Panfusine

If you're a South Indian 'Tambram' (Tamil Brahmin) who went through the traditional 'whole nine yards' , wedding ceremony to literally 'tie the knot', you would probably remember the 'oonjal' ceremony. Its a beautiful social part of the whole 3 day event (yes, the ceremonies span 3 days!). where the bride & groom are seated on a double swing (decorated to the hilt with fragrant garlands)  & are revered as Lord Vishnu & Lakshmi. They get their feet washed (albeit, just ceremonially, with a fingertip's worth of milk) and are fed a mix of milk  with bananas ( 'Paalum Pazham' ) by the spoonful, by all the older married female relatives. and this is where the interesting innovative hacks begin to fall into place.

After a perfect meal with a choice of your favorite dishes, have you ever felt so satisfied that you could (almost) give away your wealth & precious possessions? I think this could fall under that oft shared slide of wisdom from the social networking sites.. "Never speak when you are angry, never promise when you're happy, never decide when you're sad." and food definitely falls plumb into the second category. There is something so lulling about certain dishes that are categorized under the umbrella term 'Comfort food' and its usually the stuff that one grew up with.

Its been a bountiful summer, in that every week I manage to get a couple of food sessions done with veggies picked from my own back yard. This week it was half a dozen decent sized tomatoes. The thing with such personal experiences with produce, is that you want to ensure that they are used in dishes that are specially created. In a sense thanking them for the priceless opportunity of sampling food at its sun kissed best. These tomatoes found their way into a dish that in all fairness, is  in search of a better name. You see,  I happen to  belong to the foodie camp that cringes at hearing terms like 'Chai  Tea' and 'Paneer cheese'. Pleonasms , as they are called, refers to redundant words paired together, such as 'join together' or 'exact same'. So here I was with a recipe idea that seemed quite deliciously possible and ingredients to match,  - organic tomatoes from the backyard, Organic Tofu from Whole Foods Market in ...

You know you're passionate about something like blogging when missing out on one post for  a week sends you into a spiral of guilt & blanked out grey matter. The confusion, nagging feeling of  the high that invariably kicks in once you click on the orange 'Publish' button.

This weeks post was supposed to deal with a dessert made with Toddy palm Jaggery, but Murphy's Law  kind of kicked in, the one that goes on the lines of .. If you're desperately looking for something, You'll rarely find it, never mind if it stares at you in the face at all other times' . Yep.. spent an annoyingly frustrating afternoon turning the kitchen & the pantry upside down, only to discover that sometime during the past couple of months, the big bag had somehow been stuffed in the freezer, right next to the Flax oil.. so that will be a post of the next week.

It was around this time 16 years ago that I had my most memorable swig of Amarula ever. I'd just obtained my F-1 Student visa from the American consulate at Cape Town. It was such a contrast to the marathon queue  sessions at the Mumbai consulate. I breezed in, handed my papers and was asked to come and collect the passport 3 days later. That night, It was a well deserved break from my crazy thesis work that I was trying to race against time to complete. A shot of ice cold Amarula Liqueuer and being toasted by friends at the Medical Residence to the tune of  Stings 'I'm a legal alien' playing on the radio (How perfectly apt was that, considering that I was headed to NYU a month later)

Hysteresis - is the dependence of a system not only on its current environment but also on its past environment.  Turns out that the term does apply outside of physics. I like to define it as the intense craving that exists as long as two weeks after sampling a dish. You crave it so much that you simply must have more. Deep inside the  gyri that run though the cerebral cortex, are taste notes perfectly embedded and making connections to other memory cells to recreate the flavors & textures.