Today I am going to talk about one of my great loves in life which the twenties brought to me. It started off with a passion for baked goods and eventually translated to all food. The kitchen went from being the place I NEVER spent much time in to being the first thing I look at when I am looking for houses to move into. Very few of my friends who got to know me later in life believe that little fact. My mom though takes every opportunity to remind me how averse I was to doing anything worthwhile in the kitchen when I lived at home. My memories from the kitchen are my mom making cake or gulab jamun - in those situations, I would spend time lurking around the place because i wanted to get my hands on the freshly fried gulab jamun before she dunked those in the chaasni/ sugar syrup or lick the bowl she had mixed the cake batter in after she had emptied the batter into her tins to bake in. OR if the first love of my life (after Shah Rukh Khan), biryani was being prepared. The flavours would waft through the corridors of the house and I would be pulled instantly to the kitchen to check on whether it was ready yet. In Coorg, when we make something special, like biryani, we offer it to our ancestors before digging in, it's called Meedi and just a way to say thanks for the bounty and also to spend a few seconds remembering specific folks who would have enjoyed this dish immensely had they been alive. My mom does that for her father now, because like me, he was a huge foodie and loved all food, all good food. After mom switched off the gas and the biryani was simmering in it's own heat inside the pressure cooker, you had wait for the steam to die down before opening the lid. You have to be very patient here, because if you're not, what could have been a gorgeous biryani ends up being a bit of a mushy porridge looking thing. And then after the lid was opened, we would put a serving of the biryani on a plate with a bit of raita and set it aside for meedi. And then finally we would serve ourselves. The wait for the whole cooking process would kill me, but it is SO rewarding after, so you just put up with a few hours of suffering. Now when I look back, i actually slightly regret not being more involved with mom in the kitchen and growing up with knowing how to actually cook that Sambhar or grind that perfect coconut masala for the mutton curry. Because I'm doing it all now and over a phone call and it's never the same as being there in person.
Even when I moved to Hyderabad, I knew my way around the kitchen. I could cook a full meal and never understood why that task seemed so daunting to so many of my friends. I didn't enjoy it massively, so I didn't do much of it. But enough for survival and of course, the essential chai. I was born knowing how to make it. Ok, I exaggerate. But I don't remember my mother specifically teaching me these things - I guess when I sat around the kitchen on those rare occasions, I'd pick up bits and pieces here and there and all of that came back to me when I needed it in Hyderabad. I may not have known how to make a gorgeous mutton curry but I do know how one tastes. So i may have developed the art of cooking much later in life, but I have always had the love for food. When I was younger, we would visit Coorg for summer vacations. I didn't quite enjoy spending time at my father's mom's house (I've spoken about why in my previous posts), but when the time came to move to my maternal grandparent's house I was ecstatic. Now on top of their crockery cupboard there was a space in the corner where all wedding invitations for the summer were lined up. And on Day 1 of my arrival I would check all of those invitations out and ask my grandfather which ones he was definitely going to. And tell him I would accompany him to each one while I was there. And he readily agreed. I love weddings, and i love food. And Coorg weddings are spectacular feasts from small eats to kickass pandi curry to aromatic biryanis. Thatha, my grandfather, loved having me attend the wedding with him and i will always cherish those memories. When we returned from the weddings, grandma would ask us how it was and we would be in sync with our opinion about how good or bad the biryani was. And my poor little grandmother would roll her eyes, because we would not say a word about the decor or the bride & groom or the folks we met, nothing. We spoke only about what most mattered to us, which was the food and more specifically the biryani.
I owe my love for food to him and to my Coorg heritage. We are all foodies and each household makes the exact same dish differently and it all tastes divine. Nothing beats my grandmother and mother's cooking, of course - I'm unbiased-ly honest like that. Even after i moved to living with three other girls in Hyderabad, my cooking skills were limited to "feeding myself and having something to eat", also the kitchen in that house would always be so dirty that I would need to spend 2 hours cleaning it before trying to cook anything and that was of course a natural deterrent to get any kind of cooking done. So after all this talk about I didn't enjoy cooking, I can't seem think about that one moment when a friend of mine and i decided to open an online cupcake shop. It's amazing how this speaks exactly to what I had said in my last post, which is that I have never planned for things to happen. They naturally just happen. And i guess because we were younger we just went ahead and did things without thinking about it a million times. So in addition to our regular 9-5 jobs, we started this online bakery and called it The Cupcake Shop - very creative I know - someone even made a logo for us - we were reviewed in a newspaper - and made some decent money. My cousin, who used to be a restauranteur in Bangalore then, was very excited about the project and advised me many a time to do this full-time because the potential was amazing. Even today, I wonder how life would have been had i heeded to his advise and quit my job and moved to Bangalore or stayed in Hyderabad and opened a bakery.
