Cooking

Alert Reader Rahul Singh commented:

I dont know anything about kids but i can imagine that your pista and kishmish are real angels, although you may contradict some times when they r in a mood of crying, otherwise you have to agrree with me. anyways i like to read about them and i am reading abt them from quite some time. just a question why r u keep bloging the "how to be a cook" kind of blogs in between your regular blogs.

Thanks for the comment, Rahul Singh, and may I say: How the hell did you find my blog?? Seriously, I'm shocked. I thought it was my two friends reading this thing, and that's it.

About the cooking, I should clarify.

My original issue was that I wanted to deal with the problems and complications and confusions and learnings that arose when I turned into a housewife and then into a stay-at-home mom. This being an Indian household, many of those problems and learnings and so on have revolved at some point around food and cooking. First it was my learning how to cook stuff my husband and I would both like. (Well, first it was figuring out that I was going to be doing all the cooking except for fried peanuts, which my husband can cook.) And then it was learning how to cook all our food without spending the whole day in the kitchen. (And at one point, it was about learning how not to allow the kitchen door to swing closed behind me, so that I'm locked for hours in the kitchen while A. sleeps the entire afternoon away in the bedroom, oblivious to my cries for help.) Lately, it's been my learning how to deal with servants--having two servants, telling them how to cook stuff, coaxing them into not using all the oil in the house to make a single subji, and getting over my fear that they are going to poison me and steal my children/laptop. (That last fear deserves its own post. Maybe later.)

So I imagined Desperate Chickoo as a place where I'd tell great stories about my life as an Indian housewife, all drived by a recipe that brings the whole thing together. But you know what? It's too hard, so I gave up immediately. And now I'm just adding random recipes that connect tangentially or not at all to the rest of the blog.

For example. . .

A.'s Fried Peanuts
Take some raw peanuts in their skin.
Throw them into a kadhai/wok that has hot oil in it.
Stir the peanuts around in the oil until they are brown and done.
Take the peanuts out of the oil, add salt, and eat.

Star-struck

When we arrived in Mumbai in May 2004, I saw Shah Rukh Khan at the airport baggage claim. He had beautiful blond highlights in his hair, and later A. was convinced to style his hair the same way.

I saw Salman Khan's brother, such a forgettable and unpleasant looking actor that I have forgotten his name, on the lift at Lilavati Hospital, as I was coming from an appointment with my doctor. I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out where I knew that weird-looking guy from, then another 10 minutes looking for a PCO, so I could call A. and tell him about having spent 2 minutes on the lift with this guy.

I saw Govinda in the cafeteria at Lilavati Hospital; he looked sad and burdened, probably because his wife and child were in the ICU there. I felt sad for him as fans still approached him for autographs. Later I told my mother-in-law about the sighting. "Was he looking fat?" was her question.

I saw Abhishek Bachhan (along with a machine-gun-toting bodyguard) near the room where I got my last ultrasound, on the eve of Pista-Kishmish's delivery. (Apparently Amitabh himself was inside the x-ray room.)


That same day, I saw Anupam Kher as he walked through the ultrasound waiting area. We also saw many more stars at Lilavati that day, but many of them only A. recognized.

I saw Suniel Shetty at. . . um, at Lilavati Hospital. It was nearly midnight, and I had finally come to terms with the fact that the babies really did need to be delivered. My semi-urgent operation was first thing in the morning, and we had delayed and delayed our trip to the hospital. By the time we got there, the grand sliding doors by the fountain were closed, and we had to walk all the way around the hospital and enter through Casualty. We then had to walk through the inside of the hospital, back to the sliding doors, just inside which the admissions desk was located. As we finally made it there, with our bags and our parcels, not to mention my big pregnant self, the doors slid wide open and in walked Suniel Shetty. I was livid. In my truly embarrassing Hindi I demanded loudly of the security guard, "A 9-months-pregnant girl has to walk so far and can't come in through these doors and has to walk all the way to casualty, and this Suniel Shetty can walk right in the front doors just like that?" The security guard just looked back at me with a blank, helpless look, because of course the answer to that question is, "Yes."

So with all these sightings, why was I so happy to see this guy at a Pizza Hut in Powai?

Even I don't know. But, readers, if you can identify this star (and I use that term very loosely, in the case of this individual) you win Desperate Chickoo's very first contest!

Good luck!

Letter

Please take a look at this letter to the editor in the current issue of Outlook magazine. It's under the headline "Oh Lord, Save Us from the Lard."

Some time I'll get my thoughts and emotions organized enough to write about breastfeeding on this blog. Until that time, this letter will do.

Naps 2

Right now it's early afternoon, and both Pista and Kishmish are napping. They have been napping for nearly 2 hours, a disconcertingly long time for a shared nap.

This happens, rarely, when A. is home, and somewhere around the two-hour mark he'll get worried:

A.: Have they really been sleeping for two hours?
Me: [mean stare]
A.: OK, I know, if they don't sleep then I ask what's wrong with them, and if they do sleep then I ask what's wrong with them.
Me: Uh, yeah. It's taken weeks of no-cry-sleep-solutioning this family to get to this point. Please.
A.: OK.
pause.
A: But still, is this normal?

I shouldn't blame my husband. I've gone into the room where Kishmish is sleeping several times in the past few hours. I've been known to hold a hand over a baby's chest to make sure it's rising and falling; I've felt the deep, deep regret of waking a sleeping baby, as I checked for signs of life.

