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I loved this piece on cooking onions and patience by that cutie Nigel Slater. So here goes.


And not before time

There are plenty of short cuts worth taking in the kitchen (really, who wants to spend their life making croissants?), but more importantly there are the things we often skip or hurry or gloss over that it might be wiser not to. By which I mean the nuts and bolts of the cooking process that while tempting to rush through would, if we were to take a bit more time over them, make cooking and eating even more of a pleasure.

Cooking onions is a task worth taking your time over - 10 minutes just isn't long enough to get their crisp, watery flesh to break down into layers of honey-toned sweetness. Onions, whether small and whole or large and sliced, need a low temperature if they are not to burn and blacken, and plenty of stirring to prevent them colouring unevenly. The warmest of gold, evenly spread throughout, will take a good 25 minutes of an onion's time.

We like onion tarts in our house, both the thick, quivering quiche variety and those that are more like a pizza but without the cheese and tomato glop. Any onion that is to go inside a tart case needs cooking first, and cooking slowly, too. Then there are the dishes where you need the onion softened but not coloured. I'm thinking of that soup here, the one that looks creamy and tasteless, yet is, at first slurp, the very essence of gentle onion. I tend to cut a circular piece of greaseproof paper for this one, laying loosely over the top of the roughly chopped onions, so that they steam rather than brown. It works, too, if you keep a lid on and don't have the heat too high.

My favourite way to cut an onion is in to segments: so, in half from root to tip then each half into thick segments, like an orange. This way, they may take a long while to cook, but when they do finally soften you get thick nuggets of golden, melting onion flesh, somehow more satisfying than those skinny rings that get into a tangle and make your tart crumble to pieces as you slice.

It's the same with roast onions, baked onions, call them what you will. They take an age to soften right through to the core. But to try to undercut the required time is to end up with something quite unpleasant, if not inedible. You can get round this by boiling them for 20 minutes or so before draining them and returning the partially softened onions to the oven. If you toss them in a little sizzling butter first, they will cook all the quicker, but you must still have your patient hat on. Time alone will render a hard, winter onion as soft as butter and no amount of tinkering can really speed up the process.

For the record, an onion, thickly sliced or roughly chopped, with a little butter in a heavy pot, will take a good 30 minutes to soften over a low heat. I'm not sure even I give it that long, which is a shame, because the benefits are extraordinarily sweet and satisfying.

I always feel very comforted when I read this poem. How nice to feel nice about being a nobody and how snug it feels to know that Emily Dickinson thought so too, at least she wrote so too.
Though Ii wonder. Is it dreary to be somebody? Isn’t it drearier to be nobody? I don’t really want to deconstruct this poem but well, it does say somewhere there that being a somebody is being a nobody. When i wonder like this for more than two minutes, my crabby shell rears up, behind which it is so easy to hide. And back to being snug about being a nobody and gazing at somebodies.
And here’s the poem.

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us--don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Yesterday I realised I like maintenance-work related long power shutdowns. Prior knowledge of no noise and so all your inner noise kinda starts strumming. The afternoon light was blue-tinged because of our blue curtains. The laptop had not been charged and my phone was gasping. So all sources of music had gone phut. And hence I could let my voice out and my dreams travelled. One after the other, I sang songs — clearly and with what thehrav I could manage and the living room echoed back. All this while I was alone, surrounded by the blue, crying inside (for unbloggable reasons). And I was shredding radish. Ah. what therapy that is. The spell broke after I finished singing the Rajasthani maand. And if you have heard it ever when there’s blue inside and around you, especially if it has been rendered edgily, raspily, our common recall is enough to make us soulmates.

A friend wished me at the end of 2007 (actually she was not a friend then just yet...and don't know whether she is now....never mind) in my kind of way, my kind of language. She made a random list of the things that happened to her and what she learnt from them and added a post-script saying it would be nice if we could do the same with our lives and our year gone by and send it across. Well, it has taken me a whole year to do what I then wanted to do. I am sure there is some learning here as well but haven't quite figured it out yet. Actually, I have and am sure you have to. So here goes.  

* I have decided to label this year the year of just-misses.

