Monday, September 22, 2008

Cooking

On my last trip to Jaipur I picked up a few cooking supplies. My cook, Shankar, can manage with no chopping board and a knife that looks like it's meant for buttering bread but I can't. I bought the best knife I could find. It's so good that it's very likely to raise suspicion about what I'm cutting.

Shankar is hugely impressed with the knife. He has given it a special place apart from other implements and waves it around the kitchen, making thrusting motions and saying that if you plunged it into someone your hand would follow the knife right through their body. Luckily, we get on pretty well.

I also bought eggplant in Jaipur as supplies of anything other than melon in our village are unreliable. With my new toys I set about cooking eggplant with garlic, peanuts and coriander. Shankar had some radishes in the fridge and having found out the leaves were edible I cooked them in oil with ginger like choi sum.


After 2 months of very bland curry, it was great to taste the actual vegetables that I was eating. Eating greens that still had some crunch was bliss. And rice that had a little bit of stickiness. Yum.

Shankar was shocked by the absence of masala and tumeric but he pronounced the meal quite edible. I'm still trying to convince him to go slow on the garam masala and chilli powder and flavour food with onions, garlic and ginger instead. Hopefully he'll be inspired to plunge the knife into a few new things.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That eggplant sounds delicious! Did you use crushed peanuts?

And how ever do you survive without a rice cooker??

j a s o n said...

Where is the wok?