Food
Over the past year cooking has turned out to be one great stress buster, not that I am or was in a ‘lot’ of stress. It’s just that it is so much fun when you concoct something and it magically turns edible. Looking up recipes and deciding the most suitable among the zillions available across youtube, blogs and websites has become easier. The simple thumb rule is look at the ingredients, you have all of them go ahead and read the recipe, you don’t, next please. A few frustrated unfruitful search has often lead to experimentation which have sometimes turned out well. The chicken kabab was one such case. With no clear recipe in hand, I went by intuition and it did not give up on me.
Looking back, living a definitive formative phase of my life in a college hostel in a campus that was 3 kilometers away from the nearest civilization and a mess that sometimes had grasshoppers in food did have its impact on me. Being brought up as the only child pampered with all sorts of delicacies churned out by the world’s greatest cook have almost enslaved my taste buds. However, those 4 years did bring a change, a change in expectations, a change in wants and a change in threshold altogether. So all I look for now is edibility in food. Eating out in Indian restaurants is more a decision out of time crunch or need for change rather than attraction to the quality of food itself.
Being a Hyderabadi, cravings for Nanking, Biryani and Mirchi Bhajji are at an all time high alongside the craving for a leaf meals at Saravana Bhavan in Chennai. I haven’t had better biryani or better avial elsewhere. My attempts at biryani remained attempts and never really turned out great. And I did not dare try avial.
