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.

Right on the money

(While this blog has been converted to one that focusses on food, I did this article for the newspaper I work with and rather liked the way it turned out. As with all newspapers, what you write is not always what gets printed, so this seemed to be a good place to show off all the research that I did for this. So, voila!)

It’s been a rather unsettling time for the art world over the past few months. Even as reports come in of works selling for millions of dollars, it is known that prices of art have been falling – or so it seems. For many, the arena of investment has shifted from contemporary Indian art back to the stock market, where boomtime has encouraged buying. All the while, the fairly restricted and still-elitist circle that buys and sells art has been quietly going through changes – none dramatic, none earthshaking, few even vaguely surprising.

But change, nevertheless. Consider this: At the recent Sotheby’s auction in New York, the sale of contemporary Indian art were on the whole below expectations – of the 114 lots up for bids, only 86 were actually sold, at a total price of about $6.3 million, instead of the high-end figure of $9.4 million originally estimated. Rameshwar Broota’s The Other Space sold for $601,000; an untitled work by Syed Haider Raza commanded $409,000. However, stalwarts like MF Husain are still top-pops – his Pagan Mother sold at a fabulous $658,600 at Sotheby’s. About a year and a half ago, Shibu Natesan’s Existence of Instinct – 1 (2004), fetched £91,000 in an online auction. Paintings by Tyeb Mehta - Falling Figure With Bird (1998), which sold for $1.24 million, and SH Raza’s Tapovan (1972), which brought in $1.47 million - broke records. And a Ram Kumar that sold for about $32,000 in 2003 might have fetched $500,000. Today, prices have dropped perhaps 25 per cent, though exact figures are never spoken, just whispered.

What exactly happened? As Kent Charugundla, owner of the Tamarind Art Gallery in New York says, “The Indian art market is going through a correction now after coming to a point of saturation.” With the Sotheby’s auction, much of the mediocre has been effectively weeded out. Shireen Gandhy of Chemould gallery in Mumbai agrees, “The undersell at Sotheby’s points to the fact that we have overpriced ourselves.” Dadiba Pundole of Mumbai’s Pundole Art Gallery believes that this shakedown is “long overdue. The euphoria seems to have subsided. More than half the people were collecting for the wrong reasons.”

“People have now become far more selective in buying good works. Prices had been driven up by some galleries who were giving works to auction houses and then buying it themselves to establish 'benchmarks',” believes Harsh Goenka, Chairman RPG Enterprises and an avid collector. “A similar trend was when entire exhibitions were supposedly 'sold out' and then some of these works appeared in auctions. This way prices were further driven up and inventories made more valuable. Now, people are aware of such manipulation. As a result, better artists are better rewarded. Manipulation levels are down. So are prices. Christies and Sotheby's are more transparent and fair Therefore there is truer value being discovered."
Contemporary art collector Ashwini Kakkar believes that the inflation of the prices over the last few years was so rapid, “mainly because all the auction houses jumped into the fray about the same time. Also, the number of NRI buyers suddenly increased, as did the homegrown IT millionaires,” all of whom had cash available to make high-end purchases of a commodity that they could “paste on the wall for others to see”. He feels that “The reverse effect happened because there was an oversupply situation. And the government introduced a tax on all transactions related to art, which had a huge dampening effect on prices.”

According to Zara Porter Hill, Head of Indian and South Asian Art at Sotheby's, “Clearly clients are more discerning and spending their money in different ways in the Indian context. They are not just concentrating on buying work by the modern Indian artists. There are new areas showing buoyancy: video, photography and miniature paintings, for instance.” She expects a continued growing of an international group of buyers for contemporary South Asian art – “There is also a growing interest in Anglo-India, which is also undervalued at the moment. These areas should do well mid to long term.”

Dinesh Vazirani of Saffronart feels that the current low period shows a “top end saturation in an existing pool of buyers”. At the same time there has been a slower gestation of new buyers coming in at the top end, he explains, “There is some stability there. In the contemporary section, with younger artists, there is still lots of momentum, with prices still going up.” Much of this comes as a result of these works being placed in international sales, attracting a non-Indian clientele. “In September 2005 the first million dollar painting (Tyeb Mehta’s Mahishasura) was sold. Since then, there have been about 20 more that went at that price.”

Gallery owner Ranjana Steinrucke agrees that the art market is now not as flush with funds as it was even a few months ago. “But it is a soft market situation now, not really a fall per se.” Founder-Chairman of Osian’s Neville Tuli’s opinion is a little different. He explains, “The market is as flush with funds as before, even more so as many more new entrants, but the money has matured.” The market is now “not willing to accept much of the mediocrity that many new players have been sharing with the public”.

This kind of re-evaluation is necessary as a market matures. In addition, the transition from investor to collector is happening on many levels; this needs time. Tuli says, “Given the financial institutions have entered the art market now in a serious manner, the growth and the next boom will be deeper and more sustained.”

In this turmoil, how is the artist who has shot into the limelight doing vis-à-vis sales? Baiju Parthan says without too much worry, “The drop in price is more of a correction. The fall would show up mostly among those whose prices are a bit inflated. A certain amount of collateral damage could happen.”

Of kebabs and love

I am not sure when I first met a kebab, but I have my strongest memory of coming across one when I had just moved jobs to Delhi. It was, all said and not done, not a happy meeting, where the kebab was as tired as I was and the waiter holding it on a tarnished tray even more so. It was outdoors, which almost inevitably put the strongest crimp yet in the proceedings, since it was cold and windy and no one had heard of central heating or heavy winterwear. I was not bright enough to remember that Indian homes do not do anything to make guests warm, except perhaps bring out the electric heater just when the visitors’ assorted noses have gone white with incipient chilblains and their fingernails turned a violent blue, deprived of any feeling and all motion. Of course, there is an advantage in this; at this stage of frostbite, you do not taste much and, even if it is dreadful, you eat it, at least to keep warm.

And in this sort of environment, the kebabs circulated. I am convinced, and have often said it in various writings and in stories I tell – not too apocryphally – that those were the same kebabs I had met on various occasions, held out mutely by the same tired waiters at the same tired parties where the same tired people had the same tired conversation. It took some years of looking fearfully and wonderingly at these platters of small sections of very dead (well, actually, I do hope they were) meat with the consistency of rubber and of the temperature of very old and abandoned vulcanised rubber tyres that wandered past me before I came across a kebab that was, in every way, worth knowing.

