Humbling Beginnings

First off, I renounce American food! Yes, I am an American, so I can do that.

The United States of Amerika is a great country and I'm very proud to be part of it.

No more hamboogers, or fried chicken.

Truth be known, I quit American food years, decades ago. But now I'm dedicating myself to learning the art of Indian vegetarian cooking. I tried learning about ten years ago and made some mighty tasty meals, but the whole process eluded me. There is a process to cooking Indian. As is usually the case with me, it was a book that inspired me. Last time it was The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking by Yamunda Devi. The nearly eight-hundred page tome reveals many secrets of the Vaishnavan approach to food and nutrition, something that I am completely unfamiliar with. I was after the food, the spices, the food. The philosophy and spirituality did not interest me. I am still of Western mind and my brand of spirituality comes Western style. The Indian cusuine draws me in.

Earlier this year I started cooking again, exploring the fantastic food of the Middle East and northern Africa. And Thai cooking. How delicious! My impacted sinuses began loosening with a spicy Thai soup I made.

And then THE BOOK entered my life. I chanced upon this one, but as soon as I took it home, I knew I was in for an adventure. DAKSHIN: Vegetarian Cuisine from South India by Chandra Padmanabhan. A gorgeous photos accompanied every recipe. The recipes are complicated and the processes, as I was about to learn, were sometimes tedious. I was immediately drawn to the sambars, which were the first type of food in the book, followed by rasams. This is where I began. Both of these are essential to some branches of Indian cooking, both are quite wet and usually eaten with a bowl of rice. The sambar is more like a vegetable stew, with lots and lots of delicious gravy. The "gravy" is comprised largely of cooked dal, toor dal to be more specific. The first step to making a sambar is to start the dal cooking. It slow cooks and slowly transforms to lens-like peas to a soft pudding-like substance. Next a spice paste is created by first roasting various spices (cumin seeds, mustard seeds, hing, etc.) and dried chili pepper, with a dash of curry leaves, along with, in many recipes, dals. Urad dal. Channa dal. This roasted mixture is then ground into a paste, adding water or a moist substance like fresh coconut. Put to the side, the next step is to cook the vegetables. Sometimes more spices are added, almost always turmeric, and often a sambar spice. Next the paste is added and cooked into the mixed vegetables and dal. And finally, the tempering. Oil or ghee is heated and a few spices are fast fried, usually starting with black mustard seeds, follwed by cumin seeds, when the mustard seeds begin to pop. The cumin seeds quickly turn from a greyish greenish to a rich brown. Hing is often added, sometimes more dal, often urad dal, fried for a few seconds until it turns golden brown, then usually a dried red chili (broken in half, when super spices is desired), followed by curry leaves that immediately begin to jump and dance in the hot skillet. This hot mix is poured over the vegetable, covered to marry the hot spices to the rest, and served. It's a fantastic process.

The rasam is more like a traditional watery soup. It is often cooked in a similar manner as the sambar (sometimes with cooked dal added, sometimes with a paste, sometimes with a rasam spice mix.) Both of these are consumed with large quantities of fresh, hot rice. A sambar/rasam combo is a marriage made in heaven. Other foods can be added or substituted here, including a dry curry, known as a poriyal, and a food style between the wetter sambar and the drier poriyal, a kootus. Special rices are often prepared, green pea rice, mango rice, mustard seed rice, cumin rice, etc. And special spice mixes are often spinkled on white rice, sesame powder, peanut powder, coconut powder, etc. And there are salads and desserts, and other fare. Eating this style is a great honor, with hot, spicy food that sometimes makes my eyes water. And usually there are cooler, soothing dishes served as the caboose of the meal, often with cool yoghurt or other flame retardants.

So today I christened my rebirth as an Indian chef by purchasing a rather expensive (for me, at least) piece of cooking ware. It is a special grinder, a wet grinder, so I don't have to pop my triceps beating those hard fenugreek seeds in the mortar/pestle, taking upwards of half an hour, with a rather poor showing to boot, spices that weren't crunched down quite enough. The wet grinder allows me to add liquids as I grind. It also makes all the powder mixes I could ever want, and is great for chutneys and spicy pickle.

That's the other thing I so lust about Indian food. With no hot sauce on the table, or the shelf, usually, various pickles and chutneys accompany my meals, little dabs of firey substance to turn up the heat a few notches. My favorite so far is hot spicy lime pickle. It's hot! And so delicious. A dab in a spoonful of rice and sambar transforms the flavor of that mouthful, expanding the culinary delight with new flavors. And perhaps next bite, or a few down the road, I might add a dab of pickled ginger or garlic, and an whole new taste sensation bursts in my mouth. If I want to cool it down a bit, some watery date-tamarind does the trick. Eating a simple meal of just a few items is truly a taste feast!

I should have my grinder up and grinding by tomorrow or perhaps the next day. I have a small onion sambar that was so so delicious, that I want to recreate. This was to die for. That and perhaps a spicy buttermilk rasam and knocked me on my arse.

Tonight's dinner was light and tossed together quickly: some reheated tomato rasam and a cucumber/tomato/onion salad topped with thick Indian yoghurt, and a side dish of a south Indian kootu, long beans with coconut. All was so delicious, I wish I could invite you all to my dinner table.

This blog will be all about food. And food networking. I have much to learn and perhaps in a short while, something to share. In the meantime, it will be mostly my stories and adventures in cooking, and consuming, delicious Indian food!