The Spice Of Life - Blog

Easy Bake Oven

2009-07-19T21:32:00.000-07:00

We're baaaaaack! Sorry for the delay but the trip home took two weeks, followed by two weeks of trying to get back in the swing of things Pacific island style, and we're just now getting it all together. We do plan to continue blogging, maybe not quite as frequently as before, but we will be posting more about food in general, less about specifically Indian and Keralan food and life. With that out of the way, let me bring up a subject near and dear to my heart - the Joy of Baking (and I don't mean the kind that starts with rolling papers).

Right before we moved to Bowen Island 8 years ago, we sourced appliances for our dream kitchen, should we ever be able to afford it. We priced the perfect gas stove - four burners with a griddle in the middle, the perfect fridge with the freezer drawer on the bottom and built-in stacking ovens. When we walked into the kitchen of the house that we were yet to buy, we saw all of those items already there: a Wolf range, Miele ovens and the stainless fridge with freezer drawer below. That, combined with the garden and stunning view made us purchase the property - it was meant for us! We haven't looked back since.

Of course, several years have passed and we've learned the hiccoughs of the place; the Miele ovens are tres Euro, meaning that they are a good two inches narrower than any North American model and many, many baking dishes won't fit, even on the diagonal. That said, I LOVE my ovens. I cannot imagine living with only one oven (well, yes, I can, since in India we didn't have an oven at all!), we regularly have both in use.

I am a baker at heart. I like to cook and I'm pretty good at it (although I think Rob is a better cook, he has the passion for it) but I LOVE to bake. Since we've been back, the oven has produced Rosemary Cornmeal Epi, Kalamata Olive Bread and Multigrain Honey Granola (just to name a few). My baking obsession started early in life. My mother, the nutritionist, rarely had treats and desserts around the house. We were a green pepper, powdered milk and fruit family (not necessarily all together), not a cookies, ice cream and cake family. But my mother was all for encouraging her children in the kitchen so if I announced that I wanted to make cookies, she wouldn't have dreamed of stopping me. And, believe me, if the only way a sweet tooth like me was going to get cookies was to bake them myself, I'd happily memorize the dog-eared copy of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook and grease up the pan.

Back in the 70s my folks hired a photographer to follow us kids around for a day or two. My parents didn't want posed, stiff photos, they wanted slice of life stuff captured in black and white for all eternity. The photographer was a lovely woman but I was nervous. She suggested that I go about my life and maybe do some of the things I enjoyed the most. I was 7 years old and I guess I could have dug up the garden or made some clothes for my dolls but I decided to bake a cake instead. It was a chocolate cake made in a bundt pan. Southern Georgia Chocolate Pound Cake, to be exact. We have these great grainy black and white photos of me, hair in two braids, a wispy tendril escaping confinement, paisley smock top mixing up the batter. The photos are great, as was the cake, despite the fact that I was so nervous I left out the eggs. You know, despite its reputation as an exacting science, sometimes baking CAN be forgiving. But I'm not giving you the recipe for the pound cake - that's a closely guarded secret - but you DO get the granola recipe. So turn on your oven and make some granola - go ahead, bring out your inner hippy. I dare ya'.

Multigrain Honey Granola

8 c of flakes (your choice of rolled oats, barley, rye, tritcale etc)
1 1/2 c chopped nuts (our first choice is pecans, almonds are second)
1 c dessicated unsweetened coconut
1 c hulled pumpkin seeds
2 t ground cinnamon

1/4 c oil (sunflower or other light oil)
1/2 c local honey
2 t pure vanilla extract

1 1/2 c dried fruit (raisins, craisins, chopped apricots. figs etc)

Preheat oven to 150C (300F). Mix all the dry ingredients (except the fruit) together in a large bowl. Mix wet ingredients together and pour over the dry ingredients. Mix thoroughly so that all of the dry ingredients are moistened.

Spread the mixture over two or three baking sheets lined with parchment or silicone mats. You want to cover the sheet but the mixture shouldn't be thick. Place baking sheets in the oven and bake for about 30 minutes, turning every 10 minutes so that it browns evenly and doesn't burn. Take out of the oven when golden, add dried fruit and cool completely. Store in air-tight containers.

Eat with fresh fruit and yogurt or milk. Braid your hair and feel at one with the cosmos.

Ode To The Junior Wife

2009-06-13T19:46:00.000-07:00

During the time we've been here, we've often speculated as to what the locals must think of our strange little family. Rob and I are obviously too old, by Indian standards, to have a 5 year old, and who is the willowy 20-something who accompanies us everywhere? Some have thought that Emma (said willowy person) was our daughter and that Miles and Isaac are both her sons. Although, if you do the math, she would have had Miles at 13 and I'm not ready to be relegated to granny status yet (although I think that would be a lot less work)! And, if she is the mother - where is the father? This is a very traditional culture. Imaging what the locals might think of us, we have dubbed ourselves the Happy Polygamist Family. Lucky Rob has had to contend with both the senior and junior wives ganging up on him. Poor bunny.

But I couldn't have asked for a better co-wife! Emma has made our trip so much more than we could have hoped for. She slid seamlessly into our family and brought her humour and poetry with her. I'm used to being surrounded by an all-male family and it has been an absolute joy and delight to have Emma's decidedly feminine energy in the house. We brought her with us as nanny and governess for our boys and she has excelled in those areas - teaching Miles how to properly research and write a report, and also patiently teaching Isaac to read before he is even in kindergarten.

Because of Emma, Rob and I have been able to go out and film, knowing that the boys were more than well looked after. We have been able to go away overnight and know that the boys were happy, content and well-fed because Emma was there with them. But Emma has become more than a glorified babysitter and teacher. She has become family: our daughter and our friend. A fraughter? Thank you so much Emma for all that you have given to us and to our boys!

Bailey 4 life, yo!

Where's The Beef?

2009-06-06T23:20:00.001-07:00

The last thing one expects to do on a visit to India is to eat beef.

But there it is on the menu, as clear as day. Black Pepper Beef. Beef Fry. Beef Biryani. Human Beef. Actually, that one was a misprint on the menu. It was supposed to be "Hunan Beef", but apparently the menu proof-reader failed to catch that error, along with other gems such as "Om-let", "Green Peace Curry", and "Sweat and Scour Soup". Much to my surprise, people in Kerala actually eat a fair bit of beef. This I found a bit contrary to my previous ideas about India. After all, was this not the country where the cow is held sacred? They were supposed to wander the streets with painted horns like they do in the tourism posters, blissfully going from snack to snack provided by legions of Hindu devotees. These bovine behemoths pretty much have the sweet life nailed, right? In other parts of India, perhaps. In Kerala, not so much. Here, the cows appear outright skittish, as they flit nervously from tree to tree in full camouflage gear, desperately trying to avoid the legions of lunghi-clad beef aficionados desperate to plunge a fork into their bony carcasses.

There are valid historical reasons for this anomaly. Nearly 20 percent of Kerala is Christian, and Christians by and large are dedicated omnivores. If it grows, or does not move fast enough, there is a good chance it will end up on the Christian menu. Muslims, who also make up a good chunk of the population here are also dedicated beef-o-philes. Most curious of all, according to many I have talked to here, there is even a large part of the Hindu population that is fond of a wee nibble 'o' beef. All in all, faced with this carnivorous onslaught, it's a miracle that the cows of Kerala have not banded together into armed groups to defend themselves.

Our landlady Gigi offered to let us film her making puttu, which is a common food item here. It's a cylindrical concoction of coconut and rice flour, which is steamed for a few minutes. By itself, puttu is rather bland, but much like tapioca or appam, it makes a great counterpoint to something spicy, like an egg roast or chana masala. Gigi thought that it would go very well with a spicy beef fry, and not being one to argue about such things, we went ahead with that plan. Once one makes the decision to eat beef here, the next step is to procure it, and this is the step where the faint of heart might be stopped cold in their tracks. In North America, most folks are used to buying their bits of cow in large air conditioned emporiums, pushing a cart around while soothing music plays in the background. Reaching into a spotless and sterile stainless steel bin, one selects a delightfully shrink-wrapped chunk of red-dyed, feedlot-finished, hormone-injected meat charmingly nestled on a styrofoam tray. Chances are with beef like this, the cow's last thought as it saw the approaching nail gun was "Oh, thank God.... this hell is over".

In India, we do it a little bit differently. Early each morning in the local markets, the Piaggio micro flatbed trucks arrive with entire carcasses of freshly slaughtered animals, which are then carried into the marketplace on a pole by at least two men. Then the butchers go to work. Entire quarters, complete with long tails, are hung up on ancient metal hooks in front of the market stalls. Next to them hang the recently eviscerated liver, kidneys, tripe, and intestines. A severed head, freshly divested of all its skin but with horns, tongue, and eyeballs still firmly attached, is often placed in front of the stall, so that there is no doubt as to the identifying provenance of the hapless creature hanging from its hooks. There is no refrigeration of any kind. Although it appears disgusting and distasteful to some, for me, as someone who likes to hunt game for food, I can somehow relate more to this way of buying meat than the supermarket approach, where every effort is made to shield the consumer from the reality of what is being consumed. The consumer is also shielded from the multitude of sins incurred by the processes and practices of industrial meat production.

Stanley, our erstwhile landlord, pulled up on his motorcycle at 9:30 to drive me the 1 kilometer up Ponoth Road to the main market. He advised me that we were not in fact getting beef for this dish, but water buffalo. As he explained, "Beef... more taste. Some people... hurt stomach. Buffalo good...everyone". So off we zoomed up the road. The last time we went to the market, Stanley gave me a crash course in cultural acclimatization when he insisted on holding hands with me as we walked through the market. It was cool, as this is the ultimate expression of friendship for South Indian men, but I was laughing at myself about how self conscious I felt walking around in a public place, wearing what amounted to a dress, and holding my landlord's hand. With this in mind, as I'm riding on the back of his motorbike, for some reason the old song from the 50's, "The Leader Of The Pack" started to echo in my brain. At least it wasn't "My Boyfriend's Back". Fortunately, there were hand grips on the back of the bike, so I wasn't forced to wrap my arms around his waist....

At the market, Stanley quickly negotiated the proper cuts of buffalo, and our butcher went to work carving off a couple of kilos from a hanging haunch, and reducing it to smaller pieces on an ancient wooden block. He worked with incredible speed, and I was somewhat relieved to find that there was not an errant finger included in the package when we returned home. We soon were set up in Gigi's kitchen with all our camera and sound gear. The recipe for beef (buffalo) fry is actually pretty simple. A kilo of cubed meat is pressure cooked with nothing but a little salt for about a half an hour until very tender. At this point, she made us laugh out loud, because as she put the pressure cooker on the stove, she reached over for a second pressure cooker that she had started earlier which contained completely cooked buffalo! She has done so many shoots with us now, that she is thinking like a pro.

A few tablespoons of coconut oil are heated, and then two sliced onions are sauteed until golden. A few slit green chilis and some curry leaves are tossed in. Next comes the garlic and ginger, which gets stirred around for a minute. The drained pressure cooked kilo of buffalo is then added, along with a couple of tablespoons each of coriander powder and chili powder. A tablespoon of turmeric and at least a tablespoon of black pepper. One heaping tablespoon of Garam Masala, which Gigi always grinds herself from a mix of cinnammon, clove, star anise, fennel, and cardamom. While this is being stirred about, the liquid from the pressure cooker is boiled and reduced down substantially, almost to a syrup. This gets added to the buffalo mixture and stirred some more until the mixture is fairly dry. A little salt to taste, and there it is!

Gigi set out a plate for Laurel and me with a log of freshly made puttu, and a mound of the buffalo fry. It was quite fantastic. Even Laurel, the former staunch vegetarian, had to admit that it was pretty darn tasty. Addictive, in fact. Afterwards, we were more than a little saddened when we realized that this was the last shoot that we would be doing with Gigi before we left. She has been very generous with her time and her knowledge, and we really owe her a huge thank you. She made up another plate of buffalo and puttu, and Laurel, Stanley, and I walked next door to our house to feed the boys. A few hours later, Stanley rang the doorbell with a plate of tapioca and buffalo. It was like bovine crack. Must..... stop.... eating....

I fully expect to see a Burger King outlet on my next visit. They already have Domino's Pizza...

The Journey Continues...

2009-06-02T03:54:00.001-07:00

"I'm so glad we had this time together. Just to have a laugh or sing a song."

Those were the days. Early 1970. Rainy night. Homework done. Dishwasher humming after a meal of moosemeat, boiled vegetables, and an iceberg lettuce salad with Kraft Italian dressing. The whole family, except the one who called dibs on the hideous green reclining chair, would nestle into the neo-psychedelic floral patterned Simpsons Sears polyester sofa, complete with its liberal coating of Scotch Guard. The spanking new Zenith colour TV would finally warm up to the point where the snow would mostly disappear from the screen, and the opening theme from "The Carol Burnett Show" would drift out of the speaker in glorious mono. "These Zeniths are good", my dad would proudly say. "Way better than that Japanese crap. It has Chromacolour, you know...".

We loved this show, and it always used to bring my mom to tears of laughter, occasionally causing her to spit out her Ovaltine through her teeth in a fine stream back into her mug when Tim Conway would crack up Harvey Korman, who would gamely attempt to make it through the scene whilst trying his professional best to suppress a belly laugh. Our dog, a mangy poodle that my brother did his absolute best to torture at every opportunity, would often lay half buried in a harvest gold sea of shag carpet so thick that younger visitors to the house were known to get lost for days at a time. He would sit there motionless for hours, shedding fleas, hair, and bodily secretions deep into the shag carpet, exposing only his nose and eyes above the carpet like some mutant French crocodile.

More than once, as we were sitting drinking our malty beverage and snacking on Peak Freen's biscuits, enraptured by the comedic genius piped into our home by the brand new miracle of cablevision (no more antenna on the roof for us!), a disturbed look would come over my father's face, and he would wrinkle up his nose in disgust. In an accusing voice, he'd turn to my mother on the couch and pointedly ask "Was that you?". A noxious effluvium of evil hung motionless in the air, as if placed there as punishment by Satan himself. Embarrassed by the sudden negative attention, Mom would invariably say "Oh heavens no, Kenneth. It was the dog". We all knew better, but it somehow seemed acceptable to not call her on it and let Mom have her fantasy moment. She brought new meaning to the term "silent, but deadly". Mom's gone now, and I feel it is safe to tell the world. It was not the dog. It was never the dog.

At the end of the Carol Burnett show, Carol always sang a little song, thanked the cast, and gave an affectionate little tug on her left ear, which I learned many years later was a secret signal to her grandmother. Well now we're coming to the end of our little show, and it's time to thank the cast before we sing our little song. After living in India for 6 months, we find ourselves nearly at the end of our sub-continental sojourn, and as the final days here count down, I must confess that we're all a little stunned. Stunned that 6 months has gone by so fast. Stunned that we've actually done what we set out to do, namely collect real recipes from real people in real kitchens. Stunned that what has become the norm over the last several months will be but a memory in less than two weeks. We've been doing all our shopping at markets where you can get your dinner killed on demand. We've bunked in overnight trains with strangers. We've angrily haggled over 10 rupees with usurious rickshaw drivers. We've become adept at crossing 6 lanes of chaotic traffic as a unit, and somehow reaching the other side of the street with the same number we started off with. We've changed, and we've done it as a family.

Yes, we have a couple more things lined up to shoot, but it all seems rather bittersweet. Our brains are already half focused on the next part of the adventure: Singapore, Beijing, and Tokyo. Home, and all the chores and garden work that we've put off for half a year, is looming large in our collective consciousness. But we must really take a moment now and thank the people here that have made a difference during our stay here. Firstly, our landlords Stanley and his wickedly good cook of a wife Gigi. Thanks for taking a chance on a bunch of scruffy Canadians, and allowing us to rent your house. Thanks for being so welcoming and having us into your home not only for Christmas dinner, but for many other fantastic meals as well. We're not sure why you decided to make the extra effort of renting to foreigners, but we're really glad that you did. Isaac is really going to miss playing video games at your house while Gigi feeds him appams with sugar!

Rajesh, our good friend and neighbour, completely changed our lives when he offered us a ride to the main road early on in our stay. Thanks to Rajesh, I have discovered the joys of riding on the back of a motorcycle to go and play football at 6:30 morning. You turned us on to the Toddy Shop, the Punjab House, and virtually every secret location to buy crabs on the island of Vypeen. We've often thought about just how different our trip would have been if we had not met you.

Chitra, our dear friend and chief culinary guide during our stay, has been an incredible source of knowledge, recipes, and good humour. Thank you for being such a great cook and for tirelessly giving of your time and energy to help us plumb the mysterious depths of this cuisine that seems to flow out of you with no effort at all.

And finally, thanks to Gee. Gee has an amazing talent for making the impossible possible. More times than we can count, Laurel and I have been overwhelmed by your generosity, hospitality, and superb problem-solving abilities. You're a pretty good cook, too!

All of you have shown us a totally different side of India than we saw last time we were here, and we're humbled by how you've welcomed us into your homes and your lives. You've succeeded in redefining hospitality for us, and I think it is safe to say that without your connections and logistical support, our filming efforts would have been far more challenging and far less successful. Thank you.

Also thanks to Venu, Gopal & Usha in Coimbatore, Jacob at Haritha Farms, Alok, Varghese, Anwar & Sajna, Rajindran & Suma, and the multitudes that have somehow contributed in ways both large and small to this strange, and in retrospect, presumptuous endeavor. We were pretty naive to think that we could just parachute in and learn everything there is to know about Indian food in 6 months. All of you have made for a pretty soft landing for the Bailey family. This is far from our last blog post, and there will be many more before we reach home. We really wanted to take a moment to offer some proper thanks to people who have really made a difference while our brains were still functioning!

"Seems we just get started and before you know it... Comes the time we have to say so long..."

Holy Traffic Jam, Batman!

2009-05-25T22:55:00.000-07:00

Tuesdays in Kaloor can be an adventure, requiring extra thought and planning if you are heading out of the neighbourhood. Up on the main road for about 5 blocks or so, traffic crawls to an almost-stand-still as motorcycles and auto rickshaws jockey for position between the big red buses, all trying to get past the hordes of the faithful. This is the flock at St Antony's and they swarm the church on Tuesdays. We haven't yet figured out why Tuesdays are special but every Tuesday, rain or shine, hundreds of people flood the outside of the church, adorned with a 2 foot high neon sign that says "St Antony Pray for Us", many buying candles and incense to light in prayer, and blocking the traffic for hours on end. We have come to refer to this as the Holy Traffic Jam and we do our best to avoid the area on Tuesdays. But that is not always possible. Last Tuesday we were picked up and taken to Chitra's catering kitchen to do the last day of filming on the epic sadhya shoot. It took an extra half hour to make our way through the 5 block snag of devotees, beggars missing limbs, and candle vendors, but Chitra was all prepped and waiting for us when we did arrive. We had four dishes to do that day: olan, kaalan, kichadi and pachadi, all coconut rich dishes that highlight the main ingredients in Keralan cuisine. The cooking of the kaalan needed to be spread over more than one day but otherwise we were able to pull off the shoot successfully despite the delay. Thank Shiva (obviously St Antony is far too busy on Tuesdays to be looking after us)!

The last four dishes for the sadhya have very similar ingredients but the method used to cook and the slight variations in ingredients make each of these dishes distinct.

Olan has a very watery "gravy", making it a lot like a soup but it is not served in a bowl or a cup but is treated like all the other curries that make up the sadhya - a spoonful on the banana leaf to mix with your rice. It has little brown beans called cowpeas in English and thin slices of pumpkin and winter melon floating in a coconut milk broth. It is gently flavoured with green chillies and reminded me a lot of a Thai soup like Tom Ka Gai. Fragrant, a little sweet, and soothing.

Kaalan is a time-hog, taking 4 hours to reduce to the proper consistency, but oh, is it worth it! A curd (yogurt) base with turmeric, green chillies, yams, plantain, fresh ground coconut and finished with coconut oil, mustard seeds, dried red chillies and curry leaves. It is tangy, creamy, rich and spicy all at once. Apparently kaalan is rarely made at home these days, not surprising considering the attention it requires, and is usually purchased for the special feast meal at Onam (Kerala's harvest festival and the annual occasion for the sadhya).

Kichadi can be made with different vegetables (cucumber, beets, tomato, okra) but for this version Chitra deep-fried rings of bitter gourd (pavakka), that knobbly pale green cucumber-like vegetable you can find in various Asian grocery stores. Rob and I have not had a lot of luck with bitter gourd. We've had some very good dishes in restaurants, so we know that we like it when it's prepared well, but have had no success using it ourselves, it always turns out too bitter. So armed with new tips and tricks from Chitra, we are hoping to turn our luck around. Apparently one looks for the palest, least green, bitter gourd when out shopping (who knew?) for bitter gourds. After frying the bitter gourd rings, a sauce is made of fresh grated coconut, cumin seed, mustard seeds, green chillies and curd and then the dish is tempered with coconut oil, more mustard seeds, dried red chillies and curry leaves.

The most interesting dish was the pachadi. Pachadi is like a main course and dessert rolled into one - sweet, spicy, fruity and creamy. Maybe that doesn't sound very appetizing but, trust me, pachadi is as tasty as it is unusual.

Pachadi (Fruit and Yogurt Curry)

2 ripe bananas, peeled and diced
1 whole pineapple, peeled and diced
11/2 c blanched peeled, chopped tomatoes
1-11/2 c water
1 t turmeric
2 t salt
1 1/2 t chilli powder
2 sprigs of curry leaves, stem removed
3 T jaggery (palm sugar, or substitute dark brown sugar)
1/2 fresh coconut, grated
1 t cumin seeds
4 fresh green chillies
3 T of water
1/2 c plain yogurt (not skim)
1 sprig curry leaves, stem removed
1 c whole grapes, stems removed

for tempering:
2 T coconut oil
1 t mustard seed
4 dried red chillies, broken into halves
1 sprig curry leaves, stem removed

Put bananas, pineapple and tomatoes in a large pot over medium high heat. Add 1c of water, turmeric, salt, chilli powder and curry leaves. Cover and simmer til soft, about 10 minutes. Add jaggery and stir to melt.

Grind the meat of 1/2 a fresh coconut with cumin seeds, green chillies and about 3T of water in a blender or food processor to a smooth paste. Add the coconut paste to the pineapple mixture, stir, turn heat up and check for salt. Let simmer for a few minutes until the mixture is hot again. Turn the heat to low and add yogurt. Add the leaves of another sprig of curry leaves and take off the heat. Stir in grapes.

To temper the pachadi, in another small pan, heat 2T coconut oil until hot. Add mustard seeds and wait for them to pop. When the seeds are popping, add the dried red chillies and the curry leaves. Take off heat immediately and pour over pineapple mixture. Serve with rice and other, less sweet curries as a part of an South Indian meal.

But, enough cooking, let's get back to the 'hood. St Antony's gives the neighbourhood colour. Churches here are different from the staid and quiet churches back home, they have a lot more in common with Hindu temples than Canadian churches - colourful, loud, smokey with incense and jasmine-blossom scented.

One day we were returning to our house from Fort Cochin in an autorickshaw. The driver of the auto was a particularly kamikaze driver - we were all holding on tightly as he swerved around buses into oncoming traffic, honked at cars that were slowing him down and yelled at motorcyclists (and the family of 5 hanging off the motorcycle) that were unfortunate enough to be anywhere near us. Suddenly, without any warning, the driver swerved over to the curb, came to an abrupt halt out front of St Antony's, jumped out of the rickshaw, and in about 20 seconds had purchased a candle, lit it, placed it on the alter outside with a quick prayer - leapt back in the rickshaw and carried us on our way. We all felt so much better (not!) as he plunged us back into the thick of oncoming traffic. We did, however, make it home safely, so buddy obviously had his priorities in order. This has to be the first time in history that an Indian rickshaw driver said a prayer while driving, it is usually the passengers in the back doing the praying!

"I was driving home early Sunday morning through Bakersfield, Listening to gospel music on the colored radio station, And the preacher said 'You know, you always have the Lord by your side', And I was so pleased to be informed of this, That I ran 20 red lights in His honor, Thank you Jesus, thank you Lord!"

This is our 100th blog post! Can we yak, or what?

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

2009-05-21T23:47:00.000-07:00

My neighbour is a dick.

That's the Bad. Seriously. I've been a good polite Canadian for 6 months, but I've had just about enough of my neighbour, who sees fit to blast his crapbox CD player at full volume as early as 6:45 in the morning. Every morning. The cheesy speakers, unable to deal with his feverish demands for greater volume, simply collapse under the strain and distort apathetically. It is painful. This has been going on since the first day we moved here, and shows no sign of letting up. To make matters worse, he appears to be the proud owner of only one CD, and therefore has no qualms about playing the same damn thing over and over and over again. It is pop music at its most insipid, and the lack of any redeeming musical merit annoys me just about as much as the volume. If he woke us up every morning with some Miles Davis, or Bach, it might not be so bad. Once he's sure that we're all awake, say around 8:30 or 9 AM, the music stops until evening, when his crapbox black and white TV plays Malayalam soap operas at similar volume levels with doors and windows open, broadcasting the inanity throughout the neighborhood for all to hear. I've come to believe that he must think he's actually performing a public service. I'm amazed that someone can have such profound disregard for his neighbours. At home, I would have had the police on speed dial and made a ritual out of calling to complain on a daily basis. But somehow, although I have actually briefly contemplated murder, I haven't. And I don't know why.

Oowee oowee ooooo.... wah wah wahhh...

Here's the Ugly. I have been pushed to the brink of madness with this. Earplugs don't help, as our bedroom window is within 10 feet of this Devil's Own PA System. I have worked up some elaborate revenge fantasies. Perhaps renting a PA system and pumping Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" at 3 AM would have an impact. Some Nine Inch Nails perhaps. One particularly bad night, I sat seething on the front deck, unsure as to how to manage my anger. The previous night, a couple of coconuts had fallen to the ground from our tree in the yard. I should point out here that my neighbour is a poor man. His house is ramshackle, and the tiled roof is like a patchwork quilt of blue pieces of tarp, badly patched cement, and pieces of wood and salvaged plexiglass designed to keep most of the rain out for one or two more seasons before the whole thing collapses in complete decay. There I was with coconut actually in hand, and contemplating lobbing it across the fence and onto his roof. In my mind, I imagined it shattering the roof tiles and plunging through the roof and making a direct hit onto the television set, causing the picture tube to implode right in front of him. At which point I would casually walk out of the gate, walk past the open door, wave, and say something like "Jeez, I guess the wind really caught that one, eh?". I casually passed the coconut from hand to hand as I tried to estimate which tile I would have to break in order to inflict maximum damage. After a couple of minutes, I put the coconut down. I just couldn't do it. I satisfied myself by hurling a small pebble onto the roof, sort of like warning shot across the bow. It rattled off a couple of tiles and then onto the ground. He never even heard it, and I didn't feel any better.

Shrinking back from the edge of this emotional abyss, I began to see things a little differently. This guy is poor. Dirt poor. He gets up at 5 AM because it's normal for him to do a few chores in the coolest part of the day. His CD player, TV, and one CD are possibly the only luxury items he will ever be able to afford. Why should he not be proud of that? I was going to return home to my vast collection of electronic convenience items, but he was going to still be here with his one CD and TV, trying to squeeze some sweet enjoyment from the massive lemon that life had handed him. It dawned on me that the ugliness was in my own brain. It was not a proud moment.

Oowee oowee ooooo.... wah wah wahhh...

And now the Good. This week Gee made good on his promise to show us the recipe for his famous Crab Roast and Scampi Fry. Earlier in the day, Gee had bought a bunch of smaller female crabs and several of what he calls "scampi", which are a like a cross between a very large (7-8 inches) prawn, and a langoustine. They have long, spidery claws that can double their overall length. It was the beginning of the rainy season, and this is the time where the crabs and prawns are at their sweetest, we are told. These are creatures of the brackish Kerala backwaters, and are quite different from the Dungeness crab and Pacific Spot Prawns that we are used to getting. Without cooking them at all, Gee popped off the shells of the crabs, and after making sure that all the yummy roe from the female crabs had been scraped out into the pot, the shells and the small legs were discarded. He then cleaned off the gills and cut the bodies in half. Each crab yielded 4 pieces: two body halves and two large claws. The claws were then cracked with the dull side of a knife blade so that the masala could mingle with the meat. Into a large pot they all went, along with as much of the juices from the crabs as could be salvaged. Next stop was the mixie, where Gee combined about 4 tablespoons of fresh ground black pepper, nearly 20 green chilis, a good chunk of ginger, and 4 or 5 small red onions into a coarse paste. Once the masala paste was made, Gee took half of it and used his hands to mix it in well with the crab in the pot. Then the pot was covered and placed over a flame or just long enough to cause a little steam to escape before the crab was removed from the heat. The other half of the masala was then fried in a large pot until it started to darken and get quite fragrant. Then the rest of the crab/masala was added, along with some salt. The whole thing is continually stirred and fried until the masala that coats the crab is quite dark, and the mixture starts to get a little dry. Mmmmmmmmm....

The scampi were left with their bodies still attached to the heads (the tastiest part!), and only the shell of the tail section was removed. Gee blended up shallots, garlic, ginger, and curry leaves in the mixie, and then added some salt, red chili powder, and turmeric. He carefully folded this into the bowl with the scampi and massaged the masala into the scampi, being careful not to be too vigorous, lest the heads become separated from the bodies. He heated up some coconut oil (2 cups or so), and when it was hot enough to sizzle, he gently placed the scampi into the oil to fry. It's hard to describe the wonderful smells that we were experiencing in that kitchen, but it was a seafood lover's dream. After listening for the telltale "pop" sound, Gee flipped them over to evenly cook. When he finally pulled them out of the pan, they were perfect. The masala coating them was crispy, salty, and coconutty, but the prawns were tender and perfectly cooked. The heads revealed another treasure trove of sweetness to boot. The were so good that Laurel and I unashamedly were picking bits of crispy masala off the serving dish long after the prawns had disappeared. The crab was equally marvelous. Black pepper is a most underrated spice, and the combination of a large amount of fresh black pepper with green chili made for a complex taste that seemed to go on forever. Even Gee's wife Chitra, the staunchest of vegetarians, admitted that the kitchen smelled so good, that for the first time in her life she was actually considering having a taste of seafood! The Good was really Good.

