Stick it!

While we have not quite finished the vast amounts of bread that just happen to be left over from the time that there was too much bought – for various reasons – we do find that there is an occasional need for more. Like when I have to take some lunch with me when I go to work, or when I need to find something quick and easy to eat for dinner and have lot of soup on hand, the logical accompaniment being, of course, toast. So every now and then we go out there and get some bread, but not the nice soft squishy white kind, not for a while now, at least. But there is invariably temptation that crunches at the bakery, be it the very warm and familiar Yazdani, in the Fort area, the better lighted and more accessible by road City Bakery in Worli, not too far away from where the office is located, or the close-to-home Front Street, which is, the sign has said for a while now, moving to another location not too distant from its current site. There are others, equally good, but further off my beaten track, of which I shall speak anon. And that temptation comes in the form of breadsticks, also called soup sticks, which all three of the shops I generally prefer specialise in.

Yazdani has plain and simple breadsticks, with an occasional tinge of garlic, jeera or even cheese. These are not very long, stout and uneven, which makes for a wonderful distribution of taste and mouth feel, and almost always very crunchy and crisp. They come in crackly plastic bags heat-sealed at one end and perma-sealed at the other, not hard to open but rather noisy to sneak into during a meeting. City Bakery has a wider range of flavour – there is the ordinary breadstick, crunchy, thick, occasionally siamesed with a twin, identical or, more likely, fraternal. Then there is the cheese stick, which is tangy-salty, a pale orange in colour, with the once-in-a-while bite that will spark the cutting edge of chilli powder in your mouth when you least expect it. And there is the ajwain breadstick, which happens to be Small Cat’s favourite, which has the distinctive flavour and smell of the herb-seed sprinkled through it. Front Street is more assembly line, with both white and whole wheat breadsticks of uniform size and length, though not boringly so, most of the time crunchy and perfectly salted.

The others – for now is the time of the ‘anon’ I spoke of before – are a-plenty. Moshe’s bake shop and deli at Crossword, in Kemps Corner, has long thin breadsticks with a herby tinge. But they are not always crisp and go stale very quickly, so I tend to prefer the lavache instead, which Small Cat also likes rather a lot. The Bake Shop down the road towards Nana Chowk is also a good place to find really delicious and fabulously crunchy breadsticks – both the white and the whole wheat are thick, not too long, hard and incredibly noisy; they do not break on demand, but snap where they want to, and almost hurt the teeth as you try and bite into one and then chew it up to the last yummy morsel. I have a veritable passion for the whole wheat sticks, even though I know that eating too many of them is not exactly a good idea, given that I am not stick-like and slim any more, even though I do have my moments of crispness.

But in all this, it is very rare – in fact, I cannot remember any such occasion – when I have eaten a breadstick the way I am reliably informed it is meant to be eaten: with soup. Often in the bread basket in fancy hotels, I tend to hold on and break it as a sort of conversational change of direction, if I am with a casual friend, or a moment of emphasis, if I am involved in converse with a close buddy or a fond parent. It is also useful when waved as a sort of filler during an awkward hiatus in speech, or when a bubble threatens to burst out of your tummy and gauchely forth as a crass burp. And, when you are irritated by what someone is saying to you and need a diversion of thought, a breadstick is a very valuable weapon; you can hold it and break it sharply, pretending it is the neck of the person who is annoying you at that time.

But a breadstick is all about finger-play, having something to deal with while you are thinking about what to say and how, having a diversion from the actual emotion that you may feel that has an unfortunate habit of showing on your face and when you want to laugh but know that it would not be politic to do so. And, for all those reasons and more, I bless whoever thought them up.

The roll that rocks!

Somebody was talking about Karim’s, a popular and old Delhi restaurant, and my mind went floating back to the days when I learned to eat something that fast became a passion. It was when I worked for a publishing house based in the centre of the city and was taught more about food as it is available out of table-cloth-style restaurants than in them. While a late night visit to Karim’s rang no culinary bells for me, since I was more worried what was under the soles of my delicate spike-heeled sandals than what was going into my stomach, another eatery did its thing so well that even today, so many miles away from the capital of my country, I crave its offerings.

This particular dining place – it had fine food, but it was a far cry from fine dining – was called Nizam’s. To my delight and, I must admit, wonder, it had a website, from which my friend and colleague read out menu listings that he insisted I choose from. Of course, being from Mumbai and being rather protected on my own turf, especially where food was concerned, I listened in wide-eyed and open-mouthed wonder and then opted for what was tried and tested rather than what sounded exotic and exciting. And forevermore, whenever aforementioned friend suggested getting something to eat from outside our own home-made dabbas, I would clamour for Nizam’s and it’s justifiably famous kathi roll.

A kathi roll, I learned, was a thick and slightly flaky paratha that wrapped itself around egg, meat, onions and a spicy sauce. You could have double-egg-double-chicken (since I preferred that to any other meat) or single-egg-double-chicken or double-egg-single-chicken…well, you get the point, I presume. It was, essentially, the equivalent of the Mumbai Frankie, with the meat in chunks rather than shredded. Deconstructed, it was a paratha, on which was spread beaten egg, gently cooked, then layered with meat, raw red onions (I think they are marinated, since they do not have that characteristic sharpness of the completely raw onion) and a liquid chutney that was tangy, spicy, delicious and addictive. It left your lips tingling and burned fire down into your stomach if you were injudicious about its use, but in delicate applications, it worked wonders for the appetite and its aftermath.

People tell me that the Nizam’s kathi roll is not as good as the one that Karim’s serves up. I have tried to be unbiased about that, but it is not easy. After all, the ones that I think of so fondly were made even more delicious by the circumstances, the friendship and the hunger that I felt during the cold Delhi winter that seemed to have no end and no stimulation to warm me up with. Since then, I have eaten my way through various avatars of the roll, from the prettily wrapped version from a multi-star hotel deli to a more street-style concept at a fair, but my opinion on this cannot be changed that easily. I have my preference and just talking about it has my mind and tummy demanding more.

Flat as a pancake

My Soul Sister sent me a birthday gift package that contained, among other sundries that I giggled over, a bag of pancake mix. Chocolate pancakes, actually. We have not yet had the courage to open the packet and try the stuff, but it smells divinely chocolate and promises much that we all like very much, even though Small Cat is forbidden the sweet brownness and would rather chew on her kitti bikki anyway. But every time I open the larder door, I peek at the bag and wonder, just what would I let myself in for if I used it?

I have a passion for pancakes, perhaps nurtured by the ones my mother would make for me a long time ago, when I was a child and she believed that her cooking was the only thing between me and certain starvation. She would beat up and egg with some flour and milk, a little salt and a pinch of pepper, and spread lacy thin rounds of it on a hot griddle. We ate them, many at a time, with lots of salted butter and a hearty appetite. Those days soon ended, however, as we both became alarmingly rounded and ate these instead of regular food, causing merry havoc at the dining table.

When we lived in Geneva, Switzerland, my mother and I would occasionally walk down to the main square and browse through the shops for school and home supplies. And, after we were done, we would stop by the creperie just outside the main department store and order ourselves a crepe to much on before trekking back home. For her, it was the sweet kind; for me, I preferred the crepe rolled around cheese or jambon fume, fine shards of smoked ham. Once in a while, our wicked sides would emerge and we would slowly savour our way through a chocolate crepe, with molten brown heaven within the fragile envelope of soft dough.

