once bitten twice shy

last week i got invited to a cocktail party to celebrate a engagement. Cocktails and curiosity are too heady a combination for me to resist; also not the one to let go of any party invitation easily, so i made my way to the Grand Emperor.

i am pretty good with mojitos, margeritas and the not so infrequent glass of scotch although i prefer my indigenous planters punch, call it seaman tendencies. that day i had to drive back, so i sat sipping a beer and watching people, something that i havent done in a long time.

hors de vours, canapes, tapas’ were being passed around, and i was keener than ever.
the food was interesting, but more interesting to me was that everyone around seemed to be a chef too. tortiglioni, casereccia, promodoro and some other more unpronouncable names filled the air, everyone knew how many minutes cooking required for al dente and blue cheese. no one seemed surprised about the coconut sprinked on the bruschetta though. maybe they all knew about the malayalee settlement on the italian coast, what intrigues me is the influence our kinsmen would have had over italian mammas in picking ingredients

dont mistake me, i love food and new tastes and i am very experimentative in eating, as long as someone does the cooking. From my eating experience, most of the italian has been fresh food, made with local ingredients.The essence of their food, if you ask me is its simplicity. and somehow in indianising it, we seem to missing that very essential theme.

what also i have never been able to do very well is forget the our old tastes, there have been many that have bitten the dust in this world. i am pretty sure our own indigenous and very south indian murukkus, varieties of sundal, bajjis and pakodas can give any finger food a run for their money, not to mention the slightly exotic parrupu vadai and kothu parotas. Also sure, there are enough and more from items that qualify from each nook and crany of our country.
Maybe, they are very low on the popularity charts on snob value.

the culinary invasion is changing India, the normally taste wise fastidious indians are to outdo each other in eating bad alien food. but it just might be a start and we might get discerning soon, but can we keep the flag for our own delicacies flying high??

While i wandered around looking for something to eat, there were a few more-middle aged people than me trying to figure out what the fuss was all about. you could tell they would have given an arm and a leg for bajji, sojji and some filter coffee. but thats a different discussion, and a different occasion. afterall, it was an engagement party remember?

chew on this

there was a slow Food Festival in the vicinity, very appetising smells floated from the food stalls. Melbourne certainly does things in style.

the seminar was about supporting local food & produce, communities coming together to make it happen and enjoying the experience. a move away from the mass produced, frozen fare normally found on the supermarket shelves. wasnt an alien concept, have realised how big the food movement is in Australia. Eyes opened, courtesy an earlier pick from one of my book hunts - Bruce Elder’s “Remember when“

There is this whole different approach to food in the developed world, something that has not gotten around in India.  Only, Our food issues are very different and rightly so, i cant imagine our issues of availability of  healthy clean food for all being superseded by anything else.  but, shouldnt we be wary of issues that might haunt us for the next 30 yrs..

Walk down the aisle with your shopping cart in your local Foodworld. Surely you would have seen the bright orange California oranges on their shelves.. ask the store guy about its freshness  and you get queer looks, “it comes from the US right? how can it not be fresh?” Drive past the mall and you would mistake the queue to be the one for the movies, it is actually people queueing up to get into Mac. 

are we turning a blind eye to what the West has been saying all these days and embracing their discards with open arms.  lets hope we have better sense than that..

panic stations as yet?? am i hyper ventilating? neither, but surely deserves some serious thought.. while you are at that, check out ”Chew on this“. some real food for thought.. let me know what you think