That was at the home of a dear family friend. His wife had gone off to parts beyond the reach of the sliced onion to visit a son and I was taking the place, temporarily, of a younger friend, a relative almost. We sat in the garden, nicely wrapped in sweaters and warm woolly socks (which you just cannot wear to a terrace party that is going to be featured in the gossip papers the next day, my dear!), a dog breathing heavily and steamily at our feet, chatting about friends, family and folks that should be neither seen nor heard, when he asked me if I would like to eat a kebab. I was unsure, and seemed to communicate that to him, since he laughed and, still chortling into his snow-white beard, vanished kitchenward. He was back in a few minutes, holding a large plate that sent up small spirals of fragrant smoke. There was, I sniffed hard, a gentle acrid pong of fresh-cut onions that lingered. Having given the dog a morsel to keep him distracted from the rest of the offering, my friend set the plate down on the garden table and waved me to attack.

I was rather suspicious, rightfully so, considering my experience until that moment with the ubiquitous kebab in Delhi. I looked warily at the plate. It was loaded with small sections of what seemed to be dark red tubing, sliced onions and fresh coriander leaves scattered over it. Go on, my friend urged, still grinning. I reached out, picked up a fork and stabbed one of the pieces. It was surprisingly soft, but somehow resilient. I brought it to my mouth and felt the heat it gave off. And one nibble later, I was hooked. It was hot and soft and spicy, fragrant and delicious. Add a squeeze of lemon and a slice of onion (come on, who are you planning to kiss anyway, my friend urged) and it becomes a small bite of heaven. Seeing my gustatory delight, my friend made it a point to serve me those kebabs every time I went to visit in cold weather, which is when the kebabs traditionally come out to play.

My friend has gone away to where I hope he gets lots of kebabs even nicer than those he fed me and I left Delhi some years before that. But the taste stays with me, as does the vision of him smiling happily at me in the dim light of the garden, as we both chewed on those morsels of spiced meat and talked about life and living. And in his memory, I eat kebabs today, seeing him again with every bite that I relish.

Fasting, not feasting

Over the past few days, perhaps a little over a week, my dietary regimen has been rather uncertain, just like my emotions. An upset tummy and a recurrence of that dratted vertigo, with a bloody-minded sense of vengeance, had my doctor ban anything caffeinaceous for a week, except for chocolate, and that only for the sugar and soothe value of it all. No caffeine, try and detox, clean your tummy, drink plenty of water, rest, avoid all your usual running about, let the housework go for a few days, forget stress, stay away from all emotional turmoil and, most of all, eat often but small meals, with more salt that your usual, but not too much, he almost-yelled. I nodded mutely, fighting the wave of sick dizziness that threatened to wash over my unbowed head, and fled back to unscheduled page-making. As a result, I ended up being able to slide into my tightest pants, even though sitting for too long was rather painful and the lack of oxygen made my normally gently tanned face an incipient blue. Pleased as I was with that fact, I spent the day trying not to breathe too much and hoping that it would be over sooner rather than later.

That apart, eating little and hanging about doing not much more than play with Small Cat and read a lot was a good deal as far as I was concerned. Eat light was the easy part. I was not especially hungry. Too many emotional ups and downs, too much stress, too much disturbance of normal routine, too much food that was not on my usual menu, too much nervous energy and way too much angst, worry and associated stress. So anything that went in wanted to come out. Which meant lots of water, lots of yoghurt and no tea, no coffee - which I had got into the horrible habit of slugging down as soon as I got to work – and no limbu paani, which I like. I sat in my large chair, idly scratching Small Cat’s ears and watched her go into tiny paroxysm of delight, occasionally grabbing my fingers for a gentle bite.

Detox is a much abused word these days. I believe in it, yes, but not the way the magazines suggest. I detox by cleansing the mind as well as the tummy, drinking lots of water, nibbling at only what the mouth craves, eating only what the tummy wants and doing only what the energy stores allow. For me, it was all about a little dahi, an occasional spoonful of veggies and regular doses of sugar, like it or not. Gradually, the floatiness faded, the sickness retreated and the headache went back to wherever it had come from. I chased Small Cat from room to room and we wrestled and giggled, occasionally stopping for a warm hug and a little coochie-cooing over a handful (mine) or cat-biscuits (hers). As my mind calmed, so did the body. And by Monday, as I slid into my snug trousers, I was ready to tackle everything from the irascible boss to making pages and finding writers for stories that were always just that little too late.

Noodle bar

One of my favourite staples is the noodle. Or, for some reason, since people prefer it in plural – as do I, come to think of it – noodles. It hits the spot when I am feeling particularly empty and is in its own long-winded way as soothing as dahi chawal or mashed potatoes with the requisite dollop of butter is at the end of an over-long and multiply-frazzled day. Perhaps this comes from the one and only time I ate lunch in my school cafeteria in Geneva – it was not bad at all, but violated all norms of my usual apple-and-chocolate midday meal with its balance and completeness. The lunch was simple, nothing too highly flavoured or exotic, nothing to rich or heavy, nothing too remarkable or memorable. It consisted of a breast of roast chicken, petit pois with a little butter and, much to my startlement, no potatoes in any form. Instead, there was pasta – a tangled heap of spaghetti, hot, bathed in butter or olive oil – I did not know enough to differentiate then – and surprisingly delicious.

But pasta was not a new concept to me. I had eaten plenty of it at home and in restaurants whenever I had lived, from the most primitive of macaroni and cheese messes in the school canteen to the more sophisticated Pho in a small Vietnamese café in a side street in Florence to the exceedingly chi-chi version of chicken noodle soup in a ritzy New York hotel. And, just to get off the long-think track, there had been ravioli, cannelloni, fusili and more shapes and formats that I could remember that had travelled happily from my plate to my tummy. But spaghetti, lightly buttered and unsauced, as an alternative to potatoes mashed, fried or otherwise processed, was novel. For me, it worked.

Until I got to a college dorm, pasta in its various avatars was a fairly nutritious concept for my gustatory resume. It was only when I found myself in an environment where food had to be fast and easy and, most of all, cheap, that I learned the virtues of the instant noodle. Ra-men, with its different brands and spellings, came to me as manna from supermarket heaven. Just peel back the foil-plastic lid, pour in hot water, wait a few moments and you have food, my roommate taught me. It was fabulous! Even though, as so many of my more adult mentors and teachers tried to educate me, it had all the dietary value of limp string, it touched that special space in my system that needed not only to be comforted, but also filled with anything that would cushion the aggravation of being a young adult in an alien situation and the cravings of a stomach that wanted to go home.

But as I got older, wiser and more conscious about what was good for me, I started trying out more healthy forms of eating pasta. Today, I prefer the whole-wheat, high-fibre kind, the type that looks a pale-chocolate brown in its wrapper and can cook up to a gritty, nasty, chewy mass if not taken out of its boiling water soon enough. Made just right, it is perfect with my bolognaise sauce, goes nicely with a blob of butter and a few flakes of softened garlic and touches the needy spot with a grating of sharp cheese.