A few years later, when I was in the United States as a student on my own, my friends and I would drop by the Pancake Cottage near Stony Brook on Long Island, where I was based. While they drenched their ’cakes in maple syrup or fruit compote, I would go comparatively austere, with a little bit of butter and perhaps a sprinkle of nuts. Then I discovered the cheese stack, American style. It was all about calories, those things that never bothered me then, since whatever I ate seemed to evaporate almost instantly and allowed me to slide into the slimmest jeans possible without too much heavy breathing. It was all about delicious and tangy cheese, sandwiched between thick, spongy, slightly sour buttermilk pancakes, making a gooey, pully, stringy, heavenly forkful that could be twined around the fork with happy warmth.

And then the calories starting attaching themselves to inconvenient parts of my anatomy. So now when I order or eat pancakes, I make sure that I have the buckwheat kind, allegedly higher in fibre content and lower in calories, with whipped butter, if any, and a little fruit rather than all that cheese and fat. I look wistfully at plates around me that have lashings of regular butter and strips of crispy, salty bacon that just cries to belong to me rather than where they are. And I sigh gently as my dining companions ask for more butter, some grated cheese please and perhaps some chocolate sauce. But I still fit into those jeans. They wear stretch-waist trousers.

Food of thought

I had this strange conversation with a lady on the phone yesterday and wonder if she has got over the shock just yet. She had left a message on my answering machine at work and I called her back, only to find out that she was inviting me to a wine and pastries festival hosted by a local French organisation. How she got me as the one to call, I do not know, and do not much care about, though she did say that she had found someone to cover the event for her. But we chatted for a while and I told her that if she promises to feed me lots of chocolate pastry, I would definitely be there. Judging from the silence that followed my comment, I figure I should be a little more formal when I wear my journalistic cap, especially if I have never met the person I am talking to. But her comeback, once she had recovered, was fairly quick. She told me that there would be no chocolate, only brioches and croissants and a few puff-y indulgences, but that we could always make up for the lack of chocolate another day. Which left me speechless.

That has happened only a few times in my long and culinarily indulgent life. Perhaps the first time ever was when I was confronted by more French fries than I could even start to eat. It was in a small but famous inn high in the mountains of the Black Forest in what was then West Germany, in a small village called Waldhillsbach, known all over the country and perhaps beyond for its wonderful blue trout. Being a gourmand rather than anything close to a gourmet in those youthful times, I shuddered at the prospect of first meeting my fish, then having it cooked for me, and shuddered some more at the idea that I would actually eat fish. Being a stout and stout-hearted ten year old, I chose roast chicken and, inevitably, chips, aka French fries.

It was, for me, a wise decision. I watched in horror as my parents and their guests – a couple and their young son, Bengalis – chose their fish and saw it off to the kitchen with due ceremony. The food arrived, my chicken nicely grilled and succulent, the fish strangely grey-blue and staring with its fishy eyes, still in its fishy head, with a distinctively fishy leer. Not being one who liked her food to watch her as she ate, I delicately looked away from the piscine offerings and concentrated on my own foul play. It was delicious. But defeating. I managed to eat a lot of the Halbes Huhn, a considerable portion, but even I, known for my prowess at the sport, gave up about a third way through the chips. There were just too many of them. It felt as if it was sort of a Tantalus dish of fries – the more you ate, the more there seemed to be. Finally, breathing heavily, I stopped. But Father did not stop teasing me about it…I still get hints of the way I could not eat my chips, even today. I maintain my silence.

I was also defeated many years later by a chocolate sundae. Frozen yoghurt, actually, an overdose of chocolate that left be feeling and perhaps even looking rather bilious and exhausted. And silent. I wrote about this not too long ago, I know. More recently, there was another defeat on my plate at the local branch of the Hard Rock Café. I asked for a burger and got through the vast quantity of fries and of some of the veggies, but left most of the bun and some of the meat on my plate. But I know how to beat that one – from then on, I just ordered the insides, without the bread! Very quietly.

Got any bread?

Okay, so perhaps we overdid it. Or I did, at least. Sometimes I tend to get carried away and get more than I need and then stand there helplessly staring at it, hoping inspiration will strike and show me the way to a brighter and better world…or at least a world where I do not need to throw stuff away. I hate waste and was brought up on the maxims of haste making for waste, my eyes being bigger than my stomach and more such meaningful homilies. I had done this mainly with clothes, shoes and, occasionally, lipstick, but rarely with anything edible. This time I had really done it, big time, literally.

It started with Father’s request for bread that was not high fibre, not rough, not multi-grain. Nice soft and squishy unsliced white bread, he asked plaintively, well deserving of a break from my usual almost-Fascist dietary regimen I subject the poor man to most of the time. The first time I tried to do this for him – a small request, after all, especially considering what I demand of him – I failed. The bakery was not making the aforementioned staple, since it was festival time and the demand was so low as to be non-existent. So I got a most interesting and delicious brown loaf instead; except for the colour, it was soft, squishy and rather nice, even Father admitted that.

But I was determined to do what I had promised to do. So the next time bread was needed at home, I went back to the bakery (which has what is perhaps the best fresh white loaves ever made since the dawn of baking) and demanded the familiar. Sorry, the friendly chappie behind the counter – who could have been the owner, for all I knew, he certainly threw his considerable weight around to deserve that cachet – the oven was not working properly, so the baking is delayed; fresh white unsliced bread would be out only an hour after I had dropped by. Nah, I said to myself and to the friendly chappie, let’s try something new instead. So I took home sliced white bread that he promised would be soft squishy and most nice, and some multi-grain stuff for me to keep my fibre-hungry insides satisfied with.

Problem: they were both ghastly. Father and I did our valiant best with the bread, but could not handle it after a few slices. Leave it in the fridge, I said, I would figure out what to do with it over the weekend. But there were miles to go and promises to keep, so I stopped at the first decent bakery I found on a visit into town and got a nice soft squishy unsliced white loaf of bread, just for Father. The only issue to deal with was the size. It was almost as big as the backseat of our little car and took up more space than I did. Almost.

But it was delicious. A lot like the much-reviled Wonder Bread of my fairly dietarily dissipated childhood on the inside – you could squash the entire loaf into one small pellet to flick at someone across a dinner table, I giggled to myself, but the crust was hearty, chewy and brilliant. Made into toast, it lacked some of the bite – literally – of the more fibre-rich loaves I preferred, but it made Father happy. Which was the point of the entire exercise, I told myself, giving my halo a well-earned buffing to make it extra-shiny.

But all this left me with a little bit of a problem to deal with. In the fridge I had two three-quarter loaves of disliked bread, plus a huge shelf-occupying hunk that took up more room than the cooked food the fridge contained. And I had to do something with it all, just to follow my own rule of not wasting anything that can be used. We already had breadcrumbs. We had eaten all the toast we could and should. With the multi-grain bread and some of the sliced white, I managed to make a large batch of strata, that wonderful way to use stale bread and make it entirely palatable – lots of tomato-onion-garlic goop, lots of cheese and a little egg and milk and voila, a stint in the oven produces something that comforts the nerves and satisfies the tummy. And the frugal vein that runs deep inside my soul.

That leaves us with about half the sliced white loaf and a great deal of the mammoth nice soft squishy unsliced white bread. Maybe bread-and-butter pudding? Or bread pakoras? Or even bread upma? Your choice, Father dear!