Oowee oowee ooooo.... wah wah wahhh...

My neighbour is still a dick. But I understand...

Sadya Couldn't Be Here

2009-05-18T23:11:00.000-07:00

On the plate, it doesn't seem like such a big deal.

A fresh green banana leaf was placed before me, as I creaked and groaned and somehow managed to fold my aging carcass into a cross-legged sitting position on the woven mat. Chitra, our wonderful chef friend who had spent the better part of the last week and a half preparing for this meal, carefully served up her creations one by one onto the banana leaf. A total of twenty four items go into the traditional Sadya meal, and Chitra had patiently walked Laurel and me through the creation of every dish. First, she placed payasam (a sweet cardamom-infused thin pudding much revered here) onto the leaf. Then a little salt. Then a flurry of traditional vegetarian dishes, along with several types of pickle, papad, and banana chips. A huge mound of the Keralan "chubby rice" topped with a healthy, and I do mean healthy, ladle of sambar. Then finally, a dollop of pure ghee. My expression was one of pure glee.

The order of appearance of all the items on the banana leaf is dictated by tradition, based on the principles of Ayurveda, the ancient "life-science" of India. The guiding principles are certainly beyond the scope of this humble blog post, so I'll just stick to the food. As I mentioned in a previous post, in a proper Sadya meal, there must be a full spectrum of tastes, ranging from salty, sweet, hot and spicy, bland, crunchy, and bitter. Every dish is prepared without any onions or garlic, which is unusual, but based on the Brahmin idea that members of the onion family tend to distract the mind away from focus on cosmic oneness, and instead shift the focus to thoughts about how hot your wife looks in her new outfit. Despite the absence of the garlic and onions I love, the dishes in this meal were anything but devoid of flavour. They were, in fact, spectacular. And my wife still looked good.

We had started the meal preparation the previous week with a trip to visit the lady who makes the papads by hand. Then, the next afternoon, we went to visit a Brahmin catering crew who were kind enough to show us the preparation of Payasam, which is the traditional dessert. It was shocking to see how much effort actually goes into this one dish. First, they make a kind of noodle called "ada" by making a thin paste from broken brown rice flour, oil, and water. This paste is then spread out on banana leaves and the leaves are rolled up and tied with a bit of fiber from the leaf. The finished items, which look like rolled up diplomas from Banana University, are then tossed into a large cauldron to boil for a long time. We were told to return in the morning, to see the transformation from diploma to noodle, and sure enough, at 5 AM, our faithful friend Gee pulled up in front of the house. It was still very dark, and Muslim prayers murmured somewhere off in the distance as this sleepy trio drove back to the banquet hall with camera and sound equipment.

The catering crew was still going strong, as they had actually worked through the night to ensure that their feast would be ready on time. The crew, composed of barefoot and shirtless mostly older men with some pretty questionable dental work, were all clad in orange lungis as they scurried about the fluorescent lit kitchen. We were led out back, where the "ada" was unrolled from the banana leaves, and then pressed through some wire mesh on a frame to create the noodles that would later be mixed with the payasam. It was all over by 5:30 AM, so we packed up our gear and headed back home to bed. The things we do to get the proper film footage...

Over the next week or so, our friend Chitra worked very hard to gather all the ingredients and the recipes for the remaining items in the Sadya meal that she was going to demonstrate for us. It took us five days of shooting, and on each day covered about four dishes. The pickles and papad were done, so we focused on the parade of other dishes. The first day, we made Sambar and Rasam (pepper water), which actually benefit from aging a bit in the fridge. Then I started to get dizzy as Chitra, seemingly without effort, managed to pull off over a period of days things like green bean thoran with coconut, fruit curry, cabbage thoran, olan, kootu curry, and masala curry. The list was actually much more comprehensive than that, but there were so many things that I could not film it all and make notes at the same time! It was marvelous to watch this woman work. At no time did she consult a recipe or look at a cookbook. It just flowed out of her in the most natural way, and everything was absolutely delicious. It's interesting to note that while Chitra is obviously an accomplished cook, she says that her mother thinks that she can't cook at all, and that her sister is the one with the cooking talent. Normally, being a polite Canadian, I tend to defer to my elders, but in this case, it must be stated publicly that Chitra's mom is sadly misinformed. Girl can cook!

On the final day of filming, we all gathered together at Chitra's kitchen to consume this work of art. Chitra and Gee's three kids, our two boys, and Emma were all invited to sample this celebration feast. Chitra proudly dished out her creations onto the fresh banana leaves in the prescribed order. She was beaming as she related that this was actually the one year anniversary of her husband Gee's new business, and that having a Sadya meal on this day was a happy coincidence, and most auspicious. I was not about to argue. The kids ate all theirs completely, with Miles taking a second helping of rice. He's only 8, but I swear he already eats more than I do. I'm living in fear of our teenage food budget. After they were done, Gee, Chitra, Laurel, Rajesh, and me all sat down to eat this labour of love. It was amazing, and a real privilege to both eat, and also witness the making of.

Looking at my plate, I knew it was a big deal... Thanks Chitra.

Idol Thoughts

2009-05-14T23:27:00.000-07:00

It was time to get stoned.

Really stoned. Not the kind of exploding-seed-mexican-weed-out-back-of-the-high-school-dance kind of stoned, but the kind of stoned that can only come with... actual granite. While definitely harder to keep lit than it's illicit counterpart, granite offers many benefits, the most notable of which is its legality. Granite really is the only way to safely get stoned in India. I should backtrack a little... A few months back, Laurel and I went shopping in Fort Cochin, which is on an island in close proximity to Ernakulam, where we are firmly ensconced en famille. It can be reached by bridge or ferry, and we always opt to take the ferry. It's a 3 rupee, 15 minute ride on a dilapidated diesel-powered tub. One of those ocean-going disasters-in-waiting that always makes you grateful when you see the destination dock appear, as this means that there is less of a likelihood of your demise being touted in one of those headlines you always see: "Overloaded Ferry Capsizes, Hundreds Missing".

Fort Cochin is an odd little place. It's heavily geared towards the tourist trade, and flower-shirted, fanny-packed, sunburned travelers in various stages of morbid obesity are routinely disgorged from the cruise ships in order that the local merchants may prey upon them like so many oily-haired silk-shirted Venus fly traps. "Come into my shop sir! Special price!!" Here, it is not uncommon to see plastic being passed off as precious stones, and metal purported to be silver that will turn your skin green before you even leave the shop. You see a lot of white people here, more so than in Ernakulam across the bay. There is a lot of yoga tourism that happens here, and the streets are crawling with drawstring-panted, tank top-wearing European backpackers hoping to achieve some form of enlightenment on their 2 weeks away from their Dusseldorf cubicles. Turning left from the ferry dock, it's a couple of kilometers to the unfortunately named "Jewtown", home of India's oldest synagogue, where merchants lie in wait for prospective targets as the tourists run the gauntlet of cheese, dodging prodigious piles of goat poo along the way . Historically, this was a center for spice trading, and a lot of trade still goes on here. However, the vast majority of shops cater to the needs of the tourist. Carved elephants, bronze bells, silk scarves, and bad jewelry are the norm. Anything that is capable of collecting dust and proving to the neighbours that one has actually travelled to India is for sale here.

One of our missions on this trip was to collect some art, and the unfortunate reality is that Fort Cochin is actually the best place to go to shop for certain items. There are some antique stores in Jewtown that are actually quite amazing. Room after room of old (and in many cases, not so old...) carvings, boats, and even portions of entire buildings are on display. All items are fixed price, thus denying us the pleasure of haggling. On one trip we bought a few pieces and arranged to have them shipped home, and on that trip we spotted a cool looking Shiva lingam, which is a carved stone item used in ritual worship. They come in various sizes, and the one that caught our eye was about 20 inches tall, and weighed several hundred pounds. When we asked about the price, the sales person looked at the sticker attached to it. The sticker does not actually show the price. There is a hieroglyphic written on it that indicates the price only to the staff, and not to mere mortals like us, despite having read "The Da Vinci Code". She clicked her calculator a bit and calmly told us "575 US Dollars. Shipping extra". We liked it alright. Just not at that price....

A few days later, we told our friend Gee about this (are you starting to discern a pattern here?), and he said that he had a friend who was an architect, and that this friend would know where these carvings are produced locally. A week or so later, armed with suitable information, we drove out of town a few kilometers and then pulled over at the side of the road where a small carving business was set up. A corrugated tin shack served as an office, and there was a ragged blue tarp that tried its best to keep the sun off the couple of dusty shirtless men who were engaged in chipping away at some granite. Gee had some words with the boss in Malayalam, and the long and the short of it is that we commissioned this fellow to custom build the Shiva lingam for us for less than half the price they were asking in the "antique" store, with a nicer finish to boot. Emboldened, we also ordered up a great relief carving of Ganesh, a 4 tier butter lamp with base, and a stone kitchen grinder like the one we had seen in use in the notorious goat biryani episode. It would all be ready in two weeks. We were so excited, we naturally had to go and have beers with all the money we saved.

One week after that, Gee drove us out to the even more remote quarry where the work was being done. The Shiva lingam was too big to be done at the roadside workshop, so we made the trek about 30 km out of town. Several men, again under ragged blue tarps, toiled in the midday sun carving bits of temple, columns, custom stone stairwells, and of course, our lingam. It was an eye opener, to say the least. These guys work hard. It's dusty, hot, and I'm not sure what kind of medical plan is in place for the repetitive stress injuries that must certainly come with the job of whacking stone for at least 8 hours a day, every day. Satisfied that the stone work was well underway, we turned and headed back to Cochin, excited about the prospect of having fabulous hand carved stone art in our garden. It really made me think twice about my own work, which, even though it usually involves not much more than lengthy lunches and the occasional mouse click, still somehow gives me cause to complain vociferously. Note to self: get real...

Now all we have to do is get it home. Will a granite Shiva lingam fit in the overhead carry-on bin?

Currying Flavour

2009-05-11T23:11:00.000-07:00

English is a funny language. Not only does it break all of its own rules, it also has multiple meanings for the same word. Take, for example, the word "curry". As a verb, curry can mean: to groom a horse, to beat or thrash, to attempt to ingratiate through flattery and fawning, or to rebuke or criticize. As a noun, curry is a blend of spices (curry powder or what is called a masala here), a dish made with that blend, or an entirely different herb - the curry leaf (Murraya koenigii). There is also a "curry plant" (Helichrysum italicum) that smells like the aforementioned spice mix but that is not edible!

Curry Leaf, or karivepallai, is an integral part of South Indian cuisine, particularly to the food of Kerala, but does not taste anything like curry powder. There are very few dishes made here that do not incorporate the curry leaf, luckily we all love them! Something magical happens when a fresh curry leaf hits hot oil. The oil sputters from the moisture in the leaf and then the leaf gives off a fabulous aroma and gets crisp and more-ish. Not surprisingly then, the main way that curry leaves are used is in the "tempering" process. Tempering is a technique to finish many of the drier "curries", those that don't have a lot of sauce. Near the end of the cooking a mix of vegetables or meat, a separate kadai (little wok or frying pan) is heated and oil is added to it. In Kerala is is usually coconut oil. When the oil is very hot, black mustard seeds are added. When the seeds start to pop like popcorn, dried red chilies are tossed in and quickly fried in the oil to change colour. Then the leaves are pulled off of a few curry sprigs and added to the oil. The whole spluttering thing is tossed together and then the heat is turned off. All of this takes maybe 5 minutes. The resulting spiced oil is poured over the finished dish. A dish that has not been tempered is lacking a certain je ne sais quoi. Sometimes a teaspoon of methi seeds, cumin seeds or urad dal are added to the tempering to contribute to the overall flavour, texture and healthiness of the dish.

Curry leaves are fairly fibrous and so are not eaten fresh off the stalk. Because Keralan cuisine uses a lot of ground fresh coconut, the grinding process is another good time to add curry leaves. Pop the leaves of a few sprigs into the mixie (see Rob's post about majesty of the mixie here) with some grated fresh coconut and blend away. Sometimes this blended concoction is added to a dish that is cooking, other times it is the base for a coconut chutney.

When making a wetter curry, with what they call "gravy" here, whole curry leaves can be added early on in the cooking process, sort of like bay leaves. The liquid in the dish and the longer cooking time makes the leaf more palatable and digestible. It is a personal preference whether you eat the curry leaves in the final dish or whether you push them to the side of your plate as most people do with the whole dried red chilies.

In Vancouver we are lucky enough to have several stores that carry fresh curry leaves (our favourite is Asia Market on Hastings Street near Main but there are several grocery stores in Little India that also carry the leaves). Curry leaves don't have a long life once picked - a few days in the fridge, maybe a week, is about all they can handle. You can freeze or dry the leaves but the dried leaves, like dried parsley, really lack the bright flavour and essence of the leaf, frozen is preferably if you really can't get fresh. In the markets here in Cochin, vendors often throw a handful of curry leaves into your bag free of charge. But many people here have curry trees in their gardens and can pick the leaves fresh as needed. Since Murraya koenigii is a tropical plant, I'm looking into the possibility of growing a curry leaf tree as a houseplant when we get home. How cool would that be?

But back to the English language. Don't even get me started on the many definitions of "temper" or 'tempering"! As a former ESL teacher, I feel for any one who needs to learn English as a second language; it can be tricky enough for native speakers to use correctly! Spelling (anyone familiar with ghoti?)! Grammar! Idiom! Of course, it is also a joy. Its flexibility allows for playful dialogue that apparently some languages cannot accommodate. So what I am trying to say is that I don't really mean to curry, rather to curry favour with our readers out in the blogsphere and remind them, all currying aside, that voting for the Spice of Life on the Blogger Awards page only takes a minute of their time...

Pickle In My Pocket

2009-05-06T23:43:00.000-07:00

I really love pickles.

One of my favourite Far Side cartoons is the one where two gorillas are in a zoo cage, poised in front of a bunch of bananas. One says to the other (I'm paraphrasing here) "Y'know Phil, I really LOVE bananas. I mean, heck, we ALL do. But for me, it goes beyond that". That's kind of how I feel about pickles. I've been known to call out a cook from the kitchen in a restaurant and berate him mercilessly for not having the foresight to serve a proper dill pickle with a burger. I mean, really. It's just not done. You need something salty and acidic to balance out the sublime fatty juices from that grass-fed, hormone free, happy beef patty.

I've had strong picklish leanings ever since I was a boy. My mother, despite her shortcomings as a cook, actually made pretty good dill pickles for many years before she lost interest in making anything besides reservations. My favourite after school snack as a kid was one of them big salty and garlicky dills, along with a slice of nondescript orange cheddar cheese. I've tried to make dill pickles, but have never been able to duplicate her recipe. She passed away 3 years ago this week, and I suppose that my chances of having the recipe relayed to me are admittedly slim. Bugger...

The first time I visited New York was in 1991. I was a dreadlocked leather-jacketed keyboard player, recording an album ("Hey Stoopid") with Alice Cooper at Bearsville Studio in upstate Woodstock NY for several weeks. The guitar player in the band, one Stef Burns, and I decided to take a train into NYC for a day's adventure in the big city. We walked out of Grand Central Station, and the first thing I saw was a car driving past with its undercarriage emitting flames. When the car stopped at the light, a pedestrian tried to tell the driver that his car was on fire. The driver, still apparently unaware that he had perhaps minutes to vacate the car before being engulfed in flames, not only ignored the warning, but took the opportunity to yell a few choice words out the window and flip the pedestrian the finger. The flaming car took off when the light turned green for parts and fates unknown. Nobody else seemed to notice. Welcome To New Yawk.. Stef took me almost immediately to the Broadway Deli, where we ordered massive pastrami sandwiches. Waiting for the sandwiches to come, I tucked into the plate of pickles that was on the table. Half-sours! Sours! Pickled green tomatoes! A whole brave new world of pickles opened up for me right then and there. These weren't Mom's pickles at all. They were.....God's own pickles. Yahweh's own, to be more precise. Oi, such pickles.

Now I find myself quite a ways from New York City. Believe me, after 6 months here, a pastrami on rye with a little mustard would certainly go down a treat right about now. I'm in India, and while pastrami is scarce, pickles are indeed plentiful, although the pickles in India bear little resemblance to the cucumber-based Euro-pickle that we are accustomed to in North America. Pickles play a huge part in the cuisine of India, and the variations in their ingredients and preparation are as vast as the country itself. After documenting the preparation of pappadam for the traditional Sadya meal, the next thing we dove into was the creation of four different types of pickle that are used. Once again, our good friend and dedicated chef Chitra hosted us in her catering kitchen to show us how to prepare a few items. For her version of the Sadya, she made Ginger Pickle, Green Mango Pickle, Grapefruit Pickle, and Lime Pickle.

In a Sadya meal, it's important to have a variety of tastes and textures, and tradition dictates that the food items be consumed in a particular order in order to obtain maximum benefit from the meal. It is a complex mix, and sweet, sour, spicy hot, bland, cooling, and bitter items all have their prescribed place, and they all have equal importance. I use the word "prescribed" intentionally, as a proper Sadya meal is effectively an Ayurvedic prescription for well-being. The pickles play an important part. The Ginger Pickle has some heat from the ginger, but also is balanced by sweetness from the jaggery, or palm sugar. It's fantastic with rice, and frankly, this is one that I could eat right from the jar by the spoonful. The Grapefruit and Lime Pickles have a decidedly bitter taste. They are not so much meant to be eaten on their own, but as a complement to other foods. The Green Mango Pickle lies somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Redolent of chili and hing, also known as asafetida, this great pickle leans more towards the savory side of things. Although the Sadya is a pure vegetarian meal, the Mango Pickle goes great with fried fish. It's Chitra's mother's recipe, although she has tweaked it a bit.

After prepping all the ingredients, Chitra whipped through the assembly of all four pickles in short order. These things are not at all difficult to make, and once done, will sit in a jar in your fridge for weeks or months. A little salt goes a long way to preserve things. The exact recipes will once again follow in future posts once we review the tapes, but the general idea is incredibly simple: just to heat up the ingredients in a pan and put them in a jar once they are cool. It's very simple and also very rewarding. In the meantime, please enjoy the pictures we took of Chitra's masterpieces. I can't wait to get back into my own kitchen and make my own versions of these, especially the ginger and green mango. I really love pickles.... I mean, heck, we ALL do.

But for me, it goes beyond that...

My Pappadam Told Me...

2009-05-05T01:15:00.000-07:00

Well, how hard could it be, really.

Those who know us know that we've never been ones to shy away from a challenge. In just over 9 years of marriage, we've had two children, renovated houses, built recording studios, started a couple of businesses, opened a bed and breakfast, opened a retail store, and most recently, moved to India to study the food and culture. So when our friends Chitra and Gee casually suggested that we document the making of a Sadya, or Keralan traditional feast meal, we barely flinched. It's just a dinner, right? Pffffft.....Then we had a production meeting with Chitra to plan the filming, and it was then that the true scope of the endeavour was revealed. When I looked at my Excel spreadsheet of dishes and planned shooting days at the end of our two hour discussion, it became apparent that this was going to be anything but casual.

A Sadya, the Malayalam word for "feast", is a traditional Keralan vegetarian meal served up for special occasions only. It's a very fussy and involved meal to prepare, and there are some fairly strict rules and customs for it's correct preparation. A full-on Sadya meal has 24 separate dishes in it, and the order on which they appear on the banana leaf plate, and the order in which they are consumed are strictly observed. There are Ayurvedic principles involved, and therefore many do's and don'ts that may seem a little bizarre to the uninitiated. For example, onions and garlic are typically not used in the preparation of dishes for a Sadya, as they are said to "arouse the passions", and therefore interfere with a properly meditative mindset. This explains my fervent love of onions and garlic, and therefore my personal tendency to dwell in the lowest states of consciousness. Woof!

So the next few posts will be concerned with the preparation of the Sadya. Chitra, our talented chef friend, generously volunteered to prepare this feast for us over a period of several days. Our work needed to be spread out over time, because even with a large catering team, the sheer amount of work involved in preparation can take at least a couple of days. We've actually been able to film a couple of these large teams at work, and it's a pretty amazing sight to see at least a dozen people pull an all-day and then all-night shift in order to prepare these dishes, some of which are incredibly involved, for groups of people that can number as high as six or seven hundred hungry diners.

We decided to start with the thing that keeps the longest: pappadam. Pappadam are those crunchy crisp circular crackers either made from urad dal, or tapioca flour, water and salt. Some are made by mixing in black pepper, or cumin, or green chili, but the ones for Sadya are intentionally left plain. The flat, dried crackers are then fried very briefly in oil, and served at room temperature. Of course, for a special feast, we don't just trundle off to the grocery store or market and pick up something pre-made off the shelf now, do we? That would be the cultural equivalent of serving Kraft Dinner at your wedding dinner (hi Uncle Cletus...). It's just not done. So once again, we relied on a contact of Chitra's to get the real inside poop on how these vitally important snacks are made by hand.

Chitra and Gee picked us up in their delightfully air-conditioned Honda CR-V, and drove us and all of our camera and audio gear to a nice house, much like the one we have been renting, in another part of Kaloor. It was only a few miles away, but navigating through the labyrinthine streets and finding the proper address was a challenge, even for Gee. We were welcomed into the home by Chitra's lady friend and her son. After unpacking the camera, strapping on the audio mixer, and affixing the microphones to Chitra and Laurel, all of us were led upstairs to an essentially empty room where the pappadams were made. The floor was comprised of spotlessly clean 2 foot square marble (or vitrified ceramic) tiles. There was only a stainless steel bowl with a large lump of batter in it, and a 4x6 foot plastic sheet. We all got down on the floor with her, and watched as she repeatedly grabbed a small lump of batter and placed it on a semi-stiff piece of plastic that had been lightly oiled. Then another piece of plastic was placed on top of that. Next, she deftly tapped the top piece of plastic with a circular stone to press the batter out into a perfect circle. A quick peel of the top layer of plastic, and she then moved the fresh disc over the large plastic sheet by her side, inverted it, and peeled away the last bit of plastic.

The window was open, and the sounds of drums and horns from the temple festival going on a couple of doors away drifted in. Oblivious to the nearby costumed elephants and feverish drummers, she repeated this batter ballet with practiced ease. Her constant smile told us of the obvious pride that she took in what she was doing. Soon, the large plastic sheet was filled with fresh pappadam. The freshly laden sheet was then moved out into the hot sun to dry. Chitra told us that she makes about 250 of these pappadam a day, every day. She only stops when the rainy season comes, and it becomes impossible to dry them outside. It was her only source of income. Laurel tried her hand at making one, and it soon became obvious that doing it quickly and correctly took a certain amount of practice!

After this, we were led back downstairs for some coffee and a few samples of her handiwork. The pappadam were quickly fried in oil, and served up piping hot. They were so delicious, that we bought several bundles to take home with us. So part one of the Sadya meal was pretty much in the bag. As we climbed back in the Honda for the drive back home, I could not help but marvel at this woman's work. The sheer industriousness of it struck me. It was so very impressive for us to see her making her living in such an ingenious, dignified, and self-sufficient way. I could not help but wonder. Faced with the need to support ourselves and our families alone, how many of us would rise to the challenge as she had done?

How hard would it be?

Cardamom Pods And Kinky Insex

2009-05-01T23:55:00.001-07:00

I never dreamed that a rhinoceros beetle could be so... horny. I'll get to that.

When I explained to my friend Gee that we wanted to film some background info on spices, he quickly piped up, "Chitra has a friend who has a place that we can visit for cardamom". Of course there is a friend. Chitra and Gee have many friends, and they seem to pop up the most unlikely places. Ever since we had the pleasure of meeting them both, we have been constantly amazed at the densely woven fabric of their social connections. I swear that we could be making a seemingly impossible right turn across 9 lanes of traffic, when out of nowhere a uniformed policeman would leap out, stop all traffic except our car, and guide us through the intersection neatly, perhaps dusting off the tail lights with his handkerchief as we passed. When queried, Gee might invariably say something like "Oh, I went to school with his brother", "His father and my father were at college", or "I saved his cat from drowning when I was a child". Okay, I'm exaggerating a little. But not much. In this case, Chitra remembered that an old teaching colleague of hers had recently taken possession of a massive spice plantation in the previous year. So it goes...

So as a result, a couple of weeks back I found myself sitting on the covered deck of a rambling raj-era house perched atop a 150 acre estate 5 hours from Cochin with Gee, and the owner of the estate, Rajindran. Evening was falling, and as we were perched up on a hilltop at least a thousand feet above Cochin, it was thankfully cooler than the steamy evenings that we were used to. The ladies had retired, and as the day turned to night, we enjoyed the pleasure of each other's company as we watched the mist roll by the front of the deck. Gee and I had a cocktail or three, and although Rajindran abstains from demon rum, he was very happy to join us in a lengthy, and as the beverages flowed, increasingly loud and far-ranging conversation. Rajindran, who is submitting his PhD law thesis in June, and Gee, who is a structural engineer by trade, but has an informed opinion on just about everything, both proved to be exceptional conversational partners. We covered everything from the massive economic shift from the US to India, to gold conspiracy theories, to the proper way to cook certain vegetables. In short, as the drinks flowed, we came pretty darn close to solving all the problems of the world. Now if only our delegated staff can execute the plan...

There was a large fluorescent light bulb just above the door to the house, and as it got darker, the bulb served as a beacon for every insect in the vicinity. First small bugs. The odd mosquito perhaps. Then came an insect sound unlike any I had heard before. It sounded like a small prop plane coming in for a landing. Then another. And another. We were soon inundated with dozens of 2 to 3 inch long rhinoceros beetles, zooming over our heads and thumping and bouncing off the light bulb and the walls with a mad choreography that could only have been conceived of in a tiny insect brain. Occasionally, a tired and shagged out beetle would fall to the ground, only to lay helplessly on its back, wiggling its legs in a vain attempt to regain an upright posture. After a short time, at least 20 of the hapless bugs had assumed this posture. They would remain this way for hours and on into the next day, wiggling sporadically, and waiting for either a good samaritan to turn them upright, or eventual death, whichever came first. This was a curious thing. I had never seen these insects before, and I marveled at how the species could survive, given such a fundamental design flaw. The rhinoceros beetle is an equally unconvincing argument for both evolution and intelligent design.

At one point, a large winged creature with about a 3 inch turquoise body, of which there were also many, tired of buzzing around the light, wisely decided to fly between Gee's back and the back of the chair he was in. As Gee leaned back after making a particularly emphatic point, the creature was trapped momentarily. It actually let out a scream. A tiny scream, yes, but an actual audible scream with a discernible note of fear. It was as if the actor who played "Mini-Me" just got the word from his agent that he was being re-cast in the sequel to "The Love Guru". That would be enough to frighten any man. Gee leaned forward a bit, and the critter flew out from behind him, free for the moment.

There was a large post to the right of the chair I was in, and when I happened to turn my head, I was stunned and amazed by what I saw a scant few inches from my face. A large male rhinoceros beetle, replete with horned facial accoutrement, was mounted atop a submissive female specimen and, well, doing its best to perpetuate the species. He was doing a heck of a job, as the tired and occasionally twitching remains of a few other females lay at the base of the pole would seem to indicate. Unlike the screaming insect moments before, there was no sound that I could discern. With the stamina of a Cuban porn star, this 6 legged Lothario kept at his relentless procreative activity for as long as I sat there, undaunted, and perhaps even encouraged, by the human voyeurs in the immediate vicinity. Remember that old black and white science fiction movie, "The Fly"? Instead of "Heeeeelllp meeee.", it was "Whooooo's your daddy?".

We were not at the lush estate of Rajindran and his lovely wife Suma, however, to watch the horniest beetle since John Lennon have its way with the ladies. We were here to see how cardamom grew. This was a research trip, after all! Cardamom is a very important spice in Indian cuisine, and it is second only to saffron as the most expensive spice in the world. This amazing plantation produces over 35 tons of the little green pods each year, and at peak times there are over 200 people working the estate. Cardamom will only grow at a certain elevation, and can be fairly fussy to grow on a large scale. The production is incredibly labour intensive, as each pod has to be picked by hand, collected and transported to the drying house, where the pods are washed, cleaned, and dried on large racks with a heater that is fed with wood recycled from the property. The building is kept under lock and key at all times, even in this remote location. This stuff is green gold.

Rajindran took us out for a tour of the estate in a jeep. We got to film the cardamom pods being picked, cleaned and dried. It was a real privilege to get to see this operation up close. Suma, meanwhile, supervised her kitchen staff of three ladies in the non-stop preparation of amazing food for more than a dozen people. Snacks materialized seemingly every 20 minutes. Cooked chunks of tapioca with chili chutney. Fresh fruit. Elaborate meals of 8 or 9 pure vegetarian dishes were laid out on the massive table inside the 100 year old house. For breakfast, we were served idli and sambar. The idli batter was prepared the day before using the traditional stone wet grinder instead of a machine, and the difference in texture was like the difference between hand-made and machine-made pasta. The idli were light and ethereal. The best we've had.

