I am a planner. When I say we need to look at the recipe and plan for the cooking two days in advance, I usually have a damn good reason. He is a procrastinator. When he ignores my call for planning, he usually has no reason. And when we have guests coming over, he goes the extra mile in the space time continuum. At 11 in the morning on Saturday, he messaged a list of ingredients to me. I made a stop at the regular gourmet store. To my dismay, apart from cabbage, they had none of the ingredients in my list. I pulled out my car and drove to a fancier gourmet store, the one with the basement parking, infinite wait time at the lift and expats shopping for their local ingredients in a global food store. I caught hold of the unsuspecting store helper in the sauces section. "Oyster sauce and Hoisin sauce", I rattled off. Without blinking an eye, he tossed them into my trolley. "Chinese 5 spice mix", I said. He directed me to a different section and a different helper. Helper #2 not only located the 5 spice mix (which I strongly suspect is our good old garam masala), he even offered to help with the recipe. I stopped him in his tracks. This is going outside my designated duty and I had no intention to over perform. "Char siu sauce and mongolian paste", I said. He sent me right back to helper #1. H #1 gave me the perfunctory smile, "Just what are you cooking ma’am", he asked. "Vietnamese rice rolls and chinese stuffed baos", I proudly declared. "Do you know the ingredients of the sauce, I can suggest a substitute", he said. I did a quick google search and it turned out char siu is made from hoisin, honey, soy sauces and the chinese 5 spice mix. In short, I didn’t need it at all. He sneered. I wilted. I took a unilateral decision to drop the mongolian paste altogether. It felt like summoning the collective wisdom of the great Khans just to cook a bao. It was way past lunchtime and the hour of the guests landing up was fast approaching. I hurried home and burst open the door to find him sprawled on the sofa, snoring. He doesn’t wake up until half past four. Eventually, he started off with the dough for the bao. The video showed the chef kneading the dough with chopsticks. I panicked. This was obviously not going to work. A mere 2 hours to go for the guests to arrive and we discover chopsticks are not just meant for poking around your plate of rice. Anyhow, sanity prevailed and he remembered the use of fingers and hands and got the dough all made and out of the way. In addition to the list I was given, he had placed online orders for rice vinegar, hot chilli oil, sichuan peppercorn and soy sauce. I could have just as easily got these from the store, but that would have been too easy and no fun. These were delivered in batches at our doorstep. The soy sauce was the first to be dropped off. He figured out he had ordered the Japanese soy sauce instead of the Chinese one. What is the difference you ask? It is the difference between being welcomed with open arms into the wuhan market vs our visas being rejected until further notice. But, we adapt and make do. We get on to making the minced meat for the stuffing. While the meat was being cooked, the sichuan peppercorn arrived. It was promptly ground and added to the mix. The meat was doused with multiple sauce combinations, leading to an aroma that lingered on for the entire evening. I was put in charge of the Vietnamese rice rolls. The hot chilli oil and rice vinegar were finally delivered and were whisked away to the sauce making corner. The rice rolls were the easiest item on the menu since the vegetables were already sliced into nice long strips. Must say, this is by far the healthiest snack we’ve ever made. The sauces is where the magic happened this week. There was a peanut sauce, a xxx sauce and a yyy sauce. All of them to go with the rolls and the baos. I have to go with xxx and yyy because he doesn’t remember their names. "How would Watson feel if Sherlock says he doesn’t know how he solved the murder at the end of it all", I asked him. "This is not him not knowing how he solved it, this is him not knowing the name of the guy who got murdered because he doesn’t care", he replied. I had to concede that point. As for the bao, I am happy to report we did not need to use the idli cooker for steaming. We discovered we had a steamer at home. We have unearthed many such appliances from our kitchen cabinets this year. If we take stock, I am pretty sure, we would find that 90% of the stuff in our kitchen is handed down to us from one of the moms. With the steamer, we went full legit, well as legit as we could, given that it was a plastic tupperware container and not the bamboo steamer that the panda in the recipe seemed to be using. Notwithstanding, the result was amazing. Trust me, the baos looked and tasted a gazillion times better than the wrinkled, rejected versions of uruk hai they look like in the photos.
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3/7/2023 04:29:54 am
En iyi van ilan sitesi burada. https://van.escorthun.com/
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Aishwarya KalakataThe loss of and search for individualism has never been felt more acutely. Everything changed after I had a kid. But this blog is not about me being a mom. It’s about the things I do when I want to stop being a mom. It’s about telling myself that it is possible and that it is ok. It’s about my little escapades. Mostly travel - sometimes physical, sometimes mental. A desperate bid to stop my identity from being rolled into a single word. CategoriesArchives
March 2021
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