Getting gas

No, this is not a description of digestive processes gone awry, but a situational comedy of sorts. I had made big plans for my Sunday yesterday, deciding what I would make and then eat for lunch days before the lunch actually arrived. So I was busy cooking up quite a bit of a storm in the morning, in between coochieing with Small Cat and hanging up the laundry, humming quietly to myself as the dal bubbled away on one burner and the bhindi did its thing on another. I had one eye on the stove and the other on the strata I was assembling for a future dinner, layering old bread and grated cheese with a spicy blend of tomatoes, onions, garlic and, to add that Indian touch that Madhur Jaffrey (I just interviewed her, hence the reference) and others talk so delightedly about, some ginger and kothmir. Just as I was whipping up the eggs with some fabulously bland mustard I had acquired, I heard a gentle popping sound and looked over at the burners. The flame was perilously low and I ran to switch on the main and relight the fire. To no avail. We had run out of gas. Being brave and also having watched it being done so many times before, I went about getting the cylinder changed, having demanded Father’s presence, just to make sure that I was doing it right. But the alternative was also empty. Oops.

There was no major kitchen drama or disaster here. I finished my cooking on the electric range, skipped a couple of steps here and there and served up a more simple lunch than I had intended to. And dinner was even more simple, with poor Father given peanut butter and jelly on toasted soft white bread, while I ate toast and cream cheese with, mercifully, chocolate pudding afterwards for both of us to relieve the monotony. The gas cylinders arrived this morning and all is back to normal in our household.

But it gave me cause to think about life, the universe and cooking methods. While today I am lucky enough to have the alternative of electricity, what happened before that was available? I dimply remember Mother saying very rude and unladylike words in the days before we got our range, when the fuel source apart from cooking gas was not easy to get. She has to deal with an aged and recalcitrant kerosene stove, which I have fond memories of – not only did the food taste funny, it was very awkward to pick up whenever I helped clean the servants’ room, which is where it was stored for many years. It was also home to a large and curious spider, which popped its rounded head out of the kerosene storage space whenever I lifted the stove, which could explain to some extent where my dislike for the eight-legged creatures comes from – to get leered at and to have your fingers scraped rather painfully when you are only trying to help is all a bit much, don’t you think?

And then, of course, there was coal, or even wood, if you want to be even more primitive and eco-unfriendly. I have eaten many an American barbecue, where the host (or the cook, whichever came first) was proud of the fact that the grill was heated by ‘real wood chips’ and the coal was flavoured (albeit artificially) by the manmade essence of some exotic and perhaps endangered wood. It just tasted smoky and burned to me. I am afraid I had no discrimination in this. You see so many families in Mumbai, squatting by the railway tracks or living along the main roads through the city, cooking on scraps of wooden crate or twigs from a nearby timberyard or even old cardboard boxes. And you wonder what, in this day and age of microwave ovens and electric ranges, you are really complaining about.

Except that I was not complaining, just wondering what I would do if there was a power cut just when we run out of gas…

Just for kids

Today is Children’s Day. Apart from the irony of belonging to a country where children are still used to get work done – as in that horrific phenomenon that is known as child labour – I am in many ways a child at heart, even though I am very long past that age. I still play with my food. I still like eating stuff like French fries and slurping my way through large and very thick chocolate milkshakes and making that dreadfully louche sound at the end when the straw siphons up nothing but a few brown bubbles. And I still find that food tastes better when someone else makes it for you than if you make it yourself to a greater degree of perfection. Especially if you arrange it artfully on a plate to look like flowers or even funny faces.

But there was much that I was not allowed to eat when I was a child. Like crawlies, which at that stage in my life I did not consider to be creepies as well. I had a young Japanese-Indian friend with whom I would go grubbing in the dust in the garden. She would pick up the long black crawlies, the ones we call millipedes but which are really not, biologically speaking, as far as I know, and stuff them happily into her mouth. Her mother knew she did that. She said nothing. But let me stretch one fat starfish hand towards a long black crawlie and my mother would descend like an avenging angel upon my hapless head, snatch me up from my vantage grubbing spot and bear me off homewards, scolding even as she hugged me, as if my proximity to the long black crawlie had somehow contaminated my being in some way.

And then there was the friendly neighbourhood chanawala outside school. He sat there, evening after evening, his huge smile beaming upon us clamouring babies all nicely dressed in natty school uniforms, waiting for either the school bus or our assorted parents to take us home. I had been warned that I was never to partake of his offerings that were so interestingly filled into a tight cone of notebook paper, but at that age – or any age, for that matter – resisting temptation was not very easy. One day, I almost managed to grab myself a cone. I had practiced saying “sing-chana mix” for a long time and was all ready with my coin clutched in one hot little hand. I ran out with my small friends to where the chanawala sat, set to launch into my great adventure. But just as my foot stepped out of the school walk and on to the pavement, I heard my name being called in a very familiar voice. It was my father, waiting for me at the gate, all ready to hold my hand to walk me to the car parked just down the street. I still have not said my line and bought my little cone of sing-chana, not yet, not even today, so many years later.

Perhaps the most memorable edible I ever met with as a child was the Hedgehog Cake. Made by a fond parent for her young daughter’s birthday party, it was served up to us kiddies after a veritable orgy of chips, sandwiches and a fizzy drink, all eaten in a living room that was almost instantly a scrapyard of party debris. There were chip crumbs all over the carpet and the rexine-covered furniture was patchily sticky with the dried residue of various sugary colas. And all of children were happily smeared with bits of whatever we had eaten…or thrown at each other. The piece de resistance was the birthday cake in the shape and decorative finish of a small round hedgehog – iced in chocolate, it had sprinkles and bits and pieces of frosting, chocolate and candy studded into it like hedgehog spines. When it was cut, it was rather more plain inside, layered chocolate and vanilla sponge with a gentle slather of cream icing in between and the occasional M&M (or Gems, as they are called here) added for interest.

I was completely fascinated. So much so that I actually wrote down the recipe, painfully in my rounded knitting-like scrawl. I still find it occasionally in the Betty Crocker box when I am looking for clues on how much sugar to use for flan or how long my basic wholewheat bread should bake.

Doing the waddle well

It’s been that kind of week. After doing ferocious and valiant battle with a virus that took on various forms, from a mere cold to influenza to whatever makes you breathe heavily as you walk up stairs and clutch your chest because you know that you will probably die when you get to wherever you are going before you actually get down to doing whatever you went there for but you won’t, since you have too much to do before, when and after you get there…I think I just lost track of that wonderfully wild sentence, by the way, so let’s abandon it and continue on our normally chaotic course…

Anyway, hot on the heels of the virus came the festival. Which meant that though I could spend a whole two-days of a weekend at home, I worked on the day that was actually the occasion as per the calendar as per the religious tenets that the family follows. And it was not just working, but working later than usual, which left me, Father and the driver in a very bad mood indeed, compounded by the assorted felonies of not being satisfied with the work I had done and wanting to eat junk food that I normally do not indulge in for various reasons that shall remain my own. But the festival of lights had nothing to do with light – normally spelled ‘lite’ by clever marketing folk – as describing the feeling we all collectively and individually experienced at the end of it all.

