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The Ad

Please Teach Me Indian Vegetarian Cooking! (Northern Va)

I will bring ingredients and pay you $10/hr for your trouble.

I would like to know about your culture as well.

IN A SIMPLE desire to learn Indian cooking hands-on, I placed this ad on Craigslist not knowing how much it would change my life. I wanted to cook real Indian food. I didn’t want the sterile environment of a restaurant or the studied air of a professional teacher. I craved the person-to-person teaching of yesteryear amidst the homey-ness of a real kitchen. I wanted to learn the art of curries and chutneys through the senses, not just through the measuring and timing of a cold cookbook.

You see, I’m not really American, at least in terms of my palate. I seem to be hard-wired with South Asian taste buds, a person that craves the burn of chilies and mustard seed, the warm heat of ginger, cumin, and cinnamon, and the bitterness of asafetida and black salt. I don’t know why. I have been like this as long as I can remember.

I go to barbecues, picnics, and dinner parties inwardly yawning. I crave the waft of a fresh masala, the stain of turmeric far beyond the yellow hue it offers French’s mustard.

So what did I—spice craver, born in the land of bland food—do before this, during the first part of my life in the casserole-laden, fonduefixing ’60s? What any reasonable person does: I bought cookbooks and studied them. I ground stale supermarket cumin seeds and cinnamon sticks, sizzled spice after spice, a lone voyager for flavor. I wrestled with samosa dough, and ended up eating a lot of watery, soulless curries and stone-hard samosas. Sigh. Went to restaurants and visited the steam buffets consisting of endless anonymous brown mixtures. I was somewhat satisfied (it was better than a burger) and yet, I felt there was something missing. My palate seemed to insist it was so.

So many things in my life seem to follow this pattern—the search for love and my vocation, as well. A person exists in a semi-pleased daze of unrecognition, colorless, for the blind do not know colors. Then, there comes the fateful day when you are awakened and color bursts in.

Fast forward to now: I am a single woman in my forties who uses Craigslist for most everything—buying an entertainment center or sofa, meeting up with fellow salsa dancers, advertising writing classes. One desperate Friday evening I bought cheap eyelash extensions from a young Korean beauty student, and a rather bad haircut as well. Once, I traded a homemade apple pie with an electrician for installing dimmers in my house. His wife, who was eight months pregnant, was too tired to bake. They came as a couple to my house, where I greeted them with the wafting smells of sweet apples and cinnamon. The wife, young and Filipino, sat and chatted with me, while her husband, an American in a large Redskins jersey, pulled out his tools. But one day, while eating another tepid version of Aloo Gobi, I finally had a brainstorm and placed the ad.

TO MY COMPLETE shock, my email account was instantly flooded with responses from every age and from every region. Wading through them—they ranged from perfect English to unintelligible, from polite to sharp—I managed to set up a few appointments. They would supply the ingredients and I would just show up. I was so excited, and still am, every time I stand on the front stoop, listening to the soft rustling of a stranger unlocking the door. It is somehow both a great mystery and a profound gift, to be able to enter someone’s house for food. One surprising thing I found, entering these houses, leaving my shoes at the door, roasting spices with strangers, laughing, tasting, and sharing their lives, was that much more than cooking occurred. A certain antique rite, a female coming-of-age, so to speak, was being reenacted. I was learning to cook in the most ancient of ways—woman to woman, with all the senses and a great deal of warmth. I was welcomed like a family member, and taught in the same patient and loving ways their own mothers had guided them through the years.

This book is about the masala of my own life—my journey resembled the separate spices of who I am transforming into an intricate blend. I will take the reader through the doorways of these women, where we lovingly cooked together and bonded in our cultures. The recipes are not your typical Indian curry take-out. These are treasured family recipes from vegetarian homes in India—from Shahi Paneer, a dish of homemade cheese cubes in a rich tomato and cashew curry, to coconut-stuffed okra, to luscious potato-curry dumplings.

These recipes will be a welcome addition to any Indian aficionado’s repertoire, as well as a temptation for the average cook seeking to expand his or her roster of healthy vegetarian foods. They are the well-known comfort foods of any vegetarian home in India. Ask an Indian about Pau Bhaji, found on Mumbai’s Chowpatty beach, or the rich, dark chickpea stew with fried bhaure bread called Chole Bhature, famous in the Punjab, and you’ll see a visceral look of desperate home-sickness and drool. These foods are the staples of longing and memory. They are dishes you will make again and again.

Almost imperceptibly, the culture of this rich and varied country slithered into my life like a sinuous cobra, combining the modern ways of the United States with the Technicolor of India, while I ate some damn good food. I wanted to understand the Indian culture and people; and what seemed so enchanting was that I was constantly being surprised and challenged by how complex—and contradictory—it can be. While at one time thousands of years old, in another time it seems jauntily modern, yet where this occurs bewilders me. I have learned to keep an open mind. Now, after this year of cooking real Indian food, I realize that the only real way to learn to cook is through the senses and heart. It turns out that it is the only real way to live and to love, as well.