However, I do regress, regrettably too often for my own comfort. One of my secret cravings is fast-cook noodles, flavoured with an over-salty cube of chicken extract (probably synthetic) and smothered in a blanket of grated cheese that melts into a sticky goo. It is horribly calorific, has no discernible dietary health value and does more for that frazzled nerve ending than any elevator muzak ever managed. And, in spite of knowing that it is as bad for me as it can possibly get, I relish every mouthful. And crave more…

Go East, young woman!

Ok, so maybe I was not a child then, but when I first met Japanese cuisine, it floored me…in a good kind of way. It was many years ago, on a trip to Denver, about the time when I was trying to tell my Soul Sis Karen that vegetables were not going to kill her, I was taken by a friend to a sort-of-Oriental restaurant for lunch. It was a mass produced affair, sort of cafeteria-style, but it was fun and introduced me to a genre of cuisine – food, presentation and eating – that I almost immediately took to with a genuine interest in, if not a complete all-out passion for. “Yuck, raw fish!” many of my friend said when I told them that sushi had met me and been approved of. It was even more funny when I had to tell one of my madder friends that sushi was not someone I had met in class or in an airport or at one of the more eccentric parties I had been to, but something I could eat fairly happily and easily at so many of the new cafes and bistros I occasionally dropped in at.

But soon I found that Karen, with her one-time aversion to anything that was not related to Wonder Bread and Big Macs completely reversed to eating anything that was as low in calorie and fat count as possible and often even just plain vegetarian (except for green peppers and any inexcusable excess of broccoli), had a true passion for sushi. On one trip, not long after I had recovered from the arduous journey that is the London-New York-Denver stretch, she dragged me off to a sushi diner in downtown Denver and presented me with a large platter of the stuff. I looked at it, then at her, then at it again. I was willing to eat almost every tiny mote of it, except for the ones so prettily covered in roe. It looked back at me when I looked at it, I explained, and somewhere in there were tiny baby fish that were being deprived of their right to a life, all because I was hungry. It did not work as far as I was concerned. I could not eat it. Apart from the ethical aspect, I also hated the idea of the small round semi-translucent orbs, so beautifully glistening and shiny-bright, popping in my mouth to release the baby fish that they should contain. Ew.

For some reason, I cannot eat fish eggs. I cannot eat baby bananas in banana flower form either. And quail, veal and the tiny, incipient fetal peppers that are often found growing within large peppers (aka capsicum) are of the same league of unwelcome entrants to my digestive system. Hence my avoidance of all that is labelled ‘caviar’, never mind that people look at me sadly and tell me that I have no idea what I am missing out on. So when they put that glorious platter of sushi in front of me, I tend to do a furtive exchange of goodies with whoever I happen to be with, Karen or anyone else. I will eat the rest with great relish and a hint of wasabi, wallop down the pickled ginger that is my serving and anyone else’s without any consideration for their preference for it and chew my way happily through the rolls containing salmon, shrimp, tuna, unagi and whatever else. But roe…oh, no!

In Mumbai these days, sushi abounds. A few years ago, when I craved the stuff, no one had it, except for one restaurant at a fancy hotel in Delhi, which served it only at certain times of year, subject to availability and the flight schedules from outside the city, usually coastal regions. Now they dish up so many variations, including ghastly vegetarian versions that are wraps of paneer and spinach and avocado (another day we shall wail about that one) and an occasional bit of chicken tikka in the bright red masala, all of which sound interesting enough (I have nothing against fusion cuisine, you know) but would probably be dreadful from the true-blue Japanese perspective. As for the other themes in cooking from Japan, teppenyaki, teriyaki and sukiyaki, along with origami (yeah, I know it is not food, but I was just checking you out!) are all about here and now – light, easy, healthy and most delicious!

Cake love

I turned older yesterday and, if not exactly wiser, at least wider. Over the years, part of the widening process has been because of birthday cake…or different kinds and sorts, flavours and finishings, bits and bobs and baubles that have been part of the overall presentation. For some years, when I was very young, I would get a cake ordered especially for me from the neighbourhood bakery. On one memorable occasion, when the children of the residential complex were invited in for a small party, I had a heart-shaped cake iced in marzipan of the most improbably lurid strawberry pink colour. The frosting layer was thick and rich and sweet, of a sugar level that would appeal to the very young with its teeth-shrinking brightness.

A few years later, I learned how to bake and between my parents and myself, we produced all manner of esoteric baked goods and fancies. For a few years, my mother insisted on making me what she called a Pineapple Upside Down Cake, one that was richly soaked in golden syrup and pineapple juice and studded with the fruit, with layers of stewed golden rounds to create that subtle change of colour and startlement of texture in each bite. The whole thing was frosted in pineapple-flavoured royal icing, which made it even richer and sweeter, leaving us all feeling rather bilious at the end of the cake-eating experience. It took a while for all of us to communicate to all of us (which is not an editing goof, trust me) that not all of us liked such an overwhelming abundance of pineapple, but once done, it was a relief all around.

From then on, most of the cake-making was done by me for everyone. One year, for my own birthday, I made a jam roll, using a combination of strawberry jam, orange marmalade and chocolate. While it was appreciated from the aesthetic point of view, literally, our tastebuds shrank somewhat from repeating the wonderfully pinwheeled product. I think we made a trifle of the rest of it once the celebrations were done with.

Some time ago, I found an old cookbook in an old book store. I am not sure it didn’t have bug, since it fell apart every time I opened it at any page for too long, but it did its job where I was concerned. I got stories as well as recipes, and managed to create a happily delicious mess with it all. My favourite concoction, however, was what we called a ‘Sin Cake’, a chocolate overload that never rose more than about an inch and a half, if that. It had more chocolate and cocoa than any other ingredient, and rose only with the help of a gently beaten egg white or two. Which meant that, like all soufflés, it needed to be seen and admired for the two seconds it took for the entire disc to stay risen…for, very soon after it was taken out of the oven, it would fall, as ignominiously as the Roman Empire or the Third Reich, take your pick. Take a bite and it was thickly chocolate, rich and dense and fabulously semi-sweet chocolatey, perfect for a more adult tooth.

Over the past couple of years, birthday cake is hardly what I focus on when the Big Day rolls around. All I want is a good day, with no sulks, no bad tempers, no hassles, no unpleasantness, at work or at home or in transit. Sometimes, if I am lucky, it happens that way. And then it’s far better than any cake every baked!