The kitchen itself was amazing, as it was left original Kerala style. The stove was carved from a massive slab of granite, and decorated with symbols of Shiva. There were 4 "burners" that pots of various sizes were perched on, each fed by a wood fire. I swear it all adds to the final taste! Watching this crew of women work in tight quarters, communicating nearly wordlessly as they put out dish after sumptuous dish was like watching some form of gastro-ballet. We got to film the preparation of a dish called "avial", which is a traditional concoction of many types of vegetables and shredded coconut. Simply inspirational stuff. As we were leaving, the following day, Suma appeared and generously presented us with a large bag of the estate-grown cardamom and a large bag of black pepper. We were thrilled! I know that we have prattled on about the magnitude of Indian hospitality, but to have Gee and Chitra drive us up to the plantation, and to have Rajindran and Suma open up their home to us in such a spectacular fashion was truly humbling. A simple "thank-you" seemed grossly inadequate, but that's about all we could muster as we waved goodbye and headed back to Cochin. What an amazing weekend.

I will never listen to a Beatles song in quite the same way again...

Ode to Okra

2009-04-25T23:54:00.001-07:00

"Is it okay if I finish the last of the okra?" Miles says in his most polite trying-to-be-the-boy-with-manners voice. "No fair! You had seconds already. I want the last of the okra!" his 5 year old brother, Isaac, squawks. Sound like a dream universe? Welcome to my reality. I don't want to brag (yeah, okay, maybe I do!) but my children not only eat their vegetables, they fight over them too. And there are few vegetables as fine as okra to argue over.

Okra is a much maligned vegetable. It has a bad rap as slimy and hairy - it is neither - it is majestic and unique! Call it lady's fingers, gumbo, vendaka or bhindi, okra is one of the Bailey family's favourite foods. We have bhindi several times a week - in fact, during our time in India it has probably been our main green vegetable. We never have leftovers and the boys have definitely been known to argue over who gets the last bhindi in the bowl.

Bhindi is in all the markets here and appears to have no season (although we haven't been here for a full year so we don't know if it is available all year round) making it a good go-to vegetable. In Vancouver we buy okra on Main Street in Little India or in Chinatown, it can occasionally be spotted in other "asian" and "mediterranean" stores around town, but rarely in a supermarket so you have to look to find it.

For the uninitiated, okra are beautiful green ridged fruit or seed-pods, about 5 - 15 centimeters long, smaller are usually better since they can get too fibrous as they get larger. When sliced crosswise okra produces little pentagonal disks - hence the name 'bhindi' which means 'dot' in Hindi - filled with edible soft seeds. Okra is a good source of vitamin A, C and several of the B vitamins, as well as potassium, protein and dietary fibre. There is a myth that bhindi (and mushrooms) should not be washed or they will absorb water and become slimy. Not so! Don't soak them, but a wash is just fine. You can eat the whole pod but some people cut off the top part that attaches the pod to the stem.

The texture of okra depends entirely on the technique with which you choose to cook it. If you leave the okra whole, deep or shallow frying in hot oil produces crisp-on-the-outside-tender-juciness-on-the-inside. If you cut the bhindi crosswise into rings and fry them, they get crispy-crunchy and caramelized like fried shallots. You can roast them in the oven tossed in a little oil and salt to achieve a similar effect as long as you use a fairly high temperature and lay them on a sheet in a single layer. Okra's bad reputation comes from the texture of the pods if you use moisture to cook them: if the heat is too low or you have too many in the pan, the moisture in the okra comes out and they stew in their own juices instead of caramelizing. You can braise or stew okra and avoid the mucilaginous texture if you add something slightly acidic like tomatoes or citrus to the mix. Sambar is a good example of this (see previous post). Or you can use that texture to your advantage to thicken and add body to a soup or stew. We are partial to fried, very well-spiced bhindi, either left whole or cut into rings.

The following recipe is an adaptation of Fish Fry. We were filming at a cardamom estate near Munnar last weekend (more on that in another post), owned by the eminently hospitable Rajindran and Suma. Rajindran is "pure veg" which in India means that he eats no meat, fish or eggs but does eat dairy. His lovely wife, Suma, was not vegetarian when they married but has become one in deference to her husband's lifestyle choice. Because Suma grew up eating fish and meat, she was taught how to cook these foods Keralan style. Her bhindi dish uses the same spicing and technique as a typical Keralan Fish Fry, substituting bhindi where there would otherwise be karimeen. Her 'Chicken' Fry is made with cauliflower, but that's a whole other recipe for another time.

Bhindi 'Fish' Fry recipe

500 g okra

1 t turmeric

1 t ground black pepper

2 t red chili powder

1 t salt

1 t crushed garlic

1 t minced ginger

1t lime juice or vinegar

oil for shallow frying (coconut oil in Kerala but canola, sunflower or peanut would be fine)

Wash the okra and cut several 3-4 cm lengthwise slits into the pods, keeping both ends intact. Mix up the spices and make into a paste by adding the garlic, ginger and lime juice. Rub the paste all over the okra making sure that the spice blend gets into the slits. Let sit for 20-30 minutes. Place about 2 cm of oil in a shallow pan and heat until just beginning to smoke. Add a few okra at a time and fry until nearly crisp and almost black. Remove and drain on paper. Continue frying until all the pods have been cooked. Serve with rice and other curries as a part of an Indian meal.

There are a lot of myths out there about what children will and won't eat. From what I can tell, a lot of what kids are willing to eat (or not) is predicated on their community's expectations of what they will like. Our boys eat chillies, blue cheese, olives, pickles, garlic, jelly fish and most vegetables. I don't think it ever occurred to Rob or to me that they wouldn't like those things (although judging from the reactions we get all over the world, they should not like them) so we ate them and expected the boys to eat them too. No special meals, no extra dishes "just for the kids", but also no filling up on only those things that you prefer.

Now if only I could get my boys to argue over who gets to clean up their room! Hmmm. Taking a page from my own book, if I expect that my kids will want to clean their room, will they? I'll have to get back to you on that...

Bovine Non Sequitur

2009-04-24T23:59:00.000-07:00

The last thing I expected to eat in India was a steak. Yet, there I was, eating a steak. In India. This deserves an explanation.

Once in a while, despite the dire warnings of my doctor to reduce my cholesterol levels, I like to have a steak. Not just any steak. A good steak. I refuse to push a squeaky-wheeled cart through a fluorescent-lit supermarket aisle as the Muzak distracts me just enough to not critically think about what kind of crap I am buying. No mindlessly plucking a chunk of red-dyed factory critter shrink-wrapped on a dimpled pink styrofoam tray for me! No sirree, if I'm going to have a steak, I'm either going to hunt it myself, or it's going to be from a happy hormone-free grass-fed steer, one that has never seen the inside of a feed lot or a hypodermic filled with growth hormones. A cow whose last thought as it was happily munching grass on the free range was something along the lines of "Awww... that's sweet. They bought me a DeWalt nail gun for my birthday!".

When it comes to a steak house, my standards are high. I have worshipped at arguably the most sacred steak temple on the planet, Peter Luger's in Brooklyn. While attending an AES conference in New York in 1999, I had the pleasure of dining there with my late ex-father-in-law, the noted author Gerald Krefetz, and two of my engineering colleagues. We ordered the Porterhouse steak for four. After a couple of healthy martinis, a surly Russian waiter appeared at the table. He cleared some real estate, and placed an inverted ashtray on the table. The purpose of the ashtray soon became clear. The waiter reappeared with a platter of Flintstonian proportions. The largest steak I had ever seen was placed before our slack-jawed foursome with one end of the platter resting on the inverted ashtray. The steak oozed all of it's not inconsiderable dry-aged melting marbled fat into the reservoir at the low end of the plate. The waiter, who was grumpy even by Russian standards, methodically spooned this beefy elixir onto our potatoes and creamed spinach. In a thick Russian accent, he gruffly intoned "Ees not hailth food...". We were left to gorge on this awe-inspiring artery-clogging chunk of majesty, some of which I'm sure is still lurking in my colon somewhere...

Fast forward ten years. I've ben in India with my family for six months. My wife and I wanted to do something fun to celebrate our 9th anniversary. We were married on April 24th, 2000 in Dharamsala, India. And again on April 25th, 2000, but that is another story. After six months in Cochin, despite the amazing Keralan food here, I have to admit that we were getting some hankerings for something decidedly un-Keralan. In Vancouver, we are so used to having so many great restaurants offering a wide variety of cuisines, that the restaurant scene in Cochin seems rather monochromatic by comparison. Fish Fry? No problem. Rice meals? Everywhere. Strangely bastardized versions of Chinese food? You can't swing a cat without hitting one of those places. For our anniversary, we needed to branch out. Big time.

My fabulous wife Laurel, whom is known to her loyal followers as "the Queen of Google", promptly went online and found reviews of what were purported to be "the best restaurants in Cochin". For those who have done this before, your experience has probably been like ours. The "best" restaurants are the ones that pay for the most advertising. It's a real challenge to sift through "objective" reviews, most of which are submitted by the owners or family members, and come to a decision about where to eat. One review caught our attention. It was a review of Cochin's only steak house, "The Attic". A glowing review. What made this even more remarkable was that the review was submitted by a vegetarian. We were hooked.

Dressed in our finery, we caught a rickshaw from our Ponoth Road home to the bustling downtown scene on Marine Drive. It was a Friday night, and there were lots of people everywhere. Everywhere it seems, but The Attic. The Attic, one level up from the street, was entirely devoid of customers at 7:30 on a Friday night. It was a frickin' mausoleum, albeit a pleasant enough one. After being shown to our table in what must be the most un-Indian dining room in all of India, we were amazed to see that there was not one single item of Indian origin on the menu. We both agreed that this was a bold move, as it demonstrated a commitment to it's aesthetic, which, while being courageous, may prove ultimately financially suicidal.

First up was our appetizer. In a nod to 60's kitsch, we both ordered the shrimp cocktail. 8 or 10 medium sized shrimp drowned in a mayonnaise and cocktail sauce , served in a margarita glass, along with two tomato wedges, and 2 quarters of a hard-boiled egg. All things considered, it wasn't bad, although eating it made me feel like Johnny LaRue in a loud Hawaiian shirt, trying to impress the broads at the Polynesian Room. Retro, but not authentic. What impressed us both was a perfect sprig of parsley, an herb that we have not seen at all for six months.

Next up was the bruschetta, which the decidely un-surly waiter pronounced "Brew-shetta". I successfully fought the urge to correct him. 4 chunks of baguette-like bread topped with some fresh tomato, dried herbs, and sliced canned black olives. The olives were the same uninspired kind that Domino's pizza buys by the trainload. DNA testing would no doubt prove that somewhere along the line there was a vague family resemblance to an olive, but it must be said that these were perhaps best left out of the dish. The bread, sliced in nearly 3 inch thick chunks, was baguette shaped, but unfortunately made from very finely ground local flour, and not at all allowed to ferment and develop the sumptuous crumb of a true baguette. A leaning tower of mediocrity. That only left the tomato, which thankfully, was a passable shade of red. Thank god for small mercies.

Despite this, we were truly enjoying ourselves. It was actually fun to have the place to ourselves, and as much as we love Indian food, to not be eating it. Next up came our mains. Laurel's was a truly retro "Prawn Thermidor". For a moment I hallucinated a vision of her in a beehive hairdo and a Jackie Kennedy clutch purse and pillbox hat, but the vision soon passed. Hers was not bad, but ultimately uninspired. She only ate half, and "parceled" the rest. Then came the object of my desire: the steak. It was advertised as a filet. I ordered it rare, and much to my surprise, that's how it came. Perched upon some nicely cooked spinach, then a few slices of sauteed beetroot, then some slices of roast potato, was my steak. Smothered in black pepper, it seemed rather diminutive in comparison to the Peter Luger's leviathan. It would seem that the passe trend of "piled food" had finally floated across the sea and washed up on the beach. The steak itself was a little difficult to pin down. Was it aged? Perhaps for a day or two. Mainly outside. Was it tender? Maybe a little too tender. It had a texture that would suggest that it had either been relentlessly pounded by a chef as part of his anger-management therapy , or recently kicked into submission by a losing jockey. What was advertised as being "jus", was actually that Langis instant gravy that leaves the telltale MSG burn on your tongue afterwards. I could go on...

However, it was a steak, dammit! An honest-to-gawd piece of roasted meat. In India, no less. This was nothing short of a miracle. We had a great time, and to be frank, we actually expected the food to be a lot worse than it was. It was actually... charming. Maybe it was just the dinner company. Laurel and I talked about all the changes brought by 9 years of marriage. Children. New houses. Businesses. Travel. We wondered what we would be doing in another 9 years.

One thing is certain. As I was following her sari-clad form around the fire in a dimly lit Shiva temple 9 years ago, the last thing that I expected was that we would be back in India with two beautiful children. Eating a steak.

Sambar, Over The Rainbow...

2009-04-21T23:03:00.000-07:00

It's spicy. It's salty. It's sour. It's everywhere.

For the uninitiated, sambar is a kind of spicy gravy made of toor dal, vegetables, and tamarind. It is served as an accompaniment at nearly every meal, and it's an extremely important part of the South Indian vegetarian diet. It's hard for a non-Indian to imagine not only the infinite and subtle variations on it's preparation, but also the fierce debate that ensues amongst aficionados about whose style of preparation is the best. Every man in South India has a very strong opinion about how this dish should be made, and who makes it. Many will go out of their way to steer you to a place where the sambar is invariably described as the "best in all of India", and it's surprising how often their favourite version of this dietary staple resembles their mother's. Much like Italian men speaking wistfully of Mama's Sunday gravy with a tear in their eye, many will tell you that their mother makes the best version, and most wives have the good sense to agree that their mother-in-law's sambar is undeniably the best. When men speak of it, drool forms in puddles, and their eyes roll back in their heads, like Homer Simpson recalling a double pork chop marinated in beer. Well, almost...

It's long been a goal of mine to learn to make the perfect sambar. Ever since I first tasted this magnificent concoction in the 1980's at the long gone and oft lamented Noor Mahal on Fraser Street in Vancouver, learning to make this has been my heart's desire. The Noor Mahal version was excellent, at least in memory, and the first time I tasted it I was hooked. It is the legume equivalent of crack. All rich with creamy dal, tangy with sour tamarind, just enough salt, and several interesting vegetables. Finished off with hot oil redolent of curry leaves, red chili, and black mustard seed, sambar is a stew to satisfy the soul. When we moved to India, this urge to learn to make a good sambar was still lurking in the back of my mind like a paparazzo in Madonna's backyard. Out of sight, but never far away. Then we met Stanley and Gigi, our landlords and next door neighbours. The game was afoot.

For months now, we have been frequently blessed by the mysterious delivery of yummy dishes at all hours of the day. Stanley has actually appeared at our door as early as 8 AM with a steamer full of delicious idli cakes, a large bowl of Gigi's wonderful sambar, and a smaller dish of fresh made coconut chutney. From the first taste, I knew that I had found Sambar Nirvana, that mysterious state of being first described in the ancient Vedas by Swami Bhaktidefuture. I was instantly transported through space and time back to the 1980's on Fraser Street, all skin and bones with a badly gelled haircut, chewing on a chicken palak dosa that I could scarcely afford, but drowned in that wonderful sambar. Sensing that I was close to achieving a life's goal, I thought of what nefarious plans I would have to hatch in order to get Gigi to teach me how to make this heavenly concoction. I assumed that it would be harder to pry out of her than removing the proverbial rifle from Charleton Heston's cold, dead hands. My evil plots and schemes turned out to be completely unnecessary. She kindly offered to teach us how to make it. Not only that, she offered to let us film her doing it in her kitchen, along with her recipe for idli. Indian hospitality. Go figure...

By this time, we had already shot a few episodes with Gigi in her kitchen next door. She really is an awesome cook, and a very gracious hostess. She somehow makes cooking for a small army look very easy, even as she is turned out in a spectacular silk sari and festooned with gold jewelry. Our normal routine had been to show up with all of our gear around 11AM, cook and film for a couple of hours, and then have a lunch that was usually epic in it's scope. So when idli and sambar day arrived, I assumed that it was business as usual. I was wrong. We were roused at 8:30 AM by a loud and persistent knock on the door. I grabbed the nearest lungi and hastily wrapped it about my waist. With my ventilated nether regions barely covered, I rushed shirtless to open the door. There was Stanley. "You are late", he said, in his characteristically verbose way. He turned and left for his house next door. Then it dawned on me: idli and sambar was breakfast food, and not lunch. Not an auspicious beginning.

Fortunately, when we arrived next door a scant 5 minutes later, there did not seem to be a trace of ill will. Gigi got right to work as the camera rolled. First, she put together the batter for the idli for the benefit of the camera. This wasn't the batter that she ended up using though, as idli batter should really stand for several hours to give it a slight fermentation tang before being used. It's basically the same batter as is used in a dosa. Rice, a bit of urad dal, and water are blended up and left to sit. The batter is poured into little molds, and then steamed for ten minutes or so. She also made a lovely coconut chutney from fresh coconut, a touch of ginger, and some shallot. This was tempered with coconut oil, fresh curry leaves, black mustard seeds, and dried red chili. Then it was on to the sambar...

So what is this thing that inspires such strong opinions? Sambar is a study in contradictions, very much like India itself. It's at once simple to make, yet very complex and varied in flavour. How can an ingredient list so basic yield something so complicated and rewarding? The technique of the cook is everything. At the risk of stating the obvious, not only is the way each ingredient is treated crucial to the outcome, but the actual order in which the ingredients is combined is also critical to the final taste. For vegetables, Gigi's version has eggplant, winter melon, okra, potato, and tomato in it. She spices it with ground red chili, turmeric, fenugreek seeds, and ground coriander. A critical component is an interesting Indian vegetable called "drumstick". It's a long green pod about a foot long, and it looks suspiciously like a big green drum stick. If Bob Marley was a drummer, this is what he would have played. The toor dal is cooked until somewhat mushy, and then water, spices, and vegetables are added. The particular order eludes me at the moment, but suffice to say that the detailed recipe will appear after we return home and log all the tapes.

Once everything is cooked, it's time for the final tempering with the holy trinity of black mustard seed, dried red chili, and fresh curry leaves briefly fried in coconut oil. It's all topped off with a healthy hit of fresh cilantro. We all sat down and had a hearty, if not belated, breakfast of fresh steamed idlis, fresh coconut chutney, and the sambar of my dreams. To say that it was good would be a wee bit of an understatement. It is the cycle of desire, action, and fulfillment that keeps us all spinning on this earthly karmic gerbil wheel. This tasty breakfast was truly the fulfillment of a long standing desire. With this desire out of the way, perhaps sainthood is not far away...

It's spicy. It's salty. It's sour. It's right next door, baby.....

Variety is...

2009-04-14T03:17:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's because I'm a gemini. Then again, maybe not. Maybe it's because Vancouver spoils us rotten, allowing us to "eat in any language". The ingredients that are available to us at home make cooking and eating a truly global feast. Shall we make Mexican tonight? No, I think Greek. Or how about Thai? Spanish? Vietnamese? You name it, we can get the ingredients. And we do cook from all of those cuisines on a regular basis. What I'm trying to say is that I don't do too well with eating the same food day in and day out. I need variety! Now it does occur to me that this is a very privileged position, most of the world is lucky to eat whatever they can, whenever they can get it. But once food becomes a not-so-hard-to-come-by commodity, it seems to be a part of a truly western desire to want to branch out a bit and explore.

I love Indian food - all the foods of India - and there are many, many different regional cuisines in India but most of them are not available in Kerala. And the "Chinese" food here, while sort of tasty, is not very Chinese either. We've supplemented at home a bit: oatmeal for breakfast (with banana and pineapple, of course), without an oven I have become very good at whole wheat griddle scones and "english" muffins. With the reggiano we received from friends, we have managed to make a good pasta dinner too. But most of the time we eat rice, fish fry, cabbage thoran, bhindi fry, prawn masala, chapati, sambhar, payasam etc. Real Keralan food. And despite really enjoying the food of Kerala, a steady diet of nothing but Keralan food has, on occasion, grown a little wearisome. Thankfully, Rajesh introduced us to The Punjab House restaurant.

The Punjab House has become our once a week please-give-me-something-without-coconut-in-it place to dine. The current proprietor's mother opened the restaurant 30 or 40 years ago and it has been an Ernakulam institution ever since. On a Friday night you have to hang over the tables of diners and scoop in to take their seats the minute they stand up or you won't get dinner at all. We know this from experience, watching seat after seat being taken by young men who came in after us and didn't care that we were waiting with children. We are now as ruthless as they were then. Lost is he who gets up to wash his hands! The restaurant is nothing fancy - about 15 formica-topped tables, a cash desk, a fridge and freezer and some young men who work really hard because the place is always hopping. The kitchen is cramped and very, very hot. The proprietor's English is excellent (as a side note, you may not know that the main language that Indians from different areas use with which to communicate is English. There are so many languages in India but English is the common thread leftover from the colonial period) and he likes to tease the boys whenever we drop in. He is a warm and affable host who runs the restaurant as a tight ship, making their own yogurt every day and handling a very busy lunch and dinner service.

You can gather from the name that the restaurant specializes in the food of the Punjab, an area in northern India that is very fertile and known as the "breadbasket" of India because it produces most of the subcontinent's wheat. The availability of wheat in the area shaped the cuisine which is not quite as rice-heavy as southern Indian food. The Punjab House is a vegetarian restaurant that is famous for its Alu Parotta. This is not the parotta/porotta that Rob wrote about in the last post. Kerala parotta is a flaky spiral flat bread, the Alu Parotta is a stuffed flat bread. A small ball of whole wheat chapati dough is rolled flat, a scoop of filling is placed in the centre and the edges are brought up around the filling and pinched together at the top. The dumpling-like ball is then gently pressed and carefully rolled out into a circle without letting the filling ooze out. Then this pancake is fried in ghee on both sides and served finger-burnin' hot with a side of curd (plain yogurt), raw chillies for those who like them (me, me, ME!), raw onions squeezed with lime juice and various other dishes of vegetables and legumes (chick peas, lentils etc). Alu means potato and the potato filling is made with a mix of potatoes, chillies, cilantro, turmeric, mustard seed and various other yummy spices, depending on who is making it. Stuffed parotta (or paratha/parantha) can be filled with a minced cauliflower mixture (Gobi), with herbs, or anything else you have around the house. I suspect, like many of the world's great foods, stuffed parottas were originally created as a way to deal with leftovers. And what a yummy way to clean out the fridge! These are one of the tastiest foods we've eaten and the whole family agrees that a week without Alu parotta is not a good week.

I've made them at the house a couple of times and they are no where near as difficult to make as the Kerala parotta. That being said, I still prefer the one's at The Punjab House. I suspect they add a heck of a lot more ghee than I'm willing to add with good conscience. A perfect example that what you don't know can still clog your arteries...

"You Say Parrotta, I Say Parantha..."

2009-04-11T23:11:00.000-07:00

My request for sustenance was greeted with a blank stare.

"Parantha, please", I said in my most polite just-landed-must-be-extra-nice-to-everyone tourist voice. It was way back in December, and we had just arrived in Cochin, Kerala. After schlepping 12 bags of clothing, camera, and audio equipment up to our "budget" room, and seeing our tired kids and their nanny/teacher off to bed, I was hungry, so Laurel and I headed down the block to a place she knew from her previous visit: The Indian Coffee House. I could see from the tables around me that the great flatbread that I had come to know during my previous visit was available here in great abundance. I took Laurel's recommendation and ordered an "Egg Roast", along with two parantha. Or so I thought. The waiter, dressed in a rather elaborate headdress and soiled tunic, gave me my first taste of the Notorious Head Wiggle, which looked as if one or two crucial vertebrae have suddenly gone missing from his neck, causing the skull to oscillate madly on a bed of squishy cartilage, eventually returning to a point of stasis. This now familiar gesture can mean anything from "I understand you completely" to "Your daughter's pregnancy brings great joy to our village". It can also mean, as I discovered in this case, "I have no clue what you are saying". I pointed to a neighbouring table and repeated my order. "Parantha. Two please". "Parrotta!" came the sharp reply. Another brief wiggle, the meaning of which I am sure was derogatory, and he was gone, leaving me to wonder what I had done wrong.

Laurel clarified it for me. In our last trip, I had only been traveling through the North regions of India, where this flatbread is referred to as "Parantha", or "Paratha", whereas she had spent a couple of months in the South of India. In the South, after being being run through the Malayalam filter, "Parantha" has been mutated into "Parrotta". or even "Porrotta". It's kind of hard to tell exactly how it's supposed to be spelled, especially when we items like "Sweat and Scour", "Chineees food", "Chickin Manchoorian" on the local menus. Fortunately, no matter what it's called, it's pretty much the same critter. Parrotta are sort of like pizza, not only in shape, but also in the sense that even when they're not brilliantly made, they're still kind of okay. When they are brilliantly made, they are transcendant. Paired with a simple dal or curry, they make a delicious meal. Just about every culture has a staple flatbread, and this one is a high expression of the art. It's actually very similar to a Malaysian dish called Roti Chanai. We've become really addicted to them.

Like all things in India, parrotta are a study in contrasts. They are at once flaky and chewy. Flat, yet stratified. Light, yet filling. Reticent, yet tenacious. And so on... They are deceptively simple in composition. Although the recipe varies, they are basically white flour, water, a bit of salt, and some oil. Now if you were to merely combine these items and heat them, you would end up with a whitish lump about as appetizing as albino elephant dung. It's all in the technique. The dough gets kneaded really thoroughly to release the gluten in the flour. After the dough rests for a while, it gets cut up into little balls (see previous post). These little dough balls are then put on an oiled surface and flattened into about an 8 inch disk. Pretty simple so far, right?

Now comes the tricky bit. Using a technique that would make any New York pizza purveyor bow down on his knees and genuflect with a hearty "We're not worthy!", the dough is quickly flipped several times, the centrifugal force of the flip stretching the diameter of the disk by a factor of at least two. This paper thin bit of dough is then sliced into 3 equal strips. The strips are then rolled up in much the same way as a cinnamon roll, and left to rest for a while. When its time to heat them up, the cook grabs one of the rolled up dough bits, and slams it down hard onto an oiled surface. At this point, the rookies use a rolling pin to flatten them back out into about an 8 inch disk (again), but the real pros just use their hands. We've seen guys who can make several hundred of these things in a day. Every day.

The newly rolled out parrotta are then placed on a griddle until they get golden brown on each side. Upon removal from the griddle, there is one last step. The cook will stack up 4 or 5 of the freshly cooked parrotta and then sort of crush them together. This breaks the breads up a bit, and makes it easy to pull them apart in large flaky strands. When they're done right, and served fresh off the griddle, they are the perfect snack or meal. The thing is this: it's incredibly difficult to do well. Laurel is a truly great baker, and although she's come close in her few attempts, it will obviously take many more sessions before our homemade ones approach the ones made in the local food stalls. Much like a golf swing, something that looks simple can take a lifetime to perfect.

There is a good stall near the boat jetty that serves the ferry travelers between Ernakulam and Fort Cochin. It's a blue plastic tarp covering an ancient propane grill and a stainless steel work table. There are a few broken plastic chairs if you choose to sit. Not me. I'll pony up my 18 rupees and get two piping hot parrotta, served on a metal plate with two hard boiled eggs in a spicy chili/onion/tomato gravy. Standing with my fabulous wife in the shade of the tattered blue tarp and eating with my hands, using the bread to glean the last drop of gravy, I am convinced that at that moment there could be nothing better on the planet.

My request for sustenance has been granted.

Ahhh, Nuts...

2009-04-09T11:02:00.000-07:00

What is it about goat balls this week?

Earlier this week, an old friend of mine posted a bunch of ancient band promo pictures, mostly from his band, on FaceBook. This was circa 1976, and yes, it's true, in those dark days there were many crimes against fashion committed. One of the pictures featured a great guy I used to play with who, for the purposes of this tale, must remain nameless. My friend passed away tragically in an accident many years back, but he is remembered fondly by all who knew him. A great singer and front man, he was also known for two very prominent physical attributes: he had a truly immense afro, and also perhaps the largest scrotum known to man. His nickname in the band? "Goat Balls".

You might well ask, "How do you know this?". I'll let you in on a little secret. I'm a musician, and I've spent a lot of time on the road. When guys in bands get on the road, it can get a little stifling. Travel. Play show. Eat bad food. Repeat as necessary. Sometimes you need to blow off a little steam. According to my friend Joe Alvaro, who played bass in the band, our singer friend had a very special way of blowing off steam that he had been known to do on at least two documented occasions.

After a gig, when the usual bevy of party girls and hangers-on had found their way back to the band's hotel for the inevitable after party, our hero would wait for an opportune moment to sneak into the bathroom armed with a roll of duct tape, a section of newspaper, and a lighter. While all the other guys in the band were furiously trying to get lucky, and the local boys were trying their best to pick up the surplus girls, much like remoras looking for edible crumbs around a shark's mouth, he would get busy in the bathroom. He would remove all of his clothes, and then carefully fold his enormous scrotum up over his unit, covering it completely. Using the duct tape, he would judiciously apply a strip of tape so that the monster sac was then attached to his belly, thus completely obscuring Mr. Johnson from sight. The whole package bore a stunning resemblance to processed poultry skin, and therefore earned the name "The Cornish Game Hen".

The public unveiling of "The Cornish Game Hen" to stunned partygoers was only phase one of the operation. Phase two is best related in a private message, but suffice to say that it was a spectacle of dance that even now is only spoken of in hushed tones of awe by those who have seen it and lived to tell the tale. Years later, I actually played with this singer in a band called whose name is best forgotten. When I mentioned the Cornish Game Hen and the accompanying sacred dance, he blushed a little. He never denied it. He was a great guy, and I miss him.

