From The Tamil Kitchen

The other day, we watched the first episode of Samin Nosrat's Salt Fat Acid Heat. A few months ago, I bought Preeti Mistry's The Juhu Beach Club Cookbook as a gift after reading about her in the NY Times.  And, oh, how can I forget Yotam Ottolenghi or  Nik Sharma or ... This a glorious time for cookbooks and food shows, it feels like.

And there are kitchen gadgets galore.  A few minutes even in a small little kitchen store leaves me dazed, and wondering about my rather primitive kitchen where even the knives are not sharp, very much like me!

Yet, home cooking is becoming equally rare.

Not only is cooking at home a rapidly dying tradition, the foods that people eat are far from healthy--despite all those cookbooks and shows and all the scientific evidence that is touted every day.  Here in the US, and seemingly everywhere.  The global food revolution "has overwhelmed traditional diets pretty much everywhere in the world, and at an astonishing speed. This revolution is making massive numbers of people fat and sick."  I agree that "Cooking isn’t a luxury; it’s a survival skill."

Most of us "traditionalists" who cook at home will agree with this author who writes:

Here’s why I cook:
I like the way that closely following a recipe can alleviate pressure after a long day of having to make all the decisions.
I love how a dish that worked, or a meal that everyone liked, has the power to change my day.
I like that pulling off a good meal when you least expect it is the fastest way to feel victorious, even when real life does not.
I like the way that, even when I’m standing over the stove, cursing the recipe writer who suggested that onions might caramelize in 10 minutes, I’m totally absorbed. I’m not on group texts. I’m not following the outrage of the moment on Twitter. I’m getting a brief, needed respite and refuel from fretting over our democracy or forcibly separated families or any of the other horrible things humans do to one another. 

Indeed.

Well, except the part about "closely following a recipe," which I don't.

Last night, it was a table for four at The Tamil Kitchen ;)  Good times were had without junk food, without recipes, and without complicated gadgetry.  We had salt, fat, acid, sugar.  And laughs.

Health before wealth

Ever since I came across the phrase sanitas per escam, well, that is a motto that I have used a lot.  Even my food photographs on Facebook, before I took it all down, were in an album under that title.

My food photographs.  As in I made them. I took those photographs too.  And, yes, there was a separate album for foods made by M.

We continue to cook most of our meals.  And we continue to plate and serve in a manner that is pleasing to the eye as well.  We have simply stopped taking photographs.  We cook, we eat, and we enjoy.  Just like humans always did for the longest time.

Cooking and cleaning takes up time, of course.  No wonder I don't have time for Game of Thrones or whatever else that people are talking about.  Heck, I don't even get enough time in the day for me to play bridge online!

Well, yes, such tasty and healthy meals all the time means that I might live past 75, and die only at 99.6 years of age; but, that is a different problem for another day.

But, is spending time on Game of Thrones, or Facebook, or whatever else more important and valuable than cooking ones own meals?  Do people ask themselves this question?

The author of this op-ed argues something similar, by particularly aiming at what he refers to as The Prepared Food Industrial Complex.  Like the ones that young people rave about. Sometimes even the older ones.  But, ...

The $17 billion- a-year food delivery market is very flexible and well-intentioned like that. All these companies want to do is give me my life back by keeping me out of the kitchen — more time for YouTube, more time for CrossFit — and they’ve created myriad ways to do so.

I don't ever understand why time spent for cooking is a waste, and why time spent at the office or at a ballpark or in front of a digital screen is more valuable!

In fact, much of the P.F.I.C. pushes the idea that any time and any effort put into cooking is a waste. The goal, one meal kit company declares, is “saving time to make time — for everything else you want to do.” (Just so long as what you want to do isn’t “cook from scratch.”) Another meal kit service praises mail-order smoothies as a life-changing idea because there’s “no time to research, prep, buy, measure and blend before work.”

An acquaintance once joked that in most homes the kitchen is the most expensive real estate that is never used.  If only that was indeed a joke and not the reality!  Perhaps uber-clean stove-tops and ovens are no longer the result of prideful home-cleaning but merely a reflection of non-usage.

People who cook at home are conclusively healthier, consuming less sodium and fewer overall calories than people who mostly eat out. Cooking at home is better for the planet: it avoids the single-use plastics and paper goods that delivered food usually comes with, and with just a bit of creativity with leftovers, home cooking can be entirely free of food waste. Cooking is being studied as a promising tool for improving mental health, and even as a method for eliminating unhealthy behaviors such as smoking. And no matter what restaurant you order in from, there’s always a home-cooked meal that can be made for less money.

