Memory

 

I spent the past week in Coimbatore making memories. A cuddling with Panda. Amma singing in the kitchen. Appa sipping coffee and talking. Panda playing hide-and-seek. They were all red-letter days. Mark-in-your-diary-with-gold-stars days.So I tried my best to remember them, down to the littlest details. What the air smelled like. The patterns on the bedsheets. The sound of Panda sighing as he slept. 

That is one piece of advice I'm writing down for myself: on days when you're so happy you think your heart might burst, remember. Do whatever it takes to cling to that memory. write it down, take a photograph, turn it into a story that you tell yourself and others, over and over. Each time you tell the story it will change a little, but its essence will always be true, and you hold on to that. There will be days when joy will be hard to come by, when you wonder if you will ever smile again. On those days you need stories to cling to. Joy would not drive us delirious if we were not always aware of sorrow lurking in the shadows.

As I grow older, I think the fat descends from my face and shoulders and puddles around my hips. The good part of this, besides the welcome extra padding, is that I finally have cheekbones! And collarbones! Naturally, I had both those as well as all manner of other bones before this as well, but now I can see them. Now I don't need to learn contouring.
I also generally succumb to gravity more easily, I find. If I don't catch myself, I hunch. A nap sounds like a good idea some afternoons. I have begun feeling occasional twinges in my back and A helpfully offers me a back brace when I complain.
I'm also more mellow, I find, and more inclined to please myself. I've started enjoying cooking for just myself. It is fun coming up with food that pleases my palate and needn't please anyone else's. It's enjoyable, shopping for vegetables and making plans for them. I don't even mind doing the dishes, since there are so few of them. And best of all, I have figured out how to make myself cake, in under a minute. I swear, I've timed it.
What you need is a tablespoon and a half of Pillsbury cake mix, a tiny pinch of salt and two (not one, not three) chopped blocks of dark chocolate. You add to this half a tablespoon of oil (I do not measure anything precisely. I've made this often enough to know when it looks right) and a tablespoonful of water. Stir together and microwave on high. My highly scientific method for knowing when it is done is to stand in front of the microwave and sniff, until I can smell the cake.What emerges is better than most bakery-bought cakes I've eaten. It's warm and crusty; the chocolate has melted into delightful little pools and there's just enough of it to keep you interested but not so much that it gets sickly. I do recommend letting it rest for a minute or so before you dig in. Everything seems to settle and crust over in that brief wait. If you want it more brownie-like, add more oil and less water. If you want virtuous cake (why would you?), add less oil and more water, but I warn you, you'll regret it.

Superwoman

I wake up some mornings feeling fragile. I have emails I don't want to open, thoughts I don't want to think, news I don't want to confront. Nothing is particularly dramatic, these are all the humdrum happenings of modern life, but I don't want to go there, because if I do, it feels like something inside me will shatter. I feel like such a coward. People out there are climbing mountains (okay, that's always seemed a slightly pointless task in my opinion and sometimes I feel like I'd rather climb a mountain than open an email, but it's still brave) and saving orphans, while I sit here, feeling like I will shatter if I confront my responsibilities.

On days like this, tough love doesn't help. If I give myself a stern talking to, I find I turn evasive, shifting here and there, trying to avoid my gaze, which is a hard thing to do when the person whose gaze you're avoiding is yourself. I drink lots of coffee and make lists. I like making lists; it makes you feel like you're doing something productive. I have lots of lists on my phone, computer and in my head running all the time. I avoid reading them for as long as possible. Finally, I open one email, read it and reply. Then I take the rest of the day off in celebration.

To celebrate, I cook. I like cooking because, and I think I've said this before, it is the whole process of striving for something, accomplishing it and basking in your success, condensed into, oh, half an hour, somedays. Of course that only happens when you're good at cooking, but the kitchen is one place where I don't doubt my skills. It's the one place where I revel in my competence and gloss over my inadequacies. Maybe because it's the one place that I've always been told is my domain, where I am unchallenged. In other spaces I am often made to feel like I don't have a right to dominate, but the kitchen I could have. Men rarely enter it. I know every inch of my kitchen and I decide what goes where, no one else. What if I treated all the world like it was my kitchen? Oh, what magic I could make.