Later this week, our new friend Gee, who is also on FaceBook, proposed that despite my porky faux pas of the previous week, we return to his friend Anwar's farm in order to film a special dish, "Mutton Dum Biryani". Sajna, who is Anwar's charming wife, is an expert at making this very special dish, She was kind enough to let us into her kitchen to document this amazing recipe. It takes about 4 or 5 hours to prepare, and while not technically complicated, it is a great example of what the Italians call "insaporire", which loosely translated means "flavour" or "taste". It really means so much more than that. It means giving each ingredient the proper time and attention it needs when cooking in order to develop the maximum flavour. Sajna gave us a master class over the course of almost 5 hours.

First of all, you need to have mutton. About three kilos worth to feed the 25 people that had be invited for lunch that day. Mutton is a mature lamb or young sheep in European and North American parlance. In India, mutton means goat. Yes, I'm talking about those all-pervasive, pellet pooping, poster-eating, city dwelling horny critters. Notice I am no longer talking about the band here. Sajna had a few kilos of goat meat on the bone already cut up waiting to be cooked in the pressure cooker.

As Laurel asked questions and I manned the camera and recording gear, Sajna took this huge plate of mutton and slid nearly all of it into the pressure cooker, along with some spices and a little yoghurt. I did say nearly all of it, right? Bits of liver, kidney, and heart were tossed into the pot. There were two somewhat suspect chunks left on the plate. "Why aren't you putting that part in? What is that?", Laurel asked innocently. Sajna did not answer immediately. I began to have my suspicions, but I kept them to myself, as I involuntarily crossed my legs. Sajna sort of blushed a little and pointed in a southerly direction. She silently mouthed the word "Balls". "You mean testicles?", Laurel asked. Sajna quickly nodded and pushed the plate aside and locked the pressure cooker up tight. "Goat Balls", I thought to myself. Twice in one week.

Sajna prepared the masala, or spice mixture, for the biryani by sauteing onions for nearly an hour over low heat until they were meltingly soft. Then she added large amounts of garlic, ginger, green chili, tomatoes, and spices. Each ingredient was cooked for at least 20 minutes before the next one as added. The cooked goat meat was finally added and left to simmer, along with cilantro and mint.

Outside, a fire was lit with coconut shells and wood, and a massive volume of basmati rice was cooked and then drained into a wicker basket. In a large pot, the goat masala was put in, and then a layer of rice was placed on top. Then came some crispy fried onions, raisins, and cashews. More rice, then onions and nuts again. A splash of rosewater and then nearly a pint of ghee, or clarified butter was drizzled over the top. Then came the "Dum" part. The dum is a simple flour and water dough that is applied to the lip of the pot, so that when the lid is placed on it, there is a very complete seal created. No moisture or steam can escape. The huge pot was then placed on the fire, and some coals from the fire were heaped on the metal lid, effectively forming an oven. The whole mixture was left like this for about an hour, until the coals died completely down.

Guests arrived, drinks were poured, children played, and spirits were high as everyone anticipated the arrival of the biryani. And with good reason. It was truly amazing. Rich and flavourful, the meat just melted off the bone. Laurel and I agreed that this was the finest biryani either of us had ever eaten. It was a real thrill to document the whole recipe from start to finish, and a real pleasure to watch a true master at work. Sajna made cooking for 25 people look easy.

Good thing 27 people didn't show up...

Bark, Bites, and Bozo...

2009-04-02T23:02:00.000-07:00

I have a big mouth.

Not a big mouth in the physical sense. I could never give Mick Jagger or Julia Roberts a run for their money. Actually, I wish I had their money. I mean a big mouth in the sense that for most of my teen and adult life, I could almost always be counted on to say the wrong thing at the most inappropriate time. "So aside from that, Mrs. Kennedy, how did you enjoy the parade?". Where gaffes and epic lapses of taste once sprang from the youthful desire to be a smart ass, age has brought on a brand new root cause for foot-in-mouth disease: plain stupidity.

A short time ago, we told our good friend Gee that there were still lots of spices that we wished to capture on film in their native habitat, and so he introduced us to his friend Anwar, a local businessman. Anwar is an extremely affable gentleman who, despite having only just met us, was more than happy to show us his farm on the outskirts of Cochin. Gee set up a visit for Friday afternoon, and drove us out to the farm in his new white Honda CR-V. This was a good thing, because if we had been left to our own devices, we would never have found the farm. For almost a half hour, we snaked through labyrinthine unmarked country lanes. Gee had spent about ten years living in the area, so he knew it like the back of his hand. On the way, Gee told us a bit more about Anwar. They were old friends. Anwar was doing very well for himself and owned several properties. Gee also mentioned in passing that he was a Muslim. I should have paid more attention.

We arrived at Anwar's very comfortable country place and were ushered inside to get out of the midday heat. Wireless mics and transmitters were quickly affixed to Laurel, Gee, and Anwar. I set up my camera gear, strapped on my field pack containing the audio mixer, wireless receivers, cables, and headphones, and followed Anwar out into his garden, which was steaming in 43C heat. Anwar had many amazing things to show us. A large curry leaf bush was growing just outside his door. This leaf is absolutely mandatory in many South Indian dishes, and there is no effective substitute. The plant was in it's dormant stage, and we were told that in the rainy season it would grow much larger and more lush.

Next to that was a tree that he called "allspice". It wasn't the allspice berry producing plant, but rather a tree whose leaves embodied the aromas of 7 different herbs and spices. More than halfway to KFC. They said it was sometimes used in curries. We had never even heard of this before. We crumbled a dried leaf and sure enough, there was traces of cinnamon, clove, and a host of other scents, all coming from one leaf!

Next we saw a neem tree, whose bitter leaves have great medicinal value. Next to that was a very unusual tree bearing clusters of what looked like oversized oblong grapes. It's called "bilimbi", or "prawn tamarind". The fruits are slightly sour, and go very well with prawns. As if on cue, Anwar's wife appeared with a tray of glasses of cold bilimbi and lime juice. Gee told us that it was an extremely healthy drink, and he was right. It was extremely refreshing, if only for about 30 seconds. It was hot outside!

Adjacent to the bilimbi were a couple of large tamarind trees. Some of the tamarind pods were ripe, and had fallen on the ground. Tamarind is essential for providing the necessary "souring" in a well balanced curry, and it's used not only in South Indian cooking, but in other Asian cuisines as well, such as Thai and Vietnamese. Moving on through the property, we came to the cinnamon tree, and Anwar's farmhand peeled off several strips of incredibly aromatic cinnamon bark for us with his machete. We have since dried it, and used some for cooking. It's nice to know where your food comes from! Next was a soursop tree, which yielded a large thorny tangy fleshed fruit like a football. Jackfruit. Mangoes. Guava. Several kinds of chillis. We were in heaven!

On a nearby piece of property he also owned, Anwar showed us his tapioca plantation, where Laurel and the farmhand pulled up a massive cluster of this tuberous staple. Tapioca, also called cassava, is a very common starch round much of the world, but largely unknown in North America. A fast growing thin stalk hides a cluster of large sweet potato like growths just under the soil. It's bland, but a perfect vehicle for sauce. We took some back to Anwar's kitchen, peeled it, and pressure cooked it until it was tender. Anwar's wife, who is another great cook and a truly gracious hostess, made an awesome chutney from back yard chillis, shallot, ginger, salt, coconut oil, and yet another kind of tamarind, the smoky "fish tamarind".

Before we knew it a sumptuous meal was placed before us in Anwar's beautiful dining room. Two kinds of fish curry. A beef curry. A prawn dish. A plate of tapioca with chutney. Then beers magically appeared, and subsequently began to flow. Anwar sat down, all sweaty and somewhat chuffed at his first foray before the cameras, and surprised us by producing a bottle of whiskey, which he used to fortify his glass of beer. More beer. More whiskey. We began to talk of food. He surprised us again with his familiarity with Nigella Lawson, the British TV presenter famed nearly as much for her prodigious foundation garments as she is for her food. At the mention of her name, I outlined a large hourglass shape with my hands and mimed two large mounds on my chest. Anwar laughed and nearly spat a prawn through his nose. More beer. More whiskey...

The conversation moved to the importance of maintaining old ways of doing things relating to food. Somewhat emboldened by the 6 gallons of cold Foster's I had ingested at this point, I ventured off on a monologue about the glories of pork. "Sometimes I get a whole pig, and butcher it myself. We get it all ground up and make our own sausages and everything! ". My enthusiasm ramped up. "We even cure and smoke our own bacon, use the feet for soup stock, and eat the kidneys!!! We use everything but the squeal! Yup, God has never created a more perfect creature than the pig!". Not content with that graphic description of butchery, I sipped my beer and went on to describe our annual pig roast barbeque. "We stick that bad boy on the spit at dawn, and slow roast it all day. About a hundred people show up, and inside of an hour and half, the whole pig is pretty much gone! God, we love pork!!!!"

It was only on the ride home, bathed in a beery glow and grinning a satisfied grin from the day's shooting, that the epic scale of my cultural insensitivity struck me. I had just been hosted by a Muslim family for the day, and been invited into their home to share copious food and drink with them at their table. Naturally, any reasonable person would see this as a golden opportunity to launch into a half-hour long lecture on the glories of pork. It was later agreed by all that entirely new levels of stupidity had been reached by yours truly.

A dubious honour, but after a lifetime of this kind of thing, I was used it. Like I said. I have a big mouth...

May Contain Nuts...

2009-03-30T05:12:00.000-07:00

Okay, without a doubt, this is unabashed filler.

We have a good excuse. We have been so busy filming and collecting recipes in the last week and a half, that there has been no time at all to write about what's been going on! I guess that's a good thing. However, with over 10,000 loyal readers (okay, it was mostly us checking back to see if anyone was looking at the blog at all...), we feel an obligation, nay, a duty, to post up something for entertainment value. Hence, this dollop of filler.

In the last week and half, we've been to more spice farms, more kitchens, and visited the neighbouring state in an effort to confirm or deny the claims of Cochin natives who say that Kerala food rules, and everything else kind of blows. Curiously, when we travelled to Tamil Nadu, they said the same thing, only in reverse. We've seen cinnammon being peeled off trees, tapioca roots being plucked from the soil, curry leaves in the wild, and tamarind pods fresher than you can imagine. Rest assured that all those adventures will be posted up, complete with photos as soon as we catch our breath, which even now, is strongly scented with garlic and chillies.

In the meantime, I'm going to leave you with some pictures that we have taken of amusing signs. This was originally going to be part of a larger post with more pictures, but bugger it. I'm inherently lazy, it's 6PM, and the gin in the freezer is calling my name too loudly to ignore. So here they are in no particular order...

Seamen Drinks - The name says it all. Avoid the milkshakes.

Boney Dresses - Perhaps the only store in the world that caters to "minus" sized ladies.

PMS Agencies - The company that asks the philosophical question "If a tree falls in the forest, and a man is not there to hear it, is he still wrong?".

Let us catch our breath, and I promise that there will be some actual content in the next post...

Squid Pro Quo

2009-03-23T22:36:00.000-07:00

A lot of people find squid daunting and I guess that's not too surprising. They don't have a very recognizable anatomy - unless you're into cephalopods - they don't look like mammals, fish or crustaceans. And really, what other food has tentacles?

But sometimes life's finer things require just a little research and a slightly larger leap of faith to reap amazing results. So for those of you out there in your cyber-kitchens thinking that you just might be ready to take the plunge and start cooking with marine mollusks (a much more daunting one can be found here), follow me into the wonderful wriggly world of Squid 101.

Whether you call it squid, kalamari or ika, it's just plain yummy. I grew up in a neighbourhood in Vancouver that used to be predominantly Greek. Fried squid and squid or octopus braised in a tomato sauce were common dishes in the local restaurants and homes. Most countries with coastal areas have some form of squid in their diet and for good reason. High in protein, low in fat and relatively inexpensive. What's not to love? The only thing you need to remember if you want to cook with cephalopods is that they need to be cooked either quickly (1 or 2 minutes) or for a very long time (braised for an hour or more). Raw is another tasty option but I'll leave the details of cephalopod sashimi to someone else for now.

Cochin, being on the coast of Kerala and the beautiful Arabian Sea has an amazing selection of seafood. A few days ago we were at the main Ernakulam market taking some still photos and looking for some dinner. Our local Kaloor market has a good stock of seafood (as well as fruit, veg and fresher-than-you-can-conceive-of meats) but the Ernakulam main market takes edible consumerism to a whole new level. To a theme song of "Yes, Madam", "One picture please" , "Coming from...?" and vendors sucking air between their teeth, we moved through the labyrinthine streets and buildings that comprise the market and found ourselves standing in front of some absolutely stunning squid. There were cockles and crabs and the biggest kingfish we've seen to date but it was the glistening pinky-purple squid that called out to us for dinner. How to purchase squid? Fresh squid should not be fishy smelling just smelling faintly of briny sea water. Most of the tentacles should be intact and the bodies should not look wilted or dried out. Squid is best kept on ice.

So we bought 1.5 kg (which turned out to be two meals worth) of this slippery goodness, picked up a few more supplies and headed home with kalamari on the brain. Speaking of brains, time for a squid anatomy lesson and the art of cleaning squid. When you look at a squid it looks like it has two sections, a long tube-like piece which is the body and a squidgily tentacle/eye piece that appears to be barely connected to the tube. Step number one in cleaning a squid is to separate the two pieces. Grab the tube end with one hand and the tentacle end with the other and gently pull apart. Put down the tube for a moment and with the other piece cut off anything north of the tentacles: meaning the eyes, the beak (which is nestled where the tentacles come together and is a hard pyramid shaped thingy) and the tentacle-like gooeyness that had been attached to the tube. Set the tentacles aside, discard the other stuff and pick up the tube piece. Have a look in the open end of the tube and you will see what looks like a translucent bit of plastic on one side, this is the quill. Pull it out and discard it. Then, starting at the sealed end of the tube, pinch your fingers and run them up the squid body as if you were trying to get that last bit of toothpaste out of the tube. Do this over the sink or a plate because gooey stuff will squish out. Discard the gooey stuff. Ink may also come out at this point, if it does, just give the squid a rinse under the tap. If the squid has a purplish coloured membrane on it , then the tube needs to be peeled. Run your thumb along the surface of the tube and you should notice the coloured membrane roll off under your thumb. If it doesn't start to roll, apply a little more pressure or try to run your thumb in a different direction along the tube. All the coloured purply-pink stuff just rolls off easily once you get it started. Discard the membrane. You can run the squid under the tap, or not, depending on your comfort level. Rob thinks the squid taste better if you don't run water over them. I haven't noticed a difference and it's easier to work with if you rinse them. You may find as you are cleaning your squid that you discover whole little fishies in the bodies - we found two on this batch - that the squid didn't have time to eat before getting scooped up in a net. We discarded the fish but I suppose you could fry them up with your squid and eat them whole.

Once you have the cleaned tube and the de-beaked and de-eyed the tentacles, you're ready to start cutting. The squid we had were fairly small so we didn't bother to cut the tentacles at all, but you can if you like. When making Chinese food we often slit the tubes open and cut a cross-hatched pattern onto the flattened tube which makes them curl up and the extra surface area allows them to catch all sorts of yummy flavours in a stir-fry. You can go Mediterranean and stuff the bodies with grains, breadcrumbs, herbs, spices and little bits of nuts or bacon. But we were opting for Greek style fried squid so we sliced the tubes into rings and dredged the rings and tentacles in a mixture of flour, salt, pepper and a bit of chili powder. Once lightly coated with the flour, shake off any excess and carefully fry the squid in small batches in a couple of inches of oil. Fry for about one minute, then using a slotted spoon, scoop the fried squid onto a paper-lined plate to absorb the excess oil and sprinkle with a bit of salt while still hot. Serve with sliced red onion, lemon or lime wedges and tzatziki (yogurt, grated cucumber, chopped mint, minced garlic, salt and black pepper) for dipping. What a feast!

A note on the oil: Rob decided to fry in coconut oil since that is the main oil we use here. At home we would probably use peanut or canola oil. What a surprise to discover that squid fried in coconut oil taste astonishingly similar to bacon! A bit smoky, a bit porky and a lot tasty. We were all so surprised - and pleased - we haven't had any pork in over 4 months and Rob's home-cured bacon is a Bailey family favourite!

So, how hard was that? Next time you see a glistening pile of fresh squid at your local market or fishmongers, don't skip over them! Squid just want to be loved. Is that so wrong?

Courier Sauce

2009-03-22T09:25:00.000-07:00

I don't understand my son.

I love him dearly, but I don't understand him. Miles will be 8 in a couple of weeks, and for the last few months he has become increasingly obsessed with Pokemon. It all started innocently enough. A few trading cards at school. Then a growing collection of Pokemon cards at home, with which he would have epic "Pokemon battles" with his younger brother Isaac, who was too little to fully comprehend why he would always get whooped in these strange bouts of ritualized childhood combat. Don't kids play marbles anymore? Then came Christmas, and Santa, in his infinite wisdom, decided to bestow upon the boys a pair of Nintendo DS handheld gaming systems. Miles, much to his delight, received a deluxe Pokemon game cartridge to go with it. I believe that psychotherapists refer to this behaviour as "enabling".

Both Laurel and I could really give a rat's patooty about Pokemon. If you had asked me last year what a Pokemon was, I would have been certain that you were referring to a Jamaican proctologist. Now it's different. Our son bursts into our room several times a day like a hurricane to announce that "My Dialga has just evolved into a Frenobulax!!!!", or some other equally incomprehensible phrase that obviously brings great joy to him, but leaves us wondering about each other's contribution to his DNA. Is this boy the brilliant product of years of evolution, or was our offspring scraped from the mold growing in the shallow end of the gene pool?

Mind you, his achievements in the domain of Pokemon are actually quite impressive. He has methodically created a stunningly detailed mental map of every Pokemon character, and there are dozens, if not hundreds of the little bastards. He knows all their names, their origins, their habits and attributes, and the ability or inability of each one to evolve into other Pokemon types, along with the conditions that must exist to allow for such metamorphosis. In short, he has become a Pokemon bore of the highest order, in much the same way that he was a Harry Potter bore last year. Harry Potter was sooooooo last year.

So when asked what he wanted for his birthday this year, he didn't skip a beat. "Pokemon Ranger: Shadows Of Almia". He said this with a speed that seemed to indicate that he had been thinking of nothing else for months. Laurel and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes. But hey, I was 8 years old once, and my ability to endlessly obsess over a particular toy is more than merely dimly remembered. A glance inside my studio would reveal that it has actually been parlayed into something resembling a career. So out of solidarity, I set to work tracking down this elusive Pokemon game. Nobody on eBay in North America seems to want to ship games to Asia, so I created an account on eBay India, and went searching there. I found but one copy of the sacred game in Singapore, and lo and behold the vendor would ship to India. Actually, Laurel, the Queen of Google Search found it, but for the purposes of this narrative, let's pretend that I did everything. I then created an account with "PaisaPay", which is the Indian equivalent to "PayPal", clicked on the "Buy It Now" button, and hoped for the best.

I must say that I was deeply impressed. My inbox was soon inundated with messages from eBay. "Seller has received payment". "Seller has shipped item". "Here is your tracking number". "Expect delivery no later than...". and so on. I breathed a sigh of relief, secure in the knowledge that the purchase of the birthday present was handled and that my son's geek factor was about to increase exponentially. The delivery date came and went. I thought I'd give it one more day before complaining. Then two days. I had a bad feeling. Finally, I logged back onto my PaisaPay account and actually cancelled payment for the item, figuring that it had somehow crawled off to die in that special place inhabited only by single socks and election promises. PaisaPay says that if anything changes over the next 5 days, I should cancel the cancelling. Discouraged, and facing the prospect of having to find some other kind of present that would be nowhere near as appreciated ("A cheese straightener. Uh... thanks, Dad"), I did the only thing that any self respecting parent in my situation would do. I went to buy beer.

Returning from the beer store, where I have become such a good customer that my flower garlanded portrait now hangs on the wall of the shop between Nehru and Gandhi, I felt a stirring in my shorts. This time, it was not impure thoughts responsible for the stirring, but my mobile phone. I didn't recognize the number, but took a chance and took the call anyway. A distorted rapid-fire burst of machine-gun Malayalam greeted my ear, in much the same way as that old Far Side cartoon, What Dogs Really Hear ("Blah blah blah Ginger. Blah blah Ginger"). "Blah blah blah Robert Bailey blah blah blah DHL blah...". I had to stop the gentleman on the phone and confess my complete inability to understand Malayalam, with the exception of the words for "water", "thank-you", and "mother******". Thank you, Rajesh, for that last one. "English only, please", I said into the phone in that careful, slow and loud way seemed to indicate I had no business owning a phone in this country. "What is your location please?", the crackly voice asked. I then described my address on Ponoth Road, along with the nearest cross street. "Uh, uh uh...", came the response, which I recognized as being Malayalam shorthand for "Gotcha". The line went dead.

I continued home with my bag of beery goodness. I was nearly at the front door when a motorcycle pulled up to the intersection. The driver looked around, as if trying to get his bearings. I smiled in greeting as I walked past. His gaze narrowed. "What is your good name please sir?", he asked. I get asked this question several times a day. "Robert Bailey", I answered. His eyes lit up, and he reached into the satchel on the gas tank of his bike. "Package for you, sir". A little stunned, I signed for the package in the middle of the intersection, receiving a polite head wiggle at the conclusion of the transaction. He then sped off into traffic. Shaking my head in wonderment, I looked down at the package labelled "Top Most Urgent", and thought to myself, "Only in India...".

I still don't understand my son, but he's getting the Pokemon Ranger Shadows Of Almia...

Gone Fishin'

2009-03-16T02:17:00.000-07:00

This morning I saw my neighbour fishing. In the sewer beside his house.

The disturbing thing is that after three and a half months here, it did not strike me as odd. "Buddy is fishing in the sewer. Well, that makes perfect sense". As I walked out of the house this morning with the whole family, the first thing we saw outside the gate was our next door neighbour, whose name escapes me. Clad in a lunghi and a once-snazzy shirt, he was poised expectantly beside the open sewer that runs around both sides of nearly every street here. The ditch is filled with some sort of liquid/solid amalgam. An ever changing soup of mosquito larvae-ridden grey water and human effluent. My neighbour dude had fashioned a fishing pole from a 3 foot stick, and tied some fishing line to it. The other end was submerged in the water, presumably tied to a hook, although it was impossible to tell, given the thick crust on the surface. In another setting it could have been some sort of absurdist performance art, where some black-clad bohemian dangles a line into the toilet of a SoHo loft, while reciting poetry about their miserable childhood, whilst the surrounding hipsters nod their heads approvingly. This was different, though. I passed up the temptation to ask "Catching anything?", and the five of us walked on at a zippy pace. 20 yards later we looked at each other. Was he really fishing in the sewer? Yes. I made a mental note to decline any subsequent dinner invitations.

I should point out that this was not my landlord and neighbour Stanley indulging in his piscean passion. Stanley is a bit of a connoisseur of fish, and any and all invitations to dine at his table are gleefully accepted. His wife, Gigi, allowed us to film her creating two Kerala classics "Fish & Mango Coconut Curry", and "Fish Pollichathu", which is fish coated in a spicy paste and then wrapped in banana leaves to finish cooking. All of these recipes will eventually be posted after we go through and review the tapes and transcribe and test them.

But first, one must have fish! After briefly considering it, I decided against my other neighbour's approach to fish acquisition, and instead, grabbed my cloth marketing bag and hopped on the back of Stanley's motorcycle for the short trip up to the local market. I've written a bit about this market before, but it's amazing to me how my relationship to food has changed as a result of living here and using this market. I shop every single day, and I only buy what is fresh and in season. I bring home no plastic packaging or canned goods. The selection of meats, veg, fruit, and fish is staggering. I'm going to seriously miss this when I return home. To go from a daily selection of 25 different species of fresh fish glistening on a tarp to eyeing dusty cans of tuna on the shelf at the Bowen General Store is going to be a major culture shock.

Under Stanley's watchful eye, we purchased several Karimeen, or "Pearl Spot" fish for Gigi's preparations that day. These fish are very popular here, and its easy to see why. They grow in the brackish backwaters in large numbers. Karimeen are a little bony, but the meat is very sweet tasting. They are curried sometimes, but when deep-fried whole, the wee bones become crunchy and edible. There are several women that sell Karimeen and prawns at the market. They are a boisterous bunch, and the competition for customers is stiff. There must be some sort of target painted on my shirt, because as soon as I show up in the market courtyard, there is a noisy commotion and a series of frantic hand gestures, most of which I interpret to be friendly, in an effort to attract me to their particular pile of oceanic offerings. The woman that we bought the fish from set to work expertly separating the scales from the skin using a rusty looking, but extremely sharp, knife. She cut away the gills of the Karimeen, giving the poor buggers the appearance of a permanent goofy smile. Much like my own. How these women crouch like this day after day in the heat, surrounded by a growing halo of flies amidst a heap of rapidly ripening seafood is truly beyond me. Yet there they are, day after day after day. These people are tough.

Once back at Stanley and Gigi's, we went to work. I set up all my camera and sound gear, while Laurel helped Gigi on with her wireless mic. Once all her prep was done, Gigi excused herself for a moment. She soon emerged from her room, absolutely festooned with gold jewelry, and looking quite lovely in her green sari. Inside of a couple of hours she had completely assembled two delicious dishes, and I nipped next door to collect our taste testing crew. Miles, Isaac, and Emma arrived, and we all sat down to a fantastic lunch. Real home cooking, or as they call it here, "homely food". Made with love and care. Traditional. Fresh. Local.

Well, maybe not quite so local as what my other neighbour was hoping to catch...

Fish & Fruit Curries

2009-03-13T03:17:00.000-07:00

We've been eating an awful lot of fish.

Karimeen. Kingfish. Snapper. Pomfret. Squid. Prawns, You name it. If it swims, it's terrified of us. Cochin is truly one of the best places in the world to eat seafood. There is just such a huge variety of it, and it's always available fresh daily at the market. There's even an extensive network of fish home-delivery men that ply their trade in residential neighbourhoods. They creak and wheeze down the potholed back lanes on wobbly-tired vintage pre-war bicycles that have large plastic containers filled with ice, fish, and ancient rusty balance beam scales strapped to the back. They honk these distinctive little air horns attached to the front handlebars to let the residents know that a fish dinner is within their grasp. If Harpo Marx sold fish, this is how he would do it.

I took advantage of this service for the first time last week. I was having my morning chai when I heard landlord Stanley's voice outside. "Robert!" he intoned. "Stanley!" I shot back, by now used to this kind of exchange. He calls me by my first name, thinking it's my last, and I call him by his last name, thinking it's his first. "Come!" he said. I wandered outside to meet him. We shook hands in greeting. I looked at him expectantly. He simply said "Man come". I interpreted this as an instruction to await the arrival of someone very important. A few minutes of awkward silence, punctuated by the odd head wiggle, and then the Prawn Man pulled up on his bicycle, the melting ice dripping out of the back of his large blue plastic container so that he left a trail like a slug.

The Prawn Man pulled a beat up blue tarp from the back of his bike and spread it out on the ground, revealing a plethora of fresh prawns nestled in chunks of rapidly meting ice. The store was open. I decided to step back and let my homeboy Stanley deal with the negotiations. A couple of minutes of rapid-fire Malayalam later, and I was left holding 2 kilos of fresh prawns that I had exchanged for about 260 rupees. The Prawn Man pedaled, squeaked, honked, and dripped his way further down the lane. "Cool!" I thought to myself. I didn't even have to make a phone call. Telepathic prawn delivery.

Later that day we went to film another great cooking episode with our friend Chitra. Chitra has just started her own catering company called "Mayden Treats", and has moved her cooking facilities to a rented apartment that is in the same office complex that her husband Gee occupies with his Ayurvedic "relationship enhancement" business. That's a hard business to be in when your market is mostly soft. Chitra was making a spicy red fish curry for us, and also another regional specialty: sweet mango curry. Her kitchen is small for a commercial operation, but if her cooking is any indicator, she will soon occupy the whole building!

The mango curry is very simple. Freshly peeled small raw mangoes, which are just coming into season now, are simply cooked with a few spices and curd. I'm embarrassed to say that I was so busy filming and watching sound levels that I don't remember the recipe precisely. I would have to go and review the tape to provide the whole thing accurately. That will come later. All I can tell is that it was very fast, and very very good! Savoury, sweet, and a bit sour all at the same time.

The fish curry was a great version of a true Kerala classic. This was made in a "mud pot", which is a thick ceramic pot you can place directly on the flame. It definitely adds to the taste of the dish. Once again, the accurate recipe will follow once I review the tape, but suffice to say that lots of red chili powder and turmeric are mixed with a little water to form a thick paste, which was then cooked with onion, coconut oil, fenugreek, black mustard seeds, and curry leaves. To this was added some coconut milk, water, salt, and the real star of the show, Kokum, or fish tamarind. This is a special kind of tamarind that has been dried and smoked, and it's actually a different plant than the usual tamarind that we cook with. It's a souring agent like the regular kind, but it's the smoke that gives a very unique kind of flavour to the dish. It's as different from regular tamarind as a fresh jalapeno pepper is to a chipotle chili. The dish will simply not taste authentic without it. Once everything gets cooked up, the fish, in this case snapper, gets gently placed in the pot so that it gets basically poached in the fiery smoky red sauce. Like everything Chitra makes, it was unbelievably good.

The unexpected star of the show, however, was a little snack/condiment that she quickly whipped up. Dried shrimp cooked with onion and curry leaves. Rinse a couple of cups of small dried shrimp to remove the excess salt and dust (shrimp are dried outdoors on large tarps or cement). Fry a couple of sliced small red onions in some coconut oil until they start to brown. Sprinkle a spoonful of turmeric and a spoonful of chili powder over the shrimp (maybe some black pepper too if you're feeling bold). Fry the shrimp with the onion and a handful of curry leaves until the whole thing dries out a little and the onions are nice and golden brown. Let them cool in a bowl, and serve as a condiment. It's great as a snack with a glass of cold beer too!

