Thank you game and Chilli Cheese Toast
My favourite part of the day is bedtime. My children's bedtime. It's a half-hour routine involving stories, songs, hugs and the thank you game.
Yesterday, one of my sons said thank you that he got “time” to make mummy a card while the other was thankful he got to eat white rice for dinner. They really range from jaw-droppingly sweet to weird.
My favourite part however is snuggling in with my youngest boy on his bed in the dark while I play them a Sesame Street audio story.
M1 loves audiobooks. M2 loves talking with me through the book. Here’s a snippet from yesterday:
M2: Mummy, do you want to be my jaan? (jaan in gujarati = life)
Me: Yes.
M2: Mummy, do you want to be my baby?
Me: Yes.
M2: Mummy, do you want to be my white rice?
Me: Yes.
M2: Mummy, do you want to be my toast.
Me: No cheese?
M2: Yes, cheese!!!!!
Me: Then Yes.
M2: Yayy!! cheese toast!!
After a few more cuddles, he finally stopped talking, and his body became heavy against my arm.
I don’t know which memory I will treasure the most? Having my children fall asleep in my arms or the time my child wanted me to be his cheese toast (in my head, the bigger honour).
I wanted to honour my goodnight chats. They are so fleeting and so delicious you want to hold on to them for a minute more. Exactly like chilli cheese toast.
What is Chilli Cheese toast?
As a kid living in Mumbai in the late 90s there were only types of restaurants to choose from – Indian, Chinese or continental. For the people who couldn’t choose, like my family, there was the local restaurant Solitaire, which had a 12-page menu and served everything from tandoori chicken to sesame prawn toast to pepper steak.
I didn’t know about dim sum back then. Or, the difference between Sichuan and Cantonese food. If it had chillies, spring onion or soy sauce in it, I assumed it was Chinese. Like Schezwan fried rice and hot and sour soup. Turns out both of those dishes were Indo-Chinese, a whole sub-cuisine that’s very hard to find in New Zealand.
Another popular Indo-Chinese dish was chilli cheese toast.
My working theory is that chilli cheese toast was born from sesame prawn toast, but some Hindu vegetarian decided that they’d skip the prawns altogether and the sesame too. It was available not just at vegetarian Chinese restaurants but also at gymkhanas, continental restaurants, Bombay’s Irani cafes and curiously, at my Gujarati neighbour’s house.
You can have chilli cheese toast by itself or topped with a sunny-side-up fried egg.
If you do the latter, then you’ve left China altogether and you’re now eating eggs Kejriwal, a dish created in the early 50s at Bombay’s Willingdon Sports Club for the rich Hindu merchant Devi Prasad Kejriwal. Rumour has it that he loved eggs but couldn’t eat them in his Hindu home. The chefs at Willingdon hid the eggs under a pile of cheese lest someone saw him.
Chilli Cheese Toast (for two)
2 slices white bread (toast thickness)
100gm grated cheese
2 spring onions finely chopped
1 green chilli, finely chopped
1/4 tsp ginger paste
1/4 tsp garlic paste
Handful of mint, finely chopped
Salt to taste
Crushed black pepper
Generous helping of butter or dollop of Dolly Mumma's Cashew Korma paste**
Soften the butter.
Mix together the butter, spring onions, green chilli, mint, Cashew Korma paste, salt and pepper.
Heat a pan and grill one side of the bread until it is golden and almost crispy.
Remove the bread from the pan and slather on a thick layer of the butter-Korma mixture. Top with a generous mound of cheese. Bake them at 200℃ preheated oven for about 5 minutes or until they become crispy.
Serve hot with a fried egg or enjoy by itself.
*If you don't have Cashew Korma, swap if for 1/2 tsp of ginger paste and 1/2 tsp of garlic paste to make a more basic version of this dish.
This recipe and parts of this story was originally written for The Spinoff