The festival was the classic celebration of good over evil or, as with all Indian celebrations, the victory of the calorie over counsel. Even as I ordered goodies to take to my team at work from the chappie who was said to be the best in the business, I knew that it would be the season of a certain degree of indulgence over the norm. And it was, surprisingly, not really. I do not waddle – albeit gracefully – down the corridor of the office while navigating my normal hectic workaday route; at least, not yet. But some people do…or perhaps they always did, it’s just that it is rather more noticeable now than before, maybe because everyone is so darn self-conscious about having eaten too much, too well, too blatantly.

The festival was also about giving. I gave away sweets by the kilo. I was given sweets by the kilo. And somewhere along the way, a lot more chocolate than we see on an average day made its home in our fridge, leaving very little space for the stuff that is our daily diet – greens, fruit, fibre! I began to dread each time the courier boy arrived at my desk bearing a package and a broad smile – most of it was junk mail related (or not) to work, mercifully. And I started feeling that the heavy breathing was not my bronchioles getting a trifle clouded, but the mithai that had been perforce stuffed into my mouth by well-meaning and cheerily celebrating friends.

This is the time of year that you perfect the sidle. As someone bears down upon you, one arm ominously outstretched, the hand at the end of it holding something that makes the fingers glisten greasily, you need to do a quick sidestep and either grab the mithai before it is shoved into you, or avoid the friend completely, hoping that he or she will understand why you suddenly have developed an aversion to the person that you shared so many gossip sessions and giggles with. There will be times when you find that same piece of sweetmeat that you worked so hard to avoid waiting for you on your desk, but the perils of that too can be averted with retrograde amnesia – you carefully give the mithai away, leave it there for the office pests (anything from cockroaches or your neighbour at the next table) to carry off or drop it (oops!) on the floor where it will be gradually ground into the anonymously coloured carpet to be discovered as fossil fragments during some future excavation.

All that apart, Diwali has come and gone. Now it is time to clean out the debris - physical, emotional and edible – and get life and self back into shape. Meanwhile, a very happy albeit belated Diwali to all!

Gather ye rosebuds…or labels

My friend Ranjona refuses to eat apples that have not been home grown. ‘Home’, as in the larger sense of the word, as in ‘India’, as in native produce. I, on the other hand, revel in any apple from anywhere, but only if it is hard and sweet and juicy. So the Chinese apples that we get here, large, pinky-tinged and wrapped nicely in a foamy muffler in a brighter pink synthetic mesh, make me very happy indeed. They are crisp and somehow always cool, with sweet juice spurting with every bite. Best of all, they have a cute little label stuck on the side - unfortunately with the most persistent of glue - that I can occasionally peel off and add to my fruit label collection.

It’s funny what people collect these days. In my day, when I collected things rather than characters, I had boxes full of bus tickets. They piled up all over the place, in boxes, in plastic bags, in storage cupboards (well, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, since I really did not have THAT many). And, at the end of it, I was bored with it. I had no idea what I was doing with that many bits of paper and, as they gently yellowed or floated into the rain whenever there was a storm and someone left the windows open, I didn’t really honestly, genuinely care. Finally, most of them were thrown away. The rest, which did not fit into the garbage can, were given to a friend who really did need to collect something…anything.

Then I started a new collection, one that was far healthier and much less voluminous. It started long ago on a bright and sunny summer’s day. We were in a small garden that belonged to an auberge somewhere in Switzerland, just at the edge of a lake. I cannot, at this time and distance, be sure which lake it was, but it was a beautiful lake and a gorgeous day. The sun beat down, but there was a distinct chill in the air – every pore along my bare back and shoulders recognised that winter was not too far away. As we finished a leisurely and assuredly delicious lunch, a large bowl of fruit was set on the table. In the company of a few apples, a couple of peaches and a very large nectarine or two, was a conglomerate of bananas. They sat against the rim of the serving dish, happy, fat and very yellow. And the one that faced me and beamed sunnily had a neat little label pressed nattily on its side.

That was the serendipitous moment. That stunning instant of revelation. I knew what I was going to be collecting for the next so many years and I henceforth, as they said in good English novels, went about doing it with a certain dedication. In the process, I ate a vast number more of bananas than I actually liked – but it did detox my system and balance my electrolytes excellently – just to collect the labels, from Chiquita to Dole to Del Monte to the more mundane ‘Product of India’ (which I am most proud of, to be frank). I stuck them all carefully into a notebook that went everywhere with me, in which I scribbled notes for the school play, short stories that I was inspired to write when I was in a bathtub eating spring rolls and more than one vaguely libellous thought about what to do to a particularly repellent set of clothes if I ever got the chance.

Today I cannot find that notebook. I also have no idea what I would do with all the labels if I still had the extensive collection. But that has not stopped me sort-of-peeling-off the labels on fruit if I see them. For now, I waver between kiwi and apples, preferring to collect rather than consume.

Out, cold

It started slowly, but now I am addicted. Many years ago, when I was a mere babe-in-arms, my parents battled to feed me ice cream. In the struggle, they were exhausted, wiped out by the extent of the fighting and yelling and forcing that they had to do to get a little of the cold sweet down my throat. But then, serendipitously almost, they managed to sneak a tiny smidgen past my incipient milk teeth and that, my friends, was that. I have not given up looking for the dessert since.

It started with the basic of plain vanilla, common garden, nothing particularly spectacular. Then it gradually developed into more, with chocolate overtaking that to top the list. I never really did get too experimental or adventurous, because I did not need to, did not want to and did not ever become brave enough to cross the lines. I did go overboard occasionally and find myself unable to deal with the quantity of chocolate ice cream that my mind believed to be optimal, but that was rare – in fact, it may have happened once, a story that will be told anon.

Perhaps my favourite memory of cold stuff is sitting on the stairs of our house in Maryland, watching something monumental unfolding on television. We had just discovered the dairy at the University and had stocked up our freezer with nicely-sized tubs of frozen dessert. I sat there, peering at the TV (I have a vague suspicion that I was supposed to be upstairs in my room dealing with homework or something equally traumatic) and spooning up sweet heaven – it was thick, it was creamy, it was just plain delicious, the only way for a finely honed taste in ice cream to travel.

Many years later, when I was in college in New York (the state, not the city), I was introduced to frozen yoghurt. It was an odd concept, but for me it worked, since it was lighter and less sweet and cloying than regular ice cream, and it hit the perfect spot when you wanted cold refreshment and not the fallout of biliousness and hyperactivity. And it tasted better than usual, because it was dished out by my ‘little brother’ Robby, who managed a chain of the stores on Long Island. In fact, I still have a couple of store-logo keychains that he gave me then!

But it was frozen yoghurt that did the aforementioned defeating of my capacity to go through ice cream. I was in college in Colorado at the time, living in a small (and, after my home turf of Mumbai) very hick town called Boulder. Perhaps the charm of the place was in its ultra-granola culture, where former flower children mingled quite coherently with new-age gurus who ate granola and believed in weaving their own woollen garments (and, often, selling then at some horrendously over-inflated price, of course) that they wore in conjunction with clunky Pedestrian sandals and hear done in bead-braids. There was a frozen yoghurt shop in the middle of the cobbled-street mall and we went in there quite often to cool off, or just indulge in a little superfluous calori-bashing.

I was there with friend Karen and demanded their Death by Chocolate. It may, of course, have been called something else, but it was almost the death of me and chocolate beyond any conceivable doubt. It started with a layer of brownie. Atop was a slab of chocolate, shaved into substantial spirals. Then followed a thick slather of chocolate sauce, with chocolate nuggets (or was it chunks? Chips?) over that, then a couple of scoops of chocolate frozen yoghurt. Then a repeat, if I remember right. And, over the whole arrangement, a generous pour of chocolate fudge sauce and a handful of chocolate shavings. I got through about half of it. And I had to yell Uncle, Aunt and every cousin on any block, ever. I could not take any more.

