One of my proudest accomplishments in India has been learning to cook. And I don’t mean just learning to cook Indian food. I mean learning to cook, full stop. I was never one for trying complicated, multi-step recipes, especially when I lived alone. I felt like any recipe I tried went to waste. I relied on my crockpot sometimes to surprise me with a wholesome, delicious meal, but more often than not, I used boxed mac n cheese, frozen pizzas, or egg and tuna salad to survive my bachelorette life. Even when Zac and I were together in the US before we married, he would cook for me. He’s the one who conditioned me to such strong heat in curries that when I moved here, the spiciest curries didn’t bother me one bit.
When I moved here, if you’ll remember, we barely owned anything. Not even a refrigerator, so cooking was an adventure, to the say the least. We could only buy enough vegetables or fish that we could eat in one sitting, and to top that off, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. We visited Zac’s aunt and uncle soon after I had moved there, and his aunt tried to teach me how to make pulao, which is a rice dish made with some veggies and has cardamom pods, cloves, and cinnamon added to give the rice itself a bit of flavor. It looked so easy! Too easy! Fry the veggies in some oil with the whole spices and toss it all in the rice and cook! Done! I could handle it! I tried to make it a few days later, but I completely forgot how many cloves, cinnamon and cardamom should be tossed in. And who ever thought you could overly spice an Indian dish, am I right? When Zac and I tried the rice, the cloves and cinnamon cleared out our sinus cavities for days. It was awful. My lesson learned – for as many flavors as there are in Indian dishes, less is still waaay more. Time progressed and we finally bought a fridge like civilized people and were able to keep leftovers, so I got excited and started branch out with different fish and vegetable dishes. I was just getting good at it all when I got pregnant and nauseated and wanted to toss every single Indian dish out the window.
Then, I had a long break from cooking after we moved to Trivandrum. Since I was pregnant and would have to take care of a small baby, everyone naturally thought I wouldn’t be able to handle anything besides caring for a baby. At the time, I was a little more than offended. Like, my mom did it all. In fact, all the women I know did it more or less without outside help besides family. Why couldn’t I? But I digress, and now in retrospect, I realize I was such an emotional wreck that it was for the best that we kept a cook/housekeeper. After several months of keeping a cook, I got a little too bored and we fired our cook. And thus began the year of hiring and firing cooks until last December, when we finally got rid of our final cook and I permanently took over.
I hope I’m not being too modest when I say I make damn good food. I can make a chicken biryani that will knock your socks off. I can stuff eggplant with coconut and roasted cashews and tamarind like nobody’s business. I can chop, marinate, and fry slices of bitter gourd with my eyes closed. I have perfected homemade yogurt and am in the process of perfecting homemade butter. You want spiced buttermilk? I can make you a tall, cold glass. You want to try the famous Kerala red fish curry? I can make that too. The only thing I can’t do is make a round chapatti.
It’s safe to say that I can make a solid, multi- dish South Indian meal, but I could not make a Thanksgiving dinner if my life depended on it. And because both my husband and child are more carnivores than anything else, I’ve had to learn how to handle many things that I’ve never had to handle before. The chicken we buy isn’t frozen chicken breasts. You go to a guy selling chickens, pick one out and he slaughters it in front of you….if you want to watch and most people do. I know it’s just another part of life here, and it hardly bothers these tough skinned Indians, but I haate it. I stay as far away from the chicken stands as I can. It’s bad enough when we bring the meat home, and the meat is still warm. I’ve handled a chicken’s liver, gall bladder, and sphincter (so I’ve been told). Even though my biryani is excellent, I find myself eating less chicken each time I make it.
And we all know I can easily clean a fish – I wrote all about it before. And it’s like riding a bicycle, you never forget how to once you know. I’ve de-veined tiger prawns, sliced up raw squid (and tossed the tentacles), and plucked remaining feathers off of duck bones (so gross). I’m not proud of these things, but I’m listing them because I was never a person who wanted to touch icky things. Like, never ever ever. But, for some reason, being thrown into living in the middle of Kerala, it’s never bothered me as much as it could have. And I don’t know what that means. Am I different person than I was four years ago? Am I the same person who just does what she has to do to survive life here? Am I turning into a heartless monster because I’m generally okay with pulling the guts out of a fish?
Luckily I only have to ask the “heartless monster” question once or twice a week. I cook chicken and fish in bulk and then it usually last for a few days. The rest of the dishes we eat are my personal favorites – the vegetable dishes. Shopping for veggies here is something I don’t mind, which is saying a lot. We stop at roadside stands to buy the fresh produce people sell. The colors of all the vegetables are magnificent, and don’t even get me started on the fragrance of fresh curry leaves. At these stands, people sell the usual stuff like onions, tomatoes, shallots, cauliflower, green beans, potatoes, cabbage, carrots, okra, and eggplant (long green ones and small purple ones), but then there are so many others that I had never seen before moving here like snake gourd, ridge gourd, bottle gourd, and bitter gourd, green pumpkins, red spinach, elephant yams, tapioca, Chinese potatoes, large orange cucumbers that you can put in curries. There are others that I can’t even list because I don’t know what they’re called, but you better believe that we’ve brought them home, I’ve chopped them up and fried them with some coconut.
I think I was able to pick up cooking fairly easily because Indian food is all in the spices, and most of the time, all the same spices, for curries and sabjis – turmeric, coriander powder, and red chilli powder. And sometimes garam masala. Making chicken curry? More coriander and less red chilli. Fish curry? A crapload of red chilli, less coriander and several pieces of black tamarind. Making a green bean sabji? Roughly equal parts red chilli and coriander and a dash or two of garam masala. I’ve found these are the basics, and all other spices, like mustard seeds, cumin seeds, fennel, whole spices and things like asafoetida can be added as extras.
I read a great quote about Western food vs. Indian food a week or so ago – “While many Western cuisines preach the gospel of simplicity and highlighting the natural flavor of the ingredients, Indians take the opposite approach: season, season again, and what the hell, season some more.” And yes, it’s totally true. I may have made a mistake that first time with the pulao by adding too many cloves, et al. But when I add a little bit of those, plus a bay leaf, plus a bit of star anise, some whole black pepper, and a teaspoon of cumin seeds, the rice tastes EVEN BETTER. So, perhaps “less is more” isn’t the solution, but something like “more variety, less monopoly” is? I don’t know. It’s a “learn as you go” process. And it’s fun and most importantly for me it’s satisfying. I only hope that I can transfer my talent for Indian cooking over to American cooking for the time that I am home!
An American in Kerala 
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