Finder

I think I want one of these Finders to help me find my all too often misplaced stuff. I would actually go beyond the mundane business of key and phone (and everything in my bag that I cannot find) and use it to locate my spices in the kitchen stuffed two or three layers deep or just somewhere I would not readily know to look. Then there is all the paperwork put away ever so carefully never to be found again. My list of missing, misplaced or forgotten stuff is a very long one - mostly I am dealing in the territory of "unknown unknowns" and that can be rather scary sometimes.

DB's big complaint about my cooking is that there is way too much improvisation going on all the time and no consistency. If he likes how I cooked something for dinner one night the odds of that dish being reproduced ever again are close to none - he jokes that he eats every nice meal I cook like it were his last meal. While that is in part because I cannot curb my need to improvise in the kitchen, but a lot of the "changes" happen as a result of not being able to find the right spice at the right time. Sometimes the outcomes of these bizarre last minute switches surprise pleasantly and DB and J will urge me to write down the recipe so they can have it again.Needless to say, recipe writing is not my forte.The less said about the times things go south, the better.

Now, if I could assemble everything I needed before I started cooking (as DB always encourages me to), we may not run into these issues at all but that mode of operation would be inconsistent with a compulsive improviser. More often than not, I have no idea what I am about to cook until the very last minute so it is impossible to have a fully flushed out plan. A Finder may help me improvise within safe guardrails and not have me switch from a Far Eastern recipe to a Central American one because I was not able to locate what I needed on time - DB and J may be spared that sinking feeling when they see a familiar dish look just a tad different.

Movie Analogy

I served a spicy chicken curry with rice for dinner today and J commented " Eating this is like watching Bridge on the River Kwai - painful to watch but the kind of movie you remember. The blah kind of curry is like watching Cinderella" Over the years, I have heard a lot of interesting things said about the food I cook being that I can go from superlative to insipid effortlessly depending on my frame of mind. This movie analogy is however new in my experience. Since she finished eating her food fairly quickly, I am going to assume that the analogy was a favorable one. At any rate it left me chuckling to myself. 

Since DB came to our lives, we have a TV in the household and the only thing that J finds interesting on it is the Food Channel which she watches every once in a while. So when I baked a streusel cake recently and asked her how she liked it, J was on the roll. "I'd give it an eight and half out of ten. There were far too many flavors colliding with each other and that topping was quite confusing - I did not get that at all". That would be a direct lift from one of the judges of any number of cooking contests. I am so glad that there was not a TV for the first nine years of her life and now when it is here, she does not much care for it. I could only imagine her parroting lines she had heard from less savory sources - I can't imagine I would have been amused at all.

Captive Audience

Waiting in a car dealership for a couple of hours with a supremely bored eight year old in tow while your vehicle is being serviced is not fun. In fact, it is the farthest possible thing from fun. Add to that an advertised free WiFi connection that does not work and finally a TV tuned permanently to some kind of food channel. Everyone around me is trying not to look at the luscious  food porn that is streaming relentlessly in our range of vision.

One woman is making an effort to have a conversation on her cell phone, another is trying to read (as are J and I). A couple of guys are latched to their laptops and iPhones but the food porn is well beyond our collective ability to resist. By when this woman reached the climactic stages of preparing eggs in a basket (a decadent recipe calling for eggs, shredded potato, butter, maple syrup, provolone cheese and prosciutto) we were all looking up to watch - nearly enraptured by the vision.

This Frederick Kaufman essay discusses the remarkable parallels between these two businesses that at first glance would appear to have little in common.

Crest and Trough

A few days a ago, I was telling my mother how difficult it is for J and I to get used to having food cooked by yours faithfully after a break of six months. When my parents visit, mom takes over the kitchen and what a huge difference it makes to quality of our lives. It is not as much about the recipes she serves but her attention to detail and her amazing creativity.

The lack of produce options in the local grocery stores does not bother her. She will come up with ways to take what she is given and make something delightful with it. And she is able to repeat this feat every single meal for the entire duration of her stay. Yet, her life is hardly kitchen bound - she has a variety of other interests and makes time for them in her day.

Cooking and me have had a strange relationship - full of crests and troughs. I was a competent cook even before I hit my teens. Once I was allowed in the kitchen more, I was able to put my own spin on traditional Bengali recipes in a way that was often met with appreciation from family and friends. Those were probably the crests. When I started working, I had my own place for the first time along with a kitchen to do as I pleased. Often the lack of time and energy resulted in improvisations and short-cuts that ended up putting nutritious but bland food on my table. I was reaching for the trough.

