Cooks dream
Cooks dream in food. When Kristen Murray sites in her back yard under the canopy of plums slowly ripening, she dreams of the little pastries made in the Southwest of France, called rissoles. The dough is made, not with butter, nor with lard, but with the fat of the southwest, duck fat. The crust is slighty salty and as flaky as a dough you’d know that Grandma made with lard. The plum tucked inside is ripe and lovely. It is the stuff of dreams.
When Kaaren Bedi reflects on her experiences in India, she realizes that all of the cooking of the Subcontinent is done on 2-burner cook tops. She will share what she knows about preparing foods with no fancy equipment, & mostly done by hand. Along the way, you will get an understanding of seasonings, how they happen, and how they bring the dish together in the most beautiful way.
You get the point that Indian food as we know it from restaurants, is not the Indian food people eat daily on the Subcontinent. We learned long ago, for example, that the authenticity of French food, what people eat daily in that place, is not the food we are fed in restaurants outside of the frontiers of France. So it is with the Indian food she prepares. Most food is not restaurant food, but the food of mothers. And if in India there are cooks, there are still mothers behind, driving the menu.
Kaaren made a soup. It was flavorful, original, resourceful and delicious. It was made with a few little ingredients, a bit of cumin, a bit of lentil perhaps to give earthiness, and had cilantro blended in to give range, freshness. The body of the soup was water. Great food costs. I got the sense that Indian food is like French food in that it has a highly developed esthetic of beautiful combinations of elements that yield refinement and elegance. I think it is also like Italian food in that it is a home cooking, not a professional cooking, so things are straight forward.
She served her little broth with a type of pancake, fried bread, that might have had bits of vegetables mixed in to give texture and interest. It was the perfect counterpoint to the brothy soup. The chutney served with the flatbread was ketchup. Not the ketchup of Heinz, but you can understand where that one originated; but a chutney of fresher flavors and textures, a little coarser, deep red, and so satisfying.
I had no idea what I was eating. “This is chard,” I asked because I thought it was meat, or mushrooms. The rice I knew; something that you love the way other people might love a potato, an endlessly satisfying and comforting taste. The shrimp she prepared were perfectly cooked, and tossed in …. was that ketchup again? It was so good I was having trouble keeping up my end of the conversation.
“You will sleep better,” the Indians told Kaaren, “if you have something sweet before you go to bed.” So, she served another flat bread, sweetened with cane syrup, and finished with cardamom butter. Sweet sleep followed. It can be yours in the special four part series Kaaren is doing at the Chef Studio.
Check out the website http://thechefstudiocom, or email: troufood@me.com.
You will also find a series by Marietta Sisca on Italian home cooking.
Or, Kristen D. Murray offering a series on pastry.
Your life won’t be the same.
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