People seem to want to deny all these facts when they talk about the convenience of eating out all the time.  Crazy!

I am with the author when he writes:

Do I cook at home every day of the year? No. I love the burger at my favorite bistro too much to do that.

Yep. Same here.  Our burger bistros are different, however ;)

Sanitas per escam!

Modern kitchens, fancy tools, ... and crappy food!

I learnt early on in life that it is only a bad carpenter who blames his tools.  In Tamil, there is a horrible equivalent: ஆட தெரியாத தேவடியா மேடை சரியில்ல என்று சொன்னாளாம்  Horrible because, forget it; I want to keep going with my main point here.

So, yes, bad carpenters and tools. 

A couple of years ago, it seemed like a third of my neighborhood was going through home improvement.  There were workers and craftsmen hammering and cutting and doing everything that I cannot even dream of doing.  In most homes, the kitchens were being remodeled. 

One neighbor felt so good about their brand new kitchen that they even invited a few others to take a look at it.  Of course, I did not go there--I am not for making friends ;)

At what turned out to be the last ever neighborhood summer party--this was the year before the trump candidacy summer--the husband in the fancy remodeled kitchen home joked that his wife practically never uses the kitchen.  To which she responded with a cold stare.

My grandmothers and aunts and mother made divine foods even in the most basic kitchens.  During most of my childhood, my grandmother cooked only with firewood and charcoal.  Gas came much later, when I was a college student. 

The other day, my parents, my sister, and I listed all the fuel sources my mother used when we were kids: Charcoal, "leco," hot-plate (electricity,) kerosene, and--finally--gas.  Of course, no blenders or food-processors in the kitchen.

In contrast, now all of us have fancy gadgets in our kitchens.  But, the foods and snacks and sweets that we prepare mostly suck, and that is if we ever put them to use in the first place! 

What a delightful contrast to all the fancy kitchens is this story about the "king of chicken legs."

Cooking things up

The kitchen has always been a magical place for me.  Maybe because I started hanging around the kitchen right from when I can remember.  Why wouldn't I with all the awesome aromas and the chance to taste dishes and sweets and snacks right off the flame?  Oh that taste of butter that was churned right in front of my very eyes!

The excitement of the magic hasn't worn away even one bit.  I try, in my own ways, to create that magic and share it.  But, I know well that I am a part of a tiny minority.  We are practically an endangered species.  Barely ten percent of Americans love cooking.  Barely ten! "Only 10% of consumers now love to cook, while 45% hate it and 45% are lukewarm about it."  We can expect a lot more of the percentage to shift from the lukewarm category to hate.

It might seem bizarre that fewer amongst us like to cook even as the number of cooking shows has significantly grown, along with a tremendous growth in the number of people watching those shows.  "our fondness for Food TV has inspired us to watch more Food TV, and to want to eat more, but hasn’t increased our desire to cook."  Most people are mere spectators watching those shows, similar to how they are spectators when it comes to many other forms of entertainment--from wrestling to football to reality shows!

The trend is one in which people opt to buy prepared meals--the prepared ones in the grocery stores or made-to-order in restaurants.  People don't even brew their morning coffee at home, it seems like.  Why else would there be long lines at coffee kiosks?  At this rate, homes and apartments of the future might not even have to "waste" space for kitchens!

I wonder what people do with the time that they have from not spending it on shopping for groceries, preparing meals, and cleaning up the kitchens.  Is Facebooking and Instagramming that much a valuable use of time?  The government's "time use survey" from 2016 gives us an idea:

Notice how small that bar is across "household activities"?  Let's look at the breakdown of that category:

Food preparation and cleanup registers at barely half-an-hour a day, on an average.  At that low average number of hours, the best one could do is warm up frozen burritos in the microwave!

Oh well, I suppose this is yet another aspect of life in which I am out of step with the majority.  Time for me to have some home-made food ;)

Vegetarian is not a synonym for a dull, boring existence

I am pretty confident that my experience when talking with parents is no different from most others'--the conversational topics with father are quite a bit different from those when I talk with mother.  More so when they have lived the traditional lives of the man engaging in economically productive work outside the home and the woman engaging in highly productive--perhaps immeasurably valuable--work at home.

After talking about a whole bunch of family and weather and political matters, father was ready to hand over the phone to mother when he said "the lunch yesterday was fantastic. We all overate."

