Indian food | thekalechronicles

I had out of town friends visiting last Sunday and we ended up going to the new Indian restaurant in town for dinner. After a very long wait, we enjoyed chicken vindaloo, Indian eggplant (bartha), channa masala, rice and plain naan. Since my friends were departing on the ferry, I inherited the dinner leftovers — everything but the chicken, which the three of us polished off. I ate Indian food for my next meal and made the leftover rice into rice cakes for breakfasts (My mother made rice cakes like these: leftover rice mixed with beaten egg, nutmeg, vanilla, a little sugar and a few grains of salt, fried like pancakes in butter. I eat them topped with fresh fruit in the late spring and summer).

When I was a senior at university I took a room in a shared apartment with grad students from India and Thailand. We got along well and each of them taught me to make some of the foods from their home countries. I learned to make cucumber raita and a simple potato-coconut curry, a simple version of som tom, made with carrots instead of green papaya and a dish made with minced meat and basil.

As a junior abroad I had eaten a few curries in Indian restaurants in London and my mother made lamb curry over rice from leftover roast lamb, relying on commercial curry powder and lamb gravy, but the South Indian vegetarian cuisine of my roommate was new to me.

I remember that she taught me to remove the seeds from cucumbers and to cut them into small slices with a knife. I asked why we couldn’t grate the cucumber, but she said that the texture would be wrong.

Indeed. All of these years later when summer brings fresh green pickling cucumbers and cilantro to the market at the same time, I buy cukes by the half dozen, stock up on dried coconut and plain yogurt, take home a bunch of cilantro and make raita. Raita is an excellent side dish or salad to eat in warm weather.

I don’t measure anything for raita. Today I used four cucumbers, seeds carefully scraped away with a knife, three large dollops of plain yogurt, a handful of chopped fresh cilantro roots, stalks and leaves and a dash of sea salt. After mixing all of that in a bowl I heated about a teaspoon of peanut oil and added maybe half a teaspoon of mustard seeds, leaving them on the burner until the seeds began to pop. If chilies were in the market, I might have added up to a half of a minced serrano chile; as it is, I added a shake or two of red pepper flakes.

I ate this simple raita with an equally simple potato curry: peeled and boiled potatoes mashed with cumin seeds, coconut, salt and more cilantro, sometimes in a bowl, sometimes rolled up in a heated whole wheat tortilla.

After eating Indian food for a week at home, I am not tired of it, so today I made another bowl of raita, a pot of basmati rice and a simple version of aloo chole. I pored over various Indian and vegetarian cookbooks and looked online a bit before settling on the following method:

Mince one onion and add to one tablespoon of hot oil in a skillet (I use peanut oil for Indian food unless I am cooking with coconut oil). Stir onion until it begins to brown and add three cloves of minced garlic and a small knob of fresh ginger, grated. Add two teaspoons of ground coriander, and one teaspoon each of cumin seeds and tumeric, plus salt to taste. Add a bit of water if the mixture begins sticking to the pan.

When all of that smells toasty, but not burnt, add a can of tomato sauce (you can use chopped fresh tomatoes in tomato season), two cans of garbanzo beans — aka chick peas — and a dollop of tamarind paste. Cover and cook while you peel and chop three medium-sized potatoes. Add the potatoes and cook covered until the potatoes are done. Although the chick peas are already cooked, cooking them allows them to absorb some of the sauce and allows the sauce to develop flavor. While the aloo chole simmers, chop another handful of fresh cilantro to sprinkle on top after the cooking is done. One online cook suggested I add a squeeze of lemon and/or some garam masala. I did add the squeeze of lemon, but I was too lazy to make up garam masala today.

As of this writing, I have had two bowls of rice, aloo chole and raita, one for lunch and one for dinner. I am not tired of eating them yet. When I run out of whole wheat tortillas, I might make an Indian flat bread: rotis are pretty easy, made with whole wheat flour.

I have more complex Indian dishes in my repertory: long-simmered carrot halwa, bengan bartha, black-eyed peas cooked with mushrooms. I have the cookbook written by the original chef of Ajanta restaurant in Berkeley, which specializes in regional Indian foods. But on the cusp of summer I want simple recipes that do not take much time to prepare, especially because I am currently caring for a semi-invalid formerly feral cat with a seizure disorder. Onyx does not let me sleep many hours a night and I don’t like to leave her alone for more than two hours at a stretch. But even when Onyx was well I used the warmer weather to combat the weeds in my yards, leaving less time for meal preparation.