Every once in a while when I had company, I was able to find my stride and prepare a meal that was a crowd pleaser. Marriage to R (my ex) did only good things to my cooking - in fact that that was the only area of my life where change was for the better. R was sincere in his appreciation of my creative flair, loved being surprised and encouraged me to try recipes from anywhere in the world. The kitchen was always well-stocked and I did not lack inspiration, energy, encouragement or ideas.

After our divorce, I lost all of that for a couple of years. J being a baby at the time, I lacked the incentive of cooking for someone else - it was just me. I went back to eating food that was healthy and ultimately boring. By when I had worked myself out of the funk, something essential had died. Today, I can cook some of the staples of our dinner table with consistent taste but everything else can be a hit or miss.

My mother says I am like a student who is no longer interested in education and is concerned only about getting a passing grade. There is no involvement with the subject (cooking) before or after the test. I used to be a student of very different stripe once - I wanted to learn, improve and prefect myself. The grades were incidental. My mother says she's always been a student of cooking that has a passion for the subject. I have to work on reviving the passion I once had to be able to climb out of the trough I have fallen into lately. I thought that was interesting advice.

Peace With Spice Cake

I suffer from a chronic inability to follow any recipe and that becomes a problem if I want to bake. J knows to expect the worst when I take it upon myself to do so. If anything, J has come to realize that her mother can be very persistent and does not give up on something just because she has failed at it twenty times in a row.

Persistence and the capacity to spring back from failure, I guess are qualities that don't hurt anyone so it's a good thing for J to observe and hopefully emulate in other areas of life. Except in this case, J is left with the unsavory job of eating the charred cake, rock solid bread or cookies that don't resemble any kind of cookie she is acquainted with. That can be a steep price to pay to feed somebody's persistence habit though mulishness might be the more appropriate description of the condition.

Recently, I was able to turn out a decent spice cake minus a recipe - a first in my life. J's friends loved it and despite her initial reservations, so did J. A few weeks later, I tried variation on the theme of spice cake and did not bother to follow the steps that had led to the unexpected success the previous time. This one was a success too. J even said that my baking skills were improving. This past weekend, I tired yet another spice cake and for once did not feel the typical rush of trepidation when I opened the oven door after forty minutes. I shared a cake I had baked with a couple of co-workers and a friend. Only if you have failed as many times and as resoundingly as I have in your attempts to bake would you realize what an accomplishment that was.

Finally, I am friends with the spice cake. As long as I have to follow a recipe to cook something or worry about how it will end up tasting, I know it is a new and uncomfortable co-existense, the ingredients or the process and I have not come to understand each other well enough. Baking and I have upto now had a relationship fraught with stress and discord. It has taken Epicurious to resolve the conflicts we could not resolve on our own. I have always believed that following a recipe while cooking is the surest way to keep the relationship that way - remote, distant and unsteady. You never know where you stand with each other. Looks like spice cake and I are in a good, peaceful place together -  I might venture further afield now.

Mishti Doi

When my parents were visiting with us a few months ago, my mother told J a Bengali folk tale in which Mishti Doi plays a very critical role. Indeed, the protagonist finds this particular delicacy so irresistible that he forgets some important promises and thus the story.

Now, ever since J heard about the indescribable delights of Mishti Doi and it's ability to induce momentary lapse of reason, she has been clamoring to taste it. My mishti making skills are non-existent and in the backwaters where I live, there is no way I could buy her some from a desi (Bangladeshi more likely) store.

The craving for this unseen, untasted and yet supremely tempting treat has grown manifold since Grandma left and I am left with the daunting  task of producing it somehow. I figured it would not be too difficult to find a recipe and give it a shot - what's the worst someone (even if that person was me) could so with yogurt, sugar and cream anyway.

So I looked up some recipes and among the first things I saw was this dozen variations on the theme of Mishti Doi. Not exactly the simple two, three step solution I had in mind. When variation #1 (presumably the easiest) has instructions like "By trial and error you’ll find the correct temperature setting for your oven for the perfect Dahi ! If it's not setting up, increase the temperature a bit." I can already see my resolve to give this thing a shot dissipating rapidly. Cooking this thing needs one to be a clairvoyant almost !

