Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan's Blog, page 37

November 30, 2020

Today in Photo

Going to attempt to transform this rag tag bunch of garden produce into an elite Thai inspired curry. Will she succeed? Or will the big ready-made Thai Curry Paste industry win in the end? This winter, stay tuned for... How Many Ways Can I Put Pumpkin In Things? #eatwhatyougrow #terracegarden #pumpkinthaicurry

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Published on November 30, 2020 05:24

November 29, 2020

The Internet Personified: Shrink to fit

Dearest full goblets of good red wine,

I have a birthday coming up in a few weeks (the 13th, nicely in the middle of the month, and also M is the 13th letter of the alphabet so I’m fond of the number in general, inasmuch as anyone can be fond of a number.) Some things you can’t avoid, or put off till the next convenient date, and a birthday is one of them, sadly. Slowly, the world spins round and before you know it, you are presented with the irrevocable fact of ageing and dying and all that, but also, oh my god, what has happened to me, I thought, when I realised I was dreading this year’s birthday. I love birthdays! I love my own birthday especially, of course, but also the Birthdays of People I Love always feel like an extra-special day, even if we’re not doing anything, I wake up in the morning and I think, “Oh, it’s so-and-so’s birthday today” and even if it’s a perfectly normal Thursday, there is a frisson of sparkle in the air.

But this year, this strange, never-ending-but-also-speeding-by year, this year when we learn that humans are not as infallible as we think we are, and that we’re all at the mercy of biology and accident at the end of the day, this is not a good year to have a birthday party, the way I always have birthday parties: large and loud and filled with people, some of whom I only see that one day of the year. I remember once, a friend saying, “Oh good, our annual kick off of the social season” and I remember feeling smug, for having had the good taste to be born, not only in December, but early enough in December that parties still feel like something you anticipate, not a chore. Because Delhi back then (last year) was a whirlwind. House parties followed “just five people for an intimate dinner” or “let’s go catch up at that bar” and then there’s wedding season which kicks off around then too, three four five days of galas. I thought about a birthday party, I wondered if I could get everyone I was seeing semi-regularly—the nice thing about having different friend groups is being able to have variety each month—into a room. I didn’t put much thought into this, it was an abstract idea, also because every time I did think about it, I’d have this sinking feeling in my stomach, I knew what was going to happen. Inevitably, when I faced my guest list and wrote down the bare minimum of people I wanted to see, it was more than the ten people I thought I’d have in one room. It wasn’t going to be a Super Spreader party, but it was still more people than anyone (including me) would be comfortable hanging out in one room with, even if we took it outside to the terrace.

Just going to add this gif here myself.

Since the pandemic started, I’ve had to—we’ve all had to—recalibrate our expectations for a celebration. I’ve had a few: there was our anniversary, for instance, when we decided to buy some bread and ham (and a milk bottle filled with wine) and go sit in Sunder Nursery. It was in October, the worst heat was over, it was a lovely cool evening, and we sat on a picnic blanket on the grass and watched the other walkers and the trees and listened to bird song, and it was just a perfect day. We wouldn’t have done it if not for COVID, but we enjoyed ourselves so much, we decided to make it a regular thing. For Diwali, we watched a movie, opened a bottle of wine and made pork belly in the Instant Pot. For K’s birthday in June, I told him he could have a film festival, an all-weekend long extravaganza of movies he wanted to watch, which we hooked up to the projector and I cooked, again, and we had an excellent and memorable two days. All these things were supposed to be alternative celebrations, the subbing-in of something to make up for the fact that we couldn’t go out to a restaurant, for example, or have friends over, and they wound up feeling meaningful in their own right. We didn’t need anything else. If anything, this year has made me feel like I’m paused, there were several times this year when I thought to myself, “Wait, why did this thing matter to me so much?”