Recipe
 I was reading about Italian ragù and wondered if I could make it vegetarian. Fortuitously, I had frozen jackfruit on hand and it did the trick. It looks vaguely like tripe, but I don't let that deter me. I microwave the jackfruit (300 g) with a little salt and water until I can prod it with a fork and it falls apart unresistingly. In the meanwhile, I sweat two finely chopped onions down in a modicum of oil, then add finely chopped garlic (as many pods as I can bother to peel) to them. I pause to sniff at the heating garlic; it's one of my favourite kitchen smells. I either finely chop or blitz (depending upon my mood and whether or not I remember that the tomatoes are meant to be a stand-in for the patriarchy) three or four ripe tomatoes and then add them to my sauce, along with some salt. After this, it's a waiting game. The sauce needs a long time to thicken and get richer. As the tomato cooks, it gets deeper and deeper in colour and flavour. If I'm feeling fancy, I add tabasco, chilli powder and rosemary. If I'm feeling tacky, I add in packet upon packet of Dominos pizza seasoning and chilli flakes and those do the trick very nicely too. I also -and this is my secret ingredient- add in a tablespoon of tomato ketchup at this stage. It adds sweetness and umami. Then I add in the jackfruit and cook everything down some more. In the now free microwave, I boil a generous handful of pasta in salty water (don't @ me. It works, and I'm no Nancy Silverton) and then add it to my mix. I try to keep the pasta slightly undercooked, because of what's coming next. I scrape the whole mixture into an oven-safe bowl, top with grated cheese (my preference is for cheddar cheese that comes out of a tin, but others may be more fancy) and pine nuts (any nuts or no nuts will do. I happened to have these on hand and am trying to use them up because they go rancid faster than you can blink) and then pop it into the oven for the cheese to melt and the nuts to brown. At this stage, I invariably forget about the dish because I'm feeling emboldened enough to go answer another email. So, when I smell the nuts burning, I run back and curse, long and inventively. Then I top it off with freshly chopped basil and call it dinner.

On routine

I like routines. I keep trying to set them up. I divide my day up into thirty minute pieces, and dedicate each piece to an activity. I make to-do lists, and now, because I'm a designer, I add little checkboxes next to each activity that I can place a tiny black tick mark in once it is accomplished. No unsightly crossing-outs for me. I try to live a regimented life and find that over time it gets easier. The tasks become automatic and nearly mindless. Exercise is something like that now. I jump up and down and contort my body in alarming ways, while huffing violently as my face turns tomato red. To distract myself from my discomfort, I watch food shows (lately, Masterchef Australia, but also Nigella, Food Safari, Eat Street, YouTube cooking channels...) and it's nice to have a direct reminder of what I'm torturing myself for.
I enjoy cooking, but I don't care as much for the attendant activities: catering to appetites and palates different to my own, shopping for vegetables, the perennial struggle of keeping a shared kitchen clean... Besides, cooking requires thought, far more than exercise. Steps need to be planned in advance and performed in a certain way. Onions cannot be left to burn while I go apeshit over and over.
Then there are the sub-routines I keep trying unsuccessfully to set up for myself. Practicing the guitar for half an hour a day. Trying and failing to floss every night. Calling relatives and friends more frequently. Volunteering. Spending more time reading. It's easy to say that I don't have time for these things, but that is untrue. I don't make time for these things yet, because it is far easier to spend half an hour scrolling down Instagram (it's endless! that's freaky!) looking at tastefully arranged food photos and then, suddenly, it's dinnertime.
We don't usually plate food in little mounds surrounded by pools of gravy, but everyone on Instagram does. I tend to pile on my carbs higgledy piggledy and drown them in gravy, but that looks unappetising in a photo. This was an oat and green moong pongal, with a vendakkai puli kuzhambu (okra in a tamarind gravy) and velarikkai pachchadi (cucumber raita, south Indian style). The pongal was an attempt to make the usual rice-and-lentils even healthier while also using up a bag of steel cut oats that I bought on a whim and have since been studiously avoiding, because if we're being perfectly honest, no matter how much you rave about it on Instagram or how beautifully you plate it, does anyone really like oatmeal porridge?

Crisp leaves, barely holding

The weather can't seem to make up its mind. It's cold one day and broiling the next. Today, for a bit of variety, it's cloudy, and I miss the sun. I don't think I could live in one of those countries where the sun disappears for months on end. I need the sun in order to feel alive and to want to do things. It isn't surprising at all that ancient cultures worshipped the sun, it's only surprising that we stopped.
There was a super blue blood moon a few days ago. I remembered to look up at it at 9 pm, while I was trudging home after a very long, tiring day. I looked up while waiting to cross a busy street. Other people saw me looking up and looked up too. We all stood there for a few minutes, strangers, staring up at a red moon.
I have two dogs I feed every morning. They were starving and sickly when I started, but they're doing much better now. It's the best part of my day, when I get down from the bus and they dance up to me, wagging their tails. I love watching them eat; it makes me realise how much I enjoy feeding other people.
I haven't cooked much of note, lately. I haven't had the will. I try to feed myself nourishing food. I shop for fresh winter produce: thick red carrots, crunchy spinach, downy cauliflowers, but they are still wilting in my produce drawer as I drink cup after cup of coffee and eat a grape. I'll do better.
Over the weekend, I made these chillas that even picky A raved about. To make them, I chop up equal amounts of spinach and fenugreek leaves, as much as my largest bowl will hold. I add a finely chopped onion, some garam masala, toasted sunflower seeds, a teaspoonful of oil and a pinch of salt. I then dust this with a miserly amount of besan, and allow the leaves to leach their liquid into the besan, dampening the whole affair. I then slow-fry them on my cast iron pan, which is currently the only kitchen pan I need or want, until the leaves turn crisp. A and I ate these all weekend, hot from the pan, breaking off pieces in silence. Then he left and I went back to drinking coffee and eating grapes.

