as a procrastinator and generally not-too-neat person, I didn’t quickly have my place either fully furnished and decorated, nor ever really tidy. (Necessary disclaimer: I am messy, but not dirty. There are clothes on my bedroom floor, but not moldy food on my kitchen counters.)

As this birthday approached, I was debating between having people over and gathering folks at a bar. Each had its appeal – at a bar I would likely have all my drinks bought for me, but the atmosphere is beyond my control and I have to take the subway home at the end of the night; at home I have to buy booze and snacky foods, and clean, but I get to show off my (when it’s clean) quite lovely and spacious abode. But to be honest with myself, something that would force me to clean was probably a good thing, and I have put more than a year’s work into making my home a place I love. It was time to (almost literally) warm it with the people I loved.

That just left the hurdle of feeding and watering a group of friends. My mother instilled in me a strong hostessing instinct – I couldn’t bear to just provide a jug of cheap vodka and some HFCS cranberry juice and call it a day. Visions of crudités and homemade hummus danced through my head, but so did fears of overdrawn checking accounts and subsequent months of living on toast.

Thankfully, in a bit of birthday deus ex machina, I realized that, hey, it’s my birthday, and I’m young enough that my grandparents still send some cash my way come December. So that took me from zero budget to low budget. My anxiety was eased, but I still needed to do this cheap.

For food I went to the super-cheap grocery behind Port Authority for veggies to go with my homemade hummus. Target provided very cheap and very delicious restaurant-style tortilla chips and a splurge of dark M&M’s. My supermarket had organic apple chipotle salsa for just a dollar more than the regular stuff; that extra dollar was mightily worth the oohs and ahs and enjoyment of my friends. It made everything feel a little fancier.

But drinks confounded me. Alcohol is not cheap. (Or, cheap alcohol is usually not good.)

I figured people would bring beer and wine (and I knew I could count on one dear friend for whiskey), so I wanted to lay the foundation with something festive and interesting.

Punch.

I scoured the internet, got somehow set on the idea of cranberry champagne punch, found basically no internet recipes for that, and so made it up myself (with the help of many silly and frantic emails to wise friends).

Most punch recipes call for several kinds of alcohol. I’d be starting from scratch, without a bar to draw from, so that put just about everything out of my budget. A friend assured me that champagne + fruit juice would be tasty, and I picked up a few fancifying touches from the internet.

I made this entirely without recipes (and without a punch bowl – my big soup pot had to suffice), but in preparation I bought:

3 bottles of the next-to-cheapest champagne I could find: $21
2 8 oz. boxes of blackberries: $2
1 64 oz. bottle of cranberry juice cocktail: $2.39
1 32 oz. bottle of black cherry juice: $3.50

I didn’t use all of either juice – those leftovers went to a vitamin C binge to ward off a cold that was tickling the back of my throat. (Totally worked.) I’d say I spent $27 on the punch. I wasn’t exactly tracking how many servings, but let’s say 20? That’s $1.35 each, a fair competition for even the cheapest bottle of beer, and immensely better than a champagne cocktail at a bar.

This is a party, after all, and a go-with-the-flow improvised recipe, so it’s not the time to intensely nitpick calories. Serving sizes vary, too, but I can estimate that a small glass of this has fewer than 150 calories (probably more like 120) and the juice and berries are surely healthier mixers than a lot of other options. Cranberry juice has vitamin C! Have your fruit and drink it, too.

Cranberry & Black Cherry Champagne Punch
(makes about 1 ½ soup pots worth)

(Picture from Torani, but it's fairly/kind of close to what it actually looked like.)

1) Freeze an ice cube tray full of cranberry juice, and one full of black cherry juice. Leave juices and champagne in the fridge for several hours to chill.

2) Pour a champagne into punch bowl or large soup pot. (I only used two bottles at first, because my soup pot isn’t huge and also the third bottle’s cork was stuck, so I had to wait for a strong friend to arrive. This helps keep things fizzy, too.)

3) Add juice, to taste.

4) Add blackberries. (If you want to be a total rockstar, you can soak the berries in a little champagne or vodka ahead of time to booze them up.) Add juice ice cubes.

5) Stick a ladle in your soup pot and explain to guests that it’s not mulled wine.

Totally guestimated calories and cost per serving: 120 calories, $1.35

(Photos courtesy of Flickr member Wardomatic and Torani.)

Veggie Might: Masala Chai of Gratitude

Written by the fabulous Leigh, Veggie Might is a regular Thursday feature about all things Vegetarian.

(Part three of three in a series of healthyish dessertish things for the impending holiday madness.)

"Part three?" you may be asking, "What more can I do for these lactose-intolerant, gluten-free vegans?" How about welcoming them into your home with a big steaming cuppa to thank them for A) being your awesome friends, 2) forcing you try new things, baking-wise, and M) just being the supafreaks they are.

With Thanksgiving around the bend, I’ve been thinking a lot about gratitude. Sometimes it’s hard when I feel I’m constantly reminded of what’s missing from my life. The news reminds me daily, if not minutely, that the economy is on a barge to Fresh Kills, and that food prices are rising along with sea levels.