Even otherwise, I routinely ask mother about the cooking planned for the day.  Once she hurriedly got to that topic even before I asked her, and then she added "I wanted to tell you that before you asked me."  So, of course, there was no way I was not going to talk food with her after father's comments.  There is a tremendous variety of vegetarian dishes that mothers (and, now, perhaps fathers too) make in India. Routinely. Exciting foods.  Colorful foods. Differently tasting foods.

They have been lifelong vegetarians. Pukka!  While father occasionally strays into having eggs, mother has stayed away even from eggs.  When we were kids, mother even tried once to make a eggless version of a cake (I think,) which did not turn out well.

At least now, there is a greater understanding of vegetarian foods and Indian foods in my adopted home country.  When I was new here, the idea of vegetarian dishes was nothing more than a bunch of vegetables and leaves, either raw with some crappy dressing, or boiled and salted.  Like how the Onion has satirized that even now:

"Vegetarian Option Just Iceberg Lettuce On Bread" notes the Onion, with its usual satire

Recently, when another argumentative Indian was in town, I had prepared in advance a variety of vegetarian dishes.  But, apparently he does not have the personal relationship with food that some of us have. I wonder if his mother struggles as much as I did to draw from him compliments on the cooking, unlike my mother who was critiqued if the food was even a bit off--even as we licked our plates clean ;)

Consistent with my marching to own drumbeat, even in preparing the vegetarian dishes, I neither follow the old country's customs, nor of the adopted country's.  But, dammit they are tasty!  Like this one that I made and enjoyed for dinner a couple of evenings ago:

Quickly sauteed broccoli, carrots, tomatoes and onion,  in olive oil and red chili flakes,
with freshly grated gruyere cheese

A vegetarian existence is far from dull and boring.  After all, if it were dull and boring, we would not have the argumentative Indians all fired up all the time to debate every issue on this planet and elsewhere too!

Being a thayir-saadham is boring! ;)

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!

Don't wish me sweet dreams, please!

Paging Dr. Freud.

It is related to an important organ of mine for which he might have some answers.

No, not that organ.  The brain.

I want Dr. Freud to analyze why I had an awesome dream about a carrot halva.

It was a wonderful dream.  Some fuzzy face brought me a bowl of the reddish carrot halva.  The halva made from the red carrots that are available during the winter months in northern India.  

In the dream, the sweet was at just the right temperature.  I took a spoonful to my mouth and it was just the perfect texture and the right amount of sugar.  It was heavenly.

After I woke up, it was such a letdown to walk into the kitchen and realize again that it was all a dream.  

I made myself a dull and boring toast with peanut butter while the coffee brewed.

And soon after breakfast and a few chores, I set about making my dream come true.

I grated carrots, as Pandora offered me beautiful music.  I couldn't care about my tennis elbow as I repeated that same motion. 

Cooking is magic.  When everything is done, it is that awesome feeling of voilà!  Cooking is instant gratification, unlike hobbies like gardening or sculpting where it is a long time between the idea within to become real.  In the kitchen, the magic happens within a matter of minutes and hours.

I customized the recipe, true to my usual approach.  It is almost like somewhere back in my young age somebody whispered into my ears, "leave no recipe untweaked!"  Perhaps Dr. Freud can sort out why I am so unwilling to faithfully carry out recipes.  Why that rebellious attitude even in such matters?

I couldn't wait for the finished product to cool down to the appropriate temperature.  Anxiety meanwhile built up.  What if the entire thing turns out to be a disaster?  Not only will that be a waste of time and the ingredients, but the fact also remains that I am in an alien land where I can't casually walk to the nearest sweet shop and pick up carrot halva.

I took a teaspoonful to my tongue that was practically drooling all over.

It was awesome!

So, I then moved on to the next step.

A big scoop of vanilla ice cream in a bowl was the bed for a scoop of the halva.  On top of the halva, a small scoop of the same ice cream.

No reading anything.  No radio or music in the background. It was just me and this bowl.

If only making dreams come true were as easy as this carrot halva experience!

"Sanitas Per Escam" means kitchen is for passionate sex?

I am not a food-maniac who eats a great variety of foods.  Nor am I a food snob.  It just happens that, within the limited range, I love tasty food.  Tasty and healthy food.

No, make that tasty and healthy home-cooked food.