By the time all the food was done, I could hardly wait to sample everything. The smells were enough to make me barely be able to concentrate on filming. Chitra made some simple rice to go along with everything, and we all tucked in for a hearty lunch. Chitra kindly gave us a little care package of each item to take home and share. Then it was back home to cook the prawns I had bought the same morning.

Oi, such a lot of fish!

And the winner is...

2009-03-13T02:36:00.000-07:00

We could not have been more surprised than to come home from a day in Fort Cochin to find a small parcel waiting for us. It immediately screamed out Canada Post - the distinctive logo and packaging could be from nowhere else. What could this be? And from whom? Inside the parcel - 2 sticks of candy, a honking bar of chocolate and a copy of The Bowen Island Undercurrent. No note. But the "sender" label told it all - Leanne Romak had purchased goodies for us all and packed them up and shipped them off into the great unknown! Thank you thank you thank you Leanne! Believe it or not, it only took 5 days to arrive - maybe were not so far away after all...?

The boys were thrilled with their candy and scarfed it immediately. The adults are still savouring (one little piece at a time) the luscious Cocoa Camino Dark Espresso Bar which got put in the freezer right away since it was soft in this heat. It lost its temper and has a bit of bloom on it now but we know enough about chocolate to know that a little bloom is a purely aesthetic issue. This chocolate is sooo good that it comes very close to my current favourite from Organic Fair in Cobble Hill (I think it's available at The Ruddy Potato although we first purchased in on a visit to Lucinda and Wayne's fabulous farm in Cobble Hill).

The Undercurrent has been read cover-to-cover. We can read some of it online but much of the detail is missing so it was great to have this reminder of home.

What can we offer Leanne in return? Our undying gratitude? Sincere thanks? Or how about a Curry dinner when we return? We owe you one, Leanne!

Under Pressure

2009-03-10T21:07:00.000-07:00

Rob has already waxed rhapsodic over the mixie, and I admit that the mixie is a fine bit of hardware but the appliance that has won my heart and enriched my India experience is the humble pressure cooker. It doesn't look like much and it certainly isn't sexy, but what a work horse! I've always had a vague fear of the pressure cooker - hearing horror stories in the early 70s of pressure cookers exploding and imagining steam burns encased in a scalding hot poultice of splattered legumes was enough to convince me that a pressure cooker was an outdated contraption best left to the 1950s, 60s and those millet and lentil 70s. That is, until now.

The pressure cooker is an everyday appliance in most Indian households. The average Indian housewife would not be without several pressure cookers of varying sizes, perhaps because the diet here is so leguminous (new word meaning heavy in legumes). Perhaps because, as Stanley our landlord advised us, fuel is "costly" and a pressure cooker cuts cooking time by more than a half, thereby saving fuel and money. Or, perhaps it is because it saves time, the busy new era housewife can fit more into her day. Or because of the decreased time and savings in energy - either electricity or gas - it is the green cooker of choice. Why they are so popular here is not that important, they just are. Why have they gone out of favour in the West? I blame the microwave, but that's a whole different kettle of kingfish, which we won't get into just yet.

For those not in the know, the pressure cooker is a thick bottomed pot with a lid that seals completely the escape of steam or air. On the lid of the pressure cooker is a jiggly weight sitting atop the one pin sized hole in the sealed pot. As the pot is heated on the stove with food and liquid, the liquid produces steam, the steam builds up since it has only a tiny hole to vent through and this pressure (usually 15 psi or pounds per square inch) cooks the food at a much faster rate - saving time, fuel and sometimes vitamins. If you're interested in how and why they work the way they do, read this. For food that takes a very long time to cook to become tender - cheap cuts of meat and dried beans - the pressure cooker is a godsend. There are some basic safety rules to follow: careful removal of the weight only after it stops hissing, followed by the opening of the lid, never the other way round, and always check that nothing has blocked that little pin hole BEFORE you start cooking.

The day that Rob and I bought the mixie, we also decided to purchase a pressure cooker. We had watched Chitra use her pressure cooker to make the fabulous duck recipe and, despite jumping out of our skins the first time it "whistled", it seemed kind of harmless. It helps that new era pressure cookers have safety plugs and gasket release mechanisms. So we bought a Prestige 3 litre pressure cooker. A heavy aluminum pot with a little black weight and a whistle that reminds you that the chickpeas are almost ready even if you are 2 rooms away. "Whistle" is a euphemism, "screech" is more apt.

So I started to Google. Yes, I am getting a reputation, and, I have to admit it is mostly well-founded. Google is my friend. Back to the matter at hand, did you know that there are scores of cookbooks and websites devoted to cooking with the pressure cooker? Meat, pulses, vegetables, grains and even dessert recipes all made in the pressure cooker - I may even attempt a pressure cooked cake for Miles' upcoming birthday.

For a gal who really likes beans and whole grains - a bacon and seafood eating vegetarian at heart - the pressure cooker is a thing of majesty. As an example, it can take an hour and a half of simmering to cook wheat berries to a point where they are even beginning to be edible but in the pressure cooker, 20-30 minutes does it all. Cracked wheat (which is NOT the same as Bulgur which has been hulled, steamed and toasted so is already partially cooked and cooks up fairly quickly) takes about 40 minutes to cook in a regular pot. In the pressure cooker, a mere 1 minute. Of course it is easy to overcook food in a pressure cooker so checking out some of the online timetables can be very helpful.

This is a recipe for an Indian sweet called Lapsi I found online. I believe it's north Indian but we can get all the ingredients here in the south. I've altered it - I significantly lowered the amounts of both ghee and sugar - and we think it makes a great breakfast!

Bailey Lapsi (serves 5 in our household)

2T ghee or butter
3 cinnamon sticks broken in half
1 1/2 c cracked wheat, washed and drained
2 3/4 c water
1 chunk jaggery, chopped finely (palm sugar piece approx 2" x 1" x 1", you can substitute 2-3T brown sugar)
1/4 c roasted cashews, roughly chopped
2 small bananas, peeled and sliced (or one North American sized banana)
1 mango, peeled and chopped

Heat ghee in the bottom of the pressure cooker with the lid off over medium heat. Add cinnamon sticks and stir for a few moments. Add the drained cracked wheat and stir to coat in ghee. Toast the cracked wheat for about 2 minutes, until it changes colour a bit and smells toasty. Add water, stir, and secure the lid on the pressure cooker. Place the weight on top. Over high heat, bring the pressure cooker up to full pressure. When it screeches, turn down to medium and cook for 1 minute. Remove cooker from heat and let it depressurise naturally - there are quick release methods but you don't want to use these for this recipe as the wheat needs to stand a bit. Once you can jiggle the weight and it doesn't hiss, you can remove the weight and open the lid (be careful, the steam is hot!). Add jaggery and stir to dissolve. When the jaggery has dissolved, add all other ingredients. Stir and serve (you can pick out the cinnamon sticks or let the eaters do it themselves). Of course you can cook this in a regular pot but it'll take a long time. This recipe is also open to all sorts of substitutions - different spices, fruit and nuts - I used what we get easily here. You can also serve it with plain yogurt to spoon on top and it would be great with berries... yum.

I love my pressure cooker. Shhhh. Don't tell my husband...

Connected To The Net

2009-03-09T03:20:00.000-07:00

I love my neighbourhood in the morning.

There's a lot of life going on before 7AM here. A bunch of neighbours have scratched out a badminton court in an empty lot, and there are spirited games going on at 6AM. Labourers brush their teeth and hose off their feet at communal faucets that empty into the open sewer. There is an old woman who grazes her two cows in the neighbourhood empty lots and on the grasses that grow beside the sewer ditches. She scurries about in the early morning hours with assorted bottles, delivering fresh raw milk still warm from the udders of her bony bovines to her network of clandestine customers. Men on motorcycles head to work, grateful for the breeze beneath the lunghi. Women return from the market laden with vegetables and fish, dodging the odd rat that has been unlucky enough to have been recently flattened in an ill-timed dash. The last tired choruses of hopeful amorous insects buzz, as night gently gives way to morning.

Of course, I was missing all that because I was in bed. I heard a muffled voice say "That ****ing phone of yours!". "What?", I said, as I removed the earplugs that I usually sleep with. "Your phone!. Its' been going off since 6:45!" I hastily wrapped a lunghi around me and went to go and check to see who called. It was my friend Rajesh, who lives just up the road. I figured that he wanted me to go and re-injure myself on the soccer field, and was calling to check my availability for this ritual humiliation. I declined to call back. I opted to maintain my functional knees and the ability to walk upright, and instead returned to bed. Then the phone rang again. I ignored it, while my lovely wife gritted her teeth into powdery stumps. A few minutes later, we both heard the gate clanging as someone from the outside lane tried to gain access. We were being invaded!

Figuring that the sight of a flabby ferengi clad only in a lunghi would be enough to frighten away even the most adamant intruder, I wrapped the cloth around my naughty bits and marched towards the door, prepared for confrontation. The door swung wide to reveal Rajesh and his young daughter. He looked understandably surprised at my appearance. Nothing like a sleepy old white guy in a piece of cloth to get your day off to a good start. "You are having an extra long sleep?", he asked, unaware of the irony of his inquiry. I mumbled something unintelligible. As my fog lifted, I became aware that he was planning a trip to Vypeen to buy some crabs again, and thoughtfully asked if the family and I wanted to come. Naturally, my irritation at being woken evaporated as visions of crab curry danced across my inner field of vision, like one of those old snack ad trailers they used to play at the drive-in movies. "Let's all go to the lobby....".

Changing into my shorts faster than Superman can don a cape, I also managed to convince the boys that putting on clothing before going outside was actually a good idea. Grabbing our trusty green crab bucket, we three headed up to Rajesh's house and piled into his car for the short trip to Vypeen. Vypeen is a long, thin island that can be reached from Ernakulam, where we live, by a series of bridges, and also by ferry. Rajesh first drove us to his friend's prawn farm on one of the lesser islands on the way. This was a very cool property that bordered one of the backwaters that Kerala is famous for. We went to the little "seafood shack" that was right by the water, and there we found a couple of men hoisting large baskets of freshly caught small shrimp. Unfortunately, there was only one small crab was to be had, but as a consolation, we got to follow one of the men to the water to watch him fish. He cast his hand-net out 8 or 9 times, each time coming back with a fish or two. There were Karimeen, or "Pearl Spot", small barracuda, a carp-like specimen or two, and one that looked very close to what we would call a ling cod. A couple of good sized shrimp, and a small crab or two, and there was more than enough caught in 10 minutes to feed a whole family for at least a day. I've got to get me one of those nets for when the eulachon are running at home!

This made me think of why Kerala is called "God's Own Country". No, it's not that there is a Supreme Deity with a penchant for real estate speculation. The name means that this area is so rich, clean, and diverse, that one can pretty much live off the land. Coconuts grow in abundance. Fish and prawns proliferate in the abundant waters. Banana leaves for plates. Perfect growing conditions for rice. Great soil for vegetables. Eat with your hands. You can live pretty simply here, and live pretty well.

We bought a couple of kilos of the fresh prawns, and had them cleaned for us on the spot. Unfortunately, our second "Quest for Crabs" was thwarted, as access to Vypeen was rendered impossible due to a colourful festival, complete with drums and dancers with enormous fake heads, that was taking place in the one main road that runs the whole length of the island. Abandoning the quest after a lengthy stop on the last bridge to the island, we turned the convoy around and headed for home. We had to content ourselves with the fish, the prawns, and a lonesome small crab. Once home, I drained the prawns, and then sprinkled a little turmeric, chili powder, black pepper, and salt on them. Then I deep fried them in coconut oil, and drained them on newspaper. I fried some onions until they were golden brown, then added some fresh green chili, garlic, coconut chunks, curry leaves, and the previously fried prawns. A few stirs and dinner was ready...

I love my neighbourhood in the evening.

Lights Out!

2009-03-08T00:19:00.000-08:00

Rob has alluded in previous posts to the power going out here on a regular basis but I don't know how many of you realize how regular it really is. The power is turned off for a half hour every day. Yes, every day. That is the scheduled "out". It took us awhile to figure it all out, but it goes something like this: Week 1 your power is out from 6 - 6:30 pm every day. We've been messed up by this one several times since we are often making dinner around that time - out comes the trusty headlamp and the cooking continues in the dark (whilst been eaten alive by mosquitos). Indians tend to eat later - 8 pm - so this particular time slot probably isn't too hard on them. Week 2, power goes out from 6:30 - 7 pm, and so on. Each week the scheduled out is a half hour later until the final one which is 10 - 10:30 pm. Then you're back to week 1 again. Each neighbourhood is on a different schedule.

Then there are the all-too regular, but not predictable, power failures as well. We usually have 3 to 10 of these a week. Some last 5 or 10 minutes, others last for hours. You have no idea how dependent you have become on overhead fans until the power is out for 2 hours in the middle of a 35C day!

It tends to get dark here around 7 pm so when the power goes out in the dark, before the boys go to bed, we use that time to play a great game taught to us by our fabulous Bowen neighbour, Brian. We play Geography. The first person names a country (we expanded it to include continents, cities and towns...). The next person says the name of a place that starts with the same letter that the last one ended with - for example: first one says "Athens", second one says "Sweden", third one "Nantucket" etc. What's great about this game is that it requires no equipment, not even a pen or paper. You also don't need to be able to see each other (very handy when the power is out)! We've used this game on trains, in cars, in airports, at restaurants... Miles has always been geeky about geography so it was an obvious game for him to play but I was afraid Isaac wouldn't be able to keep up. But the game is so repetitive that each time we play it Isaac picks up more place names. He has no idea where the places are but since we're not trying to place them on a map, that is irrelevant. We rarely need to give him hints anymore and now that he is reading, a whole new world (pun intended) has opened up. Of course, if you play Geography too often it can get really, really, repetitive and boring but we save it for those really-need-it-times and it works out well. Watch out for all those names starting and ending in "A" though! We've also corrupted it horribly to Animalography and Foodography (yes, I know the "ography" part doesn't really work here, it should be "ology" but that's what the boys started calling them and the names stuck) where we use names of animals or food - both ingredients and finished dishes - instead of places. We've also used the dark time to make shadow puppets using the headlamp, listen to music or watch a DVD on the laptop (if it's charged) and create oral stories together.

A half hour doesn't seem like a long time but when it happens everyday you become acutely aware of the things we generally take for granted - like how much power we use and how much we are dependent upon it. You plan your day differently, or maybe it is that it forces you to PLAN your day. When are you going to cook? When are you going to eat (hard to eat in the dark, we've done it but try to avoid it since you can't see fish bones and things)? When are you going to wash the dishes (also tricky in the dark), check your email, do yoga (not when the fan isn't working!)? The power out is a good time to play games, hang with the family and remember why we came here in the first place. It forces you to slow down at some point every day, and stop doing. Less doing, more being.

Clap on. Clap Off.

Shtanley's Shtoo

2009-03-06T22:18:00.000-08:00

Enough Larium induced piffle. Time to get back to basics.

First off, we want to thank all the people that took time out to write comments or send us a private email in response to our plea from a couple of posts back. In retrospect, it was obviously a cry for help. Nevertheless, our staunch friends came through with much appreciated notes from the home front. We are now reassured that we have not slipped into some odd curry flavoured parallel universe, never to be seen or heard from again. Your comments ranged from "Keep it up. The pictures and recipes are nice. We're very much enjoying this", to "You bastards. How dare you complain when you're sitting amongst the palm trees enjoying 90+ straight days of sunshine. I'm freezing my soggy ass off here". No matter. It was great to hear from friends old and new. Thanks. Ahhhhhhh.......

This week we filmed a great segment with Gigi, our landlord Stanley's wife. As some of you may recall, we were invited to their house for a Christmas lunch. Well, some might call it lunch. It was more an epic two and a half hour festival of gluttony. Knowing what I do now, it must have taken the better part of two days to prepare. The first course, which was brought out shortly after Stanley literally stuffed a big piece of pineapple cake directly into my gaping maw, was a delicious vegetable and coconut concoction served with appam, the light and lacy rice and coconut pancake. Incredibly balanced and nuanced, this dish had a complexity that belied its simple ingredient list. We had never had anything like it before in any Indian restaurant. "What IS this?", I asked, between enthusiastic mouthfuls. "It's fantastic". "Ishtoo", replied Stanley, looking very pleased that I was pleased. I was tempted to reply "gesundheit", but fought the urge. The puzzled look on my face made Stanley repeat it. "Ishtoo". Suddenly it was clear to Laurel and me. Stew! Yes, that's it! Vegetable stew. The name of this dish is a Malayalam mutation of the English word, much like "milk-uh" and "curd-uh". Despite their propensity for appending extra syllables, they make-uh some-uh good-uh ishtoo. Almost Italian, really.

So yes, ishtoo is not a personal electronics device made by Apple-uh. It's a very tasty combination of potatoes, beans, carrots, onions, and coconut milk. It's seasoned with fresh green chili, cardamom, cinnamon, clove, and whole black pepper. Finally, the whole mixture is tempered with dried red chili, mustard seeds, and crispy shallots. First, Gigi showed us how to make appam. I've made appam a couple of times here, but always from a prefab mix. As you might expect, mine were pale imitations of the ones that Gigi makes. A quantity of rice is soaked overnight, then drained. This gets ground up in the mixie with some watery coconut milk and some cooked rice. Salt and yeast are added, and the mixture sits for a couple of hours. The yeast makes the whole mixture rise, and the bubbly batter doubles in volume. Next, Gigi heated up a special non-stick pan called a "tava" (pronounced "Ta-wha"), which is slightly parabolic in shape. Once heated, she ladled a scoop of the batter into the pan, and gently swirled around the center, which left a little island of batter in the the deepest part of the pan. In a couple of minutes, the edges turn crispy brown, and the finished appam gets slid out of the tava in all its lacy majesty. This she repeated until all the batter was gone. She must have made a few dozen of these.

For the iShtoo, she simply put all the vegetables in a large pot, along with the spices, salt, and a couple of cups of thin coconut milk. Then she covered it, and let it simmer for fifteen minutes. That's it. She removed it from the heat, and stirred in some "thick" milk (first extraction). This is done off the heat so that the coconut milk does not curdle. Finally, she heated up some coconut oil (1/2 cup?) for tempering, that all important process of finishing a curry. When the oil was hot, she put in the mustard seeds, red chili, and curry leaves When the seed sputtered a bit, she put in a load of sliced shallots and fried them until they were crispy golden brown. This she placed immediately into the iShtoo, yielding a satisfying and fragrant sizzle. A couple of stirs, and the dish was ready to serve.

Appam is the ideal accompaniment to many South Indian dishes. Their lacy texture is perfect for absorbing every last drop of gravy, as well as for grasping the yummy little bits lurking in the sauce. Emma and the boys were summoned away from their schoolwork being done at our house next door, and we all sat down to a stunning lunch. Laurel and I both marveled at how such a simple ingredient list could yield something as interesting and complicated in taste. Then again, it should come as no surprise that quality ingredients combined with good technique should make something incredibly tasty.

Good ingredients.. Good technique. Can't go wrong with the basics!

Star Trek Memories

2009-03-04T03:39:00.000-08:00

I love Star Trek, and I always have.

It was not until last night, however, as I was ruminating over recent events with a gin and tonic ("for the malaria, old boy..."), that the full brilliance of Star Trek as a social and political satire hit home. I'll try to explain the path taken to arrive at this conclusion. Watching the news from the BBC last night, there was a story about how the Sri Lanka cricket team was attacked by extremists in Pakistan as they were on their way to a test match. I had just finished reading "The Last Moghul", a historical novel by William Dalrymple that documents the brutal suppression by the British of a Muslim/Hindu "uprising" in 1857. Also, I recently completed a book documenting the relationship between Winston Churchill and Gandhi. This has provided some wonderful background information on the events that have shaped the Indian society that we are currently living in. The ruthless subjugation of the Indian people, and the incredibly bloody suppression of the 1857 rebellion by the English make it even more remarkable to me that I can walk down a street here in India with my family and be smiled at instead of lynched. One of the most interesting lines from the Churchill/Gandhi book stated that "imperialism and religious fundamentalism have always been deeply intertwined".

It was the ruling British that decided to carve out Pakistan as a Muslim state, and this forced separation was done in such an arbitrary way, that the dividing border ran through towns, and in some cases, the middle of peoples homes. In many ways, the attack on the cricket team, the attack on Mumbai in November 2008, and many others can be seen as merely the latest episodes in a bloody struggle, going back generations. It has roots in the actions of the British, who ruled India for quite a number of years. The British East India Company made vast fortunes off the backs of the Indian people, all the while playing Hindu off of Muslim, and basically doing anything they could to prevent Indian independence and maintain control over India's people and resources. Things can get pretty testy around here, especially around election time, when old and bitter rivalries bubble to the surface.

Star Trek fans, and by this I mean "The Next Generation" era, not the earlier delightfully cheesy vehicle for William Shatner's propensity for overacting, will remember a curious race of creatures known as the "Ferengi". These loathsome little men, with bad teeth and ears that were a cross between Dumbo and Prince Charles on a bad hair day, had virtually no redeeming qualities. Their only loyalty was to profit. They were untrustworthy. They would sell out their grandmothers if it meant earning an extra dollar. Lying, cheating, and stealing are de riguer. What you might not know is that "firangi" is actually a Hindi word meaning "foreigner", and its application is decidedly derogatory. That's when the brilliance of Star trek hit me. I realized that we (and by this I mean white people) are the firangi. All the unsavoury personality traits of a fictional race of space creatures have been demonstrated in the behaviour of Europeans, and their descendants, towards India.

Wow. Suddenly everything from The Crusades to 9/11 made sense.

Then, propelled further by the mystical qualities of the gin, I riffed a little more on the Star Trek theme. It became immediately obvious to me that the Borg was a metaphor for the Western perception of the failure of Communism. The Borg Collective, which was the arch enemy of the ostensibly democratic Federation of Planets, assimilated any individual into a rigid and humourless group consciousness that placed the well-being of the collective above the needs of the individual. A clear nod to the Western perception of Communism. Communism has been pretty much in our face here, as Kerala is pretty unique in having a democratically elected Communist government. And they keep getting re-elected for the most part. This is most curious, as communist ideology, at least from what I can gather, thrives on fomenting revolution, and tearing down existing government structure. I can only imagine the shock and surprise of the Communist Party here when they actually got elected, and were faced with the responsibility of forming a government! "Uhhhhh... gee fellahs. What do we do now?". One would think that thoughts of revolution would need to be put aside for a while. Resistance is futile...

The last ice cube melted in my gin, and it was definitely time to head to bed. There's no intelligent life here...

Fair Comment

2009-03-01T18:54:00.000-08:00

Forgive me if this sounds a bit whiny.

We've just passed the three month mark of being away from home, and I have to admit, we're starting to miss our friends and family, despite having an amazing adventure here. You can tell by looking at the sad faces in our passport photo montage.

We thought that this blog would be a very comprehensive diary of our trip, but more importantly, it would be an effective and efficient way of keeping in touch with friends. Since the blog started, we've noticed that our email inbox, which normally overflows with quick notes from friends and family, not to mention unwanted ads for male enhancement products, has been strangely quiet. Sure, we still get our bill e-notices, subscription offers, and so on, but the regular contact has pretty much dried up. Then we flattered ourselves in thinking that the blog itself, yes, this very thing that you are reading now, contained such a richly detailed overload of information that anyone reading it felt like they were peeking over our shoulders as we went along, and the reader might feel that any subsequent communication would be superfluous. As I said, we flattered ourseleves.

The reality is that we really intended this thing to be a dialogue, and we must remind our bloggy friends that your comments and emails are not only welcome, they are in fact absolutely essential in keeping us connected with our home and the people we care about. Looking at the hit counter, we're pretty sure that several of our friends and family are reading this daily, although admittedly, at least half of those hits are us desperately checking to see if there has been any response to anything we've written. We're not attention-seeking neurotics (well, maybe a little...), we just want to hear a friendly voice from time to time. What can we say. We're starting to miss people.

Also, if anyone wants to Fed-Ex us a kilo of parmeggian reggiano and a bottle of decent red wine, our address is:
Post 104, Ponoth Road End
Kaloor, Cochin
Kerala, India
682017

Just sayin'....

Rubbed The Wrong Way

2009-02-26T00:10:00.000-08:00

It started with a twinge in my shoulder.

Within a few weeks, I was getting regular sensations of tingling and numbness down my right arm and first two fingers. A couple of years ago, I had a bad fall and landed squarely with all my weight on my right shoulder. For several months, I was in a lot of pain, but for the last few months it seemed like it was mostly back to normal. Then this started, and frankly, it was a little worrisome. Laurel, also known as "The Goddess of Google", quickly determined that I was suffering from an impinged radial nerve. Recommendations for treatment on the site were vague, however. It was time to be proactive. I am in India. The home of Ayurveda. Ayurvedic massage might help! There is an Ayurvedic hospital just down the road. I decided to walk the 10 minutes to the hospital and take the plunge.

Having no clue as to how to proceed, I just barged in the front door. About thirty empty chairs were set up in a large room serviced by a one squeaky ceiling fan. All the lights were off, leaving the empty room in semi-darkness. It almost had the vibe of a 1930's film noir set. The reception desk was empty, but someone soon came up to ask what it was that I needed, as I must have looked a bit confused. I briefly described my symptoms, and she summoned the doctor, who soon ushered me into a smaller office. He moved my arm around a bit, and I could hear the "click...click" as the damaged joint moved up and down. He prescribed a certain oil to be applied daily, and a cream to be applied at night. "Also", he said, "You will come back tomorrow for massage". Soft lights. Soothing music. The healing touch of an attractive attendant. Woo hoo...

3 PM rolled around the next day, and I headed for the hospital, a little uncertain as to what was about to unfold. On arrival, I sat alone for about 10 minutes in the strangely unoccupied entranceway before a woman came up and asked me what I was doing there. "I have a 3 PM massage appointment", I replied. A knowing head wiggle, and she departed to locate the doctor. The doctor showed me to a side door off of the entranceway, and indicated that I should go in. The room was about 10x15, and all the walls and floor were covered in tile. A faucet stuck out of one wall. The center of the room was dominated by an ancient looking slab of wood that had a small canal chiseled into its perimeter. The weathered board, which looked like it had been stolen from an ancient temple door in a drunken prank, was tilted on a slight angle. On the low end, a hole in the chiseled canal allowed fluids to drop out into a receptacle. It looked for all the world like an autopsy was about to be performed. On me.

I was instructed to remove my shirt. Then my shorts. One of the two mustachioed attendants produced an item that I was then supposed to put on. It consisted of a narrow strip of papery cloth, about 4 inches wide, and about two feet long. Two strands came out from each side of the strip, and one of the gents tied it around my waist. This left the long strip hanging in front of my nether regions and grazing the floor. Before I could protest that my nether regions did not actually touch the floor, and did not require a strip of cloth quite that long, buddy reaches down and pulls it up past the crack of my bum, and affixes it to the drawstrings around my waist. Looking for all the world like a low budget sumo wrestler that had been recently released from Guantanamo Bay, I had little choice but to stand there stunned, awaiting further instructions. They came via gesture. I was instructed to climb up onto the vintage autopsy table, and lay down on my back. This I did. I thought of England.

One of the gentlemen produced a large pot of warm oil, and both of them grabbed a handful and began to lubricate my legs and feet liberally. Then, with a degree of synchronization that can only come from years of practice, they did long sweeping rubbing motions from the bottom of my legs to my waist. It was pretty vigorous, and it actually felt pretty good, despite the fact that I was keenly aware of the fact that I was on a vintage autopsy table with my paper clad junk getting a little more ventilation than I was used to. Onto my side. More lubrication. Onto the other side. More lubrication. Then came the order to lie on my front. They did the lower body first. By this time, almost a liter of oil had been used on me, and their rubbing motions caused me to slide around on the wooden table like a side of bloody pork on a butcher's block. I found it difficult to relax, as the constant threat of genital splinters aside, it was hard to shake the sudden realization that I had just paid two strange men to cover me with oil and rub my ass.

The work was done. I got up off the table, and as I was standing there being toweled down, the doctor casually strolled in to check on my progress. A bit too casually, actually. When he opened the door, both me and my wedding tackle were exposed to the whole waiting room, which was thankfully reasonably empty. "How do you feel?", he asked. "Violated", I was tempted to reply, but only managed to croak out a weak "good". One of the masseurs smiled at me and asked "Coming back tomorrow?". "No", I replied, uncertain as to the subtext. I put my clothes back on, went out and paid the 450 Rs for a 50 minute vigorous oil massage. Walking home, I felt a little looser, but a bit dazed. My shoulder was still hurting a bit, and my fingertips were still numb.

Why did I leave a 50 rupee tip?

The Magnificent Mixie

2009-02-24T22:48:00.001-08:00

I'm a slut for hardware.

Sexy sleek black electronic devices. Power tools of every description. A beautifully restored vintage car. All these things make me just a little weak in the knees. Freshly released testosterone courses through the veins, racing to stimulate the pleasure centers labeled "Apple", "Sony", and "DeWalt" in my crudely wired reptilian brain. No device, however, has brought the kind of joy that I have received from the purchase of a genuine Indian mixie. The mixie has rocked my world. I now walk through the markets secure in the knowledge that I could pretty much blend any damn thing I see into a base for a fine curry.

