It was a long week of snacking. When I say snack, it might give the impression of a small dainty bowl full of small dainty things lying next to my laptop and me nibbling on them over the course of the day. In reality, I grab the entire family sized packet of salty goodness and go at it until my nails are scraping the assorted crumbs off the bottom. All this accomplished in under 3 minutes, sometimes without pausing for breath. Anyway, the weekend arrived, not a moment too soon. And brought with it the Chinese New Year and Valentine’s day. Any blogger worth her salt has to keep up with these things. I am already worried about the upcoming Women’s day. I could have written about the CNY if the other half of this resolution agreed to make momos. But no, he wanted to make a romantic meal. So, here we are. I was all for ordering cake and chocolate and calling it a day. By now you can guess, that did not cut it with the Valentine. So, long story short, we found ourselves researching dishes of the heart-and-soul variety. Once we ruled out the desserts, heart shaped pizzas and eggs cooked inside heart shaped holes made in bread, what we were left with was the Moroccan rice pilaf with olive and orange chicken. This was the obvious choice because there were two non obvious things going into the chicken. And let’s face it, pilaf sounds valentine-y, even when pulao doesn’t. The morning of the V day, I wanted to work out. He wanted to go out for breakfast. So, we walked to the breakfast place, 6km away. After gobbling down a ton of eggs, coffee mascarpone and other tasty, gobble-able things, we realised our car hadn’t followed us and quietly walked back the same distance. It was a bit much and naturally, we made up with many bottles of chilled beer. As the afternoon wore on and we could no longer keep off the hunger, we finally started making lunch. First on the assembly line was the making of the pilaf. All through the process, I felt the need to contribute relentlessly. “Too many raisins. Too few almonds. We should really have got those apricots...” This has always been the case. It all started when we first started cooking on our couchsurfing adventures, ten years ago. We were staying with a couple and their toddler in the lovely town of Graz, in Germany. We had carried along a ready mix for dosas and offered to make them masala dosa one of the mornings. It’s interesting how you naturally assume certain roles in a relationship. He started chopping up things and I started my commentary. “Too many potatoes, wrong ratio of masala to the number of dosas, too much spice...” Watching us bicker, they asked us who cooked at home. We had to admit it was neither of us - we had a cook at home, and this was one of the first times we were attempting to cook. Still, they were brave enough to try it and even claimed to have liked it. I’d like to think, we have come a long way since then. Soon, it was 3.30 in the afternoon and we were only done with the pilaf. He had not even started on the chicken and we were unbelievably hungry. I helped myself to some pilaf with mango pickle, thereby bringing the pilaf down to the level of pulao. And he slurped down the leftover chicken broth, giving it much the same treatment as filter coffee. Having nourished ourselves thusly, we got down to the flour covered chicken and doused it in orange juice and cooked it. With the olives thrown into the mix, the chicken was now perfect - bitter, sweet and sour - much like love.
Bam! Valentine-y end to the post.
1 Comment
Arathi
20/2/2021 08:07:34 am
This was indeed a good read:)
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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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