Wednesday 18 March 2015

Stalk

I did not grow up where rhubarbs grow. I hadn't seen a single stalk of it till we lugged our life and luggage to England. Then, suddenly there they were, lying in their market stall. These lounging, stretching, graceful stalks. Pink and slender and as foreign as flamingoes. So, I admired their beauty, and skirted around them the way one skirts around beautiful, foreign things.



But when you live in this country, rhubarb will find its way to you. Rhubarb in ice-creams, rhubarb in pies, rhubarb with its feisty kick aimed at the corners of your jaw. Who'd have guessed? That this slender thing in its pink cocktail gown could kick like a ninja.





I loved it. I loved the coy exterior and the tart within. Rhubarb has personality. It is what it is; you either like it, or you don't. It's Marmite vegetable.

And to me, it's as English as Marmite too. In my technicolour rhubarb-imagination, I can see it's delicate stalks stewing on an AGA in an English country kitchen, then put in a pie and served to a lady, who, as the camera zooms in, I see is Beatrix Potter putting the finishing touches to Tabitha Twitchit's prickles.

But what if you invited this English Rhubarb into a different kitchen, into my kitchen? I bought six pink and well-mannered rhubarb stalks last week. D and Chotto-ma used half of the stalks to bake me a lovely cake on Mother's Day.

And I had my way with the other half.





Rhubarb & Red Lentil Soup with Ras-el-hanout

This soup! It's a very, very, very fine soup. We've had it on a loop for a week. It's a great example of why rhubarb needs to be thrown into savoury recipes more often. The recipe was inspired by a tangy dal we had growing up - a simmered mix of red lentils and raw mango. This soup has the same tart edge, balanced by the natural sweetness of carrots. The ras-el-hanout, which we carried back freshly ground from Morocco adds a beautiful North African moorishness. (You can, of course, buy ras-el-hanout, as well as the turmeric in the recipe, in almost all supermarkets and Middle-Eastern grocers.)



Ingredients

250 gms red lentil, washed
2 stalks of rhubarb
2 carrots, chopped into small cubes
1 medium onion, also chopped small
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 bay leaf
1 tsp coarse black pepper (crushing a few with a pestle is even better)
Bunch of parsley, chopped (or coriander - both work well)
1 1/2 tsp ras-el-hanout
1 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp turmeric
1 tbs olive oil
Salt




Cut off the head and tail of your rhubarb stalk; the leaves are toxic, so must always be trimmed off. Not cut your stalks in 1-inch pieces. (Usually, I leave my rhubarb unpeeled and pink, but for the soup, white looked better than the final watered-down pink, so I peeled the stalks. Feel free to leave the pink on with rhubarb that is very fresh and firm.)
Heat the olive oil in a deep pot. Throw the onions, garlic, carrots in together. Stir for two minutes, then add 4 cups of water.
Add the lentils, rhubarb, half of the parsley (or coriander), ras-el-hanout, bayleaf, pepper and salt.
Cover and simmer till the lentils have split evenly. Add more water if needed.


Taste for salt, simmer for a minute more giving it a good stir.
Serve hot garnished with the rest of the chopped parsley (or coriander).






















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Friday 6 March 2015

Stereotypes and cake

I have the week off. I get almost nothing done when I have time off. For the past hour, I've sat on the sofa staring at this lion that Chotto-ma drew a few days ago. It's such a beautiful lion, isn't it? It has kind eyes. A zebra might have another opinion, but it has kind eyes. It also has a bow on its head, if you peer in closely. What's a big beast of a lion without a little red bow in his mane, right?


We like breaking stereotypes in this house, and ste-reo-types is a word Chotto-ma learnt early. Because, by lord, we're surrounded by them outside, we drown in them when we walk out the door!

We went to the John Lewis store to buy pyjamas for Chotto-ma the other day. Chotto-ma loves dinosaurs, and she loves sharks and penguins and anything that moves on all fours or sixes. But no sir, John Lewis begs to differ. Every interesting pyjama with dinosaurs and sharks had a sewn-in tag saying John Lewis For Boys. Wait. What's wrong with John Lewis For Kids, if you must assume I'm size-blind? I'm sure people can decide if they'd like to buy it for a boy or girl based on the child's personality and taste rather than sex? Yes, there was one lone dino-print pyjama in the girls' section, bless their generosity - but no points for guessing its colour. No, it wasn't pink. It was Very Pink.



And that brings me to the country's great, unspoken colour-code. Pink and Blue. When you have a baby, don't you dare confuse those two! Girls must gurgle in their prams in pink, boys in blue. Cover a little girl in a blue blanket only if you want to hear, "Aww, what a handsome little boy!"

And of course, there's the conversation I had at the hairdresser's some time ago. There was a lovely girl cutting my hair, and Chotto-ma trying to catch my chopped, wet strands before they fell to the floor. The hairdresser and I were chatting about this and that, as we usually do. She was talking about her job at the salon, so I asked her how she'd gotten into hairdressing. And she said: "You know, I was never much into school, so I did what girls do. I got into beauty."



And then there's the fact that Chotto-ma went to a birthday party where all the girls got little purple coin-purses in their party-bags and all the boys got large bugs preserved in glass cubes. And she came home a little sad. She'd really wanted the bug with its black hairy legs and cool shiny green body, but she was a girl, so a purple purse it was.