I decided to put the new hardware to work the morning after purchase. It was about 8:30 AM, and as I was contemplating what to make for the evening meal, my mobile phone rang. It was my friend Rajesh. "What are your plans for the market today?", he politely enquired. Before I could respond at length, he said "We are going Vypeen to get some crabs. Do you want to come?" Duh... Laurel had some work to do, so I grabbed Emma, Miles, Isaac, and my green plastic crab bucket, and we walked the half a block to Rajesh's house, where he was waiting with his daughter and three nieces and nephews. As we were piling into the car, his business partner Gee pulled up on a beautiful Royal Enfield motorbike, with his two daughters hanging off the back. It's very common to see entire families of four or five riding on the same motorcycle. Our little convoy headed for Vypeen Island in search of crustaceans. Quest for crab!

Rajesh and Gee knew several little hole in the wall shops that sold live crabs, but our first five stops yielded nothing but directions to the next shop. After about 40 minutes of driving and searching, we finally struck gold. In a little unmarked shop well off the main road, several wicker baskets were laid out on the floor. A rusty balance beam scale occupied a beat up old wooden table. The biggest crabs are called "mud crabs", and they go for about 750 Rs. per kilo. They are monsters, and can weigh 2.5 kilos easily. The next size down goes for about 200 Rs. per kilo. I prefer these ones, as they are a little sweeter, and they are not so huge as to require a hammer to break up the claws. It took about 9 or 10 crabs to make up my 3 kg order, and I whistled a very happy tune on the way back to the car. All told, we bought about 2,000 Rs worth of crab between the three of us.

Once home, I hatched a plan that would bring together several of the techniques I had learned over the last few months. I would make a coconut crab curry! After dropping off a kilo of crabs as a gift for my landlord, Stanley, who lives next door, I set to work immediately. First, I boiled up a bunch of salt water and cooked the crabs in two batches for about 8 or ten minutes. Then I let them cool. I grabbed a coconut (a gift from Gee's farm), peeled off the tuft at the end, and bonked it open with a rolling pin. Then things got pretty old school. I sat on the floor and grated all the coconut onto a plate using our manual shredder. This yielded about a cup and a half of fresh, shredded coconut. By the time I was done, the crabs were cooled enough to clean. I popped the shell off of each one, and discarded the greyish gills. I was careful to reserve all the liquid inside the shells, as well as the purplish and orange fatty head innards and any dense red roe that I could find. This gets added to the curry later, and makes for huge flavour. Chop the little bodies in half, discard the teeny legs, and the crabs were prepped.

Next came the inaugural use of the mixie. You could use a blender for this, or even a food processor, but a mixie is made for curry. I tossed in:

all the grated coconut
4 small chopped red onions (1 1/2 cups or so), (Indian red onions are smaller than North American ones, and look like a very large shallot)
8 small shallots,
2 inch piece of ginger chopped up,
3 green chilies, chopped,
3 tsp red chili powder
1 tsp turmeric,
1 tsp coriander powder,
1 tsp ground black pepper,
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 stalk of curry leaves,
6 cloves of garlic,
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup water

Grind this to a nice smooth paste, adding a little water if necessary.

Next, grab a walnut sized piece of tamarind, and soak it in about a cup or so of warm water. Squeeze it a few times to break it up, and after a few minutes, you should be able to remove any seeds or twigs that are contained within. Nearly every curry has some sort of "souring agent", such as yoghurt, lime juice, tamarind, or "kokum (fish tamarind)". Getting the balance of hot, sweet, salty, and sour flavours just right in a curry takes a little practice, but it's an art worth mastering!

In a pan large enough to hold all the crab pieces, add a few tablespoons of coconut oil or vegetable oil. Coconut oil is best. When the oil has heated up, add 1 tbsp of black mustard seeds. When they start to pop, add 10 or 12 fresh curry leaves and stir. Add the ground paste and fry it over medium heat until the spices are aromatic and the oil runs clear. Toss in the crab pieces and stir to cover the crab in the sauce. Add the tamarind water and pulp. Add the reserved crab juice and roe. Gently stir to combine, adding a little water if needed to smooth out the sauce. Taste and correct for salt. Let the mixture simmer for a couple of minutes over low heat.

You should be rewarded with pretty much the best damn curry you've every tasted. We were pretty pleased. After dinner, I was so pleased that I bundled a little bit of crab and sauce into a dish and marched next door to Stanley's house. He answered the door clad in his lunghi and beaded with sweat. He too, was in the middle of a crab feast. He ushered me in and sat me down at the table. He did a little sniff test, then a lick, and finally tucked into a claw. "Good!" he grunted, looking very pleased. A plate of crab appeared before me. It was his wife's version, and it would have been rude to say no, so I took one for the team and chowed down, despite being already filled with enough crab to start my own aquarium. It was pretty good, although I have to say that I preferred ours! Shameless egotism. Gigi surprised me by tasting the sauce I made and rattling off every ingredient in my curry! She said that it was good, but fell just short of being "traditional". This is an attitude that we have encountered here before. If it's not exactly how your mom made it, it's not exactly right! I was undeterred. Stanley's enthusiastic slurps and grunts, combined with the fact that Emma was still at the table searching bits of shell for the last bit of crabmeat and sauce was enough to convince me of the success of this particular recipe!

I love my hardware. Batteries not included.

Everything Is Just Ducky

2009-02-22T23:16:00.001-08:00

My thunder has been stolen.

Journalistic thunder that is. After I was about half finished writing up a post about the notorious "Poop" milk, Laurel announced that her new blog post was finished. "Can I have the picture you downloaded from the camera that has the Poop on it?", she asked. I vehemently protested. "But I'm almost done writing about it!". With irrefutable logic, she replied "Well, I took the picture, and my post is finished". Grudgingly, I looked over her post, searching in vain for obvious flaws that would render mine the superior candidate for publication. To my profound chagrin, I had to admit that hers was better than mine. I had to let it go. I logged onto her laptop from mine and copied the picture over. "It's yours", I said. "Go. Be free...". I will console myself with another observation of questionable signage. The store at the top of our street specializes in toilet fixtures of the seating variety. The company name proudly proclaimed on the front of the building? "Hindware".

Recently we started to film a series of kitchen escapades with our friend Chitra. She generously had us into her home with all our camera and audio gear for nearly four hours while she demonstrated a wee bit of Keralan kitchen magic for us. Chitra showed us how to extract coconut milk from freshly shredded coconut (from their own farm, no less), make the wonderful pidi dumplings from rice flour and cumin, and lastly, how to make her amazing duck dish, which is a variation on a traditional Kerala chicken roast. She's a great cook, and is imbued with a ton of traditional knowledge. She is highly unusual in that she herself only eats pure vegetarian cuisine, but cooks all manner of meat and fish dishes for her family. This she accomplishes without tasting the dishes that she is making, which is quite a feat. She's developed an intuitive way of working in the kitchen that's quite astonishing. Imagine Stevie Wonder making a living as a photographer, and you begin to get an idea of the degree of difficulty....

First off there was the coconut milk. A lot of Keralan dishes have coconut milk, because we're in "the land of coconuts" after all. We had heard vague rumblings in some of the more authentic cookbooks about "first", "second", and "third" extractions of milk, but had never actually been walked through the procedure. She started off by cracking a coconut, and using the manual shredder to extract all the meat. The shredded coconut goes into a special blender called a "mixie". This is worth talking about a bit. A mixie is absolutely integral if you're going seriously pursue Indian cooking. It's a hybrid of a blender, food processor, and coffee grinder, and it allows you to grind both wet or dry things with ease. It's essential for making coconut milk, chutneys, masala spice mixes, gravies, and so on. Chitra added some water to the coconut, spun it for a bit in the mixie, and then strained it to get the thick and rich "first" extraction. This is usually added to dishes later in the cooking. Then back into the mixie with more water for the second extraction, and so on. The last extraction is very watery compared to the first. You could do this at home with a blender, but the mixie rules! We have a small mixie at home in Vancouver, but it was at this point that we resolved to go out and get one for the duration of our stay in India. Having one dramatically increases your options when it comes to food prep!

Next came the making of the pidi, which were rolled from a simple dough made with coconut milk, rice flour, cumin and salt. While the dough is still warm, you just pinch of a little bit, and roll it between your palms to yield a small football shaped dumpling. These are then gently simmered for a time in the thin coconut milk. Then it was on to the duck! Marinated overnight in coriander and red chili (amongst other things), the duck is then sauteed until it is browned. Onions and shallots are fried, and then blended in the mixie to make a fabulously rich and spicy gravy with the coconut milk. I'm leaving out a few things here, because it is Chitra's secret recipe after all! A short time of pressure cooking to tenderize the duck to a state of falling off the bone, and there it is. Chitra served it with the pidi in its own bowl, and the duck and gravy in another, so you can mix and match as you like. She also served up a fabulous fresh green mango pickle that was just green mangoes, salt, and that funky smelling but essential seasoning, asafoetida. After three hours of holding a camera, and checking sound and light levels, I was really ready to tuck in and eat . How do I put this across in mere words? It was really, really good! Thanks for a great day, Chitra! Hopefully the first of many.

And as for my wife.... all is forgiven.

When smug gets in your eyes

2009-02-20T05:15:00.000-08:00

Milk here comes in handy 500 ml plastic bags that look like little square pillows. The usual brand we see is called Milma and the milk is advertised as "double-toned"- we've yet to figure out what that means. The milk here is a mere Rs10 per 500 ml, or .50¢ a litre! Curd (yogurt) also comes in the same useful little packs.

Between our house and KK Road are 3 "corner" stores. They are handy little attachments to someone's house that open on the street side to provide a sales counter. They carry some basic items like milk, flour, salt and small amounts of fruit and veg. If you are missing just an item or two for a meal, these little shops can save you the 45 minute round-trip up to the main drag.

Miles, almost 8, has started taking trips, by himself, to one of these corner stores to purchase bottled water and milk for us. He has learned, as we all had to, that although the words "milk" and "curd" are used here (as well as their Malayalam equivalents, paalu and thairu, respectively) and are even written in English on the packets, pronunciation is all important. You must ask for milk-e or curd-e (an extra vowel sound on the end that makes the same vowel sound as in book) to be understood. So Miles walks himself up to the store, tiptoes so he can be seen on the other side of the counter and asks for " 2 milk-e" and deals with the rupees and change all on his own. Pretty impressive.

So one day about a week ago, Miles comes home with a different brand of milk and pops it in the fridge. I am the one who usually decants the milk and curd into the pitcher and plastic tub that we keep in the fridge. I pulled the milk out of the fridge and cut off one corner to pour it into the pitcher. The logo stopped me in my tracks. Miles has just purchased "POOP" milk! Rob was out, Emma was in the shower and the boys were deeply engrossed in a game on their computer. Having no-one to share the humour with, I pulled out the camera and took a photo of the remaining unopened packet for proof. One must always have proof. Later that evening, I related the story to Rob and we pulled out the camera to have a look at the photo. We had a good chuckle over the could-not-be-more-inappropriate branding of the milk. Poop milk, a classic bit of Indoglish. For days afterwards we would look at each other and mouth "poop!". We were smugly superior in our ability to see such an obvious error in nomenclature judgment.

A couple of days ago we were at Chitra's filming the making of the awesome duck and pidi dishes (more on that coming up in a later post) and as she opened the fridge, I noticed that she too had Poop milk. Rob and I, chuckling away to ourselves again, attempted to relay the humour of this name to Chitra. I thought we were coming up against some kind of untranslatable humour-barrier because although Chitra is very smart and has an excellent command of English, she had a confused look on her face. We tried to explain in more detail. You know. 'Poop', as in... She set us straight. She knew what we meant by 'poop'. She shook her head, opened the door of the fridge and pulled out the packet. And lo and behold, there it was before us, what we were unable to see clearly before. The brand PDDP. No wonder Chitra was baffled by our mirth! But, overflowing with the PDDP of human kindness, she let it pass. I felt like such an adolescent. A not very bright one at that.

A little crow with that duck?

The Day Breaks Open Wide

2009-02-16T21:09:00.000-08:00

The bells of the Immanuel Cathedral chime 5 times. The fan whirs overhead in the half light of early morning. 5 am.

The call to prayer sounds from a nearby minaret, and another day in Cochin begins. The call reaches out to the Muslims of the city - a call to community, to duty and to surrender. Facing the Kaaba, they begin their morning prayers.

Hindus are placing kumkum on foreheads and offering fresh jasmine blossoms to their gods in puja for the day that lies ahead. Each day a struggle, and a blessing.

Pictures of the Sacred Heart in flashy flourescent painted on the back a truck. The words "Baby Jesus" emblassoned on the front in a cursive flourish. A Christian truck driver lights a stick of incense, places it on the dashboard shrine and offers up a quick prayer for the trip ahead. The truck horn loud and long warns smaller vehicles of its approach.

This is how Cochin begins its day. Every day. How many of us are so grateful to wake each morning?

A Rare Sighting

2009-02-15T21:01:00.000-08:00

If I had not seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed it. It has long been considered extinct by experts, yet there was the evidence before me. Irrefutable.

It lives.

I should backtrack a little. Yesterday, we were invited to film our friend Chitra participating in a local cooking competition. Chitra was going to make her favourite duck dish, and having previously sampled its ducky majesty, I was convinced that her triumphant victory was a given, the recording of which was a mere formality. The scene was very interesting. At least 50 women were gathered in a large room in a local Christian center to battle it out. At stake were prizes valued at around 5000 Rs, but I suspect that although it was never said out loud, bragging rights played a significant role in the participation of these ladies. "Yo! That's MY dosa! Eat it. EAT IT!!!. You in my house now!".

The contest was sponsored by a local radio station, the promotion manager of which granted Laurel and me permission to film the whole thing, even the super-secret judging. Over 50 tables were laid out in this big crumbly fluorescent-lit room. Every table was covered in an identical gingham tablecloth that looked like something that had been recently peeled off of Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island. (She was much hotter than Ginger, but I digress...) All the women had about an hour and a half to assemble their goodies, which had been pre-cooked at home. There were marks to be awarded for both taste and presentation, and judging from some of the elaborate presentations, deep within the mysterious folds of many of the saris beat the heart of a budding structural engineer.

A wide range of dishes were presented, ranging from faithful takes on Kerala classics to interesting hybrid "fusion" efforts, in which existing classics are deconstructed, reworked, and rebuilt from the ground up, often with mixed results. After the ladies had assembled their creations, they were whisked out out of the hall, and the judging began in earnest. The team consisted of an executive chef from a prominent hotel, and a delightfully imperious lady whom I believe was an esteemed food critic/author. Rounding out the team was the winner of last year's contest. I followed the three judges around as they moved from table to table. They probed, prodded, sniffed, and tasted, and made copious notes on nearly 55 items.

Chitra's dish was first off. A fabulous spicy coconutty duck gravy served with pidi, which is a really tasty coconut and rice flour dumpling thing that kind of resembles gnocchi. They have a great taste on their own, but they are an ideal counterpoint to a spicy gravy dish. It's good. Real good. A town without pidi is not a place I want to live.

On the judges went, bravely munching their way through offering after offering with complete poker faces. If they had any bias, it was pretty hard to detect. Then suddenly.... I saw it. I had seen only grainy black and white pictures of it in history books, and I had to look twice to make sure that what I was seeing was no illusion, but there it was, right in front of me. Without a doubt, it had up and migrated the Aleutian Land Bridge during the last Ice Age and evolved into the specimen before me.

The dreaded church potluck hard boiled eggs.

Black olives of questionable pedigree, only recently liberated from lengthy confinement in a can, are carefully placed atop sliced hard boiled eggs, one olive per slice, and these slices in turn are placed on a bed of what appeared to be macaroni slathered in a whitish concoction of unknown origin. A true weapon of ass destruction. No doubt the fine folks at Monsanto had some hand in the ingredient list. If had been carrying a geiger counter, the readings would have been off the charts. The accompanying sign, which was in no way meant to be ironic, said "Special Salad". This was undoubtedly the low point of the competition. The judges remained stoic. If they were appalled at this entry, they were professional enough not to show it.

The other entries were quite varied, and there were some truly stunning examples of home cookery. Everything from simple but good idli and sambar, to ornately sculptured creations filled with prawns, chicken, and other bits of yumminess. It was agonizing following the judges around with a camera, constantly watching them eat bits of all this amazing stuff while fighting the urge to say "Uuuuhhhh... can I try that?". Interestingly, when the judges encountered something that was "fusiony", they did not appear to be as happy as they were when they were presented with something more in the realm of "classic". At around table 45, the judging slowed down considerably, and one of them confided to me "I'm so stuffed!". I could have sworn that one of the judges just looked at the very last entry, waved her hand, and went "Meh...".

With the judging done, the women filed back into the hall to see how they had fared. It was really a beautiful gathering. A vibrant mix of Hindu and Muslim women, all smiling at each other with genuine affection, and seeming to get real pleasure out of both an opportunity to shine outside of the house, and getting some recognition for their artistry and the hard work that they do. For us, it was a huge opportunity to gauge what kind of food was being made in the homes of Kerala. The winners were announced to a smattering of golf applause, and then the real business of eating got underway. The noise level ramped up considerably as the contestants roved from table to table, happily sampling each other's wares. Laurel and I sat in plastic deck chairs as enthusiastic cooks brought us little tastes of the things that they had made. I passed on the hard boiled eggs, but the coconut chutney sculpted into a Pokemon character was one of my faves... All in all, a great day of filming, and it reinforced our suspicion that the best food in India comes from home kitchens, and not from restaurants.

Chitra's entry should have won, and frankly, I think that the judges may have been bribed by the Special Salad lady. I have no evidence.

Odds and Sods

2009-02-13T00:34:00.000-08:00

An otherwise quiet dinner was suddenly punctuated by an anguished cry. "I swallowed my tooth!!!"

Our son Miles is possessed of a tremendous appetite. This is the first time, however, that he has seen fit to actually remove and swallow a piece of his own anatomy. There were many tears, which only ceased after Laurel and I convinced him that we had both done the same thing when we were younger, and that he was now a member of a very select club. The look of horror on his face was absolutely priceless when I asked him if he was going to collect it tomorrow, otherwise the Tooth Guru may not make an appearance. His nickname of "Fang" is even more apropos now, as he is missing a tooth on either side of a massive adult incisor. The Tooth Guru was generous, and in lieu of actually being able to find the tooth, included and extra ten rupees for cleaning.

We have a developing theme, as I realized this morning. At Christmas we were visited by John Scott and family. And now for Easter we will be visited by John The Scot. My old friend John Dyck is coming from Scotland to rent the upstairs of our house for a few weeks in April. He's coming with his daughter, who is a year younger than Miles. John is a superb studio installer, and has done all the audio and video wiring installations for countless high end studios, including work for EA and the BBC. Once again, it's going to be a lot of fun watching someone encounter this amazing place for the first time!

A couple of days go, we had an awesome day of filming with our friend Chitra, who is married to our friend Gee (mentioned in a few earlier posts). I can attest to the fact that Chitra is an amazing cook, as I've been fortunate to eat at their home on several occasions. She has the uncanny ability to pull a 9 course meal seemingly out of thin air, and everything is perfect. I think that it's unusual that as a Brahmin, she eats only pure veg, but she makes all kinds of duck, pork, fish, and beef dishes for her family, all without even tasting them! Chitra is a beautiful and very charming woman who has agreed to let us into her kitchen on a regular basis to film her teaching us several of her dishes.

Chitra took us to the main market in Ernakulam. It's a sprawling labyrinth of startling visuals and smells. The seafood selection was a bit broader than our market in Kaloor, featuring iridescent local green mussels, squid, crab, innumerable fish varieties, and even one fellow selling stingrays. I would imagine stingray to be something like skate, although I've never tried it. It strikes me as being a mere vehicle for sauce. Then there are the mutton (goat is also known as mutton here), beef, and chicken stalls. These are not for the faint of heart, although should something happen to your heart, the beef vendor will be glad to sell you another one, as he had plenty on display. Installation extra. To those of us who have been hunting or grew up on a farm, seeing recently dispatched critters before they have had a chance to be installed in neat styrofoam and wrapped in plastic is not a big deal. There's something wonderfully primal about it actually. To the uninitiated, however, the urge to become a vegetarian can hit with a surprising vengeance in a place like this.

After the market run with Chitra, she took us to another place very close to her home where there is a small mill that grinds rice, wheat, and spices. This mill also has a vintage press where they fresh squeeze coconut oil. This oil is absolutely essential to Keralan cooking. If you don't use it, the dish will not taste authentic. The press itself looked like 1920's tech, with big coarse belts driving rusty gear wheels from a noisy vintage electric motor. The coconut meat is dried in strips, and the fed through the press at least three times to get all the oil out if it. It smelled amazing. Perhaps the only room in all of India that smells like a warm macaroon on Easter Sunday. We were told that some California restaurants get spices custom ground here in 15 or 20 kilo lots in order to make there own garam masala. Just a great day of filming with Chitra, and we're looking forward to filming several episodes in her kitchen starting on Monday.

Yesterday, I was walking along to the Margin Free store to buy a few essentials, when my mobile rang. It was my friend Rajesh. He said "you must come to the office right now. We will show you something special. Something of a spiritual nature". Thinking that what he said was actually code for a cold beer, I walked the 2 km to his office, my thirst building with each passing block. Upon arriving and climbing the stairs to the office, I walked into the oddest scene. Rajesh, Gee, and a few others were in the room with a very calm looking Hindu gentleman who was holding up 2 "wands", each bent at a 90 degree angle. I understood him to be a practitioner of "Vastu", which can be loosely described as Indian Feng Shui. Gee insisted that I sit down in a chair in front of this man while he used his two bent rods to probe the magnetic field, or subtle emanations coming from my body. The wands seemed to move from one side to another of their own accord. Sometimes, they moved equally in opposite directions, sometimes they both veered sharply in the same direction. I was intrigued, but still not totally buying in. I kept thinking of Scientology probes with an e-meter. There was no way old L. Ron was going to get me to sign up for anything beyond the "free personality test". Then he got to my right leg, wherein I had pulled a thigh muscle a couple of days ago playing soccer. The wands jumped, and he said something to Gee in Malayalam. Gee asked me "Are you having pain in your right leg just above the knee?" "Yes!", I answered, somewhat taken aback. He gently ran his hand down my thigh towards my knee a few times. Not a massage, but like he was re-arranging an invisible layer of whipped egg whites on my leg. I was very surprised to find that my leg pain had been substantially reduced! Not back to 100%, but noticeably better.

Then came the kicker. For the last month or so, I've had some numbness in my right arm, stretching from my shoulder, which I injured over a year ago, and has never been quite right, down to my fingertips. At various time during the day, it feels like most of my arm is just waking up after being "asleep". Aside from Laurel, I've mentioned this to no one. As soon as those metal rods got to my shoulder, they twitched a little, and he shook his head and stopped. He traced a line from my shoulder all the way down to my right hand, and as he was squeezing each one of my fingers, he said something else to Gee. Gee then asked me "Have you been experiencing tingling all up and down your right arm and some numbness in your fingers?" I picked my jaw up off the floor and managed a quiet "yes...". This too was massaged a bit, and I was told to get a certain ayurvedic oil to apply for a couple of weeks, along with some hot towels once a day. In two weeks I should be fine.

Finally, I was informed that my heart resides in Saturn, astrologically speaking, and that when the moon is in Saturn, it's not uncommon for someone like me to suffer mild upsets of the nervous system. This heart news I found unusual, as previously I had only been told by friends up to this point that "your head is firmly lodged up Uranus". Furthermore, I was judged to be of otherwise sound health, and the recipient of some very good karma in recent years. I was advised that I should go to a shrine of Saint Thomas every Tuesday morning at 6:15 AM for the next three weeks to light a candle in order to give thanks for blessings received and to smooth the way for more to come. I didn't have the heart to tell him I wasn't a Catholic. I'm not even a Protestant, although Laurel tells me that she thinks I doth protest too much.

All I know is this. On Tuesday I'm getting up early. I'm lighting those damned candles!

Blessed By An Elephant

2009-02-07T23:19:00.000-08:00

Who knew an elephant could be so holy?

A few days ago (Isaac's birthday, one he shares with Alice Cooper...), our dear friend Gopal called us up with a tempting offer. It was the last morning of our visit to Coimbatore and Ooty, and he offered to take us to a temple before we caught the train at 1 PM back to Cochin. He picked us up in his teeny sedan around nine AM. The six of inhaled deeply and piled in for the 20 minute drive. Our destination was Aruligu Patteeswaraswamy Temple in Perur, on the outskirts of Coimbatore. This is a Shiva temple, and parts of it are over 2000 years old. There was a major expansion about 400 years ago. It is being constantly worked on and renovated, painted, and cleaned. Laurel and I are both suckers for ancient temples of all sorts. She does have her Masters in Religious Studies with a major in Hinduism after all! However, I was unprepared for the depth of beauty I was about to experience.

The exterior of the temple was completely covered in scaffolding and tarps, in much the same manner as a leaky condo gets wrapped while the workers repair the water damage and the owners try to track down the construction company to serve papers to. This was no leaky condo. All the sculpture on the exterior was being meticulously cleaned and repainted in an effort to reclaim its original ancient splendour. The entrance to the temple is made via 2 huge ornately carved wooden doors, each about 20 feet high. Signs immediately warned us that there was to be no photography under any circumstances.

After walking through the entrance hall, one is immediately confronted by the temple elephant. A temple elephant is apparently pretty standard issue in Hindu temples in the South of India. They are used to move the heavy carts laden with various idols on auspicious holy days throughout the year, and also to bless visitors and collect money. This was the first one I had ever seen in a temple, and it was a pretty awe-inspiring sight.

The elephant's forehead was smeared with sandalwood paste. Three horizontal lines that I believe are symbolic of Shiva's trident were painted on, indicating that the elephant was in fact a bona fide devotee of Shiva. The elephant stood on a rectangular bed of sand (for obvious reasons...), with it's handler by it's side. The elephant rocked back and forth, shifting it's weight from left to right constantly, looking for all the world like Bill Gates appearing before a Senate subcommittee. Gopal gently suggested that we make a small donation, either a rupee coin or ten rupee note, and in turn, we would be blessed by the elephant. Sounded good to me! I stood about 5 feet in front of the swinging trunk, and fished about in my coin purse. The elephant must have gotten a bit excited at the prospect of another donation, because it cleared its trunk in anticipation of my donation. As a result, I am now intimately familiar with the sensation of flying elephant snot as it settles on your skin.

After much fiddling, I found a 5 rupee coin and stepped towards the beast. It saw me coming. It reached out its trunk, and curved the end up so as to resemble an upturned palm. I placed my coin there, and instantly the trunk swung back to pass the coin to the elephant's handler. Assured that the donation had reached its destination, the mighty trunk swung back and stopped just over my head. Then, ever so gently, the trunk came down and rested momentarily on my head. I was blessed! Our normally outgoing boys were quite intimidated by the elephant, and declined the opportunity to get blessed in a similar fashion. Actually, it was all we could do to stop them from running away.

Gopal rejoined us after a brief disappearance and said that he had had a word with the temple authorities, and we had been granted the rare permission to take photos, as long as we did not take pictures of the sacred deities themselves. Wandering through the halls of the temple, I was struck by the construction and engineering of it all. 2000 years ago, 14 foot long chunks of rock were turned into ornately carved pillars, depicting events from the lives of the gods. These pillars were all lined up perfectly symmetrically, and were joined by more ornately carved stone joists, creating a ceiling structure that was perfectly level and square. The stones fit so tightly, that a knife blade would not fit between the joints. And that's after 2,000 years. Unbelievable engineering and craftsmanship. The other thing that struck me about this was just the vibe. I've been to Mayan temples, and the feeling was very different. These temples were not constructed by by a priest class using slave labour that was to be eventually sacrificed, they were built as acts of devotion. That feeling of joy and devotion here was palpable.

At the end of one of the halls, there was an inner sanctum that was chained off to the public. This room contained the main Shiva deity, as well as the statue of his consort Parvati. It was guarded by a priest, clad only in a lunghi and smeared with the same markings as those on the elephant. He blessed us by putting a little sandalwood paste on our foreheads. He asked Gopal where we were from, and Gopal explained. The priest's gaze softened. "Come", he said, and held up the chain for us to walk underneath. Surprisingly, we were led up the steps and into the inner sanctum of Shiva itself. He walked us slowly around the altar, pausing to show us how the the four columns holding the roof structure in the room had been carved with the top of each column leaning visibly and tilting towards the altar. It seems that even the building itself bows to Shiva out of respect. Later, Gopal told us that we had been the recipients of a very rare honour. "Good things happen to good people", he said. Surely, he wasn't talking about us....

There were hugs and many words of thanks to Gopal and his family as we departed for Cochin. The depth of Indian hospitality is unlike anything else I have ever experienced, and to us, Gopal is it's principal exponent. We left with promises to see each other soon, and we offered that his family was more than welcome to stay with us if they somehow managed to come to Canada for a visit. How fortunate we are to have found people this friendly and giving of their time. I think that the elephant blessing worked.

Now if only I can get this elephant snot stain out of my clothes...

Let Them Eat Cake

2009-02-05T23:54:00.000-08:00

My mother is amazing. Not only is she wickedly smart, curious and adventurous, she makes a mean birthday cake. For my entire life, all of our birthdays have been graced with beautiful homemade cakes. A week or so before your birthday, my mother asks the soon-to-be-feted (as opposed to fetid) what kind of birthday cake they would like. I usually answer in the theme of chocolate: chocolate hazelnut, chocolate almond, chocolate strawberry, etc. If it is the twin brothers' birthday, there are always two different cakes. My father usually opted for my mother's fabulous poppyseed cake with raspberry jam between the layers and billows of whipped cream to frost. I thought this was normal. There were a lot of things about my family that I thought were pretty ABnormal, but birthdays seemed pretty safe - I mean, everyone had cake, right? Apparently not like us.