Note: For the chillas above, I did add some leftover grated carrot, but I don't recommend it. They seemed too aggressively sweet. We're going for subtle and leafy. 

Someday I'll wish upon a star...

Today, I'm thinking of the kurma avatara myth in the Dasavataras, in which the devas and the asuras churned an ocean of milk to raise the nectar of life from its depths. I imagine it was glistening and viscous. When it caught the light just so, it would shimmer. When you dipped a spoon in it, it would ripple, then settle in its pristine goldenness. When you drizzled it on ice cream... but it seems sacrilegious to think of drizzling the nectar of immortality on ice cream.

As you grow older, you learn things about yourself. I now know that I will never be tall and thin and that dressing like I am will only make me look ridiculous. I know that no matter how reluctant I am to start exercising, I will get into it after the first ten shitty minutes. I know that I cannot walk too long in high heels without wanting to cut off my toes. And I know that when I start browsing Foodgawker, it's not because I want to find something to cook, it's because I'm hungry and had better fix myself a snack before I get hangry. None of this self-knowledge is of much use: I still buy skirts for amazons, put off working out, wear high heels and limp and am too lazy to leave my desk to get a snack. So I browse through Foodgawker for page after page, looking at gorgeously lit photos of beautiful food. Incidentally, I am so over the word beautiful to describe food and produce. I think chefs on TV shows have used it to death. The word has ceased to have meaning. Octopus tentacles might be delicious, I don't know, but they are not and never will be beautiful. So I'm going to cast about for other adjectives to describe food, as I tell you about all the things I've been snacking on of late.

A took me to a fancypants Italian restaurant, the sort that sold tomato and red pepper broth for 300 rupees and convinced us at the time that 400 was a reasonable price to pay for bits of toast with mayo on them. Still, the one dish we really went for was also the simplest, a bruschetta with finely diced tomatoes and a few slivers of basil. The basil plants at home are getting out of hand and badly need pruning. I did my bit by pinching at them here and there till I had a tidy pile of leaves. I've made bruschetta before, but I think the thing that made this place's the best I'd ever tasted, besides the fact that it compared favourably with toast smeared with mayo, was that the tomato was very finely diced. The toast was dry and rubbed with garlic. Then the tomato was piled on and its juices allowed to seep down. The whole thing was topped with only chiffonaded basil and a glug of olive oil. It was pulchritudinous. My toasts were thinner and lacked structural integrity. I rubbed them too energetically with garlic wearing out holes in their middles. Luckily, my tomatoes were too roughly chopped to fall through the holes, because my knives aren't sharp. The basil tasted nice. I ate three, then went back to Foodgawker, only breaking to snack some more on chocolate.

On the rare days that I do plan ahead, I've been making a salad. Amma's big on saving on food waste, so she collects the rinds of the limes I squeeze and pickles them in salt. I dig these preserved rinds out of their jar and whir them in the blender with mustard, green chillies, fresh basil, olive oil, salt and sugar. The resultant sauce is acid green and tart tasting. It dresses a salad of poorly chopped tomatoes, onions and cucumbers very well. I keep the salad in the fridge and pick at it all day long. It's foxy.

Cooking for one

I notice a distinct difference between how I cook for myself and how I cook for others. When A is around, I plan ahead and shop for fancy ingredients. I soak, ferment and stew. I make multiple component dishes and plate up on fabulous pottery. Not always, but often enough. I even take photos of the food in natural light, and post them on Instagram. 

When I eat alone, my food is brown. That is the colour it turns, no matter how it begins. On Tuesday, I spent an hour boiling dal into submission, first in the microwave, then in a pan on the stove. It turned brown. I added some stewed cabbage to it, and as much garlic as I could be bothered to peel. Then I left it to cool on the hob and went to bed without dinner. In the morning, I checked on it, half hoping it was spoiled enough to throw out, but it smelled alright and looked as unappetisingly brown as it had, despite the natural light. I couldn't justify throwing out perfectly good food, so I boiled it again, mostly out of spite, and then cooled it and shoved it into the fridge. It has lain in there ever since, judging me, every time I reach into the fridge for another ear of corn. That's what I've been eating mostly, microwaved ears of sweet corn, with salt rubbed into them. Except, the salt in my spice box has gotten into the turmeric and cumin sections, so it's become a spice rub all by itself. I remind myself of the anti inflammatory properties of turmeric as I gnaw on my corn and watch reruns of Master Chef. I even pop a vitamin pill every morning. 

