Dutifully digressing as always.
I have lots to write on a recent holiday my husband and I enjoyed in New Zealand. This involves a lot of wordy descriptions and very scenic pictures. It will take a while to sieve my vocabulary and find all the right words and match it with the correct picture to make it a worthy post. And that is why, I am taking the escape route and keeping it for a ‘longer’ winter’s day and sticking to some random rambling in this post. By the way, Australian winter has become somewhat a warm joke after a week spent amidst glaciers and snow capped mountains.
I don’t cook too much out of my imagination. Not because I don’t have any imagination. I guess different people who know me would dispute this point at various levels..oh! but I digress! I like trying out established recipes because I know I can expect a certain kind of taste and most of the times it’s very reassuring. If you are not able to proceed beyond the ‘most of the time’ part for you are pinned to that sentence by some insane curiosity (the same kind of curiosity which led you to wonder why auto rickshaw drivers sit on only one of their butts and drive in a slanted way or why people pronounce chicago as cheecago or why for the love of god don’t they stop Dr. Phil from airing his shows or for that matter even making one ), then let me tell you it’s because some people have no idea what they are cooking.
I have enjoyed many a afternoons browsing recipe sites and videos and so far I quite like 2 websites. One is called vahrevah.com and the other is Manjula’s kitchen. Look, I am not talking about the Grey’s anatomy of culinary science like Tarla dalal and Sanjay Kapoor. Manjula and the guy from vahrevah are pretty new and they do a very neat job. What I like about them is their humble and very native beginning. Accents are raw and typify the states they come from. I love the way Sanjay pronounces vahrevah. ‘va’ of vahrevah sounds like ‘wo’ of wok. and why is that all good chefs are called Sanjay? Majula cooks Jain food and Sanjay patronizes garlic. Manjula teaches you to make fluffy rotis that are so round that they would put any engineer’s measured drawings to shame and Sanjay teaches you how to make Dal makhani they way Chola Sheraton makes it.
There is another point I want to express and it’s not because I am racist or prejudiced or anything of that sort. North Indians are big on presentations and appropriate cutlery use. You would always find them presenting their dishes in artistically painted porcelain bowls and nibbling the food with great finesse from the edge of a shiny spoon to prove to the audience how great it tastes. On the other hand for us South Indians, it’s all about the food and just the food. Stainless steel vessels suffice for us and we can’t wait to get our hands on our grub. It isn’t because we are anywhere less savvy but just that our food requires all four fingers and a well operating opposing thumb. When it comes to food we are not ashamed of the way we eat because our food simply tastes finger-licking good.
I lumbered through that point just to convey that when Sanjay made bharvan bhindi, he didn’t wait another second to mix the spicy bhindi with plain rice and eat it with his bare hands on a very famous show. There was something very familiar and homely about that move and it made me want to revisit his website and try more of his recipes. Anways, these days I think of nothing but food and that’s because my dietician wants me to try a 1190 cal diet. Do any of you even know what that means??? I breathe twice and 500 calories is already inhaled. It’s 2 tsps of fat, 2 cups of milk, 2 other dairy products, 6 servings or carb and that’s nothing since 3 tbs of oats is one serving of carb, 2 fruits, 21/2 cups of veges and 2 cups lentils a day. If it sounds like a lot….IT ISN’T!!
Those readers who stumbled upon my blog by chance and then had the misfortune to stumble upon it again and again wonder why all my posts end abruptly. It’s because I only meander in most of them without any real focus and all of a sudden I decide to stop rambling and saunter off somewhere else. Simple and so farewell for now.
