Cooking Desi in Videsh

This year's summer project was to "Learn to cook an Indian dish every day."  After my first attempt, I decided to set a more realistic goal "Learn to cook an Indian dish every week."  After my second attempt, I watered that down to "Learn to cook an Indian dish.  Any dish.  However long it takes."  This seems to be a bit more than I can handle all summer, but I'm gonna make it work no matter what.  I know what you are thinking: Not another blog on cooking!!  Well, this is more than that (for me, but for you it may just be another blog about cooking).  My goal on this blog is to combine my family tradition of cooking tasty Indian food, with learning about the Indian spices which go into the food, and my childhood memories of Indian food in a not so Indian environment.

Let me start by telling you about my first experience cooking an Indian dish for the very first time (with no mommy supervision).  In fact, my mother is the one who gave me that idea.  She called from work one afternoon and randomly said, "There are a few boiled potatoes in the refrigerator.  Cook them."  I said, "Ok."  What I wanted to say was, "Do you know which daughter you are talking to?"  I am the youngest of three sisters and well, of course I'm the spoiled baby of the family.  I don't cook, I just have the two older ones do it for me.  In college, my friends knew me as the "Microwave Queen" because I knew how to warm up a frozen dish, courtesy of my mother, just the right amount to make it taste like it was freshly cooked.  Of course, I also managed to learn how to make grilled cheese sandwiches, Campbell's soup, garlicky mashed potatoes, tomato sauce pasta, and all sorts of veggie salads and subs.  BTW, I love carbs and vegetables.  I've been a vegetarian since Jr High so this is pretty much the only options I have on a regular basis.  But now I'm out of college and understand that adults need variety.  Plus, I'm Indian - that makes knowing how to cook mandatory.  Do you know how many times people have come up to me and said "I love chicken tikka masala and those little triangles with potatoes in them."  The latter are called samosa and they are a staple, as well as a cheap option for snack/breakfast/evening munchies and go great with Chai (not the powdered kind and please do not get me started on that).  Going back to cooking potatoes, I embarked in a journey to replicate my mother's potatoes.  My mom makes the best food ever.  She knows how to make everything under the sun.  Realistically, I knew I can't make the potatoes exactly like hers, so my goal became just to please her, make her say that I was the best daughter she had, rub it in to my sisters who have learned how to make a few dishes that are enjoyably edible.

Potatoes are a staple in many cultures and they are so versatile that it is difficult to go wrong with them - unless of course if you are me, then you will manage to screw up boiling water.  My fondest memory of eating potatoes was when we would ride the train to and from Calcutta and Jabalpur to visit my maternal grandparents.  My mother would make puris (fried puffy bread) and dry potatoes as both of those items do not need refrigeration and make good travel partners.  My mother would role up the potatoes inside the puri and hand one to us to eat while exploring and playing on the train.  Puris and potatoes (aka aloo) were also a popular dish during festival season or parties, as again, you can eat them any time you get hungry and carry the role everywhere in one hand so you don't miss a moment of the celebration.  I also remember stuffing sour mango pickle into the roll which made the dish 10 times better - especially if the mango was pickled by my grandmother.  This combination continues to be popular and can be commonly found in religious institutions as blessed food that is passed out to the parishioners after the prayer ceremony.

Back to me cooking the potato.  A side note: I live with my parents (and I'm damn proud of it) and one day I came home from work to find my mother glued to the computer.  She had her headphones on and was intently watching something on YouTube.  Once I got her attention, she screamed (not realizing that the headphones were still on her ears and at maximum volume) "Here, watch this and learn how to cook it."  It was a recipe to make Upma (another common breakfast dish in Indian - similar to cream of wheat) using bread crumbs and vegetables.  My mother had found the joy of YouTube was not only watching Hindi films (which is what I do regularly - another thing I'm not ashamed of), but also learning new variations of dishes she knew how to make and how to cook new dishes she hadn't attempted yet under the gentle guidance of Indian housewives and mothers living all over the world.  My mother had also realized that this is the easiest way for me to learn how to cook Indian food and there is no excuse why I should continue to avoid this art.

