My crazy lover affair with Indian Cuisine
I consider myself lucky for I had the opportunity to travel and try so many cuisines. I absolutely love food. Just like every second person, I am a self-proclaimed foodie. What is there to not like in food? I have never come across anything that soothes your senses like the first bite of your favorite food does. It’s magical with a tinge of fat and calories and I am all for it.
One tends to love food from foreign lands, for the fascination and freshness it encloses in each bite. Our taste buds get weary of eating the same food and we’re often unable to appreciate the flavors and textures that are our own. With my long association with binge-eating, I have come to work in reverse mode. You may or may not agree:
INDIAN FOOD IS THE MOST DIVERSE AND WHOLESOME.
Over the course of my life, I legitimately fell in love with Indian Cuisine. The reasons are many, but for me just the diverse flavors of the food we eat is so remarkable. If you ever open Wikipedia and search Indian food, there is a list of 500 dishes just blatantly categorized into North Indian, South Indian, and East Indian and so on. That’s a glimpse of the variety it has to offer to the world. Other than the main dishes, we have infinite array of street food, snacks ranging from sweet to sour, hot, spicy and sometimes all of these at the same time.
With everyone drooling over a bowl of Rajma with a plate of absolutely fresh rice, the aroma that fills the house is priceless. The beautifully made Ghujiyas for Holi that not only look exotic but are the most delicious and soft sweet there is, not forgetting my favorite Ras Malai ( I should write a separate blog about how much I love Ras Malai). Ras Malai is to sweets what mango is to fruits, THE KING! The first bite of Ras Malai is my legal high and I can eat boxes after boxes of it. AVOID IF YOU ARE DIABETIC.
When you are in India, you can clearly demarcate the region a dish belongs to by the taste. South Indian food mostly has key ingredients such as Kadi Patta also known as Curry Leaves. It gives the food the aroma and works well with mustard seeds, turmeric, ghee, cumin, coriander, fenugreek, dals, ginger, garlic, tomatoes, and yogurt. It provides a certain zest to yogurt-based salad dressings and vegetable dishes, such as fried cabbage, lentils, beans, okra, or eggplant. Curry leaf also provides a distinct spicy flavor to cold dishes and buttermilk. Yes and that is a SMALL list.
Chicken tikka is the boneless chicken dish synonymous with North India. It is chicken marinated in yogurt and spices that is then baked on skewers in a tandoor (clay oven). Clay ovens and chicken dishes date back 5,000 years to when Mughal emperor conquered the then Punjab and his picky palette brought into being what we all love and savor “Chicken Tikka” starting a chain of dishes that became exclusive to tandoor. Praise that king! Every spice and ingredient has such a distinct taste and is so essential to the recipe. The Indian dishes are so precisely prepared that if you add a particular spice in the wrong order, it could change the way the dish tastes.
The flavors of Indian food are complex, the textures so varied, that a combination of a creamy sauce with doughy bread and tender meat with vegetables is enough to send you to a ride through the flavor nation. The divine mix of aroma and sophistication is perfectly in sync. It’s said, “We are what we eat,” and rightly. Indians are just as vibrant, playful and fun as the flavors in our dishes but that’s not it. Our palettes also extend to a range of beverages that we prepare some for occasions and some to deal with the heat/winter depending on where one resides in India. One example of unmatched drink is Kashmiri Kahwa, it’s like a warm fairytale that you don’t want to end. In freezing winters, the sips of this delicacy can literally be life-saving. My personal favorite is Jaljeera, a refreshing marriage of herbs and spices that gives it the zing and opens up all your senses in the heat of states like Delhi, UP, Rajasthan.
Indian food has for centuries perplexed people and for some, it’s just goat brains and lamb guts. They couldn’t be far from the reality. Indian cuisine has an entire spectrum of tastes and variety that will leave you wanting so much more and that has compelled the likes of Matt Preston, Gordon Ramsay to come to India and learn the art of Indian food-making.
There is so much to eat that being Indians we cannot and haven’t had the means to try it all. But, we’ll do it, sooner or later.
