Zen and the making of ... rava dosai!

Not a shopper by any means, during the rare visit to anything other than a grocery store, I make sure to scan the clearance shelves.  Works with my restricted budget status over the past few years.

At 50% off was a packet of MTR Rava Dosa mix.  At a non-grocery store. What a globalized world in which we live now!

I read through the instructions there.  Seemed like work, but not that difficult.  A wonderful way to kill time too--better than passively watching television.

Because I blog about my cooking, or thanks to posting photos of my food creations at Facebook, one might think that I have too much free time on my hands.  True to some extent--nobody at home to compete for my time.  But, there is an argument to be made that people do not necessarily allocate their time well, and not all are healthily spent.

As this New York Times piece points out:

"No time? People always have time for what they consider important, and what is more important than your health? Home-cooked food contains better ingredients, and you know what you’re eating."

To put that into proper perspective, because I had never ever made a rava dosa before, it was one heck of a learning process that took up a lot of time.  From the first step to cleaning up the kitchen after I was all done, it took up nearly two hours.  The time a typical Hollywood movie runs for.  Slightly less than the time for all the nine innings of a baseball game.  Way less than the time it takes for an NFL game.

I notice that over the years, I have become less and less a consumer of entertainment of most types.  It has freed up a number of hours.  And cooking has taken up the slack.  There is a great deal of truth in the idea that fun is when you do it, and entertainment is watching somebody else having fun.  And, dammit, I want to have fun.  Healthy fun. Tasty fun. I cook.  I cook, therefore, I am!

Cooking is fun also because of the quick and easy availability of the semi-processed ingredients.  Something my grandmothers, and even my mother for most of my growing up years, did not have access to.  To make dosa, for instance, the regular or the rava dosa, they had to work from primary ingredients.  I, on the other hand, rarely ever have to start from step one.  I can easily start from step four or eight depending on how much somebody else has completed those initial processes for me.  As a kid who was always amazed at the hours and hours that the mothers I interacted with worked every single day, I do not have any crazy notion of preparing food any old-fashioned way.  No false romanticism of food in those good old days.  Yes, those dishes were fantastic, but it pretty much restricted women to nothing but that work.  Practically condemning them to a life in the hot and smoky kitchens.

“Servitude,” said my mother as she prepared home-cooked breakfast, dinner, and tea for 8 to 10 people 365 days a year. She was right. Churning butter and skinning and cleaning hares, without the option of picking up the phone for a pizza if something goes wrong, is unremitting, unforgiving toil. 

The modern food industry has made my cooking so much easier:

If we romanticize the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savor traditional, fresh, and natural foods. Fresh and natural loom so large because we can take for granted the processed staples—salt, flour, sugar, chocolate, oils, coffee, tea—produced by food corporations.

Thus, my approach to life, whether in cooking or in my chosen profession, is neo-traditional.  I value those old traditional habits and products, but pursue them via the modern means.

But, this rava dosa turned out to be a tad trickier than I would have preferred.  I followed the directions on the package, and added onions and cilantro and green chili too.  The first one was a disaster!

I had to think that I was the batter waiting to metamorphose into a pleasing looking dosa, and figure out what might be wrong.  Could it be that the flame was a tad too high?  Maybe I was pouring the batter in a way that was not working well to cook it up evenly?

The second one was slightly better.

The third dosa was even better.  Progress.

I flipped that dosa on to its other side, and it certainly looked like how a rava dosa would.

But, I couldn't afford to celebrate.  I have cooked enough over the years to know that all it takes is a little bit of disrespect, in terms of taking things for granted, and the entire thing goes awry.  Not unlike so many other aspects of life, I suppose.  Cooking makes one respect how even a small component is as valuable as a large and prominent one. All can be lost for the want of a horseshoe nail, as the old one that we learnt in school taught us.

Slowly, I completed making the dosas.  By then I had already eaten the first two that didn't come out looking good.  They didn't look good, yes, but they tasted as good as the ones whose appearance was unblemished.  But, humans that we are, we are always more fascinated by the outward appearances.  We discriminate against bananas because of some brown spots on the skin.  Better looking people we gravitate towards even if they are rotten inside, while making fun of the "ugly ones" who, for all we know, might be the kind of humans we would really like to be on the inside.

All the later ones came out well.   

I cleaned up the kitchen.  A habit that I picked up from my mother, who hates to leave her kitchen in a mess.  When I visit with my parents, I find that the least I can do is help her with washing the dishes and cleaning the countertop.  Mother protests all the time, and sometimes she hurriedly washes dishes so that I wouldn't have to.  She thinks that I deserve a break because I cook and clean here every day,whereas I think she deserves a break because she cooks and cleans every day.  Clean freaks that the mother and son are!

When done, I served myself two of those dosas and sat down with a glass of water.

The whole is much, much more than the sum of its parts, indeed!