*I quite dislike this year and it is some kind of a blip in a continuous run of good years from 2000. There were only some patches of sunshine.

* It started with hubby receiving a somewhat alarming piece of news which hopefully is proving to be some kind of a false alarm. Let's just call it a positive just-miss :)

* It then kinda brightened up with me scheduled to go to Brazil. What can be more exciting? Travel half way across the world and spend a day in the deep forests of the Amazon. Wait, I don't give labels just like that. Suffice to say it did not happen quite in the last moment

* Next, I missed a promotion that was more than due though I say it so myself. It did come later but having to walk into a cabin of a kindly-looking- embarassed- to- death boss' cabin and him pleading 'don't tell me anything' before I could utter pro...kind of sucked the joy out.

* 'Living' was a joy and it still is. I love the thing. I love everything about it. Even the despair at being unable to think of the next lead. The frustration of PRs calling up before during and after sending an email. The earnestness with which some doctors write about piles and gas problems. The pathetic attempts at neo-feminism by some others.  I don't how long this loving will last. I am scared about the end.

* I began writing more regularly. That patch of sunshine I was talking about. And writing about subjects I want to write about. Not fashion. Not cancer. I learnt that if I love to write about something, I can do it sometimes in 10 minutes. I also began writing poetry again. And I learnt how much I had missed it.

* After 10 long years, thanks to a persistent friend who loves reminding me that she is a true-blue Scorpio, I met the man I used to hero worship. The intravenous scholar. My english teacher. I learnt how when you don't see the person you truly care for for so many years, for reasons nobody can fathom, you get back the piece of heart you left with them. Intact. Fuller.

* I completely dazzled everybody at a marriage. Yeah yeah I am saying it myself but that's the thrilling truth :). Ok won't go on.

* I realised I am absolutely addicted to gmail chatting. I have spent many a five-minute just staring at who's got a green dot and who's got red. And I am addicted to reading and re-reading status updates. Actually it is not addiction. It is my very own OCD.

* I realised I am still intrigued by my brother-in-law. Perhaps because he is like a mirror.

* I have truly understood what my definition of love is. And I love it. And I realised I do not need any props for it. And my thanksgiving for giving me the kind of everyday dose of love I have got has only doubled. My garden of light.

* I also realised that my inner life is crawling and alive and truly healthy. Enough for me to last long in a deserted island.

* I missed going to Poland by a whisker. The whisker part is a guess. But instinct tells me it is a right guess.

* I haven't watched a single thoroughly memorable film this entire year. Though I finally found the CD of 'A Walk in the Clouds' That kind of makes up for all the near-misses.

* I continue to be fat and continue to exercise in spurts. I have also, I think, lost most of my stage fear.

* I have learnt that I will perhaps throughout my life be a sucker for the silliest of romantic tales. Now, no judgements.

 * I am perhaps discovering, as my friend wrote last year, 'my cause'. Never before did I feel so powerfully about something like I feel now for universalism. For xenophilia. The best words I have heard in the entire year -- rabba sacheya, sabar de do jo tere nede karde (O true God, give me the patience that will take me nearer to you).

* This website was the best gift I have received this year. I re-learnt how much my birthday means to me and was surprised anew that it does not mean so much to the rest of the world :P

 * The Wasted Vigil was the best book I read this year. Close second is Bill Bryson's Here and There. Diametrically opposite books.

* I have come to realise that my love for the Urdu language was not a childhood-related amusement. I plan to do something about it.

* Music seeped into me through many crevices this year but none so powerfully as Atif Aslam's. Serendipity. That's how I discovered his voice. And then him. He is the single brightest patch of sunshine this year.  

I suppose that's it. For now. 2009 is waiting.  

