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!
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