Original painting of many-leaved tree with roots.

The Lovely Blog Award. 6″ x 6″ watercolor pencil on paper. Sharyn Dimmick.

Last week Shira of In Pursuit of More tagged me in a relay, charging me with writing about hope and John Clinock of artratcafe generously bestowed on me the one lovely blog award. I am honored by the kind intentions of my fellow bloggers and will do my best to live up to their trust.

A major tenet of the two forms of Buddhism I have practiced is the practice of letting go, letting go of outcomes, letting go of expectations, letting go of desires. This does not immediately sound like fun, does it? That’s because we want what we want, even if wanting it is causing our suffering. I am personally undertaking a course of consciously letting go these days because I find myself falling in love. First I fell in love with a city, a country, a way of life, when I went to France. Then I fell in love with my guitar again, starting to play daily after a hiatus of a year. I fell in love with my room, starting to see ways that it could be improved. Every summer I fall in love with open water swimming when the days get warm enough to swim at the cove down in the Berkeley Marina. And, as you might have expected, I am somewhere on the continuum of falling in love with another person with all of that continuum’s abundant symptoms: sleeplessness, excitement, fear of the unknown. There is pleasure in falling in love and there is pain. There is fantasy and reality, hope and dread. I find that the easiest approach, although it is hard to put into practice, is to treat the entire experience as a practice, to work with whatever it brings to me in any given moment: if I am sleepless, get up and read or write. If I am inspired to write a love song, write a love song. If I am scared, feel the fear.

One aspect of treating life as a continuous practice is that there is no room for hope. Hope causes us to leap into the future, into some better world that is different from what we are experiencing right here, right now. When I am right here, I can respond to my fear or excitement as it occurs; when I am jumping into hope, I lose my opportunity in the present moment. My teacher is fond of saying “The love you want is no other place.” And, I, of course, am hoping that she is wrong, that there will be glorious love in a field of flowers some other day. But I know what she means: our only chance is this moment, what we find there now, where we find ourselves now. We can’t count on having another moment, better or worse.

What we can count on is that things will change: if I am sleepless for three weeks running, during week four I will fall into a deep sleep when the body needs it. The foods of the changing seasons that I highlight on The Kale Chronicles reveal this in a beautiful way: now there are Gravenstein apples and gypsy peppers, summer squash and tomatoes, cucumbers, green figs, the first grapes, blackberries, melons. Soon eggplants will come in and peaches will begin to fade away until next summer brings the new crop. I stir a couple of spoonfuls of apple crisp into my morning oatmeal and plan another round of zucchini-feta pancakes for lunch, topped with Sun Gold cherry tomatoes. Next month, perhaps next week, I will be eating something different. Food becomes more satisfying when you are not reaching for raspberries in December and tomatoes in February, when you eat what there is now, choosing your favorites, perhaps, but working with what you’ve got.

Love cannot resist reaching into the future, imagining scenarios, conjuring kisses out of the air. So let it. Just know that the fantasies, the daydreaming are a current and temporary state: mine them for their images and ideas, laugh at them and at yourself, an ingenue in a fifty-four year-old body. Watch as your mind tosses up Loggins and Messina songs (Where did they come from?). Sing them if you want — no one needs to know.

What do I hope for? I hope for the courage to face my life, the courage to be in whatever state I find myself in until that state changes. I hope for the courage to respond authentically to whatever I need to respond to. Today I thank Shira (who is in La Belle France) for encouraging me to meditate on hope and John who says lovely things about The Kale Chronicles. With my one-year blogging anniversary coming up fast (next Sunday) I tell you that I had some hopes for the blog: I hoped a few people would like my recipes. I hoped my writing would acquire a wider platform. I hoped a few people would buy my paintings and maybe even my music CDs. I hoped that I would find some writing students who want to do writing practice. Some of that has happened. But writing The Kale Chronicles has become much bigger than that because I have discovered an entire community of like-minded souls, people who care passionately about what they eat and where it comes from, but, beyond that, care about how they live their lives, treating each other with kindness and humor. I started a blog and found myself in a whole new community. I am made welcome here as I am made welcome in my communities of writers and singers and artists. And I will be calling on you soon with a special anniversary challenge, The Lauren Project — I know you will step up to the plate. There will be prizes and glory and the opportunity to help a lovely young woman find more joy in the kitchen.

Original watercolor painting shows ingredients for cucumber raita.

Cucumber Raita. 6″ x 6″ watercolor pencil on paper. Sharyn Dimmick.