Today, I felt fancier. I sauteed onions and mushrooms in a pan, and then cooked them up with Ching's Secret two minute noodles. I even scattered leftover pizza seasoning from a sachet over the top and congratulated myself over my thriftiness. The whole thing turned brown. I left it in the pan to cool and boiled up another ear of corn. 

Stuck-bottom rice

Onions and butter. So much butter. So much guilt over the quantity of butter. You know what? Screw the guilt. "Screw you," I said, prodding angrily at the onions. They shrivelled and turned brown.

A dainty sprinkle of chilli flakes. "Restraint," I muttered to myself, suppressing the urge to sprinkle turmeric. We don't want garish yellow rice.

One clove of garlic. I peered at the bulb, looking for the smallest clove. They all seemed unrestrainedly large. I peeled the smallest one, smashed it between my fingers and cast it in. The smell from the pot changed from oniony to garlicky. I took a deep sniff and coughed from the noseful of chilli.

Finally, the rice. It was partially cooked and drained, then thrown into the pot with the onions and garlic, water and salt, to cook some more. Then I covered it with a lid and fidgeted. It had to cook in its own steam, undisturbed.

I cursed and opened the pot to throw in a single pod of cardamom. The rice must be perfumed. I noticed the onions were rehydrating, plumping. Lid closed.

Ten minutes later, I was back at the pot, listening. The sounds inside had gone from bubbling to hissing. The starch from the rice was finally coming in contact with metal, the buffer of water evaporated. I chuckled to myself and turned off the heat.

Bread

It is finally spring in Delhi. The winter was long and cold, but not quite as miserable as I had expected. I suppose that goes to show that if you keep your expectations low enough, you can always be pleasantly surprised. We haven't quite cast off our sweaters yet, and Panda still longingly eyes my bed every night. But there's sunshine, and very little fog, and even flowers blooming in the garden.

I noticed a spray of poppies this morning, blooming wildly under a tree. I sniffed at them hopefully but I don't think they were opium poppies. Panda tried to eat one (he's rather jealous of anything that distracts my attention from him) and now, an hour later, he only seems as giddy as usual.

The warmer weather has me stirring from my winter hibernation and I've been venturing more and more into the kitchen lately. I find I'm going through a phase when I'm bored of baking sweets. With K gone off to the US, there's no one here to eat them. But then I'm fickle and the next post here might just be of chocolate cupcakes with cloudy frosting. Today though, I'm here to announce that I baked bread! And it was soft and crusty with an impeccable hole structure! And yes, I think that warrants a few exclamation points. You see, every few months, I decide to master bread making, only to retire, beaten, after making a rock-like loaf that even the dog turns his nose up at (and he regularly goes through the garbage pail. He thinks I don't know).

Recently though, I cracked the code for the perfect dough, and it was a revelation. You see, flour has these proteins in it called glutens, that when wet, swell, and when kneaded, form long elastic chains. The yeast in the dough breathes and it's like they're blowing bubbles into the dough. Because the gluten is in these long chains, the bubbles stretch the dough like in bubblegum, and don't burst. Then, when you bake the bread, you dry the water out, but the bubble holds, giving it that elusive airy structure. Silly that I was, I bashed on with my bread making without understanding this, and would keep adding flour to my dough willy nilly, to make it easier to knead. What I didn't realise was that by doing so I wasn't allowing sufficient water for the glutens to expand, so they wouldn't form long chains, and so when the yeast breathed, the bubbles would quickly collapse. Hence: dense, brick-like bread.

So then I tried hydrating the crap out of my dough and suddenly the stuff was expanding and bubbling like a witch's cauldron. I couldn't resist lifting the tea towel it was resting under every half-hour to see how much it had risen, and each time it was a little more. When it finally baked up it was light and crusty, albeit decidedly homely in appearance. Then I waited impatiently till it cooled, sliced and toasted it, and served it rubbed with garlic and topped with tomatoes and basil. 

Rainy-day-at-home cake

For the first time in a while, I'm spending a whole day at home. I had classes today, but when I weighed the dubious joy of listening to a five-hour lecture on Indian history against a rainy day spent cosily at home with a bright-eyed dog and a cosseting mother, it was an easy choice. This cake might also have had something to do with swaying me.

