Grain drain

(Yeah yeah, I always say I will restart that damn blog, but never get around to it somehow. Diversions exist, from people to the present. Sorry....)

Even as the corner grocery stores start stocking foods that are good for you, more people are becoming aware of the fact that bread can indeed be the stuff of life. Eaten as a staple in the West but seen mainly as breakfast fare or snack food (in the shape of sandwiches, stuffed ‘toasties’ or the more-often-than-not badly made ‘bread pakora’) in this country, bread is starting to be consumed in greater quantities as a replacement for rotis of various kinds or rice. And there, too, there has been a slow and steady revolution taking place over the years. Standard ‘white sliced’ is gradually yielding some of its supremacy – though not completely – to more exotic versions, with the number of grains growing with each avatar of the loaf. Healthy bread seems to be the formula, sometimes with fabulous products, and occasionally with not too pleasant consequences of a grain stuck in the teeth.

Most bread needs a base, which is still either white refined flour or whole wheat flour, the binding that holds the multi-grains together, as it were. As Kainaz Messman of Theobroma (known for its mega-chocolatey brownies that could indeed star in any menu for a divine banquet) says, the multi-grain bread the store sells (priced at Rs40 for a flattish oval loaf) contains “80 per cent different grains – nachni, bajra, jowar, ragi, a lot of sesame seeds, onion seeds, oat flour and more - and 20 per cent white flour, which is needed for the structure. However, even with the refined flour, it is still more nutritious than 100 per cent whole wheat with no white flour added.” Adding greater interest is the multi-grain cookie, an experience on my must-do list for my next visit to the small and divinely fragrant shop.

Zyros Zend of Yazdani Bakery and Restaurant believes that the consumer needs to have a sense of adventure that the bread he makes will stimulate. “The grains we put into our multi-grain bread are a big secret; I will tell you, but then I will have to kill you! The reason we do not want to tell people is that we want them to figure out what they are eating – it’s a matter of interest. We want them to get educated in the bread they are eating. They should know that it is genuinely good for the health and good to eat.” As a long-term customer, I myself know that it contains watermelon seeds, sunflower seeds, oats, bajra, jowar…at least nine different grains, each of which contributes to the general feeling of virtue when eaten. The Yazdani half-kilo flattened semi-spherical multi-grain loaf, its proportions honed through careful trial an error with customer feedback, can hold up to nine different grains, and is now priced at Rs50, having started at Rs30 five years ago.

Both bakeries aver that the multi-grain product is their most popular. Messman explains that “We have always had it, since the time we started the shop – it was just becoming very popular, the whole health wave happened, people became more conscious of the benefits of other grains besides wheat. More people have been moving away from traditional white.”

According to Zend, “Everyone was doing brown bread using burnt sugar. Then came whole wheat. We wanted to go one step ahead.” The Yazdani loaf has no preservatives. “And we sell the toast, too; it goes with Indian and western food – the crunchiness substitutes for wafers.” Zend supplies his product to major multi-star hotels and offices and to individuals and says with pride that the loaf has “also been approved by two dieticians of Bombay Hospital and Saifee Hospital. One slice of it is equal to three or four slices of white bread.”

These are not the only two havens of health – bread-ly speaking – in the city. Start at the top of the price chain and you find the most delicious multi-grain jumbo loaves (about Rs100 for a half loaf) at the Oberoi Deli, ideal for a hearty heap of salad greens and sharp cheese. At the Indigo Deli near the Gateway of India, a long oval of multi-grain goodness (Rs65) is punctuated by unexpected air pockets that catch fresh butter or homemade strawberry jam. Wander to Worli, to the charming Banyan Tree, where the strangely oily-on-the-outside multi-grainer (Rs65) is soft yet with a nice chew, perfect for a cream cheese and smoked salmon sandwich. And there are more – the Bread Shop at Kemps Corner, the bakery section at Hypercity, the baskets at the BBC and, of course, keeping up with the rest of the world, the fairly newly introduced multi-grain slices from a company well known for its packaged soft white bread.

With a choice like that available, virtue is, in itself, so easy to grab!