Cooking at home seems to be getting to be an endangered activity as humanity joins the ranks of the middle and upper economic levels.  So endangered that:

Alas, the kitchen still might be the most expensive, yet least used, room in any house or flat. Lest we forget, the kitchen is the tiled room – the one with a stove, without a commode.

Indeed!  As Sally comically noted in When Harry Met Sally, there is the notion that young, hot, couples, have passionate sex rolling around on the kitchen floor.  But, apparently, neither sex nor cooking happens in many kitchens!

The author notes that:

The original Greek symposium was a meal at home where the host would provide food, conversation, and the occasional pole dancer. Romans had similar traditions. Even in the Dark Ages, communal societies such as monasteries took their meals together. Monks and nuns might take vows of silence, poverty, and chastity; but, at mealtime they clustered to eat. Silence, sexual tension, and a good multi-grain may be the secrets to introspection and celibacy.

It is not easy to imagine a scene where Socrates is holding a symposium at home (no, hemlock was not the drink of choice!) with a pole dancer moving rhythmically a few feet away.  Hmmm .... maybe that is what is missing in my classes!

I suppose I put my kitchen to a fair degree of use.  The range has gotten dirty over the years, despite my attempts to keep it clean.  Whether or not what I cook is tasty (yes, it is, dammit!) I am sure of one thing: I know I am in control of my own food and how (un)healthy it is.  If nutrition is 80 percent of good health, then it is a good feeling that I am in absolute control over that 80 percent.

Though, occasionally, I do venture into, ahem, unhealthy foods.  Like the banana bread/cake that I made, with marzipan.  I then wonder why my waistline has increased by an inch over the year!

But, that came after a lot healthier meal:

Happy cooking, folks!

To stay healthy, cook your food. And, oh, use your inner microbes!

It was the tight budget in a foreign land that motivated me to start cooking.  The Sri Lankan roommate was in his fifth year of life in the US and he had a pretty good grasp of groceries and fast cooking.  The first year was a blur, as far as cooking went.

Year two, more budget issues but a little more experience in the kitchen.  It has been a slow and steady progress since then.  Now, comfort in the kitchen coupled with budgetary constraints of a different kind mean that I cook and bake a lot more than what I would have ever imagined. 

But, when I really feel cooking to be a chore, I will now remember to tell myself, “Suck it up, buttercup.”  The dirty secret, the author notes, is:

When you have no choice but to cook for yourself every single day, no matter what, it is not a fun, gratifying adventure. It is a chore. On many days, it kind of sucks.

Yep. A chore to shop. A chore it is to cut, chop, dice, and season the food. And then to wash and clean. Empty the trash.

A long time ago, when I was a kid, I asked my mother whether she felt shortchanged about having to work all seven days of the week in her role as a home-maker--"housewife," as they were referred to then--in contrast to father who got time off his work.  She simply answered that everybody has a certain role and she was doing hers.  Much later in life I found her response echoing in Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players."

So, yes, we do what we do in the kitchen.

We certainly don't want to forget that there is a lot more to cooking and eating than it merely being a response to budget constraints, argues this Scientific American piece:. 

For one, our bodies seem to expend different quantities of energy to deal with different kinds of food (the energy expended produces heat and so is referred to by scientists as “diet-induced thermogensis”); some foods require us to do more work than others. Proteins can require ten to twenty times as much heat-energy to digest as fats, but the loss of calories as heat energy is not accounted for at all on packaging.
For another, foods differ in how and where they are digested in our guts. Some foods such as honey are so readily used that our digestive system is really not even put to good use. They are absorbed in our small intestines; game mostly over. More complex foods, on the other hand, such as cassava or almonds, have to travel to the colon where they meet up with the largest concentrations of our little friends, the microbes. 

 So, there is food, and then there is food.  Choose wisely, grasshopper!

It is a testament to human ingenuity that we have now figured out how to provide as many calories as possible in our foods. We don’t even really need for our intestines to do much work, our bacteria either, or even our teeth for that matter. Our modern diets are a measure of our evolutionary success, or at least they would be from the perspective of our paleo ancestors who needed and wanted excess calories. They are not successes from our modern perspective. We now have too many calories and too many of those calories are of low quality. One in three Americans is now obese. Over the last thirty years the number of calories we eat has increased, but so has the number of those calories that come from highly processed foods. In this light, we would do well to eat fewer processed foods and more raw ones.

Sounds good.  But, dammit, I ended up slicing my thumb while working some wonderfully fresh and tender green beans!