It is perhaps still spoken of, albeit in hushed voices, in my small circle of friends.

Heaven on a plate

For many years now, my idea of light, healthy and, most of all, interesting food has been a salad. Now I do not speak of the conventional salad that has a leaf or two mixed up with some other vegetables and a selection of cold cuts or anything as boring as that. What I mean is the really creative salad, with either just one or two ingredients or the whole shebang, occasionally with a crunchy bit or two added for fun rather than edibility (sometimes it could be fragments of the kitchen sink, since all of it and more go in). I am not sure I like fruit and veggies mixed in together, not unless the tastes and textures really work in tandem, but some of the more fun melanges of crisp and crunchy, soft and chewy, light and solid, sweet, bitter, acid and spicy.

Perhaps, for me, the worst salad ever but the most basic and elegant in a strange kind of way is the standard Indian ‘salaad’, ubiquitous at restaurants of the particularly Punjabi-Chinese-Continental ilk. It has slices of cucumber, tomato, onion and sometimes mooli, all nicely arranged on a dinner plate. Punctuating the display will be small slices of lemon, that you are supposed to squeeze on to the veggies after you have delicately transferred them to your plate and dusted them with salt and pepper. You eat them as a wonderfully persistently aromatic hors d’oeuvres (which I can never spell right without a little help from dictionary.com) or as a crunchy accompaniment to the rest of the meal. There is also the mixed version of that, commonly served in office canteens, which is mainly carrots, cucumber, tomato and onion, with a little cabbage and the occasional sliver of beetroot thrown in. It is served with a small spoon from a large bowl on the counter and is best eaten judiciously – all the constituents are guaranteed to produce amazing amounts of stomach acid or gas, especially when consumed in conjunction with the food itself.

The first time I made a salad was a leafless occasion. I had watched my mother make the usual potato salad and had watched enough television versions of it, along with various other recipes in various other kitchens. But I was feeling adventurous, so I added a little of this and a little of that and created a marvellously fragrant and – as it turned out, I must admit with some immodesty – delicious concoction. It had a base of potatoes, yes, but also incorporated peas, carrots, beans, onions and bits of leftover roast chicken and slivers of juicy pink ham, all bathed gently in an unctuous dressing that blended mayonnaise with yoghurt with grated cheese, garlic, kothmir, dill pickle, olives and mustard. There may have been some salt and pepper, too, I don’t remember. It went on the table redolent of herbs and spices and made us all reek rather of the garlic and onion for what felt like days afterwards.

From that, I graduated to macaroni salads, tuna salad, even coleslaw. But my favourite (at least in theory) was a salad I ate with a close friend that I have written about before, in a place called the Delhi Gymkhana. It was a French food festival and my friend, an elderly army man who had known my family since he and his brother and my father and his brother were in boarding school together, escorted me fondly to it. The food was nothing spectacular, a fairly decent stab at cuisine from that wicked, wicked country called France. But the labels with the large dishes of food were the ultimate delight for me. There was Wall-drop Salad, complete with its apples and walnuts. And for the rest of the meal there was Rose Marry Chicken, a whimsical take on modern taste in culinary matrimony, we giggled. And, of course, for dessert there was the ever-favourite Apple Tart, the ubiquitously army Bread-Butter Pudding and, much to my eternal amusement, Peach Cobbled with Plum Compost. When the wall dropped whatever it did drop, the shoe did too, but we were too overjoyed editorially to protest. It was probably the nicest meal I have had ever!

A tree grew on Long Island

(This ain't strictly food, but it was fun, published yesterday in the paper I work on. And, yes, it is true!)

It was very late one Saturday night. My education in popular American culture has just received a fillip with a rollicking performance of Pirates of Penzance at the Port Jefferson Theatre. Long Island was quiet, but by no means asleep. A cruise ship moored just off the pier glowed with a party, the thumping syncopation of the music coming faintly over the water to where we stood on a sidewalk of Main Street in the village. Should we eat or should we not eat, was the question we had to deal with at that moment. And our tummies had their own rather insistent opinions to offer.

While the debate raged within and without, I decided that my ‘date’ needed a dose of Indian culture, in return for the favour he had just done me. So I carefully explained to him what a Hindi movie was like. I was not at any great advantage in this, since the only Bollywood production I had seen in a movie hall up to that point was Bobby, at a retro festival, which added little to my general state of awareness. But I had watched Chaya Geet and MTV, and I knew my tree from my Mughal garden from my jharokha. Any which way, I did know more than he, half-Italian, half-Hungarian and all Noo Yawker, did.

We had stopped just outside the mall in our wanderings, the car safe in its slot in the almost-empty parking lot. Lights and a warm wave of oregano and hot cheese wafted out of the pizzeria and a frozen yoghurt store was starting its nightly sluice-down. I looked around the scant greenery that rimmed that shopping area and spotted with my beady black eye, a tree. True, it was not a tree of the kind Rishi Kapoor and Dimple ran around, but it would serve the purpose of my demonstration. I hauled my friend over to it and we surveyed it thoughtfully.

“It’s a young beech, I think,” he said after some consideration. “It’s a tree,” I commented helpfully, and put one hand around a sprig that would one day grow into a branch. “And this is how you do it.” Humming what I fondly hoped to be Hum tune k kamre mein band ho - which on some further cogitation much later was obviously completely unsuited to the occasion – I swung gently around the slim bole of the sapling. He grinned fatuously and followed me, as directed.

It was then that things went off-script somewhat. On my second round, I heard the scream of sirens and saw the blue and red flash of police lights. Before I had aborted my swing, the cop-car was parked by us and a stern-faced official had stepped out, one hand on his holster, cold eyes on my gradually reddening face. My friend, being genetically chivalrous, tried to explain.

It took a few moments of pretending to be a ‘furriner who no spik Englees’ for me to get off the hook I had impaled myself on. It took my friend a few moments longer to extricate himself. Our crime would not have been noticed if we had chosen our location better: we were doing our running around trees just outside the plate-glass windows of a national bank.

China syndrome

The Chinese would probably laugh with a mixture of horror and embarrassment. I almost did. In fact, I probably would have, except that if I had opened my mouth to do anything, I would have burped, with all the gas that the lunch had endowed me with. And the irascible boss and I made amusedly disparaging remarks about it, too, standing in the middle of the corridor, as the late afternoon bustle scurried around us with people getting work done, pages made, the paper published. ‘It’ was a plate full of food that the canteen downstairs in the office fondly believed to be ‘Chinese’. It was in some way related, I will admit, wandering aimlessly between Beijing and Ludhiana with a gustatory ambivalence that even a TV show host who recently focussed on this aspect of food could not pin down. But we, me and irascible boss, ate it to the last limp twig of red pepper, and enjoyed the freedom to make comments as tasteless as the contents of our plates had been.