Out-of-town girl

Once upon a time, I was a South Mumbai brat – in those days it was called South Bombay, aka SoBo. I drove myself around, went out later in the night than I do now and did the culture circuit with much enthusiasm. Then we moved out of town to a distant ’burb and my life changed. Going out had to be planned carefully, coordinated with a lot of people and chores and made into an outing rather than just a quick dash hither or yon. For a short while I felt disconnected, like I was some kind of pariah, but then it became the ideal existence: when I wanted to be met or seen or whatever, I could be, but when I didn’t feel like the social buzz, I could trot out the excuse of being too long a commute home, so please could we do a raincheck. And, as everyone knows, rainchecks rarely happen. When I started driving into work every day, albeit with a driver doing the driving rather than myself steering through the commonly hideous traffic, it became a driving (he he he) need to get home and out of the melee instead of lingering to chat or party or dine. I just wanted to get out of the herd of vehicles all heading for somewhere, one presumes, and get to where I was going, where life was quiet and sane and stable. Home.

Somewhere along the way, I lost all my need to be social. People were an occasional buzz, not a constant for my existence, there was no need to see them, look at them, hear them, talk to them, eat with them, et al, not so often anyway. The special ones will always be there for you, I was told by a wise gentleman, who was, as he always has been, right. They are. We hear the call, mutually, and fix up to meet, greet, eat. And giggle, of course. Their work lives and my dislike of being tied to anything except what I want to be tied to helps to keep this meeting-greeting-eating judiciously spaced, so that we have things to talk about and the affection grows instead of fading into well-worn and tired tolerance.

But these days there is another reason for me not to want to travel the distance into town. Yes, we all know that it is not that much of a distance and I have a very comfortable car, a good driver and not much else to do – and thus use as an excuse – but the road into the city from where I live is now almost impassable, which makes it all a good reason to stay home, work from the family study and tele-communicate if required. Everywhere there is something being dug up, for what reason I cannot say. Sometimes it is said to be a flyover bridge, other times it is cited as being telephone cables or water pipes being replaced, occasionally it is a resurfacing job. But it makes the hour or so long drive into the parts of town that I normally frequent a far more tedious and arduous one, stretching it to sometimes even three times the duration. There are hold ups and hang-ups, waits and watches, with honking and horning, yelling and screaming, with the infrequent fist fight in a nearby slum to break the monotony of sitting in a car looking blankly out and nodding gently to the beat of the music on the car stereo.

My city is being destroyed to rebuild it again, made worse to make it better, for the goodness knows how many-th time. But somewhere along the way I am glad it is happening. Not only will it, hopefully, bring in a new and improved drive, but also gives me the perfect reason not to do that drive…not for now, at least!

Progress report

It's difficult to say why people like physical exercise. I always knew I didn't, until I found I did. Which happens every time I start a regimen, as I did about six weeks ago, when I joined a gym, partly to get back into the shape I was once so happy in and partly because I really needed to get those endorphins racing along to deal with aches, pains and other unnecessaries both physical and emotional. And in many ways working up a sweat on the treadmill or elsewise has done the trick. And along the way I and my body have remembered what we had collectively forgotten - that exercise is kinda fun, sending those good molecules zipping happily through the system and making both of us feel so much better about life and living it.

So this morning, when my trainer was trying to bend me into a shape I am not yet ready to assume, the whys of it all floated into my head. Why was I up and out so early, dodging the street cleaners and breakfast carts to walk across the block to the gym? Why was I wearing these clothes that I would normally not be seen outside the house in, with my hair tied firmly up and my nose decidedly shiny, my fingers bare of diamonds and my feet in sneakers that were so far removed from my usual stiletto heels that they made a fashion statement in themselves? Why was I allowing some strange man to grab my arms and legs and cause me perhaps more pain than I went through in many months of physiotherapy? And why, oh why, was I tottering back home after an hour of all this, with my aforementioned hair dripping saltily with sweat and my T-shirt clinging soggily to my torso, every joint that I owned disputing that ownership and demanding to be sent to another country, via speedpost?

