Happy Independence Day!!

A rain drenched scene from Kerala.



Happy Independence Day to all my readers. With a thousand fish fries and chicken fries from the hometown(it seemed like a thousand!!) snugly settled in my belly and the ones left over tucked away in my consciousness, I am back.

Well, to be precise, my mind and body still thinks it's in Calicut... still groggy from the time difference, waking up with high energy just before the sun rises and then waning down to uselessness by evening. And like an conversation left unfinished, the mind continues to take me back to the midst of the family and chaos each time I close my eyes!! To be living as a nuclear family here and then to go there into our parental families..there's a lot of conversations there that can be replayed endlessly.

Our minds are attuned to the time of the day in our choice of foods. So when the time zones are reversed, the food preferences also are reversed. Why else would I feel like eating Naan and curry at 7am and cereal at 9 pm?:)Should be able to eat the yummy non-veg nadan breakfasts now..

Anyway, now that I am finally sitting in front of a computer after a month of detoxification from the Internet, don't know where to begin writing. It was a month where I just observed the masters at work and ate instead of cooking. For a welcome change, I was relegated to the role of chopper and stirrer with the mothers doing the master planning. So I had more fun in the kitchen chatting without worrying about the end result of the cooking.

So what did we do on our vacation..nothing much..just eating, then napping to work off the heavy food and then wriggling our tummies to make space for the next meal!! I thought I was food obsessed but I was not alone there.."what's the next meal" is the thought running through every mind irrespective of what was just eaten. There was so much enthusiasm to do the next round of cooking. No recipe is too long winded or daunting for them, no meal is a slap-dash effort..(no pasta salads there!!)All made in the traditional labor intensive way. Hats off to the real cooks.

At the risk of offending some,we had so little time and so much to try out.. home food, hotel food, salkarams, weddings....wish there was a way to rent a stomach for just the vacation.:(

Now that I am back in my kitchen, I am slowly shaking off my laziness and getting back to the cooking mode. But when I am cooking, there are some voices stronger than others.... coconut oil, shallots and curry leaves are subtly murmuring in my imagination, asking me not to forget them...And my better half is pointing out that I am reliving my food experiences in my attempt to recreate the nadan food. Well, what better way to learn new recipes?

No recipes as yet, but I will give you a glimpses of Calicut soon. Let me catch up on the photos and I shall post them soon. Thought I should say hi first!!