Pitfalls of cooking and Mr P...the saga continues...

After the breakfast debacle (The Intricacies and Pitfalls of Indian Cooking and Mr P! , http://avatarofmrbean.com/2012/03/26/the-intricacies-and-pitfalls-of-indian-cooking-and-mr-p/), do you think that G would have stayed for lunch if invited? Guess what? He did! He understood that Mr P was feeling a bit downhearted and so he agreed to give him another chance to prove his culinary skills. There are some people who would take any amount of beating and would still turn the other cheek because of a soft heart. G belongs to this rare, endangered species of ‘softies’ that is on a path of accelerated extinction. G is also a vegetarian.

Mr P decided to cook rice and make daal, pappad and Aviyal to go with it. Aviyal is made from finger sized pieces of all the vegetables such as cucumber, snake gourd, eggplant, green chillies, long beans, carrots, yams, green bananas and drum sticks (of course not drumsticks that are chicken legs, but long fruits of Moringa plants).

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These vegetable pieces are washed well and cooked in a little volume of water with tamarind and salt to taste. Turmeric and red chilli powder or pastes are also added. Ground coconut and cumin and curry leaves are added towards the end.

For Mr P, the most difficult part in this whole recipe was cutting the vegetables to size. “The vegetables are to be finger sized. “They cannot be cubes or any other shapes because that is one thing that distinguishes Aviyal from other dishes,” Mr P had learned. While cutting them into finger shaped pieces, he was worried he would cut his fingers as well. However, since he started wearing finger gloves on all his fingers while slicing vegetables, he had become more confident.

So while G left to do a little shopping, Mr P stayed home and cooked the meal. Something happened to the daal which is matter for my next post. “Let’s forget the daal. Yoghurt would serve equally well and I’ll also serve a little bit of mango pickle”, decided Mr P. When G came back and they sat down for lunch, he had the meal neatly served on the dining table minus the daal.

Two spoons of food later, G suddenly choked and turned red. He was staring at his bowl of Aviyal.
“ You do know that I am strictly vegetarian, don’t you Mr P?” he asked.
“Sure, I do,” said Mr P.
“And this Aviyal….. Are you sure it is vegetarian?” asked G slowly moving the vegetables around in the bowl.

Mr P looked at G’s bowl of Aviyal. There, partly covered by the gravy and vegetables was something that looked like a finger! Mr P surreptitiously checked whether all his fingers were intact. Assured, that the strange THING in the Aviyal was certainly not one of HIS body parts, Mr P investigated further. It was bent at an angle that reminded Mr P of the celebrity actress's leg at the last Oscars that had jutted out through the dress slit, sending the whole world a-Twittering and starting an account - Angelina Jolie's Leg @AngiesRightLeg.

Mr P probed further. Amidst the vegetables, it looked like an alien finger. “Probably from Mars” thought Mr P. “But then, the THING was not red coloured and isn’t Mars supposed to be the red planet?”

Mustering all his courage Mr P pulled the THING out.
It lay in full surrender on top of the dining table.

Lo and behold! It was the one finger glove that was missing when he had put them away after washing the vegetables!

Mr P and The Intricacies and Pitfalls of Indian Cooking!

Mr P was in a flurry. He had a guest G, from overseas, coming for breakfast and he wanted to make an impression. Initially he thought he would make Dosa. Dosas are nice, thin, pancakes made from ground rice and black gram made into a paste and fermented overnight.

Mr P’s cook could make somewhat well shaped and tasty Dosas but unfortunately it was her day off. Mr P could never cook well shaped, circular Dosas. He would have been happy if they turned out at least in the shape of Sri Lanka; but often Mr P's Dosas were in the shape of India, America and some other countries of the world including New Zealand and Japan! So when Mr P thought about it further he was not that sure about serving Dosa to his guest. Moreover, the last time when Mr P had tried to cook a Dosa all by himself, it had developed an attitude and a mind of its own and had refused to come off the pan.

Finally he had to scrape out bits of sticky mess from the pan which in no way looked anywhere related to a Dosa. In fact it had resembled the humble Upma. With this thought, Mr P's mind that had been flitting like a butterfly in the garden of Indian breakfast gastronomy, suddenly settled on Upma.