I baked it yesterday afternoon, in between a conversation. It took all of ten minutes to put together and about thirty more to bake. This is one of my favourite recipes and I've baked this cake, oh, at least a dozen times this year. It is from Amanda Hesser's "The Essential New York Times Cook Book", and of course with a pedigree like that it's guaranteed to turn out splendid. Sometimes, I bake it into cupcakes slathered with this ethereally light frosting and once, I covered it in a brown butter and chocolate glaze. This is the cake I'd fantasised about drowning in caramel, but when it came out of the oven all cracked and crumbly, I decided to save the caramel for another day. All things said and done, this cake really needs no ornamentation beyond a dusting of powdered sugar. Even that disappears by the next morning, melting into the surface like it was never there. I like eating it with my fingers, sitting by the window, looking out at the rain. 

Recipe here. 

Inspiration chickpea salad

I went into the kitchen to bake a cake and emerged instead with a salad. I'd been thinking of the cake for a while. It was to be deeply chocolatey and crumbly, and as soon as it was done, I'd stab it viciously with a fork and pour bubbling caramel sauce all over it. It was late evening though, and I was tired, and while descriptions of butter and chocolate were all very well and stabbing cakes is always fun, I found that what I really craved was garlic.

Amma'd gone off blithely for her evening walk and I was left to fend for myself in the kitchen. A rummage through the fridge revealed only a handful of boiled chickpeas that looked rather sorry for themselves. So there was nothing left to do but to play U2 loudly, sing along, and start chopping. I began with the garlic that I started off in cold oil so it would infuse without burning. While that began to bubble, I chopped up a tomato finely and upended that into my wok. It hissed with a fury that only abated when I followed the tomato with chunks of eggplant. Everything got salted and sugared (I'm a big believer in adding a pinch of sugar to everything salty and a pinch of salt to everything sweet. Amma says this practice makes everything I make taste the same. What does she know?) and was then left alone to cook. I chopped up some capsicum and half an onion, then rescued the chickpeas from the fridge and skipped out to the garden for some fresh basil.

By the time I returned, the eggplant chunks were soft and the tomato had lost its integrity and was clinging onto them fiercely. Everything else went in and a few stirs later, it was ready. Now, I don't like to toot my own horn, but man was this slap-your-thigh bang-your-fork good. Even the dog, who hates vegetables like they're made up of postmen, queued up for a taste. He then watched, bright-eyed, as I photographed my cooling bowl, and spent the rest of the evening curled up ingratiatingly under my feet.

The colour of sunshine

I woke up late this morning. (Incidentally, in these places, late is 7 am, and if you stay in bed past eight, amma will come in and check your temperature.) The dog of course woke me up at 5:30, but that doesn't count as waking up any more. I blearily shuffle him out while he nips at my ankles. I let him out and head back to bed again for another blissful hour, or on rare days like today, an hour and a half. By the time I woke, amma and appa were back from their morning walk and on their second cups of coffee. The dog lay quietly panting on the floor, with the air of someone who wasn't going to move till called for breakfast. I had the kitchen all to myself, and instead of making myself coffee, I set about slicing mangoes.

One advantage of living in the north is that even though summer comes late, the mangoes stick around longer. The mangoes ripen as the sun travels up the length of the country, and here in Delhi, I get to try them all. The monsoons have come, bringing worryingly little rain,  but the markets of Delhi are still full of mangoes and will be for a few more weeks yet. I've waxed embarrassingly lyrical on this blog before on my love for mangoes. Suffice to say, it only grows stronger each year. This time around, I've mostly been eating them whole, tearing off their skins and feasting on their flesh. Sometimes though, I can be a little more civilised. 

The mangoes I had in the fruit basket were a little past their prime. They still smelled floral, but with a hint of astringent. They tasted sweet but with a somewhat insipid sweetness. I decided it didn't matter and puréed them with honey. The honey turned the colour of the purée -already very bright- into shocking orange. Then I turned on the ice cream maker and swirled in my puree with yoghurt. Appa came wandering in and we discussed the news over the noise of the machine. 

Fifteen minutes later, I was scraping out great gobs of sunshine-coloured frozen yoghurt, to set and then serve after a satisfying Sunday lunch. 

Summertime mango frozen yoghurt

As for the recipe, I'm afraid I can't give you exact proportions here. It was seven in the morning and I hadn't had any coffee. Still, here's what I remember:

Take three mangoes of the small and fibrous variety. It's good if they have a couple of spots here and there that make you disdain eating them as they are, because I still hold that the best way to eat a perfect mango is raw, with your hands, juice running down to your elbows. Peel off their skins. If they're the small, fibrous variety that I recommend, the skins should come off easy. If they're not, you're on your own, you maverick. Cut the flesh off the seeds and scrape as much as you can off, using a blunt knife. Purée this flesh in a blender with a pour of honey. Err on the side of too much honey; freezing dulls the sweetness. Then turn on your ice cream maker and pour two cupfuls of low-fat yoghurt into it. I suppose high-fat would be better, but we seem to have made 'fat' an evil word these days and I'm as susceptible to social conditioning as anyone else. Pour in your purée and watch in fascination as the yellow swirls into and eventually blends in with the white. After about twenty minutes that you'll spend discussing politics over the noise of the ice cream maker, scrape out the contents of the bowl into a tupperware container and place it in the freezer to set up firmly. Shamelessly lick the bowl ice cream maker's bowl, refusing to share even with the dog. 