Up in the air

I spent a day in Delhi earlier this week (and catching up with myself after that has made it impossible for me to write this blog) and seemed to be more on a plane getting there and back than at what I was in the city for. And much of it featured me looking at the proceedings with my eyes and mouth (oops!) goggle-open and aghast. Otherwise I would be staring at whatever it was I was staring at with incipient giggles and suppressing the odd hiccup.

My flight to Delhi was on a budget airline, since all I had to do was go there in the morning, be at a couple of meetings and fly back a few hours later. I had never flown one of these before and am not sure I want to do it again. The service was decent, the timings were passable and the treatment was fine. But it was the food that got to me. On most airlines that I have flown, you do not have to pay for water. Or even for food, though some American carriers do charge for snacks. Here, they offered small half-litre bottles of mineral water ‘complimentary’, one per passenger, and everything else had to be paid for. Which meant you were given horrible food at prices that seemed, even to my blasé mind, overblown and beyond the believable pale. A very bad (or so it looked) cheese sandwich for twice what it would be worth on the ground and about four times what it is actually worth would give anyone a bad case of indigestion. And if you wanted more water, you needed to fish deep in your wallet. But then, for those who are hungry and have no access to food other than what is being sold up in the air, does it matter?

The friend I went to see first off the plane told me her little secret. Every time she flies, which she does often enough to make budget flying worthwhile, she takes with her a small box of food for the trip. It gives her something to fill the empty space in the tummy and saves her from the ghastly airline food that is so often dished out. It is exactly what I have read about for years in various papers and magazines, but never really paid any attention to. After all, most of the time that I travel, I either do not eat, or stick with the fruit and water combination that suits my tastebuds and my tummy quite well.

It is perhaps just three or four times that I have ever eaten a meal on a plane that was even remotely edible and pleasurable. The first time was on a flight from Athens to Frankfurt, when I was a stout little almost-ten-year-old. It was another first for me: my first ever experience, albeit not my last, of the long slim sausage called the ‘frankfurter’. Being a bit of a gourmand, if not yet a gourmet, I gobbled down the two wursts that came as part of lunch and belched happily. But then we hit some turbulence and the hot dogs rebelled. Just as we were getting off the plane, walking down the aisle to the door, my sausages and I parted company, painfully for all involved. But the memory of the meal lingers…

A flight to London from New York on a Canadian airline gave me a truly delicious meal. I ate a delicately poached and very large and succulent shrimp, nicely wrapped around a subtle cheese. There was also a small slab of whitefish, perfectly cooked and bathed in a delightfully herby sauce. Nothing was congealed or slimy, nothing was semi-raw or rubbery; it was all just so, just right, just perfect. Surprisingly, Indian Airlines, when it was still called that, once served up a ‘diet’ meal, with tender grilled chicken, herb-flecked boiled potatoes and fresh fruit – a wonderful change from the usual over-cooked and over-spiced fare that has you wondering why it exists.

Maybe too many questions of that kind made budget airlines decide to cut the food rations!

Up in the air

I spent a day in Delhi earlier this week (and catching up with myself after that has made it impossible for me to write this blog) and seemed to be more on a plane getting there and back than at what I was in the city for. And much of it featured me looking at the proceedings with my eyes and mouth (oops!) goggle-open and aghast. Otherwise I would be staring at whatever it was I was staring at with incipient giggles and suppressing the odd hiccup.

My flight to Delhi was on a budget airline, since all I had to do was go there in the morning, be at a couple of meetings and fly back a few hours later. I had never flown one of these before and am not sure I want to do it again. The service was decent, the timings were passable and the treatment was fine. But it was the food that got to me. On most airlines that I have flown, you do not have to pay for water. Or even for food, though some American carriers do charge for snacks. Here, they offered small half-litre bottles of mineral water ‘complimentary’, one per passenger, and everything else had to be paid for. Which meant you were given horrible food at prices that seemed, even to my blasé mind, overblown and beyond the believable pale. A very bad (or so it looked) cheese sandwich for twice what it would be worth on the ground and about four times what it is actually worth would give anyone a bad case of indigestion. And if you wanted more water, you needed to fish deep in your wallet. But then, for those who are hungry and have no access to food other than what is being sold up in the air, does it matter?

The friend I went to see first off the plane told me her little secret. Every time she flies, which she does often enough to make budget flying worthwhile, she takes with her a small box of food for the trip. It gives her something to fill the empty space in the tummy and saves her from the ghastly airline food that is so often dished out. It is exactly what I have read about for years in various papers and magazines, but never really paid any attention to. After all, most of the time that I travel, I either do not eat, or stick with the fruit and water combination that suits my tastebuds and my tummy quite well.

It is perhaps just three or four times that I have ever eaten a meal on a plane that was even remotely edible and pleasurable. The first time was on a flight from Athens to Frankfurt, when I was a stout little almost-ten-year-old. It was another first for me: my first ever experience, albeit not my last, of the long slim sausage called the ‘frankfurter’. Being a bit of a gourmand, if not yet a gourmet, I gobbled down the two wursts that came as part of lunch and belched happily. But then we hit some turbulence and the hot dogs rebelled. Just as we were getting off the plane, walking down the aisle to the door, my sausages and I parted company, painfully for all involved. But the memory of the meal lingers…

A flight to London from New York on a Canadian airline gave me a truly delicious meal. I ate a delicately poached and very large and succulent shrimp, nicely wrapped around a subtle cheese. There was also a small slab of whitefish, perfectly cooked and bathed in a delightfully herby sauce. Nothing was congealed or slimy, nothing was semi-raw or rubbery; it was all just so, just right, just perfect. Surprisingly, Indian Airlines, when it was still called that, once served up a ‘diet’ meal, with tender grilled chicken, herb-flecked boiled potatoes and fresh fruit – a wonderful change from the usual over-cooked and over-spiced fare that has you wondering why it exists.

Maybe too many questions of that kind made budget airlines decide to cut the food rations!

In the pot

It’s amazing how quickly you get used to having a whole kitchen full of pots and pans to create feasts in. It’s even more amazing how you get used to having just one pan in which to cook up a multi-course dinner. And it’s always astonishing to me how easy it is to forget that you had just that one pan when you get back to your large wardrobe of generations of cookware.

As I grew up in my parents’ home, I had many years’ worth of accumulated kitchenware to play with. There was stuff that they had been given by my grandmother – heavy aluminium pans and British-label silverware. Then there was stuff that they had collected on their first stint abroad, from coloured Pyrex to Revereware that is impossibly difficult to find today and almost unaffordable. Then there was stuff that we gathered over various trips to various parts of the world, from Arcopal to Robex to Corning to Silit to goodness knows what else, including a paella pan, an electric crepe maker, a very large non-stick wok and miscellaneous baking dishes that – I think- have even today never been used. Then there was stuff I bought when I was studying abroad, from standard-issue Corelle to more pricey Dansk – that was, frankly, a deal between a family friend and my mother – lovely flower-figured glass plates and heavy glass tumblers that people still covet.

