Going green

I plan to go vegetable shopping on my way home from work today. While I hate going to the market, especially dressed in ‘nice’ work clothes and with ‘nice’ slippers on, I do enjoy buying stuff that is fresh and, very often, green. For me, that is in a way a bigger source of inspiration than a set of gorgeous food photographs or the smell of newly made ghee, which in itself is a wonder of olfactory bliss.

One of my earliest memories of being surrounded by vegetables in a market was perhaps when I was a small girl and my parents drove to the wholesale bazaar in midtown Mumbai. We were headed to buy an amazing – for our tiny nuclear family – amount of ten kilos of potatoes, mainly to fine-slice into rounds to dry on the terrace to make chips to fry to make our tummies very happy indeed. In the melee that was Byculla, with my hand firmly clutched in either a parent’s or a grandmother’s, I would watch bug-eyed as enormous mountains of brown-skinned spuds reached high over my head. And, once we were done, we would load the veggies into the back of the car and head home. A few days later, the processing would begin and we would take turns sitting vigil on the terrace, shooing away curious pigeons and getting distracted by soaring paper kites.

These days, our family has shrunk and the same chips are compromised on – we will eat the ones we can buy, instead of going through the labour of making them. We also take turns (more or less; Father does more and I do less) buying vegetables, choosing just what I can use when I do my main stint of cooking on a Sunday morning, and filling in any gaps later in the week. But we still make lists, fantasise (I do, at least) over what we would ideally like to buy, make and eat) and eventually allow for the vagaries of weather and stocks and get whatever we can.

My main requirement in making a list of vegetables to be bought is that there should be lots of green. Which means lovely leaves like spinach, red spinach, methi of various sizes and horseradish leaves, occasionally fennel, celery, bok choy and whatever else fits the general bill. Sometimes it is familiar, oftentimes not, and I will be found chatting with the vendor trying to make him or her understand that I need to understand what to do with whatever I was looking so interestedly at. At the small market near the house, most vendors know us and will allow for my idiosyncracies, later asking Father how whatever I had bought had turned out and whether he would be buying more of it.

I am very easily seduced by the novel, especially where vegetables are concerned. As a result we have eaten some very strange versions of the familiar, from very young and tender radish (which actually looks like a long thin bean or a thick blade of grass that may be green, purple or even white) to beans that have no discernible flavour but plenty of fibre to a melange of sprouts that are barely identifiable even with the help of the Internet. We seem to be healthy enough with a diet of this adventurous kind, even thriving on it. And Small Cat enjoys every moment of helping Father pick his way through the methi, clean the spinach and pod the peas.

So today I have my wish list ready. And the get-up-and-go to get up and go buy vegetables. Now if I could only find at least a little of what I really want…