Somewhere along the way, I also realised that this was, in fact, my life. I can’t spend this entire year pretending like it never happened, fingers stuffed in my ears, going lalalala I can’t hear you! This, right now? This is our life. It’s not the same life, or the usual life, but we are living it. We can’t forever be in a state of suspended animation waiting for things to “go back to normal” again. While the indulgence (TV watching, eating unhealthy meals, not working) was part of our collective grieving process, we have to know that we exist, right now. We are living through this year even if we pretend like it’s not happening, and everything must be on hold till there’s a vaccine that all of us have taken so we can go back out into the world again. Am I making sense?

me writing that last paragraph

So I took myself off pause. Some things have changed in our lives: we have no maid, for example, so I’ve had to change my standards for a dirty flat or else do it myself, which is a pain. Every now and then, I think of going to a bar or a restaurant with longing, but I haven’t been, not since early this year, I don’t think. When we see other people—which we do maybe once every week or ten days—we see one other person or a couple, and it is usually at one of their homes. The world has also shrunk from my many friends and acquaintances, to about five or six trusted associates, who I rotate. The only year I’ve spent in the last decade, not traveling, and we might not travel for some time yet. Can I justify traveling for pleasure right now? I don’t know. Do I want to travel when the things I love most about being in a new place are gone? And even if we did, no maid means no cat-sitter, so until we figure that out, we can’t go anywhere. Land-locked. Watching the seasons change on our own balcony.

Anyway, back to my birthday. There I was, feeling sad about things that I could not change, when my friend Niyati suggested that I expand my horizons a little. “Have two or three small birthday parties instead of one big one,” she said, “With a week or so distance between each.” It was the obvious answer and I was struck by her genius. So, two or three gatherings for me this year (thus far, December is a long month): one with three people on Friday night, the other with two people on my actual birthday. (This is not including my usual Thursday Lunch With My Mother which is another thing that has sprung out of this pandemic, we go over, she cooks a massive meal and we watch a movie.) I won’t have a new dress, but I have so many clothes, I could pull something out that I’ve only worn one time and it’ll feel new. I’ve already decided to order burgers from my favourite place for Friday night, that and some nice wine and I’ll feel luxurious and indulged. Of course I wish I could see everyone I love, even everyone I like, but this is better than seeing no one. It’s a compromised birthday, a coronavirus birthday. I can’t pretend it doesn’t exist, so I will adapt to my environment.

I’ve gone from dreading it to being excited about it again though. I think that’s something.

Two TV shows that both K and I enjoyed were Dash and Lily (on Netflix, Christmas teen romance series) and the much-better Love Life (which is not on Indian streaming services). Love Life particularly was so good, it follows a woman called Darby through her chaotic twenties and her calmer thirties using the men she dates as a narrative device, but also goes back and forth into her past with a VO, explains why she’s fucked up re: relationships and so on. For something so simple, they turned it into a very profound story about why we choose the people we choose. Anna Kendricks particularly was a great actor, you could see her personality changing with age, something hard for most actors to pull off. I loved it, it was completely my jam, but I was also delighted that K loved it, since most of the television we watch together are high concept prestige dramas. (I came across Love Life through this excellent Substack.)

Stuff I liked on the internet this week:

I have a new column with Voice of Fashion that I’m thrilled about because I get to talk about AUTHORS and CLOTHES. Here’s my first installment: on Perumal Murugan’s pant-shirts.

Reddit Adam Driver deep dive into a very particular story.

I’m feeling a Gilmore Girls rewatch coming on again.

Home for the holidays.

Only just discovered TV Tropes, the website, and was taken with these broad friendship tropes.

Loved this interview with a book critic which says so many things I feel.

The last children of Down’s Syndrome.

The Internet Personified: Adventures of the tongue

Hello to you, my yellow tulip in the sunshine,

This is the day after I finally finished the third rewrite of the book I have been working on for what seems like ten zillion years and also yesterday (seven months total, I counted) and sent it off to my agent to be sold to the highest bidder and began thinking about what to do next and one of those things was writing to you.

Last week I finally finished reading MFK Fisher’s memoir Gastronomical Me. When I say finally here, I’m not being hyperbolic. I began this book in 2018. I read a lot of it and then abandoned it on my bedside table because I got distracted, and then it moved from my bedside table to my towering unread-books-I’d-like-to-read-in-the-future pile during a declutter. (This pile came in extremely handy during the lockdown and the subsequent rest of this year, but then I started buying more new books as my own form of nesting so it’s about the same size as it was before I started.) Gastronomical Me is a great book by the way, and definitely worth reading, don’t be put off by my two year journey into its completion. And it got me thinking about food and memories, how specifically some food can trigger some memories.