And when I moved away to live for a while in Delhi, my kitchen trousseau got drastically reduced to a battered pressure cooker, a large and unwieldy frying pan and a small pot that did little more than just boil water and, occasionally and very temperamentally, boil rice. I managed to cook up meals for myself and my cat with happy equanimity and, once in a while when they came to stay, my parents or, rarely, a close friend. Anyone else had to either bring their own food, we ordered out or drove somewhere to eat. All my efforts were concentrated on that frying pan, which would probably have been relegated to the pan in which wax was melted to shape candles in my own parental home. But it managed to conjure up all sorts of feasts and treats, from wonderfully low-cal yet rich gajar ka halwa to esoteric stir-fries and even occasional batches of dosas and puris. Don’t ever ask how, I could not tell you. It was magic, a spell or two thought up by necessity, from which invention so serendipitously springs.

Once I flew home again, life expanded its horizons to cupboards full of pots and pans of almost every description. It was like having a whole new life, so much to use and so little to use it all for. But I got more inventive and yet more efficient, reducing the washing up to just one or two pans that went back into their home-recesses after doing their job.

Rice and shine

I started cooking by myself when I was very young. By the time I was about 12, I had managed to learn how to make a gamut of goodies, from simple mayonnaise to more complex cake, easy-to-do flan and rather more complex bread. Along the way, I also learned the rules of how to create the most crunchy potato sabji, the most green spinach in dal and the most shapely rotis I could ever manage (I must admit that I cheated somewhat at that, I used the lid of a dabba to cut perfect rounds). Gradually, growing up, with some battling with my favourite teacher, my mother, I managed to figure out just why you use asafoetida while tempering rai for sambhar, when to throw the tomatoes into rasam and how to drop a batter-coated round of baingan into hot oil without splashing it all over yourself. With time, I started enjoying the entire process of cooking playing with ingredients and methods to make it all not just easier and faster, but also a lot more fun for me and those who had to eat the results.

And then I went off to college in New York, my first experience of living alone. It had some trauma attached to it, in that the apartment block I called home was fondly called La Casa Cucaracha by anyone who knew that it was home not just to generations of out-of-state and out-of-country students, but also to teeming multitudes of out-of-control cockroaches. I had – and still have – very few inherited fears, but my intense loathing for cockroaches is something my mother gave me. So between attempts at culinary experiments on a recalcitrant stove, I swept and hopped and squeaked as small and large brown arthropods crawled and scuttled out of various crevices and shelves to feast on the results of my endeavours. It was, to say the least, traumatic, especially since I could not get too close to any one of the creatures for sheer revulsion and they stayed just far enough away from me to avoid being hit by the broom I was wielding with all the skill of a Darth Vader and his light-sabre. But a blizzard of boric acid managed to tame them into hiding, if not emigration, and I could play with my pots and pans without too much furtive peeking over my shapely shoulders.

That was the time I learned how to make staples. As in the starchy foundations of most meals, be it pasta, potatoes or rice. While spuds were easy enough to master and spaghetti was a cinch - especially after a protracted very-long distance call to Mother in Geneva, Switzerland, about when exactly to put the stiff pasta into salted boiling water – rice was still a bit of a mystery. And, with me, it was almost murderous in its level of difficulty. I am not an especially logical person, particularly when I am in the kitchen being creative, so the fundamentally routine and rule-governed process of making rice completely escaped me and my variedly-wired brain. It was only a few years later, when I was studying in Colorado, that everything came together and I learned how to make rice. By then, I had understood that reading the instructions on the package was not a matter of wimping out or taking the easy route, but the best place to start.

But cooking in Colorado, especially mile-high in the Rocky Mountains, is not the kind of process that sets the tone for the rest of your culinary life. In fact, it is much like they say the job of a weatherman is – you get it right about two percent of the time; the rest, you wing it or order out. My stabs at rice were indeed bloody trials, almost by fire. On many attempts, the middle would be sticky and overdone, while the edges were woefully crunchy and almost-raw. Or else everything would be like a very soupy congee or a very hard and stiff mould. I almost gave up, except that I was full of sheer pigheadedness and refused to cry Uncle. And, finally, one day, I did it. And we celebrated….with take out Chinese fried rice.

Turn on the bulb

My friend Nina and I have a deep and abiding bond that no one can break, or so I believe. It hinges on one small aspect of our relationship, one that has successfully added to our friendship a facet that only good friends can and will share without reservation. It is a fact that not many can withstand this kind of pressure and few people stay close with it in their combined lives. But the humble common garden onion is something that can break deep and abiding ties without too much difficulty, just with one gentle whiff of its unmistakeable and often irresistible aroma.

I met Nina many years ago through a mutual family friend. And since then, she has ranked among those compatible enough to be part of my family, to meet my parents (when I still had both) and to be included in expeditions that features Father and me. We have giggled, chatted and seriously discussed our way through numerous adventures, from getting our driving licenses in Delhi to looking for the perfect set of gold tissue cushion covers on a very rainy morning, we did a lot more than the average pair of madcaps would do. She held my hand when I cried to mourn first the death of my cat and then my mother, and I soothed her over the phone as she panicked about neighbour problems and unwanted health issues. And, as we looked out for each other, we ate our way through a lot of rather interesting food.

But a recurring motif, one that we laughed about even the last time we met a few days ago has always been onions. We once sat for hours in Geoffrey’s in Ansal Plaza in Delhi eating chicken tikkas and slathering each bite in a melange of onions and green chutney and sipping strange brews (beer for her, cranberry juice for me), giggling about everything from the state of the nation to the shirt the man at the next table was wearing to the spice in the chutney to the onions that both of us were eating. That was perhaps when we concluded that the best bond between friends was the generosity with which we could consume pyaaz and not object. The bonding continued over the years as we ate more kebabs, among other foods, with the accompanying onions. Now we reach for them in a restaurant as a matter of form, but only when it is just the two of us, or if Father is with us. Anyone else not yet initiated into the onion club has us on our best behaviour…food-wise.

My passion for the pickled onion has always been expressed, especially with Father. When I was much younger, we would have contests as to who could eat more of the highly aromatic bulbs, while Mum glowered across the table and nibbled on an onion in sheer self defence. More recently, I started making them at home using my own concoction of the virulent brew in which the whites of spring onions could soak for a few weeks before they were deemed ready to be eaten, and it all worked quite well, though I did find to my alarm that the liquid in the bottle was superbly efficient at cleaning the deeply ingrained grease and grunge from the corners of an old and unused cooking pot. What did it do to our insides, I wondered, as I shook up another batch of the marinade, combining garlic powder and mustard, vinegar and salt, pepper and rosemary, with a generous serving of chilli flakes, bay leaves and some oregano thrown in for luck. The pickled onions are pungent, juicy and totally wonderful with everything from omelettes to sausages, succulent ham to sharp cheese. And they are best eaten with a little bit of mustard, a little bit of laughter and a whole lot of love. Nina would agree.