On that fateful day, when my mother instructed me to cook the vegetable of the day, she even told me some of her favorite YouTube chefs who can give me step by step instructions on how to cook a potato.  I am not going detail all the ingredients and step by step instructions as you can probably find those yourself on either Google or YouTube.  Rather, I'd like to keep this blog about the lessons I learned and the mistakes I made while attempting this art.  I researched on as many recipes as I could find on reliable websites to make dry potatoes as curried potatoes seemed too daunting.  FYI, a traditional North Indian Thali (lunch plate) consists of the following: Roti (hand made tortilla), basmati rice, one dry vegetable dish (aka sabzi), one curry or dal (lentils),  yogurt, papad (a salty and crunchy cracker), achaar (pickled vegetable), and a fresh green chili with onions (optional).  Some regions put a pile of salt on the side which just seems unreasonable as there is so much salt in food itself - but it's tradition and people follow it without question.  That's the one thing you will notice about India if you ever get a chance to visit, people follow family tradition, religion, and medical advice without questioning the usefulness and applicability of said ideas.  Now, if they just followed instructions on how to wash my clothes, I would loose fewer buttons from my shirts and my jeans would be softer.

Back to the potato, so I found a simple recipe for dry potato and all I had to do was put the ingredients, along with the boiled potatoes, into a kadai and let it cook on medium for 5 minutes.  I was able to easily find the ingredients (since I know exactly where my mother keeps all of her spices and I am able to sniff them out with my trusty nose - and if you know how many spices Indian people like to keep in our cupboards, you will know why I call my nose trusty).  I did exactly what the recipe told me to do: I ensured the correct measurement of all spices and salt, and stirred every few minutes to make sure that the potatoes are not getting stuck the bottom.  The potatoes were almost ready, when I stupidly decided to kick it up a notch and put some tomato paste into the dish, similar to how I have seen my mother do a million and one times.  Well, I ended up putting half a can of tomato paste into the dish made of four small potatoes.  Then I added water and pretended that I made the worlds best curry.  It was in fact the world worst version of curry.  The dish was so bad, when my mother came home and looked at it, she didn't say anything.  I asked her how it tasted, her reply was, "Why don't you taste it and tell me.  I already know how it's gonna taste."  Hm...I screwed up.  I put too much tomato paste and it was overtaking all the other flavors.  In fact, there was so much past, that the potato (a carb that soaks up almost anything it touches) couldn't handle it and was folding under pressure of the acidic nature and sweetness of the past and the thick consistency of the gravy.

*Lesson learned: put less than one spoon of the tomato paste, just enough to make the curry red but not so much that you can see the paste floating on top of the vegetable.

My mother had to fix the dish by adding lots of rajma (kidney beans) and even more water.  I was very disappointed in myself for screwing up the first Indian dish I tried to make.  I thought cooking would be a natural talent in me because all the women in my family know how to make really really good food.  I know everyone thinks their mom makes the best food, but seriously, I have other people who are not blood related to me tell me that my mom makes the best food.  I have a secret feeling many of my friends remain so just because of the cuisine which so often accompanies my friendship (also courtesy of my mother).  Well, I'm sure they also get a kick out of my sarcastic and admittedly naive point of view.  This is when I realized that cooking is actually an art, a God gifted talent, and a blessing.  If you don't like the spiritual analogy, think of it as a chess game that you have to play using the kadai as your board, the ingredients as your pieces, and strategy is to use the pieces one at a time in a way that they work together and achieve one goal - to blend together perfectly as one yet retain their individual qualities, taste and texture.  In my case, the potatoes lost the battle against the tomato paste.  But this was just the first time, the trial run, and ice breaker.  

It took a couple of weeks before I revisited my goals of learning how to cook Desi, but it turned out more edible the second time around.  The second experience will be continued in the next edition of "Cooking Desi in Videsh."