LET ME TELL you about myself first. I am a completely untraditional, divorced single mother with two kids; a writer of novels, living hand-to-mouth, essentially, and yet striving to live a life of meaning and substance. I am also a great cook, or so “they” say. Actually, before I became a writer, I eked out a living as a caterer and still occasionally will do so, between books. After a long day of writing, nothing is more therapeutic for me than cooking. On a weekend, I am one of those urban trekkers who loves scouting around and digging through tiny foreign grocers for odd herbs, incense, unusual vegetables. In some sense, it satisfies my wanderlust in a cheap way—a quick afternoon journey to Thailand or Guatemala through the stalls of a shop. And on another level, this habit—albeit temporarily—seems to quell my voracious appetite for sensual adventure, so glaringly absent in these beige plastic clusters of suburbia where I live.

I am a new growing species in these states—a Disenchanted, Educated, Single, Boomer, Yearning. Indians call themselves Desis (from a Sanskrit word meaning “from the country”), so I call women like me DESBYs—Wanna-Be Desis. We crave the pageantry, tradition, history, connection, and spirituality of India, yet with our independent, willful, overeducated backgrounds, we would no doubt explode if seriously involved in such a duty-oriented society. We prefer to do yoga, meditate, wear a sari, eat dal, and play the role. Indians laugh at our childlike behavior, but it is actually no laughing matter. Just like the popular Indian-used term ABCD (American Born Confused Desi), we Desbys are stuck in between worlds, seeking balance and continuity, while our attention spans are pretty short and we are very accustomed to our freedom.

I find now after this yearlong cooking frenzy, this spice journey, that I am a changed person because I was allowed into a sacred circle, into the private center of a family’s home—the kitchen. I was treated like a guest, a family member, and a friend eating their food. Being part of their life, chitchatting with a steaming mug of chai, made me reexamine things in my life beyond food, concepts that had been unhinged for sometime, floating amorphously in a stew of indecision and curiosity: love, spirituality, femininity.

This simple yearlong cooking lesson—innocently started as a little two-line ad on Craigslist because I was frustrated with my lame attempts at Palak Paneer—taught me a lot more than how to make a killer spinach and cheese curry. It smashed open my heart, in so many ways. The kindness of the women, the beauty of the culture, the explosion of flavors, and, curiously, the very physical act of cooking led me to examine what is beyond all this: the spiritual realm.

ON THIS PATH I met Sri Ganesh. You may be familiar with him: he is the ever-popular elephant-headed deity, accompanied by a tiny mouse. He has a large jovial belly, and holds a conch shell. I’m not sure why he in particular ignited my passion for this culture and beyond, but perhaps it was the fact that his statue was present the first time I tasted the incendiary potions of India I came to love. Or maybe, the wisdom and calm that he emanates soothed my world-weary soul, and he seemed to be a constant reminder—at the doorway of most houses, or in their altars—that I was on a spiritual path as well as physical. Thus, not only was this a quest for ginger, the taste of India, but also a search for the essence of this wonderful avatar loved by so many. I explore in these pages, for example, the many ways Ganesh, familiar to some, exotic to others, inhabits a vital part of the houses I visit and how I attempt to pay tribute to him on my own. Offerings to Ganesh are expected at any creative venture, and as I write this book, I find my relationship with this deity beginning. I am not a Hindu or particularly a Christian, preferring to call myself a seeker, yet Ganesh touched my heart.

This book of spices is more than a journey into the female psyche through the sensuality of our palates. It is a journey of my own personal trials, seeking solace, love, and connection in this world I live in. Unexpectedly along the way, tasting exotic curries in stranger’s homes, I found more than just cooking on Craigslist: I found love, in the most unexpected way: a man, from India, too young for comfort, too handsome for words, difficult and tempestuous, kind and giving.

More than anything, this is a journey into myself, but it is also about all modern American women—all Desbys—living in this country, who find themselves divorced, alone, seeking. We are women who struggle to identify where the feminine lies. Somehow cooking resonates with that search. Even though men dominate the professional world of cooking, the home and hearth have been traditionally ruled by the woman. American women have come so far in our independence and freedom, and yet I feel, given the popularity of Martha Stewart, The Food Network, and cooking classes nationwide, we need to reclaim this territory again, in our own terms. We need to understand this nurturing side of ourselves without the classic shackles that it once represented.

THIS STORY HAS only begun.

As I finish this book, my next journey is India herself.

But in the meantime, this book is an examination of my yearlong saga of love and spices, found on Craigslist. And what is more modern than that? Years back we had to take an airplane or boat to connect with another culture. These days, we need only have computer access.

And the responses flood my email and I am always packing up to enter another house, perched in the suburbs; to open a strange door, eyes smarting from the rush of the hot steam of roasted chilies; and to find a new friend.

Another response just came from my ad, from a woman named Padma. I am quite eager to get to know her. I send her this email:

Dear Padma—

Yes, My name is Nani and I am interested. Where are you from and what do you like to cook?

Thanks—

Nani

I don’t hear back from her for a couple of days. And then, this:

Hi Nani,

My husband doesn’t want me to pursue this. There goes one of the

lessons in Indian culture.

Padma

And thus ends the story of Padma, so brief, and yet so illuminating.

I read it with curiosity. I have no husband to tell me what to do. Nor do I have a husband to care about what I do. Wistfulness ensues, yet with confusion. The Desby dilemma.

Read on, and let’s eat some good food.