Serve after a hearty lunch, preferably on a Sunday when you can go sleep it all off later. 

Date nut bars

I was sitting in a rather boring science class when I dreamed these bars up. The air conditioning was set to Arctic and I was hungry. I started thinking of roasted almonds, lightly dusted with salt. They didn't do it for me, so I switched to caramelised almonds in sugar. Somehow by the end of class that mutated to almonds and dates in a sticky chocolatey goo (incidentally, if you must have goo, it might as well be chocolatey, no?) stuck firmly atop a buttery biscuit.

That was in the last week of summer, when the temperatures rose to 46 degrees Celsius and at three in the afternoon, after slipping on melted butter and cussing a blue streak, I had my bars. I gave up eggs a while ago and it's a constant challenge to find other ingredients to substitute for them in my baking. For standard-issue date and nut tartelettes, a mixture of egg and sugar is used to bind everything together. I could've simply used sugar, but then I ran the risk of it getting too sweet or too hard. I thought about what it was in the egg that was so perfect for holding reluctant nuts together and realised it was the protein. Now, malt has protein too, of the wheat gluten sort. Malted drink mixes also contain sugar and chocolate flavouring. All it took was a little water and butter mixed with Bournvita and I had a substance as thick and goopy as my heart could desire. I chopped up some roasted almonds, peanuts and dates, mixed them with the Bournvita and spread it all on a disk of shortbread. This went into the oven until the top was scorched slightly and had settled into a decided crust.

After waiting for it to cool, I cut my disk into slices and shared one with the dog. He licked my hand in search of crumbs afterwards and hung around me chummily for the rest of the day.

Cooking for one

April was kind to us. We expected heat and we got showers. We expected dry, windless evenings and we got summer storms. May, I know it's only the first of the month, but I have to say I'm a little disappointed in you. April spoiled me. 

Panda is very alert these days. He spends most evenings running furiously up and down the length of the house, barking at sounds both real and imagined. When I finally get him to settle down in bed, he tosses and turns, wriggling his body into the funniest contortions. In the mornings, he wakes up precisely at six, like an alarm goes off inside him. I'm usually half-awake and dreading what is coming. First I hear him get up and stretch. He takes his time with that. Then he yawns, shakes himself and walks over to me. I hear his nails clicking on the floor just before I hear a shrill bark, right beside my ear. It is time to get up. 

We went for a long walk this morning. Panda sniffed about and glared at cyclists while I listened to execrable music on the radio. When we got back, he drank a lot of water and collapsed behind the sofa to await breakfast. He's very passive-aggressive about breakfast. He never condescends to sit outside the kitchen in wait, like most dogs would do. Instead he glares at me reproachfully from behind the sofa cushions while I sip my coffee. 

And sip my coffee I did, while I read the paper leisurely. I already knew what I wanted for breakfast. 

After about half an hour, I was finally hungry and so I turned on the oven. I'd already bookmarked this recipe and I had a suspicion it was going to be very very good. 

In all the southern American romance novels I've read, there's usually a scene when the heroine bakes biscuits for the hero. It is generally when he falls in love with her. I turned on the oven, measured and kneaded. I only made a third of the recipe because it was just me for breakfast. Panda came to observe, staring stolidly at me from the kitchen door. He still had a bit of a mustache left behind by his breakfast of bread and milk. Every so often, he would stretch out a pink tongue and lick his lips. 

I rolled my biscuits by hand and set them in a pan. The pan slid into the oven and then I returned to my coffee and paper. Twenty minutes later, they were ready, crusty and fragrant. I ripped them in two, and they had white, feathery, lightly steaming insides. Suddenly eager, I dragged a piece through a pool of honey and ate it, and it was exactly like I'd imagined. So then I fixed myself a plateful, poured a fresh cup of coffee, and  returned to my paper. 

PS: I'm also including a picture of an ever-so-pretty salad I made a while ago. I photographed it and meant to tell you all about it, but now I've quite forgotten what I intended to say. 

