With many of us working remotely (from home) in this age of Covid-19, we find some of our eating routine disrupted, altered, changed in some way. Maybe you used to get your breakfast or lunch on the road. You know that morning brew from your favourite shop or café, the dhal puri, egg ball, cassava ball and cane juice from a particular stand. All to set you right for the day. Lunch is always at or from (fill in the blank). But now you are home, how are you to get your ‘fix’?
How about not worrying so much about getting out to get something to eat or drink but spending the time at home making it yourself? Take the time to make something and make it from scratch. Sit down to eat and do so slowly, really immersing yourself in the experience.
Share with the people in your household. Gather everyone to sit down for a meal. We all have busy lives and rare is the time that everyone is at home at the same time to eat. Use this time to engage and connect. Make yourself a treat and indulge, you deserve it. If nothing else, the environment in which we find ourselves speaks to the unpredictability and fragility of life. Let’s cook, eat, share, linger and engage.
Cooking, particularly the act of preparing ingredients for cooking provides an excellent opportunity to slow down and to engage with what we are doing. Most of the time when we cook, we simply assemble the ingredients and put them together in a perfunctory manner. We know the quantity of each ingredient required for the dish, the order in which they are to be put together and how long it should be cooked. If it is a dish with which we are very familiar, then, as we say, you can make it blindfolded, or, with one hand behind your back. While it is not always possible to slow down long enough to really engage with the ingredients, the task at hand, or to contemplate where our mind takes us, it is worthwhile to make the effort to do so, as often as we can.
The other day I felt like eating Coconut Buns and set about making some, channeling my mother. I sat down to grate the coconut using what we call the Indian grater or sit-down grater. With one half of the cracked coconut cupped in my hands and held askew, I began to grate the coconut. I counted 1, 2, 3, 4, each movement, a slight rotation as I moved the coconut over the iron-teeth scraper; 1, 2, 3, 4 movements of the coconut again over the scraper. This rhythmic action – 4-count scraping movement and rotation of the coconut – would continue until the flesh was scraped away from the hard, outer shell. As I grated the coconut I wondered – how did I learn to grate coconut like this? I must have seen my mom, aunts, or cousins do it; perhaps that is how I learnt. This led me to think about how I learn in general. Am I a visual learner? Do I learn by doing? By reading, or a combination of both? I think perhaps both.
The white flesh of the coconut formed a cone-like mound in the bowl, as I grated. In between the white flesh were little specks of brown from the outer skin of the coconut but that was fine, it adds fibre.
With the coconut grated and set aside, it was time prep the other ingredients. I put the raisins in a bowl and added a couple splashes of rum to plump them up. Next, I moved on to cutting the cold yellow butter into the flour. As I rubbed the butter into the flour, I recalled that this was one of the tasks my mother would assign to me, or my sister Pat, when she was making buns. Paying attention and engaging with what I was doing, I noticed how the white flour changed colour as it blended with the butter turning cream-coloured, almost like the colour of seashells we’d find at the seawalls when we were children. The uniform colour of the flour was also an indication that that stage of the recipe was completed.
The aroma of the homemade ground cinnamon tickled my nose as I inhaled deeply. I couldn’t be bothered to measure the nutmeg as I grated; I was caught up in the sound of it grazing against the fine teeth of a hand grater.
Butter-blended flour, tender coconut, warm spices, golden brown sugar crystals and rum-swollen raisins were bound together in a sticky dough by eggs, milk and vanilla essence. Scooped and put onto baking pans and transferred to a hot oven, I had done all I could do. As I washed the bowls, spoons and other implements used, I felt as if I had just done something for myself. Not for the column, not for an article, not for my blog, not to test a recipe, not as a favour to a friend or one of my tasters. I did it for me, at my own pace, because I wanted to. The fact that it is the subject of this column is purely coincidental.
Out of the oven, the aroma still lingering in the air, I waited for the buns to cool. There’s was no mauby. I could make tea, but I opted to eat the buns just as is – a little warm, just like I would when growing up. The outside is crusty, but the inside is tender. The raisins on the crust seem to peep out of the bun, the ones inside warm and soft. I finish one bun and reach for another but then I stop. These buns are to be enjoyed slowly, one at a time, over a period of time. Each bite, a contemplation.
Cynthia
cynthia@tasteslikehome.org