But life had other plans, I decided to move to Gurgaon at the exact time my partner decided to move to Bangalore and The Cupcake Shop was no more. An opportunity that came easily and went away as easily and we adapted to it with as much ease. Had we been older and thought outside of corporate set-ups and a fixed salary and focused on our passion, life would have been different. But would it have been better? I can say with complete honesty that I do not regret that decision to not pursue it. I have had a beautiful life post that and I don't think I would exchange it for anything. So that's how the cupcake shop ended. And that is when I started to slowly spend more time in the kitchen. My love for desserts inspired my love for cuisine as well and i started to experiment and ask mom for recipes all the time.
And then the move to Singapore really cemented that passion. I continued to bake a LOT, and also continued to cook. I was introduced to many different kinds of food apart from Indian cuisine and that of course expands your mind. I traveled a lot and that too inspired me endlessly. My roommate of the time was extremely willing to taste and give feedback. And then Le Cordon Bleu happened. I had just broken up with my boyfriend and surfing the web trying to have Google inspire what step I should take in life next and I randomly typed Le Cordon Bleu to see if I could afford their full diploma and thence leave my job and take the leap. I of course, didn't have the courage or money at that moment to take the leap, so I did the next best thing, looked up their short courses and signed up for a cake decorating one in London. In London. I think 50% of the reason i did it was because it was based in London and two of my very close friends lived there. Three weeks with them in what I thought would obviously be my favourite city once I had visited it (!), working with other cake lovers and learning in an institute I had always dreamt of - why wouldn't I do it. And so i did. Spent lovely lovely time in London with them, learnt loads at LCB and came back with tons of tips and more importantly the confidence to bake with my heart and make it look all pretty as well.
The years that followed in Singapore, saw me baking every other day, blogging about it sometimes, hosting a charity year long bake-sale at work every Friday and raising 1000 SGD for my charity - life was good. And again i don't know why, but somewhere in between all that, I also started gaining the confidence to prepare meals. More recipes from mom, the internet at my fingertips and many cookbooks by my side, I started to gain confidence little by little. The one book that I loved to cook with was Bong Mom's Cookbook, and the fact that I could cook with spices that I wasn't familiar with was a such a huge achievement. I remember going hunting for Bangla spices and discovering an entire lane in Little India specializing in them - i was so happy that someone was understanding these spices I was asking for, because the regular South Indian / Tamil shops (which are my staple usually) were staring at me like I was mad when I said "kewra paani" in a Bangla accent (the guy I had dated was Bengali so I kind of knew how to do the accent). Slowly I started discovering the joy of regional Indian cooking and I started spending hours and hours in the kitchen trying to get the taste of Gujarat, Andhra, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, right. I even tried a couple of Kashmiri recipes once - truly divine. That's why I spent all my weekend either doing yoga or baking or trying out these recipes. My eldest cousin would always roll his eyes when my answer to his "what did you do this weekend, what parties did you end up at" with "oh I stayed at home but listen to this kickass recipe I tried". I've always enjoyed my own company - I'm not a loner, but if you leave me alone, I have a lot to entertain myself with and being in the kitchen is one of those ways. Not everything I have tried has been a success though - that's literally 80% of the cooks in the kitchen when they are trying new things anyway. That would deter me for a day, I would go back to my comfort zone of rasam-rice-pepper chicken and then come back to tackle the recipe again.