Cereal fillings

I was clearing out the larder cupboard last weekend and found some treasures I had almost forgotten existed. Like a canister of wild rice, hoarded so jealously that even I had missed it on the occasions I was looking for it; like a can of chunk tuna in spring water, never as delicious as the oily equivalent, but so much better for you, nutritionists insist; like a half-jar of garlic powder, ideal for those times you don’t feel like fiddling with the fresh stuff, but distressingly prone to clumping stodgily in the container. And, of course, that box of high-fibre low-fat fruit-and-nut muesli that I had urged on Father, promising to eat half of it myself with my favourite plain yoghurt for creaminess for the accompanying crunch. Which reminded me, there should be some Quaker Oats, some cracked wheat and some spirulina mix in that store…

But it served to remind me of the more healthful aspects of life that I had been ignoring for far too long. In between eating ‘more sugar, my dear!’, as my doctor, my friends, my colleagues and my family had been urging me to do, I had completely neglected the more obvious parts of my hitherto perfectly-good-for-you diet, which I had been assiduously following for so long that it had become part of my life and living style, so much so that I had stopped even noticing that it was not what those around me chose when given a choice. And I actually liked it, from the high-fibre crackers to the low-salt soups to the whole-grain cereals. Which is where the old memory cells sparked again…

In the drawer of my desk in the office I had stashed away some packs of instant cereal. It combined the healthiness of oats and milk with the green goodness of spirulina and I had once consumed it by the gallon, liking its sweet milky flavour and texture as much as I liked the idea of all that wonderful nutritional stuff going smoothly down my throat. Eaten hot it was wonderful, soothe food without being cloyingly anything, sweet or salty or even just plain stodgy, which is the most comforting of all, albeit in smallish doses. All I needed to do was to mix the semi-powder in the packet with hot water and, voila, the deed was done to perfection. I used to be diligent about it whenever I had an iffy tummy and wanted something more easy to digest than the usual dahi-chawal that was a preferred favourite, but since there had been little time or instance for me to need it, I had forgotten it existed.

This morning I found inspiration in the fact that I was feeling a little light-headed and was not in the mood to go through another bout of dizzy spells and wavering traffic, both human and automobile. So I scrounged in the drawer and discovered my stash…a plastic baggie full of the small packets of spirulina cereal. I tore one open, dumped its contents into my trusty giant mug, added steaming hot water from the fountain and stirred…it was all so familiar – the grey-green sludge, the gentle waft of hot milk and oatmeal and the underlying aroma of grassiness that gave the melange its raison d’etre. The first sip proved that the point still existed; the semi-liquid food still worked its magic. And I was still a nicely happy camper with an even happier tummy.

In a pickle

At the vegetable market the other day I managed to find a heap of rather out-of-season and battered Indian gooseberries, nellikai in Tamil, or amla as they are more familiarly called. They were a little more bruised than I normally would have accepted, but they were available, which made it perfect timing for me to be able to play with them while I was still trying to get my blood sugar elevated and my nerves into some kind of unfrazzled state. I got a few, more than enough to experiment with and enough to allow for wastage, if that was the route I had to follow. And I gloated just that wee bit as I carted them off, with all my other goodies, to the car. Once home, I stored them carefully in the vegetable bin, while I decided just what I could do with them. I thought about the various alternatives I was familiar with and then chose the one I had not really dealt with before – chutney.

But that was left for another day, since I was already feeling the effects of the morning’s wander. Sharp bursts of rain punctuated a day of brilliant sunshine and confused all of us – did we bung the clothes into the dryer or leave them to steam gently on their own? Should the fuzzy acrylic car blanket that Small Cat snuggled in be aired, or should it wait until the rain had indeed gone away? Should I work on the morning’s shopping, or think sweet thoughts of dull work routines being avoided instead? Having managed the beans and the spinach, the methi and the corn, eaten a delicious omelette stage managed by Father and feeling self-righteously satisfied with the day’s chores, I faded into a wonderful siesta.

But the question of the amla remained. I went through a phase a few months ago where my doctor and I decided that my system needed a little Vitamin C boost. Instead of popping pills - which is generally anathema for me – I decided to take the natural route and find it via everyday foods. It was not citrus fruit season, so an alternative had to be found. I found it. My friendly neighbourhood grocer had large bottles of amla juice, which I stashed in the fridge and sipped a small espresso cupful of every morning, my face and mouth puckering with the sour stab that woke me up far quicker than coffee or strong tea could ever do. I persisted in this through four bottles, then gave up, not because it tasted so bad – which it didn’t, really – but because the friendly neighbourhood grocer ran out of his supply of amla juice.

The sourness of the Indian gooseberry can be intense, tongue-burning, blister-inducing almost. Nibble on the slick, waxy, pale-green skin and your mouth becomes suddenly assaulted by a splash of tartness, especially when the amla is a particularly juicy one. The morsel slides its way sharply into your stomach and can bring on a twinge of acidity if you do not have any internal upholstery bolstering you. But the pleasure comes thereafter, with a sip of cool water – you are left with a wonderful sweetness that bathes your tastebuds and swamps you in a more-ish feeling. And, even after cooking, the amla still manages to muster up that special magic.

The next morning, inspired by various ideas about amla and a strangely graphic dream in which my mother’s familiar nellakai urga made its presence felt for some completely mysterious reason, I set out to clean and process the fruit. It was certainly tart – a couple of splashes in the eye and I was weeping my woes to the world. A tiny taste and I had to eat some sugar to un-pucker my lips. And all the small bites that Small Cat had taken of my fingers and hands were stinging wildly as I cut my way into my precious amlas. Finally the deed was done and I bunged the cut fruit into the goblet of the blender and gave it a good whiz, pulverising all heck out of the round-edged, hard segments, making them a coarse-grained powder-paste that sizzled madly in the pan. I had already tempered lots of oil, asafoetida and mustard and methi seeds in a heavy bottomed pot and threw in the crushed amla, along with some red chilli powder, turmeric, salt and, for luck, a little pepper. It sizzled and simmered, steamed and spat, finally settling into a deep golden orange flecked with black and brown and letting out a sweet-sour-spicy fragrance that had my button nose twitching happily.

We ate some of it with dinner and it was not as good as the stuff my mother made, but passable. Certainly worth all the effort of the process of getting there.