And there's the fact that at Chotto-ma's after-school club, when she and a friend were once playing with a box of Lego from the Star Wars series, an older boy came up to them, took the box away, and reminded them they they had the 'girl Lego' to play with, and that these were for the boys.

And there's the fact that you might know a little boy who loves playing with kitchen sets but you also know that you can never gift him a kitchen set for his birthday, without incurring the shock of his parents. He must be gifted a car, poor child. Or a football at the very least.

And the fact that a local children's magazine I was leafing through had an article called "Party Ideas for Boys and Girls", where the page was split in two - Boys / Girls, and the boys' section had science experiments, pirates, football and space. While the girls' section had a tutu party, flowers and fairies, cupcake baking, princesses and mermaids. Chotto-ma is obsessed with space and planets and all its galaxies, just as I was when I was young. She loves science experiments, which we often do at home with kitchen ingredients. But never mind all that - let's just put all the girls in sparkly mermaid costumes, shall we?

It's hard for children to find their own voice when the world seems to be so organised in their stereotypes. When they're seen as Boy or Girl, instead of People. Girls, especially, are constantly given subliminal hints about their 'role' in life. When you gift a girl a Barbie (I could write an entire post on everything that's wrong with that doll), and you buy a book called 'Facts on Fossils' for a boy, you are sending her a strong message, which will have far deeper repercussions than one might think. [Link to an interesting article on that below]

We do what we can to balance Chotto-ma's world at home, even if it means breaking the smallest stereotypes. I have a blue toothbrush and D has a pink one. We went out and bought them after telling her how people couldn't be coded by colour, how no one had to follow any set notion of 'Obvious'. And when we came back home from the hairdresser's that day, I showed her a photograph of the scientists who built Mangalyaan, the Mars orbiter. The photo showed a group of Indian scientists, all women, in beautiful silk sarees and flowers in their hair, punching the air as they made history in space technology. They'd probably also packed their child's lunch before coming in to work to build that rocket.




Chotto-ma sees D cooking as many meals as I do; because dinner is cooked by whoever has the time to cook it that day. And the house is cleaned, and clothes folded, by whoever has the time to clean the house and fold the clothes that day. There's nothing more to it - apart from the fact that you'll probably eat a little better if I cook the dinner. And you'll probably also get a slice of lovely cake after.

Are there stereotypes that bother you? Moments when you have found them frustrating as a parent, grandparent, uncle, aunt? Stereotypes that annoyed you when you were a child? I'd love to hear your stories, for surely I'm not the only one who has them? My stories come from being the parent of a girl, but which ones do you face as the parent of a boy? I'd love to know, and it'd be good to have this discussed - please share the blog link on Facebook and elsewhere if you like.

And in the meantime, I'll give you a recipe for a mean orange-almond cake, which goes well with good old talk about things that matter. I've baked it thrice in three weeks. Well, Chotto-ma and I baked it together, even as we talked about planets, bugs, prehistoric creatures and other so-called 'boy things'. Because, there might be a set recipe for a cake, but there ain't no set recipe for a girl. Or a boy.



Added on March 10, 2015: A kind lady emailed me an article yesterday after reading the post. This article is from a US perspective, while mine is from the UK, but they say the same thing. It shows why seemingly small, market-created stereotypes can do deeper damage to our social structure, and handicap girls and women. Here's an excerpt from the article

"...contributing factors, according to academic experts I interviewed, include a culture that encourages young women to play with dolls rather than robots and pursue traditionally female careers, as well as the self-perpetuating stereotype that a programmer is a white male. Sometimes women can feel like they don’t belong in a technical world dominated by men.
Those stereotypes are based on reality, according to data released by some of the largest tech companies. Among the top employers in Silicon Valley, including Facebook, Google, Twitter and Apple, 70% of the workforce is male. In technical roles, the disparity is even greater. At Twitter, for instance, only 10% of the technical workforce is female."
You can read the complete article here.


Orange and Almond Cake





Ingredients

1 cup plain flour
1 cup ground almond
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 cup freshly squeezed orange juice, pulp in
2 tsp zest of an orange
2 heaped tbsp of butter
2 heaped tbsp yogurt
1/4 cup oil (vegetable or sunflower)







Preheat oven to 160 degrees C (320 degrees F).
Grease cake tin with butter, keep aside. (I like my 6-inch, and deep, cake tin for this)
Mix the dry ingredients together in a large bowl - flour, ground almond, baking powder, sugar, orange zest.
Make a well in the middle. Crack in the eggs. Add the vanilla essence, the butter, oil and yogurt.
Start mixing it in a circular motion. Pour the orange juice a bit at a time as you mix. Till it's a nice smooth batter, easy to stir.
Pour batter into cake tin. Bake for about 50 minutes, then slide a knife in to check if done. If it's still a little soft, switch off the oven, and pop the cake back in. Leave it there for 15 more minutes.



This cake has a beautiful crunchy crust when it's just out of the oven, so you must have a slice warm. But once it's cooled, wrap the rest in clingfilm and leave it on the table overnight. It's even better a day later, when the ground almond has released all its lovely natural oil.

You'll love it!









COMMENT CAVEAT: Many of you have written to me saying that comments you leave here are often not published. So, a little note: if you don't see your comments here in 24 hours, please know that they have not reached me at all! Blogger can play up, and I hate to think that words you've taken time and care to write down have vanished. So please, email me your comments if you find them missing, at peppercornsinmypocket@gmail.com, and I promise to post them them here, and write back.