Becoming an Indian Chef

Coming to India has had the surprising effect of turning me into a “domestic goddess”.  A domestic goddess is someone who cannot really cook, is hardly able to boil water, and does all her hunting and gathering in the processed food aisles of the supermarket, until a dramatic change in circumstances renders her convenient (but unhealthy) lifestyle useless and forces her to cook for herself. And I mean really cook – not just tossing frozen veggies in the microwave or making sandwiches out of pre-sliced bread and prepackaged burgers.

While I wasn’t quite that bad, I generally only had enough time to make boiled eggs, canned pineapple, and oatmeal in the mornings; or toss packaged chicken parts into a pan for a fast dinner. Sometimes, maybe once or twice in year, I would get inspired and try to make a complicated dish, like potato salad, a loaf of wheat bread, or a holiday pie. I mean yes, I could cook things and have always tried dabbling in making food that was different than my standard fare – even once making Thai curry chicken – with pre-packaged spices, already mixed and balanced in the right combination, canned coconut milk, and other frozen or already-prepared ingredients from the supermarket. But usually, I never had time for such time-consuming and labor-inducing recipes, and on a daily basis rushed out the door having cooked only a boiled egg.

But moving to Hubli-Dharwad 10 months ago re-exposed me to the experience of cooking for myself and opened up a whole new world of flavor, scents, and variety.  It’s been fun choosing a huge selection of brightly colored fruits and vegetables from the street vendors cart; eye-opening to learn how to select just the right spices, freshly ground and piled high into mini-pyramids at Durgad Bail marketplace; and useful figuring out the correct flour  to purchase in order to make chapattis versus rotis. I came to the conclusion that the little bananas are 10 times better than the big bananas; and stopped weekly at the local corner shop to buy ½ dozen hen eggs that, weirdly enough, were never spoiled although kept outside daily, in the heat, unrefrigerated.

Every night I was able to have my standard dinner of chapattis, a vegetable dish – usually cabbage, spinach, or bendekai-based -, dal or channa masala, and a spicy rice dish like veg pulao or puliyogare-  made by me, straight from scratch!

It would be great if I could say that I had now mastered the fine art of Indian cooking and declare myself a chef of international standards. But, unfortunately, this I cannot do – the meals I cooked never tasted quite like the “Sunday Specials” our housekeeper in Hubli would cook and share with me every weekend. The chapattis were never quite soft enough; the spices not quite balanced correctly making my dishes a little too overpowering or under powering; the vegetables a little over- or undercooked. And I generally made the same dishes each night so variety was not my strong point. Plus I have a tendency to add some of my own personal taste to everything I cook, which basically means adding a huge helping of butter to everything. Chapattis? Put butter on the tawa.  Dal? Not right without a few tablespoons of butter. Rice – never right without butter! Phud?  Of course goes great with butter! After all, they look like mini corn muffins to me, so why not add butter??

I learned to do a pretty good job on dinner, but still never managed to find the time or inclination to do anything more than stop at the More Store for corn flakes and orange juice for breakfast.  And after starting my work at Samarthanam, which required that I commute between Hubli and Dharwad daily, time became even more limited. If not for Laxmi Madame, the hostel cook at Samarthanam Dharwad, I probably would have never eaten in these last few weeks. Breakfast and lunch at Samarthanam is served daily. The food, which is usually a vegetable dish with chapattis or rotis, sambar, rice and sometimes a sweet, is always freshly prepared that day, and is a tasty low-fat, low sugar, veggie-filled, healthy addition to my day.