Sizzling hot pan dribbles the water on its equatorial
territory,making it leap and dance, ‘AH!! Its ready’, pronounces my sister in
law.
I am standing in obedient attendance to the right,all tools
in place. The thinnest flip,tick(available in plastic, steel and
wooden forms),Batter: tick(after spending five minutes
staring at the instructions and then carefully mixing the ingredients according
to the exactness mentioned on the overleaf,I waved around scissors and poured
into my multitude little containers,feeling slightly professional. I mean how
difficult could it be?)
What are we making?Question is what are we creating by
omission ? But that we shall come to in a bit.because the objective is to create
a Dosa.or for future article reference cripsy’,courtesy
my familial demand for this particular snap in the recipe.
It’s a papery thin savoury crepe,prepared from rice
batter,which apparently has my whole family up in orgasmic pleasure if the bite
is accompanied by a resounding crack of the crips
dosa.AHHH!!! perfection.
There is a general law when you mention this dish,the
gatherings mouth waters, but the prospect
of actually making it elicits,gasps of helplessness.My mom a cook of say thirty five years
experience but courtesy lacking the genetic pool that fills the southern finger
tips with ingrained flair of spreading the batter just right… she has just
about started to get things under control, but still drawing a big Aiyyo illey,not passing the strict muster of my dad’s crispy demands.thirty five years of lumpy and thick,and perfection looming now.
Back to the present and finding my feet impatiently standing
next to the stove,and post the dancing droplet pronounciation my hopes for the crips were running high,I mean here was
my sis in law proclaiming knowledge to the ancient art,who was I to disbelieve!
Its for me to dream up images of crips
and her to conjure,well my task was also to make the batter,a task that should
not be taken lightly.
So like I said me and my assortments were ready and set.
Though pronounced runny by the grand chef!! I still thought
it held the hopes for a great cripsy.
Fingers crossed we added the delicately balanced batter on
the hot pan that was to deliver it from its watery existence to a plate full of
palate teasing crips..
But as most well planned events tend to walk down murphy’s
lane,we stood there fighting a battle of prevention, against sticking to hot
tawa by the runny batter,a battle that was valiantly fought by first the
plastic flip(which turned up its plasticky fake lips at contact with the fiery
beast,not a great idea),then the wooden flip,and then to hell with non stick
,full fledged scraping with steel.
But like they say events that have to unfold ,unfold and
even the universe aligns its self to the hotness of the agenda producing a pan
whose every pore has been homed in on by the dosa batter,caked in short.This I
diligently washed, in the hope of producing a crips,in trial effort number two,did
I tell you I am a very optimistic , persistent person.
This optimism saw me floating around the sink with my steel
swipe,cleaning the slate paving the way to a clean pan,just around three
times,before me and my sister in law rechristened our goal to what they call
‘Set Dosa” we decided crips had too
much phoo pha attatched to it.
So set dosa it
was.A fat little fluffy dosa,though here too ours resembled a beer bellied star
fish,goa returned and totally sunburnt.Thanks to the pan which refused to
comply by only conducting the perfect heat setting through.
After three washes and a name change,we still didn’t get the
feathery delights promised on the flip side of that heavenly sounding batter
packing.
Set,or unsettled or anything remotely like a
dosa’s cousin.
Growling stomachs ensured ,we ate it with relish ,but the air bore the promises of an
oncoming postmortem.
And as we concluded our medley of various cuisines for dinner,on
the next note we started querulously naming the culprits, from the batter, to
the company that produced the mortar, to the heat emanating unevenly from the
stove, to the incorrect curvature of the pan, to the lack of skilled tools
available to the professional housewives some thousand kilometers south of us,to
the next time we shall swipe onions on the pan declarations.
In all our muttered
scientific analysis,we completely skipped the human error that bought two
people who believed till recently that kitchen was paganistic territory ,gracefully
relinquished by us to people who wielded their tools with grace and produced cripsies with an easy flair that could
now make me green.
And just because we decided that the tools of edible warfare
need not be alien anymore,doesn’t mean that with that pronouncement, and with
the you tube parroted knowledge,and some gleaned from hour long conversations
with mom, would come the skill of that little extra salt sprinkle ,that feel of
the perfect heat off a pan, by waving your hand over it.The whiff of perfection
by bending down to smell in a pot if the crackle smelt just right and The art to
presciently predict the state of the contents inside a cooker after hearing x
number of whistles from the symphony of the pressure cooker.SIGH!!!!!
All this gyaan evasively dances around me,while I play with
grown up toys ,pretending to understand the hiss of the crackle,the whiff of
the readiness of the oil ,and my favorite ,tossing the pot around,like Nigella the
chef,grunting in satisfaction at the compliance shown by the residents of the
pots,they however miffed with my carelessness decide to jump,practically out.
So after my professionally qualified circus antics I am also
the official mopper around.
My transition from mopper to chef de resistance is an evolution ,by which I mean that by the
time your eyes pop out of your sockets to evolutionarily make space for the
presence of constant staring at computers,till then coming into my kitchen to
dine will be an Amazonian experience, a chop off the old roach variety,throw in
a little fire and treat yourself to he
man and she jane meal.
But the air in my lair has love,lots of love,lots of smiles
and tonnes of mischief!!!and hope.
So maybe for now you can place that on your tongue and let the
spirit sip in and maybe the breeze brings in ghosts of Deccan
supreme chefs to speed up the Darwinian experience a notch. BON APPETIT!!!
