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Frozen batteries and a Salty Conundrum


Frozen batteries and a Salty Conundrum

A mid-life crisis is not the ideal time to deal with a pandemic. No….. That’s so not fair. News for you buddies…. That’s life hitting you below the belt!!! Yes, you have taken one right in the batteries, caught your breath, or whatever is left of it, and taxied you way here. Now you are dealing with a midlife thingy plus a pandemic apparently. This is way far from anything you call normal. So now what? That’s the big question.

The lockdown didn’t mean shit to me. You see, I had lots of practice. I was sitting at home doing nothing anyway for the past year or so toying with the idea of starting my own restaurant. This has been my passion. But the distance from passion to possibility and from there to reality is as I found out, a freaking big hike. So here I was, hiking down that road of apprehensions with dwindling finances at one end, domestic responsibilities at the other, and trying to balance the two. But this unique phenomenon called the lockdown did something, it froze the batteries. The practice I had did help but it's running out fast. That’s when I decided to start cooking at home, I mean the fun stuff, cakes, cookies blah blah…you know, stuff that at least makes the kids think that I am a better than their mother at this. Yeah…that’s the mid-life shit thinking for you. The road to recovery from that point is long and hard. It’s complicated. Getting kicked in the frozen batteries will now look better. Don’t go there.

But I have been doing some cooking. Things did turn out well. The kids loved whatever I made. Funny that..!!. But the really great thing is that many people have started to cook during this time. This is great news. Bullshit, I was jealous. I have been cooking this and that since I was in 5th standard, I used to help my mom in the kitchen, usually with the hard labour stuff like grinding dosa batter, coconut and scraping coconut (Malayali da). Then I graduated to omelettes, chicken, fish and beef. The cakes and cookies came later.

These newbies have it easy. They have YouTube and set recipes. They have gadgets. Life is easy for them and moreover, the information is just out there. It’s roaming around on the internet. It’s free! These people even have to look in YouTube to figure out the difference between cubed and sliced. Where is the hard work I ask? See, life is not fair, Batteries all over again. Ouch!

But when it comes to salt, it is difficult. The newbies are stuck. Most recipes say “salt to taste”. WTF! YouTube videos also just show the presenter putting in “as much salt as needed”. Again, WTF! How do you figure out how much salt? Well, it’s not easy. First, there are many kinds of salt, a discussion on which is a subject for another blog. But for your regular Indian cooking, I suggest sea salt. Sea salt is just salty taste. Many other kinds of salt impart flavour too. If you don’t know the difference, this is where you stop reading. So the rule of thumb, half a teaspoon of salt will do for 1 kg of boneless meat for Indian style curries or gravies. After the cooking is done you taste the gravy or curry and then add more if needed. The thing with salt is that you cannot take it out after cooking. So go with this rule of thumb and you won’t go wrong. When doing eggs, a quarter teaspoon of salt per egg is more than enough maybe a little less. For anything you going to drain excess water out, don’t add salt at all before cooking if possible. Salt will pull out the moisture from things cooked in it. So after you soak your pulses overnight, you kind of lose the advantage if it’s cooked in salt. You add salt when finishing the dish. 
The thing with salt is that you learn the hard way, and that’s a good thing because as time goes by you “just know” and that is what tells you that you are on your way. So you can go tell those recipes not to “salt to taste” you again.

Location: Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

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