Because at some masochistic, self-flagellatory, tortuous level, I liked it. The pain felt good, because at the end of it all, I knew, I would look good. And my former physiotherapist was right, after all, when he insisted, 'No pain, no gain'. The results were already there for people to see, for me to feel. And the pain was changing, from the immediate burn of unused muscles to the insistent dull ache of lactic acid to the twinges of almost-recovered sinews. It was starting to work. And that, in itself, was something to celebrate.

Dress to de-stress

(Sigh. Yeah, sometimes inspiration does not strike when and how it should. But there is always published stuff that I can fall back on...)

A few weeks ago, I decided to lever my nicely-rounded self out from the chair in front of the computer in the study and get some exercise. Almost before I knew what I was doing, I had signed up at the nearby gym for a month’s worth of physical activity of a very remotely familiar kind. The first day, I huffed and puffed through an hour of trotting along on the treadmill, wheeling along on a recumbent bicycle and stepping forth on a cross-trainer. By the next morning, I was being yelled at by muscles I could not remember I had, popping and cracking at the joints as I rummaged to find suitable clothes for my newest road to the goal of general self-improvement and creaking musically as I bent over to tie my sneaker-laces. Much to my horror, I discovered that in my enormous wardrobe, I had little that even vaguely resembled garb I could torture myself in. It was time to shop.

I started with the gym, which offered me their own label of pants, at a nice price of about Rs625. But they were blue and clingy and I wanted red and roomy. At Reebok, Nike, Adidas, and various others name outlets, the more esoteric and international the tag, the higher the price. Most salespeople looked snootily at me and presumed that I had strolled in to the wrong place. I peeked at the price tags, noting that a plain pair of track pants could cost about Rs1800. Feeling every one of my unwanted extra inches, I slid out as fast as I could and found solace in the wonderfully spike-heeled sandals in the window of the next shop. A department store was what I needed, with its lovely anonymity and friendliness, somewhere like Westside, Lifestyle, Big Bazaar or Max. So there I went. And came across an interesting paradox.

There was a huge disconnect in the whole mind-body equation. Most if not all the track pants (of course, there is a very good reason they are often called ‘sweat’ pants) made for the female sex are configured to fit bodies that have a long and happy relationship with exercise machines, weights and stretches, not those that needed it. Almost all that I looked at were tailored nicely, in decent colours – there was a fluorescent green I particularly fancied, and various shades of grey, blue, red and one nightmarish fuschia pink – and with neat logos, stripes and fastenings. They were primarily in synthetic fabrics, with generous helpings of lycra, all no-nos in my book where gym fashion is concerned. And they were affordable, ranging from about Rs700 to about Rs1500, less if there was a sale on. But – and it’s a fairly big but – more relevantly, they were all in sizes that could fit only the fit, figures that avoided adipose and eschewed any connection to calories, shapes that denied any link to the genetics of the Indian female proportions, especially as defined in the shastras, with curves and hollows in logical situations. Every one that I looked at was cut so slim and so straight and so clingy that I had perforce to slink stoutly away to the men’s section in a nice and friendly store called The Loot.

There I had better luck. I found pants that were soft cotton, generously cut and near-etheric in comfort levels. Sadly, they came in several shades of dreary: dark blue, black, beige, grey, mud and muddier. The salesman announced to me that they were “For mens, madam!” When I tried them on, they were wonderful – soft, roomy, breathable and well enough cut to add a soupcon of a la mode pajama-style to the oversized cut. They could be adjusted to sit snug at my still-slim waist, flowing smoothly down to my feet…and beyond. A minor cut and hem job that took the in-house tailor about ten minutes to do and I was all set to work up a sweat and work off some gastronomic sinning at the gym. All at far lower prices than the lycra leggings my gender was supposed to squeeze into, reduced from Rs1100 to a mere Rs 550 for one pair and from Rs1300 to about Rs600 for the other.

The pants are doing their job well. I am doing my exercise routines well, or so I am told. And some day not too long from now I am determined to walk into the store and denude the racks of all those lovely coloured track pants that are made “For womens, madam!”