Before giving up, I decided to look some more. Since I don't recall caramelized sugar being part of the Mishti Doi taste , I am a little suspicious of this "easy" recipe. One blogger's version looks quite promising  and the instructions are easy enough to follow - love the lack of ambiguity in particular. Not one to leave good enough alone and just cook the damn thing, I had to seek out a second opinion and there was no lack of them - there are 6920 entries per Google on the subject.

The one I checked out went into some technical detail that is bound to please the more sophisticated cooks but it's not something one such as myself should even bother with. If I know what's good for me and keep my limitations in mind, I would go with the three step formula and have J believe that it is Mishti Doi. But given the keen level of anticipation, I feel obliged to turn out something that is reasonably close to the real thing. My lack of competance at all things mishti (sweet) and the plethora of how-tos are not helping out.

Food Miles

There are already too many points to ponder over what used to be the simple (and at one time in the distant past even pleasurable) act of shopping for produce in a grocery store. Paper or plastic, organic or conventional, GM or natural and the list goes on. Each choice is fraught with ambiguity because there is no black and white answer to the question of right or wrong - for who and what goes in to producing that food or for those who will consume it.

To add to our angst-ridden produce shopping experience is this new idea of calling out in the how far the food has traveled. Is the consumer now expected to add the miles and use that total to feed their guilt about hurting the planet. Or they may have a way to pay their way out of it by shopping only stuff that was grown with a hundred mile radius.

Slowness Drink

I am all for embracing slowness and often wish everything and everyone around me felt the same way as I do about excessive speed. Be it the frenetic pace at which we go through the work day, try to gobble as much information as possible while we are on-line (which for many is all the time) or the corners we cut while putting a meal on the table, speed is ubiquitous.

There is this notion that the faster we get there the better off we are. Those that want to slow down get left so far behind that they are not socially viable any more. Paul Davis in his article on slow reading challenges this idea. He says :

That never-ending data stream isn't going anywhere, and the fact is, we may need its addictive distraction more than it needs our attention.

That said, I love the idea of an anti-energy drink and can't wait to try Slow Cow. Maybe if they had these things coming out of vending machines at workplaces, people would give calm a chance over a shot of energy when they stressed, doing themselves and others a favor in the process.

Synthetic Food

In his book In Defense Of Food , Micheal Pollan recommends not eating anything that our great grandmothers or great great grandmothers would not recognize to be food. That makes for good, common-sense, relatively easy to follow advise. I have recalled it while grocery shopping ever since I read the book. Following it seriously is a whole different thing.

The molecular gastronomy people on the other hand have created the first completely synthetic food. They have a worthy cause too :

"If you use pure compounds, you open up billions and billions of new possibilities,” Mr This said. “It's like a painter using primary colours or a musician composing note by note.”

He says compound cooking will enthral our taste buds — or, rather, our trigeminal nerve — and help to end food shortages and rural poverty because farmers could increase profitability by “fractioning their vegetables”.

I was listening to a story on NPR recently on the unraveling of Punjab's Green Revolution. I imagine, if synthetic food goes mainstream, those nutrient depleted, pesticide resistance fields would be replaced by chemical factories to produce the billions and billions of new possibilities in food Mr. This has in mind.

Whenever I read the phrases end food shortage and rural poverty, the image of third world farmers being coerced into farming practices that they are not comfortable with comes to mind - the Green Revolution was once touted as the best thing that happened to Punjab.

Cooking Aids

Cleaning the stove-top after cooking has got to among the most unrewarding household chores. I love this utterly beautiful roll-up stove that I am sure make the cleaner feel a little better rewarded because of its looks. The idea of a drawer style fridge is nice too - less space taken, easier to find and use things before they turn into science experiments and hopefully not as much of an energy hog as the old-fashioned refrigerator.

What is a nice kitchen without a state-of-the-art indoor composter (I have blogged about this one before and the technology has progressed since then) Taking the trash out for me is a constant battle between good intention and laziness. It helps that J wastes no time to let me know that kitchen is "stinky" - she is a little neat freak. Some of the most creative gadget ideas for the kitchen are to serve the cooking for one need.

College and for several years after that I cooked for one and it was enough to kill the pleasure I found in cooking. No number of tips for solo-cooking or gadgets would change that for me. As far as I am concerned, cooking is fun only if it is for more than one. I am lucky that J has a sophisticated palate for her age. Kiddie meals don't appeal to her and neither do hastily cooked meals at home.To impress J, food has to be cooked slow and right - with love and attention. I am glad that she has high standards even if I most often fail to make the grade.