My friend Nayantara told me once about what a delight it was to feed her then-infant daughter all these fruits she’d never tried before. The baby’s face trying a fig! A strawberry! A mango! This look of surprise and joy at discovering new textures and tastes! Imagine being a small human and discovering something you love for the first time! I don’t even remember the last time that happened to me, after you’re grown up, you have a dictionary of tastes stored up in your head, hardly anything is new. The first time I ate currywurst on the streets of Berlin, for instance, I already knew what to expect: three familiar tastes in one. Chopped up sausage with sweet ketchup and curry powder on top. The combination might be a surprise but hardly anything is unexpected unless you go in expecting salt and taste sweet. (There’s that Friends episode where Rachel mixes together the recipe for trifle and also for shepherd’s pie? And Ross is like, “It tastes like feet!” but would it taste like feet or just jam and cream interacting with the mince, which okay, is gross, but also familiar flavours?)

Here are my food memories then, Gastronomical Me style. Or Proust, if that’s what you prefer:

Sweet potato chaat in Delhi: Which is this great snack you only get on the side of the road in Delhi during the winter months, the same way you only get bhutta during the rainy season. There’s this roasted potato smell, because the guy has a tall bamboo stand filled with raw sweet potatoes and in the middle, there’s a basket filled with coals and he’s put a couple of potatoes in it and when you ask for one, he digs it out from the middle, closest to the coals and the skin is all blackened and he peels it so the tender yellow-brown flesh comes off in big chunks under his wicked tiny knife into a disposable leaf bowl. I’m explaining it like I would explain it to a foreigner (sorry, Indian readers) but watching the guy prepare it is half the joy. Over it, he squeezes a big lemon and adds a mix—all the guys have a different-but-same version of the masala mix—from a small plastic box with holes along the top and then he puts another bowl on top of it and shakes them together like a cocktail and then he pulls out a stick and puts it on to a potato and hands you the whole thing to walk away with. It’s soft and giving and warm and wholesome and is the perfect snack for a cold day, especially when you’ve been shopping at an open-air market and it’s that awkward hour between lunch and dinner, and the sweet and the sour and the tangy all mix up and when you get to the end, you chase around the leftover masala with your remaining potato and eat it all up. By my college, back when I was in college, the Regular Sweet Potato Guy also had these green tart fruits called amrakh (starfruit to everyone else) and I got into those for a while instead of sweet potato. These are ridiculously sour, green things which, when sliced into thin little discs are in the shape of a star (pretty!) and over which he put the same masala mix, so instead of the sweet of the potato you had this super tart gets-in-your-teeth-and-makes-them-squeak citrus snack which I was really into then.

Frankies: As a Delhi person, I was always kind of snobby about kebab rolls anywhere that wasn’t North India, but I lived in Bombay for some time, and once, visiting a friend in South Bombay, she suggested we get frankies for dinner, and I shrugged, wanting to be easy and amiable about what I ate, even though I knew in my heart that it would be another disappointment. But these rolls weren’t even pretending to be like the seekh kebab roll I knew and loved! They had chopped up chicken pieces in them, cooked on a pan with onions and vinegar, making a dense bed for the chicken and making them so slippery that you had to hold on to the paper wrapping as you ate because half your stuffing would wind up in them. I loved them so much that when I moved back to Delhi and discovered the same brand existed here, I bought myself frankies over and over again, much like I bought rolls in Bombay and once again, was disappointed because it wasn’t that evening, by the beach, eating a new thing and being surprised by how it tasted. (Bombay also introduced me to the butter chicken roll—a combination I would never have approved of, because I am conservative about my eating—except when I ate it at two am, which is the right time to eat a butter chicken roll, you’ve been drinking, you had dinner at 8 pm, you need something to soak up the booze, it turned out to be exactly the food I had been wanting all along, without knowing it.)