Wasted perhaps this very vigil is
A tale that makes me whisper, please!
Scorches the soul; this pomogranate burst
Taliban, tyranny, tragedy and blind trust
Endless its nights; its days a kind of curse
Dauntlessly but sanity claws, its nerves terse

Vigil it keeps over people who calmly accept
Insanity shrouded in verses, wives stoned for being suspect
Grief over books nailed to the skies
Irreverent here are a little fidayeen’s cries
Live, it tells me, your life’s far far nice

This btw, is an ode in appreciation of a book that am reading right now called Wasted Vigil (if you didn’t realise it already — the first letters of the peom make up the title..a favourite trick of mine :). This is by a London-based Pakistani writer Nadeem Aslam about everyday life in Afghanistan from the time of the Soviet invasion to the defeat of the Talibans. Perhaps because of its topicality or perhaps because it is a subject that I get passionate about or perhaps because it is indeed a heartrending story..I don’t know the reason but this book has seeped into my dreams and is snaking along my skin. I want it to get over quickly and I don’t want it to get over at all. And unlikely I will get over it ever.

 

 


 

Today, I rode on happiness again. Last time too, I could not do the barn dance. I was in Delhi and had just learnt that I will be going to the city of my dreams, London. This time, the world was too much with me to dance with abandon. There were people staring at me in the bus -- I know my eyes were shining. I was even happy to feel the crush of the shivajinagar crowd automatically pushing me inside the bus. I was thrilled that I didn't get a seat. I rode on happiness as I told you. Atif Aslam is performing in Bangalore. This day I will remember, more than the real thing. Unheard indeed is sweeter.

Am I the only one feeling distressed about the amount of hate floating around? I see it in my father’s mutterings and my mother’s downturned mouth, in silly status updates and facebook groups. Uck. I can’t analyse, I can’t articulate. But I can write a limerick.


It’s business as usual for the fanatics.
this really is the jihadi’s very fix
Hate’s like busy little tics;
that swarms inside and pick
at those who gladly mimic
others ideas; So happy to fall for those tricks
So easy to make the mind sick
enough to believe life’s a black-n-white flick
Oh! But life’s really by grey licked.

My father loved a plain digestive, though it is difficult ot think of him and the iconic biscuit without conjuring up a picture of him trying to slip an entire unbroken one into his mouth in one go. I can't remember him ever actually succeeding, and if he did it was probably something he did in secret.
It is funny how, whether you had them in your kitchen or not, the digestive always manages to taste of home. It has a unique ability to take you to safe place, to somewhere you think you remember fondly,
even though you may never have even been there. The smell alone, wheaty and sweet with a hint of the hamster's cage about it, is instantly recognisable as a good place to be. It has been said that this is one of the great tea dunking biscuits but I have to disagree. The digestive is altogether too risky. If ever a biscuit will let you down on the way from mug to mouth, it is this one, its open crumbly nature being just not strong enough to hold a decent amount of liquid before it collapses in your lap. But then,
like not using the zebra crossing, some might welcome such risks to inject a bit of danger and excitement into their day.

Till my teen years, I never did figure out the exact meaning of ‘dessert’. The word, to my spelling-challenged mind, conjured up palm trees, a huge oasis and sand dunes. And the only dessert I got to eat when young were all Plain Jane ones — vanilla mostly, chocolate sometimes and as a rare treat, strawberry ice-cream (which invariably smelled of sickly sweet cough syrup).
Now, when I hear renowned pastry chef Mickael Besse reel off exotic desserts ranging from balsamic vinegar ice-cream to cherry champagne to olive oil icecream with strawberries to dark chocolate fantasies, my now-much-better-at-spellings mind conjures up visions of apple pie-laden English cottages, French vineyards overflowing with cheesy treats and handsome Italian men churning out 100 per cent fat free gelato!
All these desserts, by the way, will soon be available in Bangalore (some of them already are out there) at Ecstacy, the dessert hang-out that is all set to open at UB Mall by the end of this month. Mickael says he became a pastry chef to “escape the odours of cooking” and has trawled the world for nearly 12 years in search of ‘perfect ingredients’. “The mind churns out the dessert — coconuts and lychees make for a treat as do strawberries when marinated in mulled wine and served with olive oil.” Close your eyes and imagine.
Ecstacy has quite a fan following at its flagship outlet in Chennai where the fastest selling dessert is ‘Chocolatier’. Self-explanatory, the death by this particular chocolate will send you straight to heaven — it is made of the extra smooth and delicious Valrhona chocolate. This is a dark, creamy variety of chocolate from Valrhona, a small town near Lyon, France. Chocoholics consider it as one of the world’s finest varieties.
Incidentally, Valrhona chocolates are made from beans of a single year's harvest from a specific plantation. There are also many other flavours to try — cheesecakes made of imported cream cheese, mascarpone-dotted and coriander-infused ice-creams, Taal Madeleine biscuits with blueberries, apple cinnamon biscuits...yes, the mind (and the tongue) boggles. There’s also scope for your traditional fudge, apple pies, raspberry souffles and the ubiquitous tiramisu. “Desserts are 60 per cent presentation and 40 per cent ingredients,” says Chef Besse in all seriousness. And 100 per cent heaven, he forgot to add.
Somebody said life is uncertain, eat dessert first. Well, if you have to eat this particular one, put aside all uncertainties — you will first have to rob a bank. Priced at just 1.4 million dollars, the ‘Strawberry Arnaud’ at the Arnaud’s restaurant in New Orleans, are berries with bling, according to the Forbes magazine. The dessert features six port-marinated strawberries decorated with mint, cream and er..a five carat pink diamond ring. Available by special request, it is served by white-gloved waiters accompanied by a jazz band in one of the restaurant's private dining rooms.
I know, you would rather have that fresh strawberry cheesecake winking at you from behind the counter at your local bakery. So would I.