I came in late to work today, right in time for the canteen boy to beam happily at me and offer me the day’s menu – fried rice, he listed, and noodle. I have always had a passion for the noodle, from Instant Ramen to carefully handcrafted threads, and I concurred: noodle it would be. I knew what it would be like; I had seen it before and even tasted of it on an earlier occasion. But asking for the whole helping was a new one. It came soon after, gently steaming (which does help make up for a lot of untold and untellable woes), on a large plate. It kept company with a small katori of ‘Vegetable Manchurian’, the chappie said cheerfully, and a large spoon. “Thank heaven for Nina and her gift of a matched set of cutlery!) the noodle was not in the singular in any sense of the word. It lay there along with a number of its kin, all in various lengths and, occasionally, in such close proximity that it adhered firmly in clumps, and it was bathed with a patina of brown – a blend of soy sauce, oil and I-don’t-want-to-know-what-else. It tasted of not much – the starch of the noodle clogged most else out of existence, with the rare tinge of onion and an infrequent hint of pepper adding interest.

But it was the Machurian sauce that put the bite into the bungle. It was redolent with garlic, the flour-based brown gluey semi-liquid studded generously with finely chopped bulb. And the pakora swimming in it, dense and stodgy, held more garlic tenderly in its oddly misshapen mass. Combine the noodle with the sauce and it worked, though perhaps not in any way that the Chinese would recognise, being even a delightful way to soothe a week-frazzled system and a spiky-harassed mind. Comfort food in one of its many avatars, sliding gently down a very sore throat and softly bathing a stressed sinus with a gummy duvet of mildly-flavoured pap. Ideal for a day that wavers between searing hot outside and semi-frozen inside the office. Ideal for nerves that do not want any more edge to an otherwise jagged existence.

That makes it good food, never mind the culinary qualities it may pretend to possess. And never mind its provenance, its constituents or its consistency. As something to fill the stomach and line the mind, it was a perfect lunch.

Fast food station

It all happened a very long time ago. I was in college in Mumbai for a short time and made friend with some very interesting women – it was, oddly enough for me, a women’s college – who showed me a very interesting world that was entirely new to an extraordinarily naïve me. They took me shopping in stores that I had never been with my mother; they showed me how to catch a bus in ways that I would never do with my father; and they taught me how to eat what I had never seen before, leave alone ever tasted. It was not that I was such a snob, merely that it was all outside my sphere of experience, for the simple reason that I ate very simple food that was, most often, made in a very simple way at home. Or else, as I have said before, I ate apples and chocolate, among the very simple pleasures of life and food.

These new friends introduced me to street food. That had always been looked at with some disdain in my family, since no one had the time or energy to spend on dealing with a bad tummy, whoever’s it may have been. I was kept firmly far away from anything that was sold by a not-too-salubrious-looking bloke who sat at the corner of the bend in the pavement selling stuff in slim paper cones. I was kept firmly away from anything that seemed to have liquid in it, since you never knew what had been floating in the container and when, if at all, the water it held had been boiled or otherwise disinfected. And I was kept firmly away from any food that was cooked – grilled, toasted or otherwise – on any sort of stove or tawa or grate that did not look like it had been scoured with a stiff steel brush and lots of detergent.

Perhaps the first step came from a vaguely affirmative suggestion from my mother, I can never be sure. We were sitting on the balcony one evening after I had come back from college and idly chatting about who had said what, done what and worn what over the day. And I told her and my father about how the girls went down to the gate of the campus every afternoon to eat the food that the small stalls there sold. There was dosai, I told them with some amazement, and lots of other things that I didn’t know. You should try it one day, Mother said, almost in passing, moving rapidly on to the taste of mutton samosas at the café on Marina Beach in Chennai when she was a collegian. Father must have laughed, as he always did, teasing me and then her about the need to belong and do what our friends did, instead of not being a ‘shoop’ and taking a different road from that the herd travelled. So, the very next day that I was in college (which was, I admit, not as often as it should have been), I went down to the gate with my friends and did the food thing.

It was revelatory. I opted for sev puri, something that sounded right from all the research I had done. And it was well worth the trouble, singed eyebrows notwithstanding. Those were a result of the high chilli level in the various chutneys and sauces that were spooned over the basic recipe. It was exotic, to say the least, for someone who knew her sushi and quenelles, but had no clue where more local delicacies like bhel, pav bhaji and ragda pattice were concerned. It began with a small leaf torn from a writing pad or old school notebook. On it were arranged six small stiff puris, obviously crunchy and deep fried. Then came a layer of crumbled boiled potato, topped with a little finely chopped onion and kothmir. Then a healthy sprinkle of crispy sev, over which was washed a little green chutney (put very little, my friends shrieked, knowing my rather wimpy tastebuds) and a little more brown chutney. Then a little more sev, for garnish, with more coriander leaves. And the paper with its contents were handed to me.

I ate, with a certain amount of exploratory delight and no little wonder. The textures end the tastes were most interesting, almost addictive, even with the overall cloud of fire from the chilli chutney. But the crunch and the softness, the sweet tang and the incendiary, the fresh and the fried, all melded wonderfully in my mouth. Though I ate that only once, and never really met the same sort of thing again (the stuff served up at work is dreadful, stale and dull), I was delighted. Maybe one day we will renew our acquaintance…soon.

Take another puff

No, this one is not about smoking and, a bigger NO, I do not smoke, I do not advocate smoking, I do not particularly approve of smoking and I will never do so (Kiss a smoker even on the cheek and you will see what I mean!). But what I am talking about is puffs, of various grains – corn, wheat, rice, bajri, jowar and so much more that has been used through time to add fibre, bulk and good health to the average diet. And since I am big on fibre and actually genuinely prefer whole wheat to white (it is not just bread, but a state of mind), I am a passionate advocate of things puffed, its integral fibre stretched into gold-brown veins across a cloudy expanse of paler cream or white.

It started very early in my life – a story that is often re-told by Father when he gets sentimental about his little baby (which I was, a long time ago). He laughs when he remembers the way he or my mother gave me a small katori with some puffed wheat in it as I sat on a carefully cleaned floor. Instead of being as sanitarily conscious and healthful, I would proceed to tip the contents of the katori on the floor and then pick up each puffy grain and stuff it into my still-fairly-toothless mouth. It must have tasted better that way, because I certainly preferred eating it off the floor than to be more salubrious and use the container.

Popcorn was another significant chapter in my life, this time when I was a college student. There is a story my family relished – and still does – which was amazingly not apocryphal, but all true and verifiable, strange as it may seem. It was late one evening and there was a movie being watched in a dorm room two floors above where I lived with my roommate of the time, a rather single-minded blonde. She had her sights set on the gentleman in whose room the screening was to be and insisted that I had to go along as chaperon…the first time, at least. Being a civil type and fed up of the incessant badgering that had bombarded me ever since the invitation was first extended, apart from the fact that I was sort-of-friends with the gentleman concerned, I agreed to go. But we had to take something, she insisted, so we took a bag of popcorn into the small kitchen of the dorm and put it into the microwave to start it popping. The instructions read, the buttons pressed, the appropriate sounds heard, we stood there chatting waiting, with the oven door wide open, until the bag could be taken out. I am – or used to be – the happy, exuberant type, who made extravagant gestures. Which I proceeded to do at that very moment. The base of my thumb hit the edge of the microwave oven door. Hard. There was a profound sound. Then a small squeak from me. Then chaos, as my roommate fussed, the other person in the kitchen standing near the sink ran over to see what had happened and we three watched round-eyed and horrified as blood welled out of the gash in my skin. After a little soothing and some sensible advice from the dorm-in-charge, I watched a little of the movie happily hopped up on an astonishingly strong painkiller, clutching a bag of frozen peas to my injured hand, feeling nothing but a wonderfully thick cloud over my mind. At the infirmary the next morning, they discovered that I had cracked a bone in my hand and needed to wear a splint for six weeks if I refused a cast for four. I have not eaten very much popcorn, and never the microwave kind, since then.