But this is not an ode to my mother Ellen, it's actually a nod to the tradition she continues to uphold. One that I think is important. A cake "from scratch" can take as little time as one from a mix but it is a process, a creation, an act of love. Of course, a homemade cake can take hours or days, if you like that sort of thing, but a simple cake really isn't difficult and I've never understood why people are daunted by it.

That being said, this year I was a little daunted. Since having kids, I too make a birthday cake every year for Rob, Miles and Isaac. I too take "requests". Rob has a soft spot for cheesecakes (I think last year was the chocolate, salted caramel and pecan cheesecake). Miles has been very adventurous - one year I made a Tomato Spice cake for him - last year his cake was decorated like a basketball. Isaac likes Orange and Lemon for his cakes, although last year's was a chocolate Treasure Chest with edible booty spilling over the edges. I have no shortage of experience with cakes. I've been baking cakes since I was seven years old (and we have photos to prove it). But here we are in the tropics, without an oven, a mixer, a blender or even a whisk. For the last month I have been racking my brains for a way to make a cake for Feb 4th - Isaac's 5th birthday. At one point Rob suggested I just purchase a cake from one of the local bakeries. Has he learned nothing in the 10 years we've been together?! But that's another topic all together.

So I did what I do well - I Googled. I searched far and wide for a solution. DId you know that apparently you can bake a cake in a pressure cooker? Most Indians have pressure cookers. We don't. I checked out ice cream cakes - just not possible with the teeny freezer we have and no electronic kitchen gadgetry. And then I stumbled upon the creation that is known variously as: Gateau de/aux Crêpe, Crepe Cake, Mille Crêpe, etc. A perfect solution to my ovenless dilemma! There are chocolate Crepe Cakes but I have been underwhelmed by Indian chocolate (too sweet for my tastes), ones layered with whipped cream (no desire to beat cream by hand with a fork for 2 hours), and some that are soaked in lots of liqueur (difficult to procure and not really suitable for a 5 year old's birthday). So I borrowed and I tweaked and I developed one especially for our situation. Spiced pastry cream and fruit curd layered between silky saffron crêpes. Piled high and just oozing filling! I had originally planned to make a mango curd for between the layers but the mangoes just aren't ripe right now. So we adapt. Isaac loves bananas, so banana curd it is. It turned out beautifully and Isaac was thrilled even if there was no writing on the cake.

Happy Birthday Isaac! And thank you Mom. Some traditions are definitely worth holding on to.

So, if you ever find yourself in the tropics without an oven on a loved-one's birthday, you too can spread the love and Let Them Eat (real) Cake!

Over the top No-oven Birthday Cake for the Tropics
(or Saffron Crêpe cake with Banana Curd and Ginger Pastry Cream)

Banana Curd
8 small (or 4 North American sized) bananas, peeled and smooshed
125g butter
1 c sugar
3 small limes (or 1 North American sized), juiced & strained
3 medium eggs

Melt the butter over low heat in a small, heavy pan. Add smooshed bananas, sugar and lime juice. Cook, stirring, for about 10 minutes until glossy and translucent. Beat eggs in a bowl. Temper the eggs by slowly adding a few tablespoons of hot banana mixture to them while whisking constantly. Add the egg/banana mix back to the pot in a steady stream while whisking constantly. Cook for a few moments until the curd thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon. Cool and refrigerate.

Ginger Pastry Cream
1 1/2 c milk
2" knob of ginger, peeled and roughly grated
4 egg yolks
1/3 c sugar
3 1/2 T corn starch

In a small heavy-bottomed pot, bring the milk and the grated ginger to a boil. Take off the heat and let steep for about 10 minutes. In another pot, whisk together egg yolks, sugar and cornstarch until smooth. Slowly add the hot gingered milk to the egg yolk mixture, whisking constantly. Place over medium high heat and bring to a boil, whisking steadily until the mixture thickens. Pour mixture through a sieve. Cool and refrigerate.

Ginger syrup:
1/2 c water
1/2 c sugar
2" knob of ginger, peeled and roughly grated
Bring all ingredients to a boil in a small heavy-bottomed pot. Reduce heat and simmer until all the sugar is dissolved and the mixture thickens a bit. Cool and strain. Store in the fridge.

Saffron Crêpes
85g butter
3 c milk
large pinch saffron threads

6 medium sized eggs
1/3 c sugar
1 2/3 c unbleached flour
pinch salt

Brown the butter in a small pan until it smells nutty - don't let it burn. Heat the milk with the saffron threads until bubbles appear around the edges of the pan. Allow both butter and milk to cool for about 10 minutes. Beat together the eggs, sugar, flour and salt until smooth. Slowly add the hot milk and the brown butter. Cool and refrigerate until ready to use. Storing in a pitcher is ideal for making crepes. At this point everything, above, can be made the day before and kept in the fridge.

When ready to make the cake, bring the crêpe batter to room temperature. Heat a non-stick crêpe pan (or tava) over medium heat. Pour a scant 1/4 c batter onto the pan and tilt to create a thin film covering the entire surface of the pan. Cook until just beginning to brown, then flip and briefly cook the other side. Slide off the pan on to a plate and repeat until all the batter is used.

Building the cake: Place a crêpe on a serving plate and spread with a thin layer of banana curd, placing slightly less in the middle (or you end up with a strange dome shaped cake). Place another crêpe on top of the curd and spread with a thin layer of ginger pastry cream. Continue alternating until you have only one crêpe left (you could also add a layer or two of fresh fruit in the middle). Place the last crêpe on top and gently press down, to adhere the layers and even the cake out. Chill. Drizzle with ginger syrup. Sprinkle with freshly shaved coconut (or desiccated, in a pinch) and serve in oozy wedges.

The Beauty of Ooty

2009-02-05T21:15:00.001-08:00

All this leisure is exhausting. We've earned a break.

With our friend Gopal's able assistance, we hired a car and driver to drive us to Ooty for a couple of days of R&R. Ooty is a hill station less than 100k from Coimbatore in the province of Tamil Nadu. Hill stations were built in several locations in India as refuge for the English from the heat of summer. The most famous of these is Simla in the north. Every year the English would move their entire government from Delhi to the relative cool of Simla during the hot season. The winding road to Udagamandalam , or as it is more commonly known, Ooty, is about as nausea inducing as it gets, with more than 30 hairpin turns as it rises to nearly 2200 meters above sea level.

As we left the foothills and got into the Western Ghat mountains proper, the boys were delighted to have their first wild monkey sighting. These little buggers look incredibly cute, especially the mothers with small babies clinging to them, but their appearance belies a nasty streak a mile wide. Look. Don't touch. The steep climb levels out around the 2000 meter mark, and there Ooty is spread out before us. Many tea plantations form well manicured geometric patterns of lush green that cover the undulating hills. It's quite pretty, and refreshingly cool.

Ooty is also a resort town, and where there is a resort, there is cheese. Lots of it. Not the yummy reggiano kind of cheese that I've been craving, but the tacky "only exists for the tourists" cheese. Our driver, bless his misguided soul, erroneously assumed that due to the fact that we were of the caucasian persuasion, we wanted to stop at every tourist trap that the town had to offer, and subsequently divest ourselves of every last rupee in the quest for ultimate cheese. Fortunately, there was no giant fiberglass "World's Largest Idli", or anything like that, but the places he chose to deposit us were not far off that degree of fromage. After a frantic search for a suitable place for lunch, at least a place our driver thought suitable for Westerners, we were summarily deposited at a place called "Shogun". This was a truly dreadful place, swathed in tacky decorations that were more faux Chinese than the Japanese name suggested. Lunch was not great but not truly awful. Just about triple the price it should have been at the locals only places just down the street. If I sound grumpy, it's because I was. At least there was no attempt to serve sushi. Sigh...

Our friend Gopal generously fixed us up with a couple of deluxe rooms at a resort that he owns a holiday time-share at, but rarely has time to visit. It's a huge and sprawling complex with over 100 suites, and it somehow manages the peculiarly Indian feat of appearing both brand new and run-down at the same time. Our suites were fabulous though, with cooking facilities (unused) and hot water showers, however brief. We were virtually the only people there, and if you've ever seen that old British TV series, "The Prisoner", you'll get a small sense of the vibe. I half expected that giant white blancmange to come chasing after us when we attempted to finally check out. Be seeing you!

We took a drive to the Botanical Gardens, a Raj-era holdover that had definitely seen some better days. It was nice to walk amongst some greenery though, despite being stopped by strangers every 30 seconds to pose for photos with them. A few guys in their late teens/early twenties with boozy cigarette breath were perhaps a little more enthusiastic than was was comfortable when they posed with their arms around Emma and Laurel. Grrrrr..... Then it was off to the Boathouse, a man-made lake also dating back to the Raj era. Here, we actually broke down and rented two decrepit fibreglass pedal boats. Each boat displayed a two foot high Disney character on it's bow, and I'm pretty sure old Walt and Company will be waiting a long time before receiving those licensing royalties. At one end of the lake was a sorry no-man's land containing several retired pedalboats in various stages of sinking. This is a theme that is repeated throughout the India we have seen. There is this odd combination of enthusiastic beginnings combined with subsequent systematic neglect and decay. A children's park will have a huge expensive granite plaque proudly announcing the persons present at its dedication, yet all the playground equipment is rusty and broken. Elaborate concrete fountains are built in the middle of roundabouts, yet they contain only weeds within their cracked concrete walls. Did they ever function? Ooty has a full size horse racing track, yet its covered entirely with weeds and the structures are crumbling. Monkeys patrol the broken fountains in the Botanical Gardens, where water hasn't flowed for thirty years.

The sun was going down, and we felt the sudden need to actually dress up in long pants, sweaters and hoodies, which was pretty unusual for India. We headed off for dinner, this time swearing to do the exact opposite of whatever the driver recommended. Our obstinance was rewarded with a decent Northern Indian meal at a local workingman's hotel. You may have noticed that there is not much written here about the food in Tamil Nadu. Speaking for myself, the food is not as varied or interesting as it is in Cochin and some other parts of the state of Kerala. Gopal did show us a couple of new things, such as Sevai, which is a really good kind of rice noodle. The Poori, or deep fried puffy bread, were quite good here. However, fish and other seafoods are pretty much off the menu, and instead there is an endless parade of idli, dosa, and sambar. If there are any other regional specialties that stand out, it may just be that we were not visiting long enough to sniff them out.

The next morning, we checked out very early and thus managed to escape the clutches of the prisoner retrieval blancmange, although I'm sure I caught a glimpse of it in the rear view mirror as we left. It was Isaac's 5th birthday the next day, and we were determined to show him an elephant as a special treat. We drove down the backside of the mountain through another 30 plus hairpins until we leveled out onto the plains of the tiger reserve. Just before we hit the plain, the driver shouted "Elephant!", and sure enough right by the side of the road, ambling through the dense brush was a wild elephant about 10 feet away from the car. Pretty exciting stuff.

Driving through the reserve, we stopped to take pictures of a troop of monkeys. The driver had his window open, and suddenly there was a commotion of excited voices in the car. A large female monkey (I could tell, as she bore an uncanny resemblance to a topless Cher), obviously the recipient of extensive Ninja training, leapt up and perched on the driver's door, and attempted to climb in the car through the open window. The driver reached for the nearest weapon, in this case a wooden brush, and wildly thrashed away at the monkey until she finally was finally convinced to leave the vehicle, unharmed. There was much laughter after the shock subsided. We also saw several peacocks, axis deer, more monkeys, a mongoose (tasty!), and several more elephants in the reserve before we turned around and hightailed it back up the mountain, and then back down the mountain to head straight back to Coimbatore.

We owe a big thank you to Gopal for showing us the depth of Indian hospitality. That night our excitement mounted. One more sleep and we could return to our house in Cochin and gorge on seafood! We are but simple people...

The Sacred And The Profane

2009-02-04T22:40:00.000-08:00

All you need is love. And cash. Oh yes... Cash helps.

We were thrilled to receive an invitation to Coimbatore from our friend Gopal, in order to attend the two day long birthday festivities for his guru, Shree Harsha Matha. We booked our tickets on India Rail, which is always an interesting process. They do have a web site, although it's main purpose seems to be the vexation of potential clients. We have learned through trial and error that a much better alternative is to hoof it down to the railway station, whereupon one stands in line for a "journey cum reservation ticket". This little document needs to be filled out in excruciating detail. It requires the name, gender and age of all seats booked, as well as train numbers, station acronyms, departure "timings", and so on. I'm sure there was a box in there asking for my favourite colour, but a good chunk of it was in Hindi script, so I left some items blank. After filling out the form, you move to another queue, and after what can be a substantial wait in a sweltering room serviced only by a few rickety 1930's era ceiling fans, you have the privilege of getting to the ticket booth itself and suffering the disdain of the person who processes your ticket, which is invariably filled out incorrectly and requires substantial modification by the unamused clerk. To add an extra bit of drama, there is always the risk of building ingress from roving livestock.

After 4 hours or so on the train, we arrived in Coimbatore, where we were greeted on the platform by Gopal's son. We were summarily loaded into a taxi and whisked to the hotel that Gopal had kindly booked for us. At around 6 o'clock, we finally got to met Gopal face to face, after more than 4 months of email dialogue. If there is a kinder, more generous man in all of India, I would be hard pressed to believe it. We drove in Gopal's little van to the guru's spanking new temple, as Gopal had arranged a private evening audience for us. A great honour.

Now this is something I've always wanted to do: have a real live meeting with a genuine guru. The romantic in me fantasized about being recognized as a long lost disciple from a previous life, reunited with the all-knowing master at last, collapsing at the feet of this enlightened being, unashamedly weeping tears of bliss as scenes of past lives reeled past my newly awakened third eye. The experience fell a little short of that mark. Harsha Mata spoke no English, and after we were ushered into her private A/C sanctum, she gave a discourse on her accomplishments "more in 60 years than most could do in 200", the coming age of destruction, and her ongoing mission to lead her followers to godliness. As I watched her giving this discourse, I could not move myself out of the doubtful Western mindset that made me question everything that was said. All around, people treated her with deference and ultimate respect that bordered on worship. Actually, it was worship. I was trying to have an open mind, but this kind of thing always sets off alarm bells with me. I came up sorely lacking in the cultural framework that enables the machinery of instant devotion. Inwardly, I wondered if my divinity doubts would be addressed in the form of some dramatic spiritual epiphany. You know, something along the lines of Mathaji materializing in my hotel room later with secret words of love and knowledge. Then the phone rang. She picked it up and had an animated conversation and if I didn't know better, she actually sounded a little... cranky. I wondered again if all gurus fielded their own phone calls. "For karmic advice, press one. All gurus are busy right now. Your call is important to us! Please... stay on the line".

The next morning we headed back to the temple for the first day of the birthday celebrations. The temple is only two years old, and it's quite beautiful. It was built on land donated by a wealthy couple from Dubai who are ardent devotees of Mathaji. From 6AM, a group of priests sat in a circle, performing rites of offering and chanting into microphones, which were then piped through a pretty respectable PA system spread all around the grounds. On one of the pillars of the temple was a sign saying that the use of cell phones was prohibited. This was the source of great amusement for Laurel and me, as we watched more than one of the priests, naked from the waist up and body parts smeared with markings of sandalwood paste, field phone calls while in the chanting circle. The sacred and the profane. More and more devotees arrived, and the celebrations began in earnest. Mathaji came out to receive the adulation of her followers, and in return, she blessed them profusely. It was quite touching to see how emotional the response was of some of the devotees to her blessings. Tears coming down cheeks, they would touch her feet as a sign of love and respect. At one point, a brand new Honda sedan was driven into the compound, and everyone crowded around it. It seems that for the second year in a row, Mathaji was presented with a brand new car from a devotee. She climbed in the driver's seat to check it out as the donor beamed a huge smile.

Mathaji also singled out Emma as suitable marriage match for the son of the wealthy couple from Dubai. Emma was whisked away and photographed. A friend of the Dubai matron interviewed Emma, inquiring about her family, education, and so on. This was in turn relayed to the Dubai lady, and favourably received. From her end, it was a "go". She was very pleased that Mathaji had divined that Emma was perfect for her son, as Mathaji had arranged the successful marriage of her first son. Fortunately for Emma, she does get the final say on all of this. I'm not sure if spending her adulthood clad in a bourka stirring lentils in some steaming secure compound in Dubai is really in her future plans.

Adjoining the temple is a massive covered area that seats about three hundred people at a time, and that's where we headed for lunch. This is where things began to make a lot more sense for me. There is no real "welfare system" in India, and temples such as this one systematically feed countless poor people a free meal each day. The food and labour is donated by devotees, whose actions earn blessings and karmic currency. Its sort of a "win-win" situation. The donors get a spiritual benefit, and the recipients get food, which may otherwise prove elusive. Mathaji is the conduit through which all this flows. The system makes a lot of sense, and its replicated in similar microcosms all around the country. While the nice simple vegetarian meal was being served, one woman, who was dripping with diamonds, implored me to videotape her as she spooned rice onto the banana-leaf plates of the disenfranchised. Ignoring the person she was serving, she flashed a gold-toothy smile and stared into the camera, as if to say "Look at me! I'm ****ing rich and I'm feeding the poor!". I didn't have the heart to point out to her that there is much more spiritual benefit in selfless anonymous acts. Still, despite the grandstanding of the wealthy, the temple served over 1200 meals this day.

Returning back to the hotel, I noticed an odd change in myself. The previous night, Gopal had given me a nice new blue cotton shirt, which I decided to wear to the temple that day. Upon removing it, I noticed that from the waist up, including my hands and arms, I had turned a uniform shade of blue. This made me look like a low budget Krishna, not quite the transformational moment I had hoped for. However, my desire for a mystical visit came true later in the night, although once again, not quite in the form I had hoped for. After more than two months of superb health, and as if to expressly punish my doubts, I spent the bulk of the night fending off the the attack of the dreaded "Delhi Belly". Unsuccessfully. For the next 24 hours, I stayed in the hotel room performing porcelain penance rituals of my own, the details of which are not for the eyes or ears of the uninitiated.

Paradise re-Found

2009-01-29T05:28:00.000-08:00

You know how a smell or a taste can trigger a memory? I smell eucalyptus trees and I am instantly transported to Berkeley, California, circa 1976. I recently had a taste-memory flash that shot through years of foggy memories and landed me right back to 1983 (insert groovy, wavy dream-sequence shot here)...

I am 19, home from Boulder for the summer and working in a crappy restaurant as a waitress. Also working at said crappy restaurant is a fellow named Bob. He is a drifter/traveller/musician type. He works at a restaurant for a few months, makes enough money to travel to somewhere new, and heads back out - to Thailand, hitching though the US, to India and more. He has patches all over his army-surplus jacket and stickers on his guitar case from all the places he's been. Bob's a nice guy, but more importantly, Bob is about 5 years older than me and treats me as an equal. Bob is a no-strings-attached kinda guy but he's cool and has some interesting friends.

After a shift at the crappy restaurant, Bob asks if I want to go hang out with some friends of his. Silly question, of course I wanted to go! Bob's friends are even older then he is, maybe even 30. Two men and a woman living in a small basement suite somewhere in east Van. One of the guys is Indian from the West Indies and he's just back from a recent trip to visit his family in Trinidad (over 40% of Trinidad is Indo-Trinidadian). The suite is decorated with a driftwood coffee table, Indian cotton bedspreads tacked to the wall and remnants of incense sticks in wooden burners shaped like elephants. Joni Mitchell is on the stereo.

Bob has a pipe. Not the kind your grandpa smoked, if you catch my drift. Did I say that Bob was older? Anyway, out comes some of Bob's favourite brand of herbal comfort. Bob is also generous and the pipe gets passed around, once, twice, maybe even thrice. As the world gets dimmer and the paisley on the bedspread starts to blur, Bob's West Indian buddy decides to nip the munchies in the bud (pun intended) and starts cooking. Within minutes, the most amazing smells start wafting through the little apartment. A plate is handed to me - a smoosh of red, a few bits of green, a puddle of warm reddish gold on the sides and a warm chapatti to scoop up the yumminess. And it was yummy. Exquisite, in fact. Now it may have been the herbs talking but this red stuff was just about the best food I had EVER tasted. Seriously. What could I identify? Tomatoes, yep, that was the red. Sliced I think. I tasted chillies, that was the green but red chilli powder too. Onions, sliced thin. Was that cumin? Hmmm, I think so. Fried up into a delectable mess of melty goodness on the plate. The chapatti was pretty good too. I asked Bob's friend what we were eating. He shrugged and said, "Curry".

Fast forward a couple of years (insert sound effect of a zipper here): I am living in my own basement apartment. My first solo living arrangement and I'm liking it a lot. I start cooking dishes I had made at home, dishes I remember my mother making, a few she would never have cooked (there was one bad attempt at the 1980s ubiquitous deep fried zucchini, but the less said about that, the better). I try several times to recreate Bob's friend's "curry", to no avail. I try adding various "curry" powders, I try browning the onions. I try oil and I try butter. Something was always missing. And it wasn't the pipe. The recipe just couldn't be as simple as it seemed at the time - could it?

Many years went by and I forgot all about the red nectar of the gods, caught up in other culinary trifles and foodie distractions. Fast forward (zipper, sound again, but much longer this time) to 2009. Posted along Ponoth Road in our area of Kaloor are signs for "Real Food Court" on Azad Road. Apparently they do delivery - not something one expects to see in Cochin. We passed these signs many times before venturing over to Azad Road to check it out. The term "Food Court" would have me sprinting in the opposite direction back home, but after our time in SIngapore, where the best food in the city is offered up in "Food Courts", I was feeling a little more open-minded. Real Food is a spic-and-span mid-sized restaurant that serves up South Indian and Chinees (sic) food. 'Chinese' food is pretty popular here. In fact, it is the only kind of non-Indian cuisine that you will find in every part of India. Indian 'Chinese' food, like Canadian 'Chinese' food, bears little resemblance to the real deal but it certainly can still be tasty. Rob, Emma, the boys and I are all sitting down pondering the menu - what is "Chicken 65"? Or a "sharjah shake"? We pass on these mysteries and order up Chilly Gobi, Egg Roast, Tomato Fry (pronounced the British way, of course) and a pile of flaky, chewy-tender porotta. The food comes, I serve some up for the boys and put some on my plate. The porotta are great. A good porotta is a thing of majesty and I am working on my technique so I will be able to recreate these beauties when we return to Bowen. I tear off a piece of porotta and use it to scoop up some of the Tomato Fry and pop it in my mouth. I am instantly transported thousands of miles and 25 years into the past. Could it be? Have I found the Holy Grail? As the luscious redness flecked with green chillies and curry leaves slides down my throat I know it to be true. I have found the sublime, yet simple, "Curry". (fade to black)

Here is a pretty close version. The recipe doesn't make a lot (but could easily be doubled or tripled) since it is usually served with several other dishes, breads and rice.

Tomato Fry

1t mustard seeds

6-8 curry leaves

2 whole green chillies (make a slit from the mid point to the ends, or slice on the diagonal if you want a hotter dish)

2T coconut oil or ghee (but coconut adds a lot of flavour)

1 small onion, thinly sliced

2 cloves garlic, minced

1/2" ginger, peeled and minced

1t turmeric powder

1-2t chilli powder

1t cumin seeds

3 ripe roma tomatoes, cut in wedges

a bit of water

salt, to taste

Heat oil til quite hot, add mustard seeds, curry leaves, whole green chillies and cook over high heat until mustard seeds pop. Add the sliced onion, turn down the heat a bit and saute until translucent. Add garlic, ginger, turmeric, chill powder and cumin and stir for a few minutes so the spices don't burn. Then add tomato wedges, turn the heat back up, and cook until they soften but don't completely lose their shape (you may add a bit of water, as necessary, to keep it from sticking but you want it fairly thick). The key to this recipe is fairly high heat, you don't want to stew or steam the tomatoes. Finish with salt, to taste. Can been eaten hot or, as is more common here (where people eat with their hands), warm-to-room-temperature.

Behold, The Coconut

2009-01-27T21:24:00.000-08:00

Ahhhh... the coconut.

Is there a more mystical plant than cocus nucifera, the venerable coconut palm? It's very appearance and structure is a metaphor for life itself. It's three layers map to the three planes of existence outlined in yogic literature. There is the grossly physical outer shell, a thick husk which must be removed before anything useful can be done. The astral inner shell contained within the husk, as hard to penetrate as the yogic literature itself, and finally, the causal portion of the nut, containing the blissful essence of coconut, the sweet meat and refreshing juice. Much as the yogis endeavour to reach the incalculable inner bliss of the causal plane, cooks all over Southern India perform time-honoured rituals to reach the inner part of the coconut.

Is there a more useful thing in Southern India than a coconut tree? This one tree gives so much, and asks so little. From it we get the obvious, which is yummy fresh shredded coconut, a mainstay in Keralan cooking, but it also provides cool and refreshing coconut water when the coconuts are green, coir fiber to weave mats with, leaves to fashion roofing with, vinegar and oil to cook with, toddy to numb the brain, and most importantly, shade on a hot day. There are many layers of nuance to the use of the coconut that I never even dreamed of before I came here. I have learned that the white meat inside the nut is actually a jelly for the first few months of its life as a nut, and eating that jelly is said to be calming to the stomach. You can buy these green ones on the street or on the beach, and after you drink the nice refreshing water inside, the vendor will split the nut open, and cut a piece of the exterior off to use as a spoon so that you can scoop out the jelly. The jelly starts to turn to firm white meat after about 6 months, and a true connoisseur will monitor the growth of the nuts on his tree and select the ones that are 11 or 12 months old in order to make the sweetest curries.

The less said about the toddy, the better.

The first challenge when you get a coconut, is how to open the darn thing. It's bloody difficult to do. That is, of course, unless you know "the trick". My friend Gee showed me the trick this week after a visit to his house for a breakfast of roast duck curry (with liver!), vegetable curry, puttu, and string hoppers. Gee's family has a farm outside of Cochin, and his family makes regular runs to it to get vegetables, bananas, and coconuts. Gee gave Laurel and me a big bag of coconuts and another of bananas to take home. We were grateful, of course, but I lamented my lack of industrial power tools that assumed would be necessary to open the coconuts. Gee said "No, there's a little trick to it. It's very easy". Then he proceeded to demonstrate. Well, almost. He described the procedure but didn't actually open a nut before our eyes. "You see the three eyes at the end of the nut?", he said. "There are two that look the same, and one that looks different". I looked. There was. "Hold the nut in your hand. Make sure that the eye that looks different is facing up. Then hit it with anything around the equator, and it will crack easily". Sounded simple enough. Too simple. I was dubious.

Once back at our house, I resolved to put the theory to the test. Laurel had bought a little wooden roller for making parotta and other flatbreads, and I thought it might be a little light, but I'll try it. In my left hand, I held the nut so that the 3 eyes were close to my thumb. If you think of the eyes as being the North Pole, you flip the poles so that they line east -> west, instead of north -> south. Following Gee's instruction, I ensured that the odd eye was topmost. I tapped the coconut with the small rolling pin at the equator, and to my great surprise, the nut cracked and the water within cascaded out. This informed me that the next time I do this, I should stand over the sink... I was amazed at the ease of it. As an experiment, I got another coconut and held it differently. No amount of whacking it would make it budge! But hit it around the equator with that odd eye facing up, and it works every time. This is one cool trick. It ranks up there with spinning an egg on its side to determine if its been hard boiled or not. Hard boiled eggs stop immediately when you try to stop them, fresh eggs want to keep spinning. This is real mystical kitchen lore. Try it at home. Amaze your friends.

Next on the task list was how to get the meat out of the coconut and into some food. The solution is delightfully low tech, yet incredibly efficient. The shredder is a little piece of wood with a curved piece of metal bolted onto it. At the business end of the piece of metal is something that looks like a jagged tin leaf. You simply rub the coconut meat against the jagged leaf, and in a very short time, you can remove all the meat from half a coconut and have it prepped for cooking or extracting coconut milk. Here' a good simple one to try. If you can't get your hands on a fresh nut and a shredder, substitute a cup of dried unsweetened coconut. A better solution is to get thee to an Asian market (our favourite standby is Asia Market on Hastings street in Vancouver) and see if they have any fresh coconut in the freezer. At any rate, try this one. The version here is with cabbage, but it works just as well with shredded beets, beans, or any other vegetable.

1/2 large green cabbage, finely shredded
1 cup or so of shredded fresh coconut (the meat from about half a coconut)
2- 3 tbsp coconut oil, or ghee
1 cup minced onions or shallots.
1 tsp turmeric
2 tsp black mustard seeds
8-10 fresh curry leaves
3 whole green chilis, slit
1 tsp chili powder
3 cloves garlic
1/2 inch of fresh ginger
salt to taste

mince the garlic and ginger to a paste, adding a little water if needed
Heat the oils in a large wok, and when its hot add the mustard seeds.
In a few moments, they should sputter, add the curry leaves, and the whole green chilis.
quickly add the onions, and continue stirring until they are translucent.
add the garlic, & ginger, turmeric and chili powder, and keep stirring until the spices smell cooked
add the cabbage, and stir the mixture until the cabbage cooks through. I like it when it starts to dry out a little and brown.
add the coconut and continue stirring until everything is well mixed and a little drier.
add salt to taste (1 tsp?), stir, and place in a serving bowl.
Serve at room temperature as part of a curry dinner!

So that's it. The universe explained. In a nutshell.

My Secret Love

2009-01-25T21:18:00.000-08:00

I have an embarrassing secret to share. In the last week, I have begun a clandestine love affair. With a fish.

As with any affair freshly begun, we can scarcely get enough of each other. Stolen moments in a biryani shop. Lusty thoughts in a market as the long and lean torso is teasingly displayed before me in all its delectable silvery nakedness. Sorry...

