Cooking in India – 10/2/14

                I’ve already touched on this subject in one of my earlier blog posts where I wrote about making roti with my homestay mom, but there is so much more to cooking in India than having fingertips of steel to pick up insanely hot food with your bare hands.

                First of all, almost all the cooking I have done/seen done has been conducted on the floor. On a related note, there are no counters anywhere – not in the kitchen, not in the bathroom, not in the bedroom, etc. This has posed somewhat problematic in regard to the bathroom, especially when I was sharing with Chase because neither of us had a place to put our stuff besides the (not always clean) bathroom floor. Usually an abundance of hooks on the walls make up for lost counter space, but at my homestay in Banaras I can’t find a single hook in the bathroom. I’m going to have to ask what the heck I’m supposed to do with my towel while I shower considering there isn’t a separate space for showering (the showerhead is in the middle of the bathroom without any curtains or anything and water gets everywhere). In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen a single shower curtain since I’ve arrived in India. Anyway, back to cooking. All of the slicing, stirring, kneading, peeling, grinding, washing, and rolling of food products is performed on the floor (not straight on the floor, there are plates under the food that is being prepared). Actually, most things happen on the floor here. You sit on the floor to cook, you sit on the floor to eat, you sit on the floor to bathe, you sit on the floor to learn Hindi, and the list goes on and on. At first all this floor sitting hurt my American hips and knees that aren’t accustomed to sitting cross-legged on the floor for extended periods of time, but I have since adjusted and now find the floor considerably more comfortable (although, I do admit I would prefer to sit in a chair every once in a while).

                This next cooking related thing is more of an interesting anecdote from a while ago that I forgot to write about until now. On Ben T’s birthday (September 19) we decided that we were going to bake him a birthday cake. As an avid baker back home, I offered my services to the group to come to the program house in Munsiyari an hourish early to bake the cake. Upon arrival at Malika-ji’s house (aka the program house), I realized that there was a) no recipe for me to follow and b) no oven in which I could bake the cake. The second issue was quickly resolved by a solar cooker being brought out for our use, but I have to admit I was a little nervous about just haphazardly throwing ingredients together to make a good tasting cake (I didn’t want Ben to be disappointed on his 18^th birthday now did I). I roughly gestimated two cups of flour, a cup of sugar, two eggs, a cup of butter, a half a teaspoon of baking soda, a quarter cup of milk, and a cup of a raisin/walnut mixture and mixed it all together (adding milk/flour to fine tune the batter consistency). We cooked the cake in a cheesecake pan and proceeded with the impromptu frosting. Since there wasn’t any powdered sugar to make a glaze or frosting, I just mixed milk, butter, and granule sugar together until it was a semi-pasty consistency. Half the cake (well, maybe more of a tart since it didn’t rise at all), was then coated with the frosting and we all sang happy birthday to Ben. The cake miraculously tasted fantastic. It was nice and spongey and the frosting’s crunch (due to the undissolved sugar) was reminiscent of crème Brule. If only all of my forays into recipe-less cooking were as successful as this one…

                At Munsiyari we had cooking lessons that were incredibly fun. We made pakora (the most similar thing to it in American food is the onion ring but it’s not really anything like that either), samosas, and marijuana seed chutney. All of us were quite intrigued by the interesting chutney and a little reserved about trying it at first. We were all assured many times by multiple reliable people that it would not have any effect on us, but we all still giggled when we saw that it was 4:20 PM while we were eating the pakora and chutney. People here love all sorts of chutney. Outside of blueberry chutney with brie I had never really had much of it, but sooo many dishes are served with one chutney or another. It’s one of those words that people here use to describe everything. “Yeh kya heh?” (what is this?) “Chutney.” Or even worse is the word “subji” that just groups all kinds of vegetables together into a single word.