Only prudence and the presence of the chef is preventing me from attacking the round cheese board peppered with assorted crackers, apricots and sun-dried tomatoes that’s sitting between us. None of the little blocks of cheese on the board is anything like the processed cheese that I have grown up on or the emulsified cheesespreads that has been slopping about on my breakfast bread for years.  “Eating processed cheese is like licking rubber,” says the chef and as I am still reeling from the salty, pungent aroma of goat’s cheese that’s doing a little jig behind my tongue, I have no cause to disagree.
Nor do Bangalore’s gourmets who have (finally) a wide variety of cheese to choose from. In fact, today, it is possible to find more than 150 varieties of cheese right here — everything from blue-veined Stiltons and Roqueforts to the sweet and delicate Swiss Emmental to the soft mozzarella and Camembert and the wonderfully nutty Italian Parmesan — you name it and you will find it in the city’s gourmet stores and fairs such as Olive Beach’s Gourmet Bazaar. Cheese appreciation has been gaining ground in India, says Chef Manu but we still have to get out of the mould of munching supermarket cheese slices.
“Cheese is a fascinating subject. The French  themselves have nearly 1,000 different cheeses...there is creamy cheese, smoky cheese, hold-your-nose-and-eat-cheese..exploring the world of cheese is like exploring the world.” What the chef likes best is goat’s cheese because of its “earthy quality”. “Goat’s cheese gets its characteristics from what the goat eats and goats generally tend to eat everything!”  The taste of cheese depends on a particular vegetation, soil, environment, milk and of course, what the milk-giving animal eats. 
Which is why the French have the prestigious ‘AOC’ certification — ‘Appellation D’Origine Controlee’ which guarantees that the cheese originates from a specific region of France and has been produced in a traditional way.
Take the ‘king of cheese’ Roquefort, the celebrated and uber expensive blue cheese from France. (It costs Rs 450 per 100 gm at Olive Beach). Recipient of the first AOC certificate, Roquefort was originally ripened in the soil of natural caves of Mont Combalou in Roquefort-sur-Soulzon. Traditionally, cheesemakers extracted it by leaving bread in the caves for six to eight weeks until it was overtaken by the mold. The inner part of the bread was then dried to produce a powder. Incidentally, the largest producer of Roquefort cheese is ‘Societe des Caves de Roquefort’, which owns several caves in the region and opens its facilities to tourists once in a while!
Nowadays, says Chef Manu, the mold is produced in the lab and is added to the curd or introduced into the cheese through long sticks that keep poking it. This mold is responsible for Roquefort’s distinctive blue and its smoke n salt tanginess — which hits you like a wrestler’s blow, the second you bite into its crumbly texture. Precisely why I reach out for the cracker. This time, without the chef’s prompting!