It all began innocently enough. I went up to our local market to purchase a fish in order to make a fish biryani. I've bought several fish from the market this way, and I started off my fishy forays with a few snapper, which are kind of similar to our local rockfish, those spiny, scaly, butt ugly, and incredibly tasty fish we see swimming around in salt water tanks in the Vancouver's Chinatown. On this day, tiring of the monotony of snapper, I instead opted for a little tuna. These little guys are smaller than the albacore tuna we see in the Pacific Northwest, and they showed promise. After the fishmonger had it eviscerated and cut up into little chunks, I took it home, fried it up, and put it into my biryani. In a highly uncharacteristic display of selflessness, I put some in a pot and decided to take it next door as a gift for our landlords Stanley and Gee Gee, who are in the habit of routinely inundating us with food items at all hours of the day and night. When I arrived and rang the bell at their house, Stanley opened it, looking a little surprised to see me. I handed him the pot, puffed out my chest, and proudly announced "Fish Biryani! Made with fresh tuna!" He looked crestfallen, and did that clicking sound/sucking air thing I've described a few times. Shaking his head, and with as much tact as his limited English would allow, he said "Tuna no good. Kingfish better". The wind was definitely out of my sails, but to his credit, he didn't slam the door, and instead, graciously accepted the pot. He returned the pot the next day, filled with spicy pork curry and tapioca root. Again, he felt compelled to reiterate "Kingfish better". It was a thin line. I'm pretty sure he was trying to be helpful, and steer me towards a better quality fish experience. On the other hand, maybe he was just being a dink.

So... kingfish, eh... I had to know more. I went back to the market and chatted up my fishmonger friend. I discovered that kingfish is sometimes called "sailfish" here, which is ironic due to the fact that it really has no dorsal fin to speak of, much less a sail. I also made the discovery that kingfish is about three to four times the cost of most other fish, costing about 300 Rs/kilo. It is one of the few food-related instances in India where the Bailey Law Of Inverse Expectations does not apply. In this case, you truly get what you pay for. Immediately, I was seduced by this fish. Long and lean, these silver beauties can reach 3 or 4 feet long, and weigh close to thirty pounds. It seems as they are built to swim fast and eat, and little else, as their torpedo-like bodies are basically one big slab of firm, buttery tasting flesh. Imagine a four foot sausage made of serrano ham that knew how to swim. It has hardly any bone, beyond its spine, so the body is just meat, meat, and more meat. I could not wait to get this baby back to my place, put on some music and my sexiest lunghi, and have my way with it.

There is a great method of preparing fish in Kerala that I have tried my best to duplicate here. It involves cutting the fish up into chunks, and marinating it in a spicy, garlicky, and sour masala. After bathing in this majestic marinade for a period of time, each piece is fried in coconut oil until just cooked through. Dust with a little salt, and voila... ready to be eaten as is, with maybe a little cucumber and onion salad on the side, or included as a layer in a fish biryani. This fish is so good that we've had it 4 out of the last 5 nights. I'm going to make a fish curry with it tonight. If you want to try to strike up an affair of your own with this exotic beauty, you may have some difficulty. You might be able to find this fish frozen in slices in an Asian or Punjabi market, but you're really better off using fresh halibut, or even mahi mahi. Salmon won't work as well, and red snapper or cod is perhaps too flaky of a texture. So here's the deal.

750 grams of kingfish, halibut, mahi mahi, or any other firm fleshed white fish.
3 tbsp of ground black pepper
1 tsp turmeric
2 tsp chili powder
approx 1 tbsp coconut vinegar, or apple cider vinegar, just enough to make a paste with all the dry ingredients
6 cloves of garlic
1 inch of fresh ginger root
salt to taste

In a mortar and pestle, mash the ginger, garlic, and salt together to form a paste
mix this in a bowl with the dry ingredients, adding the coconut vinegar get a paste that is not too runny.
Add the fish chunks to the large bowl containing the paste, and mix it all up with your hands, making sure that all the fish is covered with a coating of marinade.
clover the bowl, and let it sit in the fridge for at least an hour. Overnight is best.

Put a couple or three inches of coconut oil in wok, and heat it up.
Fry the fish a couple of pieces at a time, turning as needed.
Drain each piece against the side of the wok to remove excess oil, and place on a plate covered with paper towel.
Dust immediately with some good non- iodized salt.
Repeat as necessary

Dim the lights. Make sensual yummy sounds. Soon you will be as hopelessly head over heels in love as we all are. The trick is in trying to keep this clandestine affair from spiralling out of control and taking over your life. But Stanley was right...

"Kingfish better".

Gone Native

2009-01-23T03:53:00.000-08:00

Everyone has had that dream. You know the one. You have a big important speech to make in front of a large crowd, and when you get up to make it, a wave of laughter ripples through the crowd. You look down, and only then you realize that you're not wearing pants.

The day started off well. For a few weeks now, I have been trying to master the art of wearing a lunghi. The lunghi is what most men in Southern India wear instead of pants. It's basically a sheet of cloth, and it covers a gent from the waist down. It can be worn in either the long form, where the cloth border grazes your toes, or the short form, where the fold is above the knee. It's the South Indian form of shorts.

When I first got here, I must confess it was a bit disconcerting to see men walking down the street together holding hands, and sporting these long flowing dresses. Then I got to thinking that they thought I was the strange one for sticking, and I do mean sticking, to the Eddie Bauer canvas shorts and Joe Boxer briefs. My way of thinking began to change a little. Then, on a warm and romantic evening, my landlord, Stanley, clasped my hand and held it for much much longer than a Canadian guy is normally comfortable with. If I had a predilection for steam baths and Judy Garland, perhaps it would be different. Laurel was on Stanley's roof with us, and she caught my discomfort immediately. She smiled a smile that said "don't you dare offend this man by letting go of his hand". She who must be obeyed. So I went with it. It was much the same feeling as the first time I ate sushi 25 years ago. A real battle between intellectual curiosity and years of conditioning. I fought the impulse to withdraw my hand, fake a yawn, and make an excuse to leave immediately. Stanley eventually let go of my hand, and when he failed to ask me to spend the summer with him on a Greek island, I realized that this was actually kind of cool. I'm good with this.

So next comes the lunghi. I bought two of them. Then I had to figure out how to tie one. This was no easy task. Thank god for YouTube. I found out that Christians and Hindus wear theirs with the seam to the right side, and Muslims wear it to the left. I'm living in a mostly Christian neighbourhood, so I dressed right. I practiced for a while and started to wear one around the house. After a few days of this, I felt a little more comfy. I must admit that on a hot day, there's nothing like the feeling of some fresh air circulating around the old twig and berries. I got bolder. I decided to wear one outside and go shopping. To the strains of "Thus Spake Zarathustra", I opened the gate and walked out into the street. It was pretty hard to shake the feeling of self consciousness. I was convinced that I was wearing it wrong, and that every passing person was staring and quietly clucking and sucking air through their teeth. The men here make it look so easy. For all I knew there was this secret subtle code in the way the thing was tied or folded, the infinite variations of which indicated your caste, sexual orientation, IQ, and yearly income. For all I knew, my lunghi boldly announced to the world that I was a retarded asexual with very little money in the bank. At least one of those statements is true. Still, I soldiered on in a mix of blissful ignorance and abject fear. I made it home with groceries and a beer, and it had not fallen off. Life was good.

Yesterday, I had a breakthrough in folding the damn thing. I found a way to do it that let the lunghi stay on for the entire day without having to be re-tied every 15 minutes. My confidence rose, and my inner soundtrack went from "Thus Spake" to "The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly". I positively swaggered down the street, feeling fairly invincible with my new tying technique. I was a baddass in a strip of cloth. I had been invited down to the office of Rajesh and Gee in the afternoon, and when I arrived, there were high fives and "looking good man!" comments. I listened hard for that hint of mocking, but there was was none. Then I sat in one of the office chairs and nearly did a pretty spot on Sharon Stone impersonation. However, it would seem that I had gotten over the barrier. I was comfy in a lunghi. Then we went out for dinner.

The whole family returned to the North Indian place off Broadway for more of the Aloo Parotta. The proprietor was thrilled that the boys were capable of eating chilis, and treated them both to a complimentary lassi. We ate and ate and ate. Then, as I got up to wash my hands, I felt the lunghi give around the waist. Horrified, I sat back down to contemplate just how I was going to re-tie this thing in a crowded restaurant. While still seated, I ended up accidentally tying one bottom corner to the waist, and I became hopeless tangled. Gandhi in a homespun mobius strip. Eventually, I got it sorted, but not before turning several shades of red in the process. We paid the bill and left, and in the privacy of a darkened narrow lane, I readjusted for the rickshaw ride home.

No matter. I had fought the lunghi... and won.

Curiouser and Curiouser...

2009-01-20T21:41:00.001-08:00

The car pulled up exactly on time.

Our smiling driver helped Laurel and me load our many cases of camera and sound gear into the deluxe Toyota SUV for our trip to Haritha Farms. Our new friend Gee had volunteered his car and chauffeur to drive us the 75k to this organic spice farm/homestay/cooking school. Gee is a partner with Rajeesh (aka Mango Man, Crab Dude, and He of the Swarthy Parotta) in their burgeoning herbal aphrodisiac business, a business that is perhaps the only one in which success relies on the competition not being stiff.

These two have been extraordinarily generous towards us with their time and vehicles, and we really owe them a debt of gratitude. Gee's wife Chitra is an extraordinary cook, and we plan on documenting her culinary adventures next month, after we return from Coimbatore and filming our friend Krishnagopal's Guru's 60th birthday party on the 31st and 1st. Our calendar is getting really full!

The drive to Haritha took about an hour and a half, and we were greeted by our host's mother, Mrs. Mathew, who ushered us into a cool enclave and presented us with two glasses of fresh pineapple juice. We settled into our deluxe room, which featured perhaps the nicest bathrooms I have seen yet in India, and soon our host arrived to greet us. Jacob Matthew is an extremely affable middle aged gent, whose intelligence and sophistication belie the fact that he has never really travelled outside of Kerala. He runs the operation with a keen eye towards creating an environment of quiet comfort, but in a sustainable and eco-friendly way.

After setting up my shoulder harness field pack consisting of a battery powered audio mixer, two wireless mic pack receivers, Sony headphones, extra batteries, cables, and lens tissue, I set up Laurel and Jacob with their wireless lapel mics and we headed off to the local market to do the shopping for the cooking class he was going to hold that evening. He was simply amazing. He effortlessly navigated through the busy market, seeking only the freshest of produce. All the while he was conversing with Laurel and tossing off more nuggets of information per minute than we imagined possible. There was so much good stuff I ran out of tape. Actually this was a relief, because hoisting a heavy camera while wearing a 15 pound pack in the Indian mid-day sun was not exactly relaxing.

When we returned to the farm, we were treated to a nice lunch of masala dosa with coconut chutney. He flashed a nice smile and said "If you could give me your passports and visa information now, we will get that detail out of the way". In a now familiar routine, Laurel and I looked at each other in panic. We had become so comfortable living here, that we no longer carried our passports around in our money belts anymore. They were at home. Bugger. Now it was Jacob's turn to be panicked. The new security regulations meant that if he were caught with us there staying overnight on the premises without proper documentation, he could actually face jail time. This was not exactly the note we wanted to get started on. Without boring anyone with the details, let's just say that we found a mutually agreeable way to work around our error that ensured our host would not go to prison.

The cooking demo that night was great. Jacob is a natural performer, and a pretty good cook to boot! I filmed the whole thing as he directed Laurel and three other ladies from Switzerland in the creation of 5 dishes. Sort of a fusion cuisine, and not exactly pure Keralan. Of course, the power went out in the middle of the lesson. Undaunted, we soldiered on with candles and flashlights. When the power returned, we were ready to eat! We sat down to a really nice dinner with Jacob and the Swiss ladies. Dinner conversation was an interesting hybrid of fractured English and our miserable attempts at French. Somehow, we understood each other!

Next morning, at Jacob's invitation, we got up early and were on the road a little before 7:30. He took us through fields of pineapple, stands of rubber trees that slowly dripped raw latex into little cups, soaring pepper vines, curry leaf bushes, nutmeg and mace groves, and most unusual of all, cashew trees. If you've ever wondered why cashews are expensive, its because only one nut grows at the end of a pear-like fruit. Each nut casing has to be individually separated from the fruit, and then pried out of it's casing. I think that if there are two hundred fruit on a mature tree at a given time, that would be optimistic. It's just a huge amount of labour required to get a kilo of cashews!

By this time, we were both exhausted from the constant filming and barrage of new information. Jacob actually drove us back to our house, and we had a hard time staying awake on the trip. We reviewed the footage last night, and boy, was the trip ever worth it! Needless to say, Haritha Farms is definitely a prime destination if you are ever planning a trip to Kerala.

Thank you Jacob!

Unusual Snax

2009-01-20T04:05:00.001-08:00

"More mongoose please, Dad!"

These are words I never thought would emanate from my son's mouth. And mongoose is something I never thought would go in his. Or mine.

We spent a morning on Vypeen Island in an attempt to track down the largest mud crab known to man. I believe that we came dangerously close with the purchase of a 1.2 kilo monster. Our friend Rajeesh, a local lawyer and herbal aphrodisiac entrepreneur who also happens to be our neighbour, took us all out to Vypeen Island in our quest for crustaceans. It really helps to have someone who reads and writes Malayalam (an interesting palindrome) taking you around. Unbeknownst to us, crab was being advertised all around in a variety of little stalls. Just not in English! We ended up buying three in total from two different shops. The 1.2 kilo specimen had the biggest claws I've ever seen, aside from a massive lobster I once saw in the airport in Halifax. The taste was pretty good, but I must say that our native Dungeness crabs are pretty hard to beat.

After making the grab for crab, we stopped the car near a roadside vendor who was making and selling freshly pressed sugar cane juice. He had one of those little presses that sort of vaguely resembles a wringer from an old washing machine, except his was way more uptown. It was powered by a little diesel motor, as opposed to most, which are hand-driven with a large wheel. A large length of sugar cane, maybe three or four feet long is repeatedly run through the wringer until all the juice is extracted and collected. This guy's trick was to squeeze a lime in with it. It should be noted that limes here are sweeter than the varieties we get at home, and it really added a nice edge to the drink. Great thing on a hot day!

Rajeesh was determined to show us some of the best treats Cochin has to offer, so our next stop was at a funky little North Indian restaurant that he liked to frequent. Here, they had only aloo parotha on offer. "Aloo" means potato, and a parotta, also known as parantha in the North is a kind of flatbread that is grilled. The "aloo" variation means that you get a grilled piece of flatbread, stuffed with a spicy potato mixture, which is then lovingly brushed with ghee and served up with a side dish of yoghurt. A big dish of fresh green chilis sat on the table as an accompaniment. "Potato and grilled bread?", you might ask. "Big deal". Not here, folks. These were the best ones that Laurel and I had ever eaten, and we've had few in our time. They were so good, we ended up ordering seconds. All the while our noisy chewing, punctuated only by the occasional "Mmmmmmmmm..." was being observed by a young man at the next table who was slicing about 10 pounds of potent green chili on an old wooden block, without the benefit of protective gloves. I remember thinking to myself "I hope he doesn't have to pee soon".

Our warmup snack completed, we drove to the outskirts of Cochin. Our destination was a toddy shop of some reknown. Toddy is a beer-like beverage derived from tapping a palm tree. It's a whitish, cloudy, unfiltered, and a decidedly coarse kind of mildly alcoholic beverage. Real working man's swill. It's served in a large clear jug, and comes with its own hand-held strainer. Never a good sign in a beverage. It's kind of sour tasting, vaguely reminiscent of "chang", which is a Tibetan beer-like concoction. There's also a similarity to "pulque", a cactus derived drink from Mexico that occupies a similar socio-economic niche. Laurel and I sampled chang at a Tibetan wedding in 2000. It was poured from a battered old aluminum pot, the spout of which was greased with a liberal dollop of yak butter. This apparently made it taste better. Toddy, on the other hand could have maybe used a little yak butter. It tasted vaguely coconutty, but was not the kind of bevvy that would make this gastronaut line up for seconds. Rajeesh had no such misgivings, and downed at least three full glasses of the stuff. He was driving.

Rajeesh ordered the food for us in a burst of rapid fire Malayalam. There were enough rrrrrrrrolled "r"'s interspersed with blurry vowel sounds to make him sound a bit like a methedrined Ricky Ricardo telling Lucy she could not come down to the club under any circumstances. Soon, a couple of plates appeared. They were chunks of something done up in the Keralan Black Pepper Fry style. "Now what is this?", I asked innocently. "This is mongoose, and the other one is the daily special, how do you say... crane". Crane was actually the white egret that we often see keeping a cow company in the grass. Kind of like a heron, but without the appetite for the goldfish in your pond. We were unclear as to the provenance of the mongoose. Was it the recent loser in a battle with a cobra? Road kill? Where does one shop for quality mongoose? We all looked at each other across the table, each trying to gauge the reaction of the other. He might as well have said "Burrowing Owl in a delightful whale sperm sauce. The sperm is ethically harvested...". The boys did not bat an eye, and happily munched whatever chunks of endangered species were placed on their plates. It was pretty spicy to be sure, but despite our adult misgivings, we all dug in fearlesly. Miles really liked it. "The mongoose is really good, dad!", he exclaimed. To be fair, it wasn't that bad at all. Bony. A little thin on meat. Mongoosey. Mind you, a pair of Adidas would taste pretty good in that sauce.

Next came a plate of tapioca root, and a plate of shrimp pepper fry. This was followed by 4 big plates of karimeen, the local specialty fish, swimming in a fiery chili sauce, which was fantastic. After that came a plate of duck. All that sauce was mopped up with plates of appam, those little pancake-like flatbreads, and puttu, the coconut log thing. We actually cancelled the last plate of deep fried karimeen due to the imminent danger of bursting. Again. We drove back to our house in a satiated state of disbelief. We had eaten the mongoose and lived to tell the tale. Surely the cobra population was now on the upswing.

No rest for me, though. I had three and a half pounds of crab to cook for dinner!

Sari about that!

2009-01-18T03:18:00.000-08:00

Okay. So I have notes in my travel journal from 9 years ago and I make good notes. And then I googled it - don't cha just love Google? I found a few sites with step-by-step instructions. It can't be that hard, just a tuck here, a wrap there, a pleat or 5 and we're on our way, right? Piece a cake! (Or so I told Emma, our fabulous 20 year old nanny).

Not. Let me explain. I have worn a sari exactly six times in my life. Three of those times I had women who wear saris almost every day helping me to dress. The other three times I was in Canada where I can pull off the almost-but-not-quite- properly-wrapped-sari thing as long as I walk with my head held high and avoid Little India. I like wearing saris. They are stunning on pretty much every figure - tall, short, chunky, or boney, all women look graceful in a sari. Peasant women wear them one way (you need to be able to squat whilst making bricks by hand), fashionable Calcuttans another. Some are made of the thinnest of cottons, others are of heavy silk with gilded borders. The sari comes in three parts: an ankle-length underskirt that has a drawstring waist, a short blouse that has been tailored to you and is always very snug and 5 to 7 metres of fabric. One end of the swath of fabric is usually differentiated from the rest by a change in pattern, colour or design. It is called the pallav and is about a metre in length. This is the bit that hangs over the shoulder and down the back. Apparently they make something now called an "automatic sari" that you pull on like a skirt with the pleats sewn in place in front and on the shoulder piece of the pallav. But that's cheating. And we don't cheat.

So when we were invited by Venu to his sister's wedding, Emma and I decided that we needed to purchase saris. I own two already from our last trip here - I was married in a sari! - but I cunningly didn't bother to bring them. I mean, really, who BRINGS a sari to India? Off we went to Mahatma Gandhi Road, to one of the many fabric emporia in search of the perfect sari fabric.

Emma and I have very similar taste in both colour and design of fabric and neither of us likes anything too busy, too blue or too bright. The women here look stunning in fuschia and neon turquoise with sequins but Emma and I look washed out. We were first shown into the silk room. Here saris cost between Rs 1000 and Rs 4000 ($25-$100). We were shown to little stools in front of long counters in AC comfort. Behind the counters rainbow-walls of stacks and stacks of saris in almost every colour and combination you can imagine (and then some! Emma and I have often commented that the most unlikely colour combinations are put together here and, yet, they somehow work.). The shop assistants started pulling the stacks down and flinging the lengths of fabric onto the counter in front of us Emma and I sat, shaking our heads. Too busy. Too pink. This one would be beautiful if the border wasn't orange. Do you have anything in green? What about black? Emma and I started chanting our mantra, that apparently went unheard: "simple, simple. too fancy". More neon colours and intricate patterns in sequins came out. And as the 50th sari was being piled on top and the assistants were beginning to look exasperated, Emma and I got up, somewhat sheepishly, and decided to try the other room. The room where there are no seats, no AC and saris start at Rs 200.

We did end up finding fabric that we were both happy with. Emma bought a beautiful red and gold silk sari that makes her look like a princess and I bought a black cotton sari with gold and ochre borders. We each spent less than $30. Next we hopped in an autorickshaw and whizzed back to our neighbourhood to visit our tailor. Yes. We have a tailor. His name is Sunil. Emma and I have been dropping off our clothing that wasn't quite fitting right - a little too loose in the waist, a little too tight in the arms - with Sunil for almost a month now. His little shop up on KK Road does good alterations for as little as Rs 40 ($1). A couple of weeks ago I had a salwar kameez (tunic and pants) made for me. The 5.5 metres of fabric cost me about $6, the labour was half that. Sunil is handsome and has a spectacular smile. He strikes me as a bit of a charmer, which in his line of work, dealing mostly with women, is probably advantageous. But his English is limited, and our Malayalam is less than that, and this language barrier makes him a little shy with us. After taking measurements and consulting about necklines and sleeve lengths, Sunil assured us that our sari blouses would be ready for us to pick up the day before our departure.

So once our blouses were made and we tried them on to make sure they fit (barely! Gosh they make them snug), we piled them into our suitcases for the trip to Kannur. Venu had 2 wonderful friends, Sanju and Siraj, who had come in from out of town as well and who hung out with us at the wedding. Siraj is from Andhra Pradesh where they speak Telugu, not Malayalam so, like us, he communicated mostly in English. Sanju is Keralan and, like Venu, works in a Call Centre so his English is excellent. He was so good with the boys, making paper boats and airplanes for them and taking them for walks through the village. All the young men were interested in talking with Emma - no surprise there! I believe Emma has been compared (favourably) to at least 4 different Bollywood stars.

Siraj is a teaser. The kind of boy who pulls a girl's pigtails because he likes her. He spent most of the day before the wedding, when Emma and I were attired in the easy-to-wear salwar kameez, teasing Emma that she wouldn't be able to pull off a sari. People here take pride in the sari's difficulties. A woman who can wear a sari is a force to be reckoned with. Of course he also teased her a great deal about her "lack of appetite". Anyone who knows Emma knows that she eats just fine! Even when she has to eat 2 lunches in a row as we did on the wedding day. Siraj was starting to grate on the nerves, just a bit.

The day of the wedding, Emma and I gave ourselves an hour to figure out the whole sari thing. I had neglected to bring safety pins with me so we had to run out to a "fancy shop" to purchase some. I pleated and wrapped Emma first. After a few adjustments, I thought she looked pretty good - although the pallav wasn't as long as I would have liked and she didn't feel entirely "secure". Then I dressed myself. My pallav was about the right length but I felt bulky near the waist - and no woman wants a bulky waist! Oh well. We slapped bindis on our foreheads and we figured we were ready to go.

Venu arrived in the lobby to pick us up and we all filed out of our room to go down to meet him. As Emma and I walked by the cleaning lady she hissed at us. No, hiss isn't the right word. In Kerala when people want to get your attention they create a sound that is something in between a hiss and a sharp intake of air between their teeth. And there is none of the negative connotation that a hiss has attached to it. So the cleaning lady hissed at Emma and me. Then she shook her head and started adjusting Emma's sari. I told Rob to go ahead and take the boys downstairs with him, we'd be along in a moment. The cleaning lady motioned for us to follow her back into our room.

Once in the room, she completely unwrapped Emma and, starting from the beginning, started to make perfect pleats. It took about 20 minutes for us both to be entirely re-wrapped and adjusted. Rob sent Miles up to see what was taking so long. We kicked him out using the time-honoured expression: " We'll be ready when we're ready". We returned our attention to the cleaning lady. She turned us and tucked. She held out a hand for a safety pin, and then another (one for the waist pleats, one on the pallav pleats). She tugged and flipped. She knelt and tugged to make sure the saris were the right length. When she had finely determined that we were up to snuff, she wiggled her head and opened the door. Not a word had been spoken. I pressed a tip in her hand. She handed it back. I pressed a little more forcefully. She smiled a bashful, shy smile and wouldn't meet my eyes but did accept the tip. We thanked her (one of our few non-food words in Malayalam - "nani") and headed downstairs.

The boys were a little irritated at being kept waiting but when Emma and I walked out onto that street, we had a wow moment. People stopped talking, the vendors and wallahs nodded appreciatively and Siraj didn't say a word. Not one. Boy, can Emma wear a sari.

We Nearly Explode

2009-01-18T01:38:00.000-08:00

Remember those old Timex torture test commercials?

You know, where they strap a cheap wristwatch onto some buff guy who then waterskis through a pool of piranha, only to smile soggily for the camera and proudly display his watch, which is still ticking, but always set to 10 minutes to 2? Well, if there was a torture test for stomachs, I think we've just been put through it. We survived. Barely.

Venu, along with four of his friends, came to pick us up in a spiffy hired SUV. We were supposed to leave around ten, but he arrived 15 minutes late. The boys and I were well tarted up in our brand new Indian dress clothes, so we headed downstairs from our room to meet the gang. The girls, dressed in their shiny new custom saris, were right behind us. Or so I thought. 5 minutes went by. Then 10. Venu began to nervously look at his watch and make that clicking sound, followed by a quick inhalation of air that is peculiar to South Indian men. He didn't want to miss his sister's wedding, and was starting to get stressed. We sent Miles back up to the room to fetch our recalcitrant duo, but he came back empty handed. More watch gazing and air sucking. Finally, our two lovelies made their appearance, looking resplendent in their perfectly turned out saris. They poured themselves into the SUV, and only after we had departed for the temple did the truth emerge.

Being a gentleman, I will leave it to my lovely wife to explain the sound reasoning for her tardiness. It is not for me to say. It was worth it though, because the girls looked really great.

After about a 40 minute drive, we arrived at the temple moments before the wedding was about to happen. I got some great shots as the priest worked his way through a somewhat abbreviated version of the Hindu ceremony, which normally can take in excess of 6 hours I am told. It was fun for us to watch the couple stumble over various points of protocol, as we remembered not having a clue what we were supposed to do when we got married in a similar ceremony 9 years ago. It was somewhat reassuring that it was difficult for these two! As I mentioned in my previous post, the bride's demeanor changed from the happy smiling girl of the previous evening to that of a ghost, and a somewhat nauseous ghost at that. At the end of the ceremony everyone was pleased it seemed, and many of the aunties we met at the party the previous day came by squeeze Laurel and Emma's hands to express their happy approval of their saris.

Next, we were all herded into a massive hall for lunch. Huzzah! Rows and rows of tables were laid out with newspaper. We were shown to our seats, where a big banana leaf was then placed before us. Men came by carrying little vats of pickle, rice, chutney, curd, and a few different curries, which were then piled onto our banana leaf plate. As with all South Indian rice meals, they only stopped serving food to you when you either fold over your banana leaf and concede defeat, or pass out face first into your food remnants. We opted for the former, though we came dangerously close to the latter. Then we were all herded outside for group photos. It seemed everyone wanted to get a picture with the Foreign Family That Wore Indian Clothes. Did I mention that there were a few hundred people there? "One more picture please, Mr. Robert". "Miss Emma, can we get some photos of you with my cousins?". We posed nonstop for about 40 minutes, and it really got to be a bit much. However, being Canadian, the last thing we wanted to do was be rude, so he happily complied with every request. Laurel and I were imagining the happy couple reminiscing over their wedding photos 20 years from now and thinking "Who the **** are these people, and why are they in all our photos?"

By now we were stuffed and tired, but we weren't' done yet. It was time to waddle to the groom's house for the traditional post wedding visit. The walk was only about 500 yards, but after a huge meal in the heat of the afternoon, it was a challenge to move at all. Some cool lime drinks were served at the house, and we politely said hello to some of the people we had met the day before. After hanging around for an hour exchanging pleasantries, it seemed that there a momentum to leave. We were stopped on the way out, and shown to a couple of tables. A kindly gentleman explained that "it is our custom that when a person visits a house for the first time, they cannot leave until they are served a meal". Laurel and I shot a look of panic at each other, but we knew that resistance was futile. We had to suck it up and take one for the team, which meant eating our second full meal within the hour. So down came the platefuls of chicken biryani, raita, and pappadam, and slowly but surely, the food disappeared from the plates. I caught the attention of the gent who explained this custom to me, and as he leaned over, I good-naturedly said "This isn't a custom, this is punishment!" He smiled, leaned a little closer and whispered conspiratorially in my ear. "Marriage is punishment". I laughed so hard that a chicken bone nearly shot out of my nose. "Don't tell the groom", I said.

Groaning under the extra load, and silently giving thanks for the miracle that is the draw string belt, we were ushered into the house for a quick tour, and... more photos! After finally exhausting all the combinatorial permutations of Foreigner and Family Members, we finally were able to express our thanks for being invited and oozed off into the sunset, narrowly avoiding leaving a trail like a slug. The boys slept most of the way home, while Laurel and I worked hard not to have our eyeballs roll back in their sockets.

Needless to say, we passed on dinner that night.