My pet peeve about a Breakfast
This is one of those stories which are being compiled to add to the cookbook for our family. As I said ours is a large family, 12 kids, and their families make almost a village, so dishes which we dish out have all kinds of flavors spanning from Kollam to Koilandy, so south influence to north Malabari ones.
The others in series is :https://medium.com/@lthampi/a-waft-of-sorts-from-that-corner-with-a-well-5956e9e55f38
All of us have some memories related to food. Or is it just the foodie me, not sure I have a lot of such flashes which come and which make me tap away on the phone to order some. One of them is how I used to assist my dad, in making a simple dinner of kanji (rice porridge, I can write a whole blog on it, or rather this dish deserves to be written about. It is so wholesome and so satisfying to have it. Although a lot of us associate it with sickness. I would say that is your childhood trauma, you need to heal and see its possibilities. When combined with crushed and squeezed coconut milk or when it is had with payar (pulse) and an omelet made with small onion and green chilies, fried in coconut oil and a dash of coconut pieces there as well as curry leaves. You get the scene right. It is heavenly! Or it's a killer combination with a piece of tender mango pickle or green mango chutney and pappadam or dry fish fry or just roasted pappadam. So heal and have kanji in the right way. ) I really have got diverted from what I intended to say. So when I was assisting my dad when our main cook Mom was away at work on some of the days. I took up chopping green chilies, and small onions for the omelet. Just after that, you use the toilet and don't wash your hands before that. So that was a memorable burning dinner time memory.
Or it could be the snack time in childhood which involved, achappams — rose cookies which are arranged on the hand as a ornament, the rings in it and put on the fingers and then had one by one, just for the fun of it. Or maybe to savor it fully one small ring at a time. Another kadi (snack) time, the venture is combining Calicut halwa with Calicut very thin banana chips, they are a deadly combination. So you take 2 chips, take a small chunk of halwa and stack them up as a burger and have them. Never had I seen a burger in those times, but can relate now. These used to be great eats after a long day of school and to which I used to look forward. All of these would be gurgled down with a glass of milk flavored with Horlick, which was considered to be best health drink at that time.
Coming to my pet peeve on breakfast. It is about the Idlis. The steam dumplings when looked at it is just dough steamed. As such it doesn't have much character to it. It can be quite doughy if not left in a steamer for the right amount of time. It can taste as though you are eating raw dough, as sometimes the middle area of it can remain so, because of time precision, which can be missed on a workday morning. I remember at home it was resorted to used as the popular breakfast because it was the easiest to be made and it can be eaten with quite a number of things. Say, just with sugar, or add ghee to it, or use premade podi (chutney powder) or on a good day it attains it glory by getting combined with sambhar and coconut chutney. When there is a Tamil influence then mint chutney, tomato chutney, or groundnut chutney could also be the combinations. But I tell you on a busy school day when asked to shove it down with whatever, and it is just taken out of the steamer and you just have a few minutes before you cycle to school, it isn't pleasant. With that experience, I restrained from having idlis in my adult life for a long but now got back to it when served in Kannadiga style — Tatte idli — which means a flat and circular plate used to steam the Idlis, origin from bidadi area of Karnataka.
When had with chutney podi and ghee it becomes so scrumptious, those not-so-good idli memories are a thing of the past after I discovered this fluffy variation of it. My Idli trauma is healed I would say, thanks to it. As this dish is the best go-to dish, to heal your troubled stomach, of course not with the above combination I said, but with some curd.