Veggie-tating

Every time Saturday peeks around the corner of the week, my stress levels waver from high to sky-scraping. It is not that drastic deadlines loom at that time of the week, or that I need to get something done that cannot wait until Monday, but that I need fodder for my culinary adventuring on Sunday. So by Friday I am edgy, peering at the vegetable sellers lining the pavements on the way to work, demanding to know what is in season from my driver, from Father, from friends at work, even from various search engines on the Internet. And all along I am half-occupied, mentally speaking, in trying to find new ways to make the same old seem like it has never been seen on the dining table before…at least, not for a very long time.

But over the past week I have been at home, taking a break from a routine that effectively sent my head spinning and my blood sugar levels too low for everyone’s comfort. It means fresh food every day, more innovative culinating and some cleaning up of foods stored in the larder that once in a while I lose to a household pest or four (Remind me to the tell the story of the paprika – right now I am still too traumatised by that incident of yesterday morning!). Which is exactly what I have been doing, much to the detriment of various waistlines – mine, Father’s, a friend or two and, her being included in everything we do, Small Cat’s. Today, as Friday, is close to panic time for my vegetable-arian sensibilities, so I nagged and whined and argued until Father decided it was time to drive me to the market (I am disallowed to drive, and am actually behaving myself, or else I would have done so myself a few days ago!). Bright and early, by shopping standards, we set out.

It was drizzling when we got there and we debated the virtues of a large floral umbrella, but finally thought against it. After all, picking out the perfect potato would not have been easy with wallet in one hand, shopping basket in the other and, if I had been a native deity, a few more limbs would have come in most useful, one to carry the umbrella. I trotted forth, squeamishly avoiding piles of wet leaves and rinds and the occasional squashed but still identifiable veggie, towards my goal of a vast and tottering heap of spuds, still polka-dotted with wet earth and some of the pouring rain. I chose, accepting and rejecting what the vendor handed me, chatting at him, smiling at his banter and trying to ward off the persistent fly that targeted my button nose. We exchanged goodies – I got my potatoes and onions and a blessing, he got his money and a smile.

The vegetables piled into my basket. Eggplant, gloriously purple and fat, Indian gooseberries, round and a glassy green, leafy fenugreek and vibrant red spinach, a thick and juicy branch of ginger, green chillies that demanded stuffing, golden kernels of corn, bright and clean broccoli, scarlet tomatoes….sigh, there I go like wotsername again! We came home happy – I did, for one, I cannot tell what Father was feeling at that moment – and planning what to do with the bounty, for some of it was unexpected, serendipitous, just for the look of the vegetable. Which is the best part of going to the market, to make the little discoveries that otherwise float past without being noticed.

Travels and a fish

I was out all day yesterday with a friend and, on our various adventures, we stopped by a popular restaurant for lunch. It is well known for its coastal cuisine and especially for its shellfish. We got there a little later than we usually do lunch, because of various errands, traffic and occasional sharp bursts of rain that made us duck hurriedly into stores and under awnings, so there was no waiting, as is the norm in that eatery, I know from one previous experience. My friend lives where sea fish is more or less a luxury and, like me, she is rather proper in that she prefers to eat what is available fresh close to its source rather than what is sourced from light years away. We had stopped by a well known bakery and bought fresh breads, redolent of the seven grains used in one kind and the olives and oregano in the other. And we wandered in with a little cloud of baking aromas like an aura surrounding us, and demanded to be fed.

The maitre d’ (there seemed to be many of them) looked oddly at us, then decided that we were of an unknown species but would probably tip well, and seated us at a decent table. Unfortunately, the diners were placed intimately neat each other, since it was a fairly crowded and small space, and we heard much conversation that we were not sure we really wanted to hear, including that between a stout gentleman and his lady, who was introducing him to her daughter - which left us speculating about who was what to whom. The proximity apart, it was a pleasant dining experience, all in all. My friend and I did our share of gossip, giggle and gustatory satisfaction, watching, listening to and commenting on our neighbours without much fear of being overheard, since everyone was so busy chatting and we spoke a definitely different breed of not just language, but accent as well. We asked for a menu, ordered beer (for her) and a cola (for me) and sat back and felt our legs twitch after the sudden dash into the restaurant out of the rain.

The roster for us was simple, but delicious. Pomfret cooked in an especially spicy masala-mix, my friend wanted, and was assured that it would be perfectly to her taste. Something not too hot, I emphasised and got tikkas, marinated pieces of rawas grilled in a tandoor. I was told to choose a vegetable, since I lean happily towards all things green, and picked on paneer palak, something I like most of the time and rarely eat since in our house rude jokes are made about spinach in that smoothly pureed form and Father refuses to eat paneer if he knows it is being served (we who can cook also can camouflage, he sometimes realises). And then there was a raita (not the raaeetah of Nigella Lawson fame, but the more conventional Indian version as served in a public eatery), without which my friend does not believe a meal to be complete.

It did not take long for the food to arrive, hot and redolent. The waiter started with the tikkas – large cubes of fish coated in a violent-looking red masala that was unexpectedly mild and enveloped the perfectly grilled rawas in a loving embrace (dear God, I sound like her again!). On our urging, since we were both hungry and in a bit of a hurry, the rest of the food was brought in, and we were served pieces of pomfret piled with something that looked most dangerous but was, surprisingly, not as bad. The ‘gravy’, so thick that it was almost a casing, was very spicy indeed, even the tiny bit that I accepted, but it had distinct flavours of coconut and curry leaves and something else that was not mirchi-hot, but delicately persistent. It was very good and, if it did not have as many chillies ground into it, I would have asked for more. The paneer palak was wonderfully green and white, cool and fresh in texture and appearance. The raita left something to be desired, heavily onion-laden and scanty in all else as it was. And the methi roti that I wanted was one of the best I had eaten, with lots of bitter-green fenugreek leaves patted into a butter-crisped flatbread. We wound up with a small round of frosty malai kulfi, not as good as the Parsi Dairy stuff we both are addicted to, but not bad at all.

It took us about an hour and a bit to get through lunch, pay and leave. And we would do it again some day, with more time to spare and less places to be, things to get done, people to meet.

Going Indian

I was watching Nigella Lawson on the television last night – yes, the hostess with the mostest, especially in seductive adjectives, the lady I wish I did not sound so much like on occasion. She sashayed her way through Indian food, producing a melange that was horrifyingly like the watered down versions found in British supermarkets, which was most unlike desi khana as eaten in either restaurants or homes, but was probably, in its own way, delicious and totally edible. Her pronunciations of various dishes was funny to the Indian-acclimatised ear and the wary use of spices almost amusing in its caution. But she was indeed a delectable dish in herself, beaming fondly at her viewers through the camera and wiggling her ultra-feminine albeit billowy way through her kitchen into people’s homes. And if the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, she must have a lot of admirers!

