J & J & J :)

 

Eggs Benedict 

    Back in school, I remember reading a story about a lady whose appetite for good food was remarkably high. The greasy, gooey, frosty and the syrupy stuff never messed with her gustatory delights. Though a fictional account, the fact that she lived a long, healthy and pleasurable life, despite gorging on dangerously delectable food gave me tonnes of food for thought.

 After we polished off the last batch of potato croquettes yesterday, Amma warned me that I better stop cooking lest I end up having a shapeless body( pointing to her tummy with an apocalyptic look on her  face) and bring hazards to whoever I am living with in the future. I tried convincing her of my stern decision to counterbalance extra doses of butter and cheese with additional work outs and to marry a fitness freak to escape the impending disaster that she predicts. But I didn't succeed.

I am one of those people who find solace and joy in the transformational and therapeutic power of cooking and eating. People who forget the worldly worries in good food. People who find utter bliss in the whole experience of food!

The other day as I watched Julie and Julia, I saw bits and pieces of myself in both the ladies who share an amazing passion for food.
Whether it was whisking up the hollandaise sauce or making the poached eggs or turning to cooking or blog writing as an escape from the daily grind, there were particular instances from the movie that I felt have been adapted from my little world.(A Malayali girl Mastering the Art of French Cooking?! Maybe, though my inspiration for French cooking was Laura Vitale  and not Julia Child)

Today I  read an article ( "Moving images, moving words" by Baradwaj Rangan) on Abbas Kiarostami in The Hindu. It cites a quotation from one of his movies which I would like to reproduce here:

           "One morning, before dawn, I put a rope in my car. My mind was made up, I wanted to kill     myself. I set off for Mianeh... I reached the mulberry tree plantations. I stopped there. It was still dark. I threw the rope over a tree but it didn't catch hold. I tried once, twice, but to no avail. So I climbed the tree and tied the rope on tight."

          "Then I felt something soft under my hand. Mulberries. Deliciously sweet mulberries. I ate one. It was succulent, then a second and third. Suddenly I noticed that the sun was rising over the mountaintop. What sun, what scenery, what greenery! All of a sudden I heard children heading off to school. They stopped to look at me. They asked me to shake the tree. The mulberries fell and they ate. I felt happy. Then I gathered some mulberries to take them home. I felt happy. My wife was still sleeping. When she woke up, she ate mulberries as well. And she enjoyed them too. I had left to kill myself, and I came back with mulberries."

This should explain the transformational and therapeutic power that I was talking about and 

why food drives so many of us crazy :)