Once upon a time ago, I had a well nourished tummy...

A long pending tag about an old favourite…mom’s cooking!

Although mom had and still has a full time job, she somehow multi-tasks and remains the world’s best cook…with her birthday coming up next week, this tag seems a fitting salut to the magic of her love and to the 1000s of meals that we were force fed then and miss now.


Mom’s long beans poriyal
Theres some wonderful magic that mom does with plain long beans and tomatoes. A spicy and simple dish, she used to store this in a big bowl when she went out of town for her weekend classes. Weekend meals for me and my bro used to be beans dosa, beans sandwich, rice & beans…and we loved it! (for the first few months atleast)!

Idiyappam+ Maasi or cheeni sambal
First of all the idiyappam…they need to be fine strings –for this you need gadgets with tiny holes and the energy to keep the idiyappam press going on and on and on… When we weren’t messing it up trying to do that, mom did this exceedingly well.
Combo #1 - Maasi sambal
A coconut+lime+powdered dry fish thingy, I could pack in more than 15 idiyappams accompanied with this amazing dish. The only difficult part is scraping the coconut and getting good quality dried fish (without sand)…but its worth it!
Combo #2 - Cheeni sambal
Burnt sugar+lots of cut onions+dry fish powder+lots of simmering= 1 yummy yum yum dish- 1 months stock of which that Dad carried in a steel container when he went off to ship. This can be made very thick and mixed with milk to be diluted if and when more peoples turn up for grub…or if one gets hungrier!
The best part about both these dishes is Mum could somehow always make the usually nasty smell of dried fish disappear in 10 minutes. Some women are amazing!

Sambar of any sort
Sambhars make for wonderful accompaniment for idlis, rice and dosas. And mum knows atleast 3 different sambhars…on top of which, she can make them change taste between morning to evening to night – for idlis, it’s a more watery and spicy sambhar. For rice, she adds whole small onions (me likes crunching them!) and varies combinations with different vegetables like radishes, drumsticks and ladiesfingers. At night for dosas, she adds potatoes which somehow absorb the sambhar’s flavour in less than half an hour.

Tomato/ Onion/ Garlic chutneys
Amazing how mom can whip up any of the above chutneys in all of 5 minutes and still make them so amazingly tasty. I miss them all!

Pepper liver gravy
An old favourite of Dad’s, this is usually made on X’mas or New Year night so that we have some nice n spicy gravy and idlis when we return hungry after midnight mass. But its best the next day morning, seasoned and slightly fermented.

Fish/ crab gravy
Fish gravy is as indispensable during weekends because you can have it with anything –idlis/chapattis/parathas/rice/idlis/dosas- and dad being a fish freak, there was always lots of this at home. Crab gravy was special because it requires a 3 hour, 2 handed lunch to do justice to the juicy meat-there is that magical moment when you manage to cleave your way past the shells and a small white cluster plops into your palm!

Meatball gravy
Theres supposedly a patented family recipe behind this masala – this involves collecting a whole lot of random things, measuring them, and forcing kids to take them to the mill for grinding. But such kids are later mollified by being given “pre-serving samples” of the gravy and patties well before lunch.


Dad’s fish and prawn fry
The kitchen was usually mom’s kingdom…except when Dad was in a fish fry/prawn fry mood. This is not as simple as it seems. Aforementioned little boys are called in from various sleeping/TV-watching/play areas and are forced to help one strong captain with 14 inch biceps. For fish, the process is relatively simple – the fish cleaning water has to be poured from plant to plant so that sometime in the distant future “we can pluck shiny red tomatoes for salad”.
Cleaning prawns is a bit more dirty and complicated, one has to break the shell-then with a small knife, you need to clean it of one dirty strip…and then rinse. Dirty forced labour, but no one ever rescued us…after lunch, we were quite happy to forget such trauma.

After this the captain took over…masala is lovingly created and pushed into slits in the fish’s body…the flame is kept ONLY at simmer (fiddlers with the flame are threatened with various punishments ranging from being hung upside down to permanent exile without monetary support) and some “extra special” pieces are fried in coconut oil. The best fish cleaning volunteer was usually awarded with fried fish eggs in their tiny pouches…because by eating them, “you can get the strength of a hundred fishes”. There usually was a noticeable puffing up of a little chest for about 5 minutes after eating fish eggs.

And now I am hungry!