So you watch this program called “The Foodie” on Times now? Yes I watch it every Sunday, courtesy my housemate from the south. SO this last week I saw an interesting Mexican buffet in the show where there was an Orange with onion salad!!! I was fascinated.
So I decided to try out that combination in our very desi puffed rice dish (called poha in the north or aval down south).
Some details I had overlooked:
It is summer here. Scorching hot. With heavy showers every alternate day, bringing with it humid humid days. This is not at all the season even for an orange seed forget the orange!
The bottle containing oil had become ‘the bottle that had contained oil’. So not a drop of oil for frying the onions.
Top it with absence of any potential vegetable to be put into the poha.
Now it was very late already and my stomach was rumbling giving audible sounds of warning that it was hungry as hell! I had an onion without oil to fry, an overripe tomato and the soggy wet poha which I had washed already overlooking all the ‘finer’ details for the dish. I guess such nonchalance and ‘don’t-care’ attitude (or ‘taken-for-granted attitude’ as a friend puts it often ) emerges when you have been eating the same poha for the past two nights for dinner. And that it turned out well!
So anyways, to compensate for the absence of oil, I decided not to fry the onions at all. My mind was on an experimental curiosity itch! An itch which was about to cause a deep red swelling on the skin of my culinary-proud peacock. So I ‘fried’ the tomatoes instead. Fried it, till it stuck to the bottom of the pan. To relieve the maid who comes in the next day of her problem of scrubbing it hard (in vain!) I put in some powder(s). So the powders and the sticky (Fried) tomatoes blend and they finally stick to one another in a mess instead of sticking to the pan. Phew!
Next I decide that the ‘powder’ has to get cooked and that wouldn’t happen with the tomatoes in with them. And so in goes some water. And it boils. And I am surprised it smells good. ***JUST A THOUGHT: Generally men tend to ruin things which are turning out well by merely overdoing things!.*** Next I add the raw onions and let it get boiled (don’t grimace!) with the ‘thing’. Smelling Better!
Next goes the waiting poha, and I mix it in. But I feel something is missing. It smells like your regular mom’s dish. Remember ***JUST A THOUGHT*** ? So now I decide to be provoked by the ‘orange-onion’ salad thingy I saw on T.V and add the Orange juice (which I had earlier bought for just drinking. I didn’t even know that I would be using it in this fashion. Had I known I would never have bought that in the first place!) So I thought Half cooked ,crunchy, almost raw onions with orange juice would taste just like the salad. ( I could see that on the face of Mr.Foodie! Tasty!)
BIIIIG MISTAKE!
I had to have a little just to cheat my stomach and rest went into trash. I had the rest of the orange juice ( and it tasted soooo good!) and drank a lot of water ( again cheating the tummy) and called it a night!