When I think about it a little more deeply the trips i took to Italy also influenced the mad foodie inside of me. The small bites in Venice, the gallons of cheap Aperol spritz, the amazing Napolitana pizza, the gorgeous pastas, the many many many fried anchovies and the crazy laughter with my two friends from London who will eat for one whole day if you let them, just added to my love for good food. I always thought the French are the ones that truly love food and all the tiny aspects of it, but watching the Italians cook only for passion and want to be able to share that joy with folks they are feeding and just do it so matter-of-factly made me want to leave everything I was doing and move there and start a restaurant myself. Every time I walk into a place and walk out after a crazy awesome meal, I'm think to myself - damn I want a place of my own and do this for the rest of my life - is it just me? Anyway Itlay has always been and will always be an inspiration. Adithya once told me (amazing how he figures in almost every post of mine these days, but I guess i am cherishing his friendship more than ever as i go through this phase of transition) that while Bali is where my heart is at peace, Italy or Europe might be where my heart sings. And I think, at least in the case of Italy, that might be a 100% true.
I know what Im going to say next is not the nice-est thing, but it truly is my opinion. I am not a huge fan of tiny bits on your plate that count for food in uber-expensive restaurants. Im just not. But the one that made (another) mark on my food brain was Locavore from Ubud in Bali. Their food, their service and the (many) free amuse-bouches (sorry, I'm being honest) made me fall so deeply in love that I went back every time I went to Ubud and then recommended it to every one who has since travelled to Ubud. The minute someone says they are going to Bali and need recs, I sent them the link of the website and ask them to book a table ASAP, to guarantee a spot at the otherwise completely booked out restaurant. Apart from Locavore, i think my heart truly craves home-style Indian cooking. Except when I'm in Italy, because then my heart craves everything, even the deep fried Pizza Fritta, which should spell heart-attack the minute you see one (but so goood omg!)
One of my mother's best friends is from Manipur and we were posted together in Srinagar, Kashmir once and sometimes in the afternoons when we used to come back from school I would see Rachel aunty and mom sitting on the table laughing away with a whole feast laid out before them. Her kids would eventually join us for lunch as well and these impromptu potluck parties would just be the highlight of our day. And Rachel aunty is a damn good cook, she cooks all kinds of cuisines but my absolute favourite dish of hers is this dried shrimp and wild chilli chutney she makes. I think it's also my mother's favourite dish of hers. Just that chutney with hot rice was like Diwali in your mouth. And I realised, you could take me to a Michelin star Indian restaurant but the food that most appealed to my heart was these kinda of backyard recipes that my mother, her mother and her mother have made for the longest time. Don't get me wrong, I really admire the amazing expertise that chefs working with molecular Indian food showcase, but I can never be them, nor can i after having eaten at one of those restaurant say with utmost honesty that "this is the best Indian food ever".
When my dad is at home, thanks to his years of army training, he needs to have a full meal comprising: a vegetable dish, one dal/lentil curry, chapatis, rice, freshly cut salad, yogurt and sometimes a meat or fish dish. Always. I also have very few memories of him eating with his hands, because I think he has done it only about twice and maybe both times at a temple lunch setting. So when my father is travelling or away on work, my mom and I would make rice and tomato rasam or pepper rasam, get a slice of onion each and finally, a teaspoon of lime pickle for lunch or dinner. That's it. And that would be the best meal experience ever. I wish we could recreate that in a restaurant setting that modern Indians and an international audience would be open to experiencing. Because the true Indian flavours lie in village recipes made with fresh produce you either grow yourself or get from the weekly or daily fresh markets. And while it is all good and nice that we can do with Indian food what the french do with theirs in terms of technique and make it look all pristine and heavenly as well, the actual challenge lies in taking Indian food and Indian dining experiences as they are and presenting them to the world with a little tweak here and there - enough to retain it's authenticity. Give me a bowl of spicy mutton curry over gourmet food any day.
It's hard to believe even for me myself that in spite of loving food so much and loving being in the kitchen so much, I eventually started doing very little of it. 2017 was a tough year for me on many many fronts mostly because I was acutely aware of everything i was not doing. And spending time in the kitchen was one of the biggest things on that list that was screaming out to me. By the end of the year I almost had a nervous breakdown and even the news of a promotion didn't do much to get me out of my constant state of anxiety. I'd want to lie in bed and never get up, it's a topic will speak more about in the upcoming posts. But by Dec I knew something had to be done and so here I am in beautiful Bali 19 days to my 30th birthday trying to see if the concept of a regional Indian restaurant will work here. Some call me mad, but where's the fun in living life if not with a slice of mad ?
I'll end this post with the below quote:
Follow your bliss
If you do follow your bliss,
You put yourself on a kind of a track
that has been there all the while
waiting for you,
and the life you ought to be living
is the one you are living.
Joseph Campbell
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