Jonna Rotte for breakfast: I have only eaten this a few times in my life, and that was when I was a very small child, staying with my cousins and grandparents in Hyderabad. Back then, there was a dairy next door so we had fresh milk and sometimes the fresh milk came with fresh cream, and when we had fresh cream, they’d suddenly have a breakfast consisting of rice flour rotis, white and crisp paired with this same fresh cream, sprinkled liberally with as much fresh ground chilli powder as we could stand. The chilli powder was made at home too, so was coarse and flavourful, the cream was thick, the rotis flew off the stove and on to our plates as fast as we could eat them. In retrospect, I really don’t like cream so I don’t know how I was persuaded to eat this meal, but it combined everything I loved: crisp textures melding into soft, heat and mild. We were introduced to chillis very early on as children, I asked my mum the other day if there was ever any separate food prepared for kids with less spice, as we do these days and she said no, all we did was build up our tolerance, so you’d start off eating adult food with a lot of rice and daal and very little meat (the spice carrier) and you made your way up to it as you went along. I’m thankful for this now, because I can eat anything, no matter how spicy, in fact, the spicier the better, but also it means that food that isn’t spicy tastes bland to me. Indian food, that is, I’m fine when I’m traveling but I do miss heat in my food to make my mouth wake up a little bit. I don’t know how Indians got on before the Portuguese came and gave us all the gift of the chilli pepper.

Steak: I have not eaten that much steak in my life, beef being hard to get in India, but two times stand out. Once was in Bombay (Bombay! So much name checking of you today!) where there was this small Italian restaurant in Bandra called Mia Cucina. Mia Cucina had two stand-out dishes on their menu: a sausage and bell pepper risotto which I have never been able to find anywhere else, not exactly the same anyway, and the steak, which, being Bombay, might’ve actually been beef not buff. It was the first time I learned to eat and love steak, just a hunk of meat, cooked sparingly, with a little gravy on the side. I remember the crisp top of that meat and the soft inside, and because I always ordered it medium rare, it was juicy in the middle, and funnily, even if it was slightly bloody, it never put me off, I liked it even more for all that, mopping up whatever was left on my plate with potato. The other great steak of my life was in Paris (obviously, darling) and we were so broke that holiday because we had miscalculated the bicycle rental we did the day before. (The company keeps 300 euro deposit and DOES NOT REFUND IT for six weeks, meaning our holiday was spent waaay under budget since that 300 euro was something we were counting on to, you know, live.) Anyway, we had taken to checking Tripadvisor near us for nice, highly rated places that were also reasonably priced and there was this one tiiiiiny bistro a few lanes away, which we almost got lost getting to and when we got there they were almost closed but agreed to stay open for us and we ordered one steak to share and ate it, lovingly, not talking at all, because it was so good and we were so hungry and all the waiters and the bartender and everyone watched us splitting this steak with amusement but really, that was the best steak I’ve ever had.

Vietnamese barbecue: I know when you think of Vietnam, you do not think of barbecue, but really, it was entirely by chance (and hunger) that we wound up at this semi-famous place in Nha Trang, which was only meant to be a pit stop between Saigon and Hoi An, but we were so tired we stayed two nights instead. I still dream about that meal though: you’re given a small personal grill filled with coals for your table, you point at the meat you want, which comes to you raw and marinated, and then you cook it yourself. I don’t know what they put in that marinade, but it was perfect: salt and tangy and yet subtle enough for the meat to shine through. I didn’t find it in any other city after we left Nha Trang, so it was obviously a specialty.

Cutlet paos: House-sitting for friends in Goa, we go for a scooter drive and come across a van at a crossing out of which people are buying food. This van, I’ve learned subsequently, is extremely famous and well-known, and has been there for ages, but it was the first time we had ever even heard of them. I follow quite a simple motto when I travel: when you see people waiting in line outside a restaurant or a food truck, join them. It hasn’t steered me wrong once. Noronhas was great, and I’ve been thinking about their beef cutlet paos a lot lately, because I haven’t been to Goa in so long. Beaten slices of meat fried in a sooji batter sandwiched in a fresh poi served with french fries and this green chilli sauce that is so good that whenever I asked K to go get takeaway from them, I’d tell him to remember the sauce like fifty times. Apparently they make it themselves which is why it’s so nice. Oh Noronhas. Writing about you makes me miss you. As soon as I am vaccinated (and can organise cat care), I am on the first plane out of here to Goa.

This is what I’ve got. Tell yours also.

November 16, 2020

Today in Photo

Literally impossible to get any work done because she keeps lying on my keyboard and being cute. (And yes, because I've gotten a zillion questions about this before: it's a mechanical keyboard and it's by a company called Redgear, I've had it for about two years now and I love it because of the clickity clackety noises it makes when I'm typing, I don't know how much it cost because K gave it to me as a birthday present but he got it online.) #olgadapolga #wfh #colleagueswithfur

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Published on November 16, 2020 22:24

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