One of my new duties as house frau was to go over a menu with Violet, our new cook and house cleaner, and teach her about Gluten free cooking. As a part of that conversation she asked if we liked spicy food. Bravely I offered up that we would like "medium spice." Today she made a sambar and a chutney for us, and a big batch of idli (yeah, sorry, that's as good a description as you're going to get right now; for the first few weeks we are just trying out some recipes; when we figure out what we love I will start to learn how things are made). The sambar, she said, is not very spicy while the chutney adds a little kick.
First, it is absolutely amazing! At the risk of channeling Eat, Pray, Love (or maybe if I am lucky Animal, Vegetable, Miracle), learning to eat food that has history and tradition might become one of the best things about this experience. The flavors and textures and temperatures have had centuries to develop, to find their own place, to learn how to become a beautiful intensity together. And all these elements take just as long to unfold and to reveal themselves in being eaten. Eating has become an occasion of taking into ourselves - consuming - a history, but a history that takes its own sweet time to arrive, that arrives with its own time, lingering long after you think you are done with it, long after you think you have become something else, moved on to something else. Which is to say, fifteen minutes after lunch and my tongue is still tingly. So yeah, the best lunch I have had in a really long time.
But second, I think I might need to have another talk with Violet to recalibrate our spice levels a bit.
First, it is absolutely amazing! At the risk of channeling Eat, Pray, Love (or maybe if I am lucky Animal, Vegetable, Miracle), learning to eat food that has history and tradition might become one of the best things about this experience. The flavors and textures and temperatures have had centuries to develop, to find their own place, to learn how to become a beautiful intensity together. And all these elements take just as long to unfold and to reveal themselves in being eaten. Eating has become an occasion of taking into ourselves - consuming - a history, but a history that takes its own sweet time to arrive, that arrives with its own time, lingering long after you think you are done with it, long after you think you have become something else, moved on to something else. Which is to say, fifteen minutes after lunch and my tongue is still tingly. So yeah, the best lunch I have had in a really long time.
But second, I think I might need to have another talk with Violet to recalibrate our spice levels a bit.
This is making me super depressed about the bottles of trader joes brand chutney and masala we have in the pantry.
ReplyDelete