Flames

Have you ever been tempted by somebody cooking Mediterranean food, gently pouring exquisite red wine in a pan and heating it so that it catches fire and shows some of the most enticing colours; colours such that you feel like you want to dissolve in them for the rest of your mortal life?? The only thing that would hamper you from living this fantasy is probably the absence of such conditions in the first place in a day to day life. Well…meet someone who just overcame that barrier and found a way to enjoy the same feeling in a normal Indian kitchen!!!

Actually it’s just that I’ve been trying my hand at cooking lately. My journey in the kitchen dates back to the times when I was about 9 years old when I had my first encounters of the fiery kind. My hunger had driven me into the kitchen and like many other fellow Indians, my cooking started with the good old Maggie 2-minute noodles to satiate my writhing guts. The war on terror (of hunger) has continued unabated since then, just like its namesake; with no hope of a truce in the foreseeable future. 13 years old and I baked my first pizza. (Not joking at all…though it was more of Indian food than Italian & the recipe included some bread, capsicum, tomatoes, onions, cheese & of course ketchup; which due to lack of a better noun would be called a pizza.) Later at the age of 14, I successfully made my first cup of tea without using any clay or a potter’s wheel. Just like the hero grows up in a 1980s Bollywood movie, my cooking continued with stupendous pace with me learning to make laddoos, coffee, shakes, curries & earning a perfect 10 at the age of 20 to make my first chapatti which was just-the-right-thickness, just-the-right-softness, just-right-grilled…and behold thy breath; A PERFECT CIRCLE! (Though this was just a prototype and mass production would take a long long while…& efficiency, another 3 millennia.) Today I learnt to successfully make much-better-than-just-edible dal & rice. And this is where I found the treasures of the kind known only to Mediterranean chefs, (except for all those who also happen to be in direct contact with fire.)

Place: Kitchen at my home
Preparation: “Tadka” for my dal

I started heating the oil and put some “sarso” in it. My hunt for some of the other exquisite ingredients (read Asafetida/ “Hing”) took me longer than anticipated and when I returned victorious to my workstation, as if out of nowhere, I was greeted by the sight of a three coloured flame in the “tadke ka katora”, just like we learnt in our 6th grade text-book!!! And as the towering inferno went higher & higher, and for a cross-section in time, I could unravel the mystery of what would be the feeling of burning the house down!

Thankfully the size of the inferno towered to just about 7” and the fire department’s services were not availed. Much needless to say that I managed to escape without a scratch or a burn (actually I didn’t runaway...to quote from the poem Casabianca, “The boy stood on the burning deck!”). The tadka was then remade by my very educated mother who just showed how to make a proper tadka, (can’t one see anything else except the cliché nine planets?) And when I started boiling it, I put a few “Aritha”s (used to treat hair) instead of “Kokam” (an ingredient that gives tang); identified the error & corrected within a response time of less than 58 million nano-seconds. For the record, the dal was highly delicious & I savoured it with my mother & sister. Hope that in the times to come, I manage to cook up something as delicious everyday with as much fun as today and lesser danger...

Hasmukh :)