In the meantime — back to the present — a simple raita recipe for cucumber season, courtesy of Padma, my Indian roommate in college, who taught me how to make it. The secret to good raita is no shortcuts — you must cut the cucumber into spears and de-seed it with a knife and then you must slice each spear into small bits with the knife — if you grate it, the cucumber turns watery. Raita is all about texture. So set aside an hour to make raita — you won’t be sorry.

Cucumber Raita

Peel 2 cucumbers (or use an Armenian cucumber, which requires no peeling). Slice each cucumber lengthwise into quarters, sixths or eighths, depending on its circumference. Remove all of the seeds. Slice the now seedless cucumber into small pieces and put in a steel or Pyrex bowl. Grate 1/2 of a fresh coconut into cucumbers. Add one bunch chopped cilantro.

Heat a small amount of peanut oil in a small skillet. When oil shimmers, add 1 tsp of mustard seeds and 1 dry red chile. Fry for a few seconds until mustard seeds pop and add chile, mustard seeds and oil to cucumber mixture to season it. Add plain yogurt and salt to taste, making it as creamy or as light as you like.

Food notes: You can, of course, make this with dessicated coconut — it’s just not as good as when you use fresh. Make sure your coconut is unsweetened — sugar in raita is gross. You can eat the raita as a salad, as a side dish with an Indian meal, or simply mixed with rice.

One Lovely Blog Award: I’m supposed to give you seven random facts about me. Here goes:

1) I’ve written two new songs in the last week, “Ingenue” and “The Werewolf.”

2) I like to eat pie for breakfast, although I usually eat oatmeal or polenta cooked with milk and sweetened with seasonal fruit.

3) My favorite color is kelly green. I also like lavender and blue, crimson, claret, raspberry, all balanced with plenty of black.

4) I am a Pisces, Sagittarius rising, Gemini moon, Venus in Aquarius.

5) Although I am a folk musician and will always be one, I have always (always?) had a fantasy of singing with a rock band.

6) If I could only eat one type of food for the rest of my life, it would be Indian food.

7) This bull needs a big meadow: don’t put me in a pigeonhole — I won’t fit.

Now I need to pass the award to fifteen of you. In no particular order

1) Celi at The Kitchen’s Garden — Celi writes about sustainable farming, a subject dear to my heart. Beyond that she is fun and knows how to tell a story.

2) Shira at In Pursuit of More has endeared herself to me by her generosity and her commitment to simplicity.

3) The Caerus blog, a brand new blog, showcases the artful thoughts of Suzanne Edminster, Karina Nishi Marcus and a growing cadre of guest artists. Look for it on Thursday mornings and go back to read the back archives.

4) The Literary Jukebox. I found this one this morning. Maria Popova posts a literary quote and a song everyday. Great for literate music junkies.

5) Debra at Breathe Lighter. Debra shares all aspects of her life in San Gabriel — recipes, photographs, pet stories, field trips, music, all accompanied by her enthusiasm for life.

6) John at artratcafe provides an art education by featuring the work of many diverse artists. He writes poems, too. Foodies will like his brilliant posts on food that combine illustrations, literary quotes and recipes with a certain je ne sais quoi.

7) John at From the Bartolini Kitchens writes an ongoing love letter to his Italian family and the foods of his culture. Want to make cheese or fresh pasta? See John.

8) Eva Taylor of Kitchen Inspirations knows how to put it all together: the dress, the shoes, the place settings. Lately she has been experimenting with healthier, lighter versions of favorite foods, keeping to a low-carb diet.

9) Betsy of Bits and Breadcrumbs cooks food I want to eat — I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

10) My writing pal Bob Chrisman has branched out and now writes a memoir-type blog called swqm60. Check it out.

11) Jane Robinson at Art Epicurean posts abstract paintings and encouragement for creative types.

12) My old friend Maura writes theonceandfutureemptynest about her life with husband, children, grandchildren, parents, dogs, running shoes, kayaks and literary ambition. A graceful writer, her thoughts will resonate with the sandwich generation.

13) I’ve already sent you to look at Deby Dixon’s photos on Deby Dixon Photography. Have another look, please.

14) Can’t leave out my pal, Movita Beaucoup! This chick is funny. And an incredible baker when she leaves off the Crisco frosting. And someday she is going to buy a painting (but you could beat her to it and buy up all of the best ones first. Just saying…)

15) Your nominee. Please use the comments to tell us all about the blogs you love the most, the ones you open first everyday, among other things. We have free speech here.

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