I just want to add: Kishmish screamed as I was writing this post. By the time I made it to her room (no great accomplishment, as this whole place is about 900 square feet), she was asleep again. Pista's sleeping next to my desk, and she's been whinnying and neighing in her weird sleep.

I'm sorry, but is this normal??

Okra-mole

File this one under Baby Food You Can Feed To The Whole Family.

Kishmish and Pista just started eating lots of pureed vegetables. The thing is, vegetables are expensive, and it takes time to clean and prepare them properly. Plus, it's hard to guess how much a baby is going to eat, because their preferences change daily.

So -- and I'm not particularly proud of this -- I often end up eating a few spoons of their leftover food, and I am happy to announce that a lot of baby food really is good. I present, therefore, the first in a series of recipes for things you can feed to baby and to anyone else.

Okra-mole

What a terrible name. But it tastes like guacamole, and calling it okra raita (which it is) just doesn't seem good enough.

Ingredients:
1/2 kg okra
salt
lemon juice or yogurt
red pepper
cumin powder
chopped onion/garlic
chopped tomato
chopped cilantro
amchoor (optional)

Method:
- Wash okra and cut off the ends.
- Steam for 7-9 minutes, or cook for one whistle in the pressure cooker, with minimal water.
- Puree the cooked okra. Don't puree it to a complete paste. It's nice if there's a little texture.
- Put half aside and serve to a baby.
- Take the other half and season with salt, lemon juice or yogurt, red pepper, cumin powder, chopped onion/garlic, etc. until it tastes the way you like it.
- Serve chilled with rotis or rice or thick dal.

Pluto

After we told my parents we were having twins, my father wrote us this long email of largely un-solicited and overwhelming advice. One point he made was that, while in previous generations a father only really started to bond with his child once the baby was born, ultrasound technology now allows both parents to have a common experience to help them bond with the babies. This didn't really happen with our 7-week scan, where we found out there were two (two?!?!) rice grains with beating hearts in there. But at around 12 weeks we went in for another, more advanced scan, and those two rice grains had gotten quite big, with enormous heads and flailing limbs, and they were gyrating away.

After that, my husband did sort of bond with them. . . in a way. He'd say, "Hey, who am I?" Then he'd lay down in the bed and flail around, arching his back the way they were doing when we saw them on the little TV in the doctor's office. It was funny. At least, in some weird way, a little paternal bonding had taken place.

So it was inevitable A. would give them names too. While eating nuts one day (I was protein-crazy during pregnancy), I commented that the "babies" were probably only as big as a cashew nut. Actually, as A. pointed out, they were probably a lot bigger by then. But the concept stuck, and they got the nicknames Kaju (cashew) and Kishmish (raisin).

And once they had names, I guess it was inevitable that A. would start talking to them as well. But he never got into the "let me tell you all my hopes and dreams for your future" kind of talks. Instead, he'd ask them about their days, their plans for the future, their memories of the past. He'd also provide the baby voices, responding to his own questions:

A. (normal voice): I heard you babies had your picture taken today.
A. (high voice): Yes, Papa. That doctor took our naked pictures on the ultrasound and he did not take our permission.
A.: Kaju, is that true?
A. Yes, Papa. We did not have time to get dressed properly. He took nangu-pangu photos of us.
A. Kishmish, were you smiling for your photo?
A. Papa, I was busy trying to explain a secret to Kaju my brother.

Usually these conversations would start with A. talking directly to Kaju and Kishmish, speaking through my abdominal wall the way people do with pregnant women. Often, however, they would continue long after I had left the room, with A. carrying on the conversation excitedly.

A.: Kaju-Kishmish we're going to take a long drive to Mulund today, so that we can eat a thaali.
A.: Papa, can we bring our friend Sitku?
A.: Who's that?
A.: He's our friend from Baby Colony. He doesn't have enough to eat, and he wants to have a thaali too.
A.: That's extremely generous Kaju-Kishmish. Very good.

And on and on. All the way to Mulund, on our walks at the seaface, over dinner at Dosa Diner, A. would discuss all kinds of things with Kaju-Kishmish--their former lives as twin drug-enforcement sniffer dogs in Punjab, their experiences with the doctors I saw way too often, and their lives in Baby Colony. I don't know where A. got the idea for Baby Colony, but it became a real thing.

And just to be clear: this was no longer about bonding with the babies-to-be. At some point it became an alternate, bizarre reality for my husband, a way to avoid remembering that these babies were in fact extremely small and helpless beings. Finally, with the birth of the babies, Baby Colony went away.

Yesterday, during our morning household "rush" -- a rush that is totally contrived because, let's face it, the only one with anywhere to be is my husband, and even he isn't so great at getting there on time -- A. was distraught about the Pluto situation, which was covered extensively in the morning paper. "Isn't it kind of sad, you know, about Pluto?" he asked me, as though Pluto was a kid who had been caught cheating, or a guy with 2 kids who had just been fired.

"Yeah, it is kind of sad," I agreed, and suggested that he read this article.

"Mimi," my husband said after a pause, "Do you think Baby Colony is on Pluto?"

Dissertation

I failed to post yesterday not because there's nothing to write about, but because I'm paralyzed by indecision. What do I write first? How do I write it well? How do I avoid looking like a dummy in front of the, oh, four people who actually know about this blog?

Now you--all four of you--know that it's not the twins keeping me from finishing my dissertation. It's my own mental problems.