She started with a Mughlai chicken recipe. There was a lot of browning and gentle cooking going on, which is a good thing where Mughlai is concerned, since it makes the meat tender and the spices thoroughly infused. After browning boned chicken thigh bits – she warned that it was the best for long cooking, since breast meat tends to get stringy if cooked long – she simmered them in a gravy/sauce/mixture, whatever you want to call it, of onions and almond paste and cream and yoghurt and various other additions. And then came the fatal ingredient, straight out of a small can – garam masala. A cautious tiny spoonful and that was it. It looked great but it was, even to spice-avoiding moi, blah.

From there, the seductive Ms Lawson moved on to a raita, which she cutely called a raa-ee-tah. She mixed yoghurt with salt and bits of spring onion and then threw in a healthy handful of pomegranate seeds, squeezing in some juice from the fruit as well. As far as my knowledge of Indian food goes, especially the Mughlai kind, that is not done. Be that as it may, maybe she liked it that way. Anyway, food is about creativity and innovation, right? And each to his or her own is the best route to follow. Ms Lawson followed her raaeetah up with a paneer mutter, where she did not go mutter mutter, but Mutter-ed, as in the german form for Mother, going mooter mooter. Yeah, I know, frivolity, but that was the mood by then and a consciously sexy woman smiling sideways at the camera always makes my fur bristle. Now that dish was yummy in execution and appearance, with fresh colours, delicate spicing (perfect for the sweet peas and mild paneer) and pretty presentation.

What stood out in this episode was the contrast to other cooks like Keith Floyd and Madhur Jaffrey. The former throws spices around with happy abandon, flinging in prodigious amounts of garam masala, pouring in huge amounts of turmeric powder and adding so much red chilli powder that my eyes start watering just watching it so many miles away and so many months after the filming actually happened. He makes a glorious mess and the food looks like an anonymous dark brown or deep red bowl of stuff that I always worry no one will or can eat. Madhur Jaffrey uses more green chillies in various forms than I have ever bought in all my life, and while her recipes tend to be more native and thus authentic, they are spicy to follow and to look at, making me wonder whether whoever eats that food takes off like a rocket the next morning! Ms Lawson’s cooking tends to be more casual, less prescriptive and more homely, as that wonderful word so often still used in matrimonial columns goes. And it looks good, with balanced colours and beautiful tableware.

I am not sure how much one can learn from watching Indian cuisine being made on television, especially if one is Indian and has a native instinct for food and its creation. But everything is a lesson of some kind, and everything has potential for exploration and adventure. If it is edible, it should be considered seriously, methinks. Even if it is more a deliberate conglomeration of adjectives designed to be a siren song to the average man's hormones than actual good food.

Little balls of goodness

When I was very young, a baby perhaps, Mother would make something special for me to eat. It was sago pudding of a sort, plain boiled stuff, almost like a congee, with mustard seeds sputtered into it, mixed with yoghurt to form a wonderful, gooey porridge. I ate it just like that for years and then, as I got older, experimented with additions – from spice-touched potato crisps to tangy mango chutney to, only once and never again, a dribble of honey. As a family, we also ate a sweet version of this in javarshee (as I called it) payasam, with thickened milk being home to soft, soft, soft sago, swimming in the saffron and cardamom-flavoured pool with bits of cashewnuts and raisins fried in fresh home-made ghee. I loved it all, from the small while balls of dried sago to the tiny cooked morsels that eluded the teeth as you tried to bite into each one on its slithery way down into your stomach. And whenever I had a sore throat or an iffy tummy, I would crave the gruel with dahi, since it soothed, cooled and somehow felt like it was a warm and comforting blanket that you could snuggle into. (I sound dreadfully like Nigella Lawson on her television cooking show with my descriptives, don’t I? Sorry!)

As I grew up and associated with more people outside the house and immediate circle of family and close friends, I met more sago…or sago in more avatars, at least. In school, someone once brought sago fritters, sabudana vada, and I loved every bite, even the green chillies that I soon learned to look for and avoid like the proverbial plague. We ate it often at home as chips or papads, frying up a stiff plastic-like fragment into a gloriously puffy, crunchy, light snack. And there was, as always, the pudding. But I also found, to my teenage horror and almost-betrayal of my nutritional self-righteousness, that the sabudana I so loved and enjoyed eating was actually just pure starch, with little natural goodness to recommend it except for its soothe value. It was also notoriously difficult to deal with in almost any version of its cooked self, that for a long time it was sent into exile in our house.

Then I went to live in Delhi and struggled womanfully to handle sabudana. I bought the large kind, in the futile hope that at least if it didn’t do what I wanted it to, I could find something else to do with it, or to it. All I discovered was that the bigger it was, the more of a mess you had to deal with when it went wrong. When I made kheer and brought the cooked sabudana and thickened milk together into a sweet porridge with all the accoutrements I knew, it was fabulous, warm. Once it was put into the refrigerator, it came out with the milk still thick and sweet, the nuts and dried fruit adding a delightful punctuation, but the sago was hard, almost bullet-like in its determination to break at least one of my teeth. I did find out what the science behind that disaster was, but decided to forget about it and not play with the stuff any more than I had to.

But after moving back home and taking over the housekeeping, I felt bravely adventurous enough to battle sabudana again. So I went out and bought the largest I could find and cooked it into gruel. It worked. I tried it in payasam – hmm….not bad at all, I was complimented. And then I made the mistake of overreaching my confidence levels. I attempted to make sabudana khichdi, the food of the days of the local fasts. I did everything I had been instructed to do, from gently soaking the sago to getting ready the prodigious amounts of oil I was told I would need to make the dish. I heated the aforementioned oil, sputtered some asafoetida, mustard seeds, kadipatta and a few pieces of kaju – I do not eat peanuts, which is the norm here – and then, with fingers crossed, eyes semi-shut and a muttered incantation (or was it imprecation?) threw in the soaked sago. Voila! In one small moment, it was done, or so I fondly hoped. Instead, it turned into a greasy block of reinforced concrete, delicately patterned in tiny spheres, some transparent, some opaque, all rock hard.

Since then, I have mumbled darkly under my breath every time anyone mentioned sabudana. I pass the bags of the stuff at the grocery store and glower. And I glare at anyone who tells me just how easy it is to handle sago. But all the while something inside me whispers in two voices, one telling me that of course I can do it, the other saying that it is wonderfully delicious food that I am missing out on. I know I will succumb one day. Until then, I prefer to eat someone else’s version of anything to do with this small, round, white food.