Hello! This week we’re really looking forward to having Ragini Chawla share with us. Find out more about Ragini on her instagram here.
Enjoy — Sinae and Kate
Day 1
I am dreaming about salt when I hear my alarm ringing, and subsequently my stomach.
I realise I can’t stay in bed too long, as the signs tell me to make some porridge.
I boil oats with half oat milk half water, I don’t know what to do with oats. I usually just follow what I have seen my friend J do. While it boils I clean last night’s dishes, I can’t stay still in the kitchen. I have to be doing something on the side! I realise this is not good, specially first thing in the morning. It’s a worry for another year.
Pear, banana, dried fruits and nuts, honey. Just as J does, I don’t deter a single step.
I take my bowl to my bed, and put on some Coke Studio on youtube to wake up.
An hour into working I can feel a sensation in my head, my head feels something like this, and I am Up to make coffee.
Someone told me to put gur, or jaggery in coffee and I scoffed at them. To this day, I can vouch for gur and say it just makes the coffee so smooth, or maybe more how I like it.
One sip, two sip, big gulp, I am set !
I pack last night’s dinner for lunch and head to the studio.
30 mins later, I am cold from the bike ride, and ritualistically take vitamin D and ginger lemon tea.
12 pm, I eat an apple I found in my bag.
It’s 1:30, I can’t keep my hunger away any more and head down to the kitchen to warm up my food.
I have a very exciting Tuna sabji with rice, cooked in Goan-ish, style.
Leftovers from last night, and a result of a patient Sunday cook, a recipe I loosely remember that I ate 4 winters ago. A Goan friend cooked it for me, and I was surprised tuna could be cooked as a sabji with curry leaves, mustard, onion. In my head Tuna chunks were supposed to be eaten in a sandwich always.
I added roasted red pepper to it, I saw it in the fridge last night and knew I won’t do much with it in the future. I find it hard to be creative with red pepper since I didn’t grow up with it in my house.
With the tuna, the roasted red pepper is amazing.
Maybe it’s thinking about food for this journal, or the nostalgia and emotion brought to me over the weekend that I realise that fish is the only non vegetarian food which has a lot of emotion attached to it in my family. Growing up, we always ate Pomphret fillet fried, as whole. As a kid I was fascinated with it. My mother started cooking a lot of Bengali inspired fish curry over the winter, and my dad and brother always talked about the kind of fish, Rohu mostly they bring in my house, very enthusiastically.
Last year, I lost my appetite for fish, one day, all of a sudden.
Maybe I ate too much of it growing up, I thought.
Worst, I think maybe I never enjoyed fish but consumed it out of peer pressure.
Every now and then, I cook fish, in the hope that I will rediscover a love for it.
Weekend sadness and the sabji I cooked, made me realise I need to go back to it, for the emotion it comes with for me.
For this, I am indebted to coconut oil, my friend, and Karma’s Goan curry masala.
Tonight’s dinner and tomorrow’s lunch, cooked with 29 too many Cashews in.