 

The things I love about winter

It's a very cold day here. I went out to stand in a patch of sunshine but a chilly breeze chased me back in. I have another six weeks of winter left. I was inclined to be gloomy about it, but well, that doesn't help anyone, does it? So I decided to make a list of the things I love about winter, to read over whenever the cold makes me grumpy.
1. There's a deep pleasure in sipping a hot cup of tea.
2. The wind stings my cheeks to a rather becoming pink.
3. Scarves! I love my multicoloured scarves, but feel a little silly wearing them in the summer.
4. Getting myself to go for a run in winter is especially hard, but once I do, I get the roads all to myself. And the cold air causes a weirdly pleasant brainfreeze.
5. Now, admittedly I haven't been to any this year, but still, bonfires!
6. Socks. I could write an ode to my socks. Indeed, I'm only just battling the urge. But never was an item of clothing more appreciated.
7. Winter vegetables. Everything is young and green and crisp in the winter. And once you've screwed up the courage to plunge your hands into cold water and wash them, they're a real pleasure to cook with.

I'm going to continue adding to that list, each time I find myself thinking nasty things about the cold. Sigh. It'll probably be a mile long by New Year's. Still, I meant what I said about the vegetables. Rooting about in fridge recently, I found a couple of ears of sweet corn. Now, roasted corn on the cob is delicious, but I wanted something I could dish out and share. So I took the extra step of cutting the corn off its cob with a knife.
Then all I did was saute it with a little salt, sugar and pepper. A squeeze of lime juice and a few coriander leaves for colour and it was ready. I do love sweet corn. I eat it kernel by kernel, and love how they burst in my mouth. There are a hundred different ways in which you can make this, of course. Chili powder, butter, chaat masala, mint... But I like simple best.

I have no real recipe for you today. Just saute your corn with a little salt, sugar and pepper, till it changes colour slightly, going from yellow to orange. Err on the side of undercooking. 

Winter porridge

The cold makes me very grumpy. For the past month, I've been surviving on large amounts of caffeine and a steady stream of cussing. This morning was no different. The dog woke me up at six and no amount of pleading or shouting would stop him from barking in my ear. I could've slept through that too, but once his barks hit a certain hysterical note I know I had better get moving. I dressed, attached the leash to his collar, and led him out, all the time cursing inventively. Indeed, the very colourfulness of my tirade gave me a grim sort of satisfaction. Panda danced beside me, quite oblivious while I blistered his ears.

Somewhere after the third block though, I finally ran out of nasty things to say and was forced to look about for inspiration. The street was very foggy; it was like looking through an out-of-focus lens. Strange then, how it made the tar road look blacker, the green of the ferns greener. Panda's whiskers quivered when he spotted a labrador ambling past, while the lab's owner wished me a cheery good morning. And at around that moment, I finally tired of being grumpy.

I came home full of good resolutions and I cemented them with porridge. Now, I've been on a bit of a health kick lately, and it has become my habit to eat some sort of porridge for breakfast. Usually quick-cook oats in milk with a swirl of honey hits the spot, but today, I wanted something more. I dug out Amma's stash of daliya (broken wheat) and soaked a couple of tablespoonfuls in hot water. In half an hour the grains were soft and chewy. I cooked them down with milk, threw in a few chopped almonds and raisins, and added a whole bunch of spice: cinnamon, freshly grated nutmeg, a  pinch of cardamom, and a grating of orange peel. I sweetened the whole mixture with jaggery and it was ready.

Now, I'm the first person to admit the stuff is distinctly homely looking. It's clumpy and the jaggery turns it an uninspiring beige. But oh, it smelled so good that the dog stopped worrying the sofa cushions to sit at the kitchen door and whine. And as I finally sat down to my bowlful, wreathed in fragrant steam, winter didn't seem too bad.

Broken wheat (daliya) porridge (1 serving)
Daliya: 1 1/2 tbsp
Water: 1/2 cup
Milk: 3/4 cup
Nutmeg: 1/4 tsp
Cinnamon: 1/4 tsp
Cardamom: 1/4 tsp
Jaggery: 1-2 tbsp
Almonds (blanched) : 5-6
Raisins: a small handful
An orange

Boil the water and pour it over the daliya. You can also cannily use the same water to blanch your almonds in. After a half-hour of soaking, transfer to a thick-bottomed pot and pour in the milk. Boil on medium-high heat, while stirring continuously till the mixture thickens. This will take about 8-10 minutes. Once it is sufficiently thick (remember, it will continue thickening even after it's been taken off the heat) turn off the stove and stir in the spices, jaggery, raisins and almonds. Grate a little orange peel over the porridge and serve, steaming.
Note: I used jaggery because that was what I had on hand. I'm trying to stay away from processed sugars these days and I was out of honey. But I imagine honey, or molasses, or even maple syrup will be very good too. 

Sweet. Always.