But this lean time is the perfect time to focus on bounty, to look around and say, "Hey Leigh. You’re doing pretty well: your brain works for the most part, you have a great family of friends and family types, and you are not starving." Or you could use your own name and circumstances.

The perfect accompaniment for Thanking and cold-weather gatherings: a cup of masala chai out of your favorite mug from your favorite late-night hangout in your college town that takes you back to a time when cares were scarce even though money was more so.

Masala chai is Hindi for spice tea. Chai derives from cha, the Chinese word for tea. At this point in the post, the grammar/word nerd in me must inform you that “chai tea” is a pleonasm, like ATM machine or A.M. in the morning. Don’t be that guy/gal. Chai means tea. If you say “I’ll have the chai tea, you’re saying “I’ll have the tea tea,” which could be horribly misconstrued.

I’m a tea person. Coffee just never did it for me. Believe me, I tried in college; I tried in summer stock. During my years as a waitron, I poured enough coffee on 2­ to 3 hours sleep that I’d do anything to make it through my shift. But when you’re having more milk and sugar than coffee, and oh yeah could I have a little ice cream with that?, it’s time to stop kidding yourself.

Over the years, I’ve been perfecting my masala blend. I like mine fiery-spicy, so I go heavy on the black pepper and ginger. Cardamom is also my best favorite spice friend. It tastes like warm. Sometimes I put it in my chai by itself.

There are hundreds of masala chai recipes on the Web if you want to experiment with different spices and quantities. Go crazy. The most common spices are cinnamon, cardamom, clove, black pepper, and fresh ginger. Optional, but also tasty additions can be nutmeg, allspice, fennel, bay leaf, and star anise. It’s best to use a hearty black tea like assam or keemun. Darjeeling is a bit too light to stand up to the flavors of the spices.

The only hard and fast rule is one held by tea drinkers the world around: Do not boil your tea leaves. The order of operations here is very important. To really get the flavor of the spices, they need to be boiled; but tea leaves are more delicate. Boiling causes the tea to become bitter.

Boil the spices first, turn of the heat, then add the tea leaves and brew. It’s that simple. Tea tip for the ages: Never boil tea leaves. Ever. Oversteeping is bad too. A friend who used to work in a tea shop once told me: Brew, don’t stew. Three to five minutes is the longest tea leaves should steep.

Before I started writing this, I started feeling a little insecure. Just how authentic was my masala? I asked my friend P, who is from Northern India. He told me I was off-base with the anise seed in my original recipe, so out it came. I couldn’t tell the difference when it was gone. We need never speak of it again.

This is a strong brew, just the way I like it. It’s also malleable; bend it, shape it any way you want it. It’s all right. The recipe is easily increased or decreased.

The traditional way to drink masala chai is with milk, but you can go skim or soy/rice if you’re cutting back on fat/calories/cholesterol. I made this recipe with soy because it’s a little heartier than rice milk and stands up better to the cooking. Of course, there is no rule that you have to have milk at all. But for a nice holiday treat, it is comforting and delicious.

Thank U, India; thank u cardamom, and thank u to all my spicy friends. Happy T day.

Masala Chai of Gratitude
Yields 4 cups

3 cinnamon sticks
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp black peppercorns
1 tsp cardamom pods (about 20 pods)
2 knobs fresh ginger (about 1/4 oz
3 tbsp loose black tea (i use keemun)
3 tbsp clover honey (sub turbinado sugar or agave nectar for a true vegan bev)
1 1/3 cup soy milk
3 cups water

1) Wrap cinnamon sticks in a kitchen towel and crush with hammer or rubber mallet.

2) In a coffee or spice grinder (or mortar and pestle if you’re old school), grind cloves, peppercorns, and cardamom pods for 10­ to 15 seconds.

3) Peel and dice ginger.

4) In a sauce pan, bring to a boil 3 cups of water and all spices. Reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes.

5) Add soy milk and honey, and bring back to a boil, stirring occasionally.

6) Turn off heat. Add tea leaves and cover.

7) Steep for 2-3 minutes.

8) Strain into teapot or mugs and serve hot.

Approximate Calories, Fat, and Price per Serving
94 calories, 1.8g fat, $.30

Calculations
3 cinnamon sticks: negligible calories and fat, $.18
1/2 tsp cloves: negligible calories and fat, $.02
1/2 tbsp black peppercorns: negligible calories and fat, $.02
1 tsp cardamom pods: negligible calories and fat, $.04
1 knob fresh ginger: 45 calories, 0g fat, $.03
3 tbsp loose black tea: 18 calories, 0 g fat, $.12
3 tbsp clover honey:192 calories, 0g fat, $.38
1 1/3 cup soy milk: 120 calories, 4.7g fat, $.40
TOTALS: 375 calories, 4.7g fat, $1.19
PER SERVING: 94 calories, 1.8g fat, $.30