These days I look for interesting cereals that I can feed the family with. Small Cat refuses to be distracted from her favourite kitty biscuits and Father prefers a diet low in fibre to one high in the more nutritiously healthful and antioxidant-rich goodies. So whatever puffing is done, is done by me…with great relish and a mind that revels in the virtue of it all!

An apple a day

For many years now, ever since I was in high school, I have eaten an apple a day, usually for lunch, as far as has been possible. Of course, there have been days when apples have not been available, or when there has been other food that grabs my fancy, but the apple tended to feature in some form, at least in thought if not in actually deed. So today, when I took my apple out of my lunch bag, I thought about the times gone by, when an apple was all it took to make a lot of people very happy. Apart from me, that is.

Remember the lady called Eve? She was a bit of a prude…and then she saw an apple. Big, red, rosy and luscious, it called her, lured her, tempted her, pulled her into the circle of sin. And she bit. Literally. That one bite made her want more. And one major part of the ‘more’ was a partner in crime. If it had been anyone else at any other point in time, they may have given up, because the only other person there was in the area – and the world, as it was then, at least as far as Eve knew – was a chap called Adam. The problem was that up to the point in time that we speak of, Eve ‘knew’ Adam only as a buddy, a brother, a companion. But after that little bite of the apple, she wanted to know a lot more. And, once he bit, as was inevitable, Adam changed in status. And Eve found soon after that, as the preachers tell it, that she ‘knew’ Adam in a whole different way. This little bite of healthy fruit led to a lot of problems, from persecution and exile of what may have been the first ever political refugees to the population explosion we are all still trying to deal with today.

That apart, it was the apple that started it all. Through my days of growing up and - we hope - present adulthood, I have met very few people called Adam, the most notable being far younger than I was and almost always, for reasons I never questioned - for thus was the habit of childhood - found under a bed, sofa or suchlike piece of furniture. Perhaps that was why I never could question the whole apple story, even though I firmly believe that it was apocryphal for the most part.

But apples and doctors have been linked in folklore, albeit not really in reality. There is an arbitrary relationship between the two, one being part of the flora and the other, fauna. In my life, the twain have never really met…except in the adage. As for my doctor, she doesn't like fruit!

Doing it in style

I was out on Saturday with Father and, after a strenuous morning of signing, shopping, socialising and scouting, we found ourselves in one of the better hotels in the city, looking for lunch. And it was to a coffee shop that we had once known well in a slightly different location that we gravitated, knowing that my nose was shiny with sweat and sunburn, that Father’s feet were tired of his formal shoes and we wanted little more than a very large glass of very cold water with which to wash down the morning’s peregrinations. We wandered to a table by the window yet sheltered from the sun and sat down. If there had been a way that I could have put my feet up, I would have, but it was a fancy hotel, the tablecloths were snowy clean and the hostess too immaculately stiffened and neat for me to charm my usual way through it all. So we sat there, gently counting down the seconds until the icy water arrived, smiling rather idiotically albeit fondly at each other.

Then decisions had to be made. What would we eat? Will it be a la carte or the buffet? After all, buffets are notorious for being composed of leftovers, weren’t they? And for afters? Pudding? What would dessert be? We both liked chocolate. But in this heat and with my paranoias about high cholesterol, low salt, high blood pressure, acidity and more, what would be most advisable? The waiter, bless his rounded little face a vaguely ingratiating smile, came over with a suggestion: the buffet, perhaps? We should look, we decided, and walked around the stretch of serving dishes laid out to see what was on offer. And the big platter of smoked salmon, pink, glistening and with absolutely no smell, except the faint tang of the lemon slices in a bowl nearby made my mind up for me. The buffet it would be.

We started at one end, examining all the salads. There was sprouts with slivers of green pepper; there was a heap of chopped apple and walnut, presumably rather deconstructed Waldorf; there was a wonderfully green bowl-full of lettuce, three kinds, separated by colour; there were small individual servings of tabbouleh and humus, chopped veggies and spring onions. There were bread baskets, holding white, dark rye, sundried tomato and olive, masala and multigrain. There was a tray of little martini glasses heaped with shrimp cocktail and a platter with salami, another with turkey close by. And there was that wonderful array of smoked salmon that pulled me into it, sort of like a surrealistic and very hungry Alice in Wonderland. But I looked and saw no trace of the traditional accompaniments – no sour cream, no capers, no sliced pickled onions. But I was happy. I ate bites of nicely buttered coarse grained bread with iceberg lettuce sprinkled with vinaigrette and mouthfuls of the salmon. I could have stopped there…or perhaps after a couple more helpings of the delicious fish.

But life, like the buffet, went on. I continued with a bite of this and a morsel of that. Fish in a sweet-sour brown gravy married happily with stir fried noodles. Chicken tikkas with kasoori methi were delicious when wrapped into a bit of butter-slathered hard roll. And prawn patio worked great with a sago wafer, the bland and the spicy off-setting each other with much joy. The vegetables, I ignored, startling myself by that, since none of them yelled “Eat me!” on the first round and I was by then too full to consider a second sortie. And, besides, dessert demanded attention.

That was a delightful combination, of small helpings that went well together. I slurped myself through a serving of chocolate parfait, carefully scraping off the decorative whipped cream and as carefully scraping every last smear of bittersweet chocolate sauce off the sides of the tall, slim glass. I demolished the passionfruit cheesecake in two not-very-large mouthfuls and I looked rather disdainfully at the tiny square of chocolate-iced cake that called itself a petit four. Our waiter, who was by then alarmingly paternal and beamed at us every time we happened to look up from out plates, offered ice cream and, when we refused both strawberry and banana-caramel, brought us some semi-sweet chocolate instead, earning himself a larger tip and some very positive reviews on the guest comment slip.

We finally staggered out of there, our tummies a little more stretched than they were used to and our smiles connecting one ear to the other. It was not a meal that we make a habit of, being rather more austere in our eating habits, but it was a lunch I certainly enjoyed. The company most of all.

Eating grass

The house is a bit of a zoo first thing in the morning, almost before dawn cracks and wakes us all up. The doorbell rings just before six am and the milkman has now learned to leave the packet of milk just outside the door, on the painted marble bench – the first day, he rang the bell five times before I came staggering out to open it, my bare legs wrapped in a towel and my hair flying every which way around my head; that was enough trauma to stop him doing that ever again. Soon after the sound of the front door bell comes the tinkle of another bell – the one that hangs on the collar around Small Cat’s neck. She hops off Father’s bed, where she has slept through most of the night and comes scampering out of his room. Then she stops on the carpet near the dining table, yawns hugely, stretches into some early morning suryanamaskar-akin positions and takes a flying leap over some imaginary hurdle to reach the kitchen door. And there she waits, her at-first-plaintive chirps gradually swelling into astonishingly piercing caterwauls.