Every year, no matter where we lived, we celebrated Pongal in true Tamilian style. Amma would wake us up at the crack of dawn, we'd bathe sleepily, wear new clothes, and watch a pot of milk boil over. The boiling over of the milk is to signify abundance, but at the time, it just seemed rather wasteful. And for breakfast, there would be pongal. 

There are two sorts of pongal that Amma makes: the salty one or ven pongal, and the sweet chakkara pongal. Amma insisted that we eat both sorts, so I'd force down a minuscule portion of the salty stuff, and then eagerly reach for the sweet. For chakkara pongal, rice is cooked into a slurry with milk and ghee, while in another pot, jaggery is boiled with water to make a thick syrup. Everything is then stirred up together and the rice turns brown and sticky. Raisins are dropped in and they plump in the heat. Amma finishes it all off with a dusting of cardamom, ginger, and freshly grated coconut. I couldn't get enough of the stuff. 

For a long time, it seemed almost sacrilegious to make pongal on any day, other than Pongal. So I'd wait for it on the breakfast table, each fourteenth of January, wondering if it would be as good as I remembered. It always was. 

These days, we make it far more often. It makes for an indulgent weekend breakfast, and the leftovers are sublime, just eaten cold from the fridge. And really, we never bother with making the ven pongal anymore. Given a choice between salty and sweet, I pick sweet. Always. 

Pink snow

It's taken me a while to get used to this Delhi monsoon.  It's a cycle we go through every few days. The days get hotter and hotter till the tar on the road melts and sticks to my sandals. Expeditions outdoors are invested with a sense of daring. Only the most intrepid brave the heat.

The evenings get very still. The disappearance of the sun brings no relief. The earth takes its time dispensing the heat it has absorbed all day. The air is heavy. It is at this time that troops of ants march relentlessly indoors, finding cracks in the wall to disappear into. Panda takes a break from lying panting on the floor, to paw at them investigatively.

We carry on like this for as long as six days at a time, and by the fourth day, take to predicting the rain, knowing it will come. Each time though, the rain takes longer, as if testing our faith. When it comes, it comes with almost no warning. The sky is no help. It continues looking grey and ominous while the sun beats down from it, and even after the rains it remains that way.

The rains bring some relief. The morning after them, Panda and I have great fun peeking at our reflections in puddles. While he shies away growling, I self-consciously check my hair. It is very pleasant on those mornings, just after the rain. But as the run goes higher and higher, it dries up all those little puddles determinedly. By evening, all that is left of them is a crust of mud along the sides of the road. And then it all begins again.

The one good thing about all this is that I'm getting a great deal of use out of my ice cream maker. Why have lemonade when you can churn it into a sorbet? Why drink coffee when you can eat gelato? Don't throw away that awfully grainy fudge, churn it into ice cream. We have contrived to spend these monsoons merrily indeed.

In that spirit, I hacked away at a watermelon, juiced its innards, strained and chilled it. I then churned it to pretty pink snow and ate it out in the garden, in defiance of the sun.

My pick-me-up

Whenever he gets on the subject of filter coffee, Appa gets quite lyrical. He waxes poetic on how the decoction collects in a pool under the filter, drop by precious drop. How the milk is warmed gently, so as not to startle it, and then the decoction is poured into it in a steady stream. He describes how the concentrate blooms in brown ripples in the white milk. Then how the coffee is poured back and forth between utensils to warm it to tongue-blistering temperatures without allowing it to boil over, and to develop a thick froth on its surface. And then finally how it’s poured, masterfully, into a steel tumbler and must be drunk hot. Immediately.

But that is his description, not mine. For twenty three years, I’ve been able to take or leave coffee, as it comes. Indeed, my indoctrination into this coffee-drinking culture has been so subtle that I’ve only just realised it. But three months in Chennai, spent with relatives whose day doesn’t begin without a brimming tumblerful of coffee prepared just as described, made me appreciate its value. Recent events: an overload of work and a pleasant but time-consuming distraction, have made me cut down on sleep and so become more and more dependent on caffeine.

It has taken me a while and much experimentation, to decide exactly how I like my coffee. I tried it in Appa’s way. It wasn’t for me. His coffee was so hot I lisped for a week afterwards. Perima makes a smashing, perfect-temperatured cup of coffee, but she lives in Coimbatore: impractical for a weekday morning coffee run. Amma, with the best of intentions, is determined to make me drink as much milk as possible, and so adds far too much of it to my coffee. As for the cook’s coffee, ah, the less said, the better. I finally decided to take matters into my own hands, inspired by this recipe on Food52.

It was a weekend morning, humid and drizzly. Panda stared pensively out of the window while I boiled my water. We waited together for the decoction to percolate. When I finally had a little brown pool, I stirred in some brown sugar and a pinch of cinnamon. A generous clattering of ice cubes and a pour of milk later, it was ready.

I took a sip and I knew. I finally loved coffee.