The Upma had become world famous when it had helped Floyd Cardoz in New York, to walk home with the award for Top Chef Master Season 3, of 2011. Mr P in all his humbleness was confident of beating any Top Chef Master in Upma preparation. After all wasn't it a South Indian preparation and who else could claim to cook it better than Mr P? He also decided to make tea the Indian way to serve with the Upma.

Before continuing with this anecdote, let me impart this knowledge for those who are not aware of the intricacies of Indian cooking. Upma is prepared by adding roasted semolina into the correct quantity of water while it is boiling. The name Upma is derived from two words. The first word, Up for Uppu, means salt or salty. The second word is Ma and you have definitely got it wrong if you think Upma means Salty Mother!!! 

The term Ma stands for Mavu which means dough. So together Upma means salty dough and it is easy to guess that salt is a major ingredient. The required amount of salt is to be added into the boiling water before the semolina. Ginger, green chillies, curry leaves and sometimes onions are added to give flavor. In Kerala, plenty of grated coconut is also added.

The traditional Indian way of preparing tea is by boiling water on the stove and adding tea leaves/powder directly into that water. Sugar is also added into that boiling water and the liquid is then strained and mixed with boiled milk. 

“Easy meal to prepare” thought Mr P and roasted a cup of semolina for the Upma first. He then put a pot of water for tea on one burner and a pot of water on the other burner for the Upma. The cooking went off incident free and the Upma appeared to be alright albeit a little bit sticky.

Guest G arrived on time and Mr P served the Upma and the tea to his guest. We can imagine how lyrical Mr P would have been praising the Upma as a wholesome food and what a winner it was at the Top Chef Master competition.

G put a spoonful of Upma in his mouth. Mr P waited eagerly for a comment and the guest cleared his throat. “Interesting” he said. G was in a cover-up mode and with a face devoid of any expression, hastily took the cup of tea in his hand.

Mr P tasted the Upma then. It was slightly sweet. But was there any salt in it? No, not a teeny weeny bit! Nil! None! Nada! The "Salty dough" was totally salt free, unsavory and unpalatable!

“Where did all the salt that I put in the water go?” Mr P wondered. He glanced at G furtively. G had taken a big sip of the tea to wash down the bad taste of the Upma from his mouth.... 

A tortured look came over G's face and he gagged.... in an involuntary retching reflex!  

Funny Travel Incidents: Oh No! Mr P loses his sight!

Mr P was driving his car when he noticed that he was slowly losing his sight. He had been alright before he started his journey from that small town to his home city. It was indeed a long drive and he had managed to finish his business just before dusk and had set out for home playing his favourite song “Why this kolaveri, kolaveri, kolaveri di” on the car audio. He had only stopped for a cup of tea at a convenience store and had continued to drive when he noticed that he was not able to see properly. Mr P rubbed his eyes a few times thinking it was just bleariness from tiredness but soon he realized that he was indeed becoming blind. He wondered whether he had had a stroke from high blood pressure that ran in the family. He remembered that he did have a terrible headache a month before. “Can it be that I suffered a stroke then and it is being manifested as this sightlessness now?” he wondered. He worried whether the drinks he had consumed lately contained any methyl alcohol which is also known to cause blindness, but he had been drinking only tea and Bournvita for the past few months since that episode with Moose drool and Long island iced tea (He bunks work with a tummy bug and drinks moose drool http://avatarofmrbean.blogspot.in/2012/01/sneaking-off-early-from-work.html).

However he could not deny that the tea he had in the evening from the convenient store really tasted as if there was some sort of poison in it. He had stopped for the tea around dusk and it was soon afterwards that the problem with his vision had started!

A worried Mr P was slowly trying to drive home when he was stopped by the Highway Patrol. “I don’t need this now” he muttered to himself as the police officer tapped on his window. Mr P wound down the glass and the policeman asked him “Why are you driving without your lights on sir?”

Moral from this anecdote? Car manufacturers should make vehicles that sense night when it follows dusk and automatically turn on the headlights when the car is being driven by people like Mr P. As for Mr P, for the first time in his life he felt like giving a hug to a police officer. Wasn’t he glad that he was not losing his vision!