Just when I am ready to leap out of bed and grab Small Cat, tucking her under my sheets and going back to sleep for a few precious minutes, Father arrives, muttering protests albeit lovingly. He rolls open the kitchen door and lets Small Cat in, following her to the window, which is also opened, and lifts the little furball up to set her on the wide ‘window seat’ created with a granite slab outside. There she stretches again, yawns, grooms herself briefly and checks that all is well on her little lookout; and then she turns to stare big-eyed at Father (I have seen this happen often, so presume it is a regular sequence of events). That is his cue – and god forbid that he should do anything else! He has to pluck out stalks of wheatgrass that is grown just for Small Cat in four small pots at different stages of development, and feed the green strands to her, preferably one by one, sometimes in a bunch. She will chew so enthusiastically that he is often in danger of losing a little skin from his fingers, and has to push her away so he can get to the grass.

And whenever she feels the need for some comfort or some rest after a particularly rambunctious playtime or is just plain bored of whatever amusement may be available to her at that moment, she trots over to the kitchen window and demands to be lifted up so she can graze. This is such a routine that we often call her ‘our little cow’.

But then, I always say, she has some of my nature. I like things green, vegetable and fibre-rich, as does Small Cat. I believe in whole grains and raw food and, to some extent, so does Small Cat. And, while I do not graze as enthusiastically as she does, we both like the idea of fine dining, each food eaten in its place and at its time. Which makes us not just epicures, but folks with the right snob values.

Between the bread

For many years my lunchtime diet consisted primarily of sandwiches. That, and fruit and/or yoghurt. I lived through what seems like a lifetime of sitting in classrooms and working in a newspaper office fuelled by the bread-and-betweens that I concocted in various kitchens, for myself and my former roommate (Karen, who still speaks of my creative expressions in a vaguely awed voice) and a parent or friend or assorted acquaintance or three. And I did pretty well, except that the older I got and the more sandwiches I made and ate (not always the same thing, you will understand) the more picky I got about what I could find to make my culinary synapses happy, or at least cheerful. So now if I am given a ’wich made with mundane white sliced bread and easy-filling, I will more likely than not revolt, objecting occasionally violently to whatever is shown to me under the title of: sandwich.

It started out with no complications. I was able to eat the packaged white bread and enjoy it, especially slathered with butter and anything from sliced cheese to peanut butter to jam to tomatoes to leftover sabji to boiled egg to ham to bologna to – on one memorable occasion – tomato ketchup. And then I saw a film called The Breakfast Club. In it, one of the actors (I think it was Molly Ringwald) smashed handfuls of crunchy potato chips between two slices of soft bread. Watching that segment for the umpteenth time made me wonder what it would be like to bite into that. I tried it. It was heavenly. Delicious. Delightful. Divine. Just plain yummy. And the experiments began.

Soon after that, I was introduced to the wonders of bread that was not white, not sliced and not packaged. It had to be bought at a bakery or made at home, had lots of interesting nuggets of whole grains or nuts and seeds and flavours in it and not only tasted better, but felt better in my mouth, too. Gradually, that genre of bread took over my life. Today, if you ask me to take a bite of plastic-bread, as I call it with characteristic disdain, I shrink, I quail, I plain refuse. Put a slice of plastic cheese between two of these slices and I go pale (or as pale as my nicely tanned skin can possibly get), shudder not too gently and reach blindly for a sharp object with which I can drive whoever is doing the offering away.

To me, a sandwich has STUFF in it. I prefer the three-slice formula, starting with slabs of rough-textured bread, the darker and more fibre-rich, the better. Then I slather on home-made mayonnaise (with the fishes tails, Papa!) and, if I have it, a smear of the mustard that makes your eyes water, your nose sting and your sinuses sing out loud in sharp soprano. Then comes the fun part – pile on the ham, chicken, roast beef, salami or whatever other cold cuts you have. Or, if you are going veggie, heap that bread with pesto and lettuce, hummus and falafel, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, even carrots, potatoes, onions and more. Then gently place another mayo-ed slice of bread on the top, and repeat with other fillings, this time perhaps cheeses and leaves. Put the lid on the whole with the last slice of bread and press down very lightly, just enough to make sure that everything stays together coherently. Slice diagonally with a very sharp knife – this makes sure that you get a cross section of the contents and you get those corners of bread with crust that are especially delicious as they absorb all the juices even as they help keep the sandwich together long enough to be eaten without too much mess.

In all this, perhaps the best sandwich I ever ate was one afternoon in a small town in England. I was strolling through downtown Tunbridge Wells with close family friends when we decided to stop to eat. We sat in a small café with very painful wrought iron furniture (my ankle bones got severely dented on that trip) and ordered sandwiches. Mine were water cress on brown bread. They came, a huge serving, with thinly sliced pumpernickel, a fine shaving of lightly salted butter and a thick layer of leaves, bitter-fresh and crispy clean in taste and texture. As I chewed happily, my back warmed by the sun and my heart by the affection of almost-family, I thought of sandwiches past, present and future. And planned for the execution of many more…

Telly talking

I was watching two food shows on television last night and couldn’t help remarking on the contrast between them. There was a locally made effort, with the well-rounded Kunal Vijaykar as the host, noshing on paella and a spinach concoction that he gingerly and very reluctantly forked up. And then there was my favourite foodie, Anthony Bourdain, who did a very uncharacteristic and un-food show, eating but not very much, telling of a trauma that only someone who had been there could have spoken about. while neither was brilliant television, both were remarkable, in opposite directions of opinion…and good taste!

Vijaykar was sniffing around Spanish food with the chef of a well known Mumbai hotel. If I had been the chef, frankly, I would have refused to have him in my kitchen or at my table. He seemed completely inept at talking about the food, totally clueless where the recipe was concerned and amazingly awkward when eating it had to happen. He does that often, making a wonderfully foolish spectacle of himself as he bumbles and blunders through wherever he is and whatever he is eating. It happened in Chettinad, it happened in a tea estate, it happened again this episode. As he watched the paella being made, he remarked less than sensibly about how the seafood was going in, how the rice swelled up and how the dish bubbled (well, maybe not that, but that was the general level of comment). And when he ate it, first sampling the spinach with surprisingly ham-handed stabs of a fork, he did not have the finesse or the spirit of adventure that would make it al seem like great fun! His bites of the paella – with a spoon, no less, assisted with a fork – were tentative and his ensuing remarks moronic, to say the least. And his most serendipitous moment was perhaps when he showed astonishment at the way in which the taste of the seafood had infused into the rice. And the naivete was not spiced by enough charm to make it even semi-appealing.

Sigh. I read the funnies in the papers that we get every day. They were more absorbing.

Later last night I sat through a re-run of No Reservations. It is perhaps one of my favourite shows, where Bourdain travels to wherever and eats whatever in whichever dive he can find, occasionally going for the experience that mandates actually sitting down at a table…’whatever’ being the operative term! I have watched him scarfing down animal innards in China, messing with tacos of various descriptions in Mexico and carefully picking up food with his fingers in India. But yesterday’s episode was very moving and ‘different’. The crew was in Beirut, when the airport was bombed after Lebanese soldiers were kidnapped. And there was chaos, uncertainty and, of course, fear. No one knew when they would get out, no one knew even if they would get out. And Bourdain spoke about not just the situation, but also the insecurity that he and his friends and colleagues were feeling at the time. There was reality television happening, very little food, except at the start and when they got together to muster up a meal or two, and it moved me more than any news report or National Geographic story could. It was all there, all real, all graphic, and all frightening. Which elevated it beyond the usual genre of food shows on television, where someone eats something, cooks something and talks about something with a happy face and a very happy tummy attached.

Compare the two. And you will see who wins. And you will, I am sure, agree with me.