INDIA UN-CURRIED: A PICTURE IS WORTH....

My first Frankie in over a decade! On my first evening in Bombay, my nephew Rahul, brother-in-law Anand and I walked down to Breach Candy for the wrap made with flaky Indian bread dipped in egg, quickly cooked, then stuffed with a spicy mutton, chicken or vegetable filling and topped with chopped onions and a delicious chili vinegar sauce.

View from a cafe in Arab Street in Singapore. I stopped there after a busy afternoon for a cool moment and a cup of coffee. The low, two storey, mixed use buildings in the neighborhood are called shophouses. Local merchants sold their wares there. Today there are massage parlors and all kinds of restaurants in the quaint buildings that is a must on a tourist's must-sees in S'pore. Fabrics, baskets and trinkets are for sale too.

Dinner on a banana leaf -- the traditional South Indian and Sri Lankan plate -- at the restaurant of the same name, Apolo Banana Leaf in Singapore's Little India. Rice, fish head curry, delicious jumbo prawns and an assortment of vegetable dishes made for a satisfying meal!

India Un-Curried

It’s 3 o’clock on Friday afternoon in Los Angeles and I am inching north on Fairfax through crazy and all-too-familiar traffic, desperately turning onto side streets in an attempt to reach my daughter’s school by 3:10 for a parent-teacher conference.

I’ve just left the test kitchen in Culver City where I teach Un-Curry cooking classes. Today was Meat Feast and my clothes smell of chicken and fenugreek, cinnamon and garlic. Even as I breathe in these aromas, heightened by my exhaustion and the heat of the sun beating down at me through the car windows, my brain is in overdrive, making multiple lists because in two days I will be getting on a plane to travel 10,000 miles to India.

Shopping lists: Mini-DV tapes, kids’ toothpaste and sunscreen for one of my best friends’ kids in Bombay, sneakers for my niece (you don’t get good kids’ shoes in India!), pine nuts (also hard to find in India, except perhaps in Kashmir?) for a dear friend who loves to make her own pesto, dark chocolate for my mother, pistachios for my mother-in-law, some gifts -- I have not yet figured out what -- for the people who are going to help on my food project.

Packing lists: clothes that will be appropriate for the heat because it is summer time in India, hat, walking shoes, cameras, sound recorder, notebooks, all the books for Dad that I collect between my trips home, the gifts for friends and family that I have somehow already managed to shop for...

To-do lists: make an order of 3 dozen sweet potato puffs for a client first thing Saturday, finish my sound recordings for my daughter so she can listen to a message a day from me while I am away, finishing updating her calendar so my husband knows which class she needs to be at when, clean the house, visit the mother of a friend who has been ill, cook dinner for friends who are coming over Saturday night...

These are just some of the things I HAVE to take care of before I leave on Monday afternoon! I am not even contemplating right now the lists of what I need to think about and do on the actual trip. Time enough for that once I am on that plane!

This is how it is every time I go to India. What’s different is that for the first time in 10 years, I am traveling there alone, leaving husband and daughter behind for four weeks. And I am traveling for work. A trip dedicated to my work. What a concept!

When I was researching my last cookbook, The Essential Marathi Cookbook some years ago, I wanted to travel through Maharashtra, interview home cooks, taste their food and record their recipes and stories. Since we live in California and my daughter was a toddler at the time, packing up and heading halfway across the world to India was not an option.

But the idea stayed with me and I would bring it up every so often, wishing I could make the trip, and just as quickly nixing it as a pipe dream. Early last February -- hard to believe it is only 6 weeks ago -- I was talking about Indian food to a documentary film maker who had just taken my cooking class and telling her how I would love to make just such a trip. She was enthusiastic. Visuals of locations there, people cooking, bazaars, unusual ingredients. It would be wonderful, she thought.

Why not take that trip to India? Why not hire a camera crew and record some interviews with my contributors, with my parents? Why not get some footage to piece together into a reel to pitch a travel-food show? Why not? Why not? What was stopping me?

For a day and a half, I let the excitement simmer and then I woke up that Sunday morning, turned to my husband and said, “You know how I’ve really wanted to make that trip? I think I should do it now.”

Without missing a beat, he answered, an astonishing and welcome answer, “Do it. I’ll support you. Do what you need to do.”

The time was right. The great thing about turning 40 is that it liberates you in many ways. One way was to make me realize that time is scarce, that there was no longer any putting off of things I really wanted to do.

The Meaning of Epoisses

"Époisses?" asked my 8-year old.

That was her first word today, even before "Good Morning". Since she started speaking (at the tender age of 6 months), very often her first word on waking up is a food word. When she was three, she often greeted me with "Waffles?" Pancakes had preceded waffles and now, of course, we were getting more refined.

Époisses. Currently her favorite cheese. I discovered it at a wine & cheese pairing a few months ago at my favorite gourmet food store, Surfas (http://thesurfasblog.blogspot.com/) in Culver City. I took it home to share with my family along with two other cheeses that I had enjoyed at the pairing, some fresh walnut-date bread and a fabulously tart-sweet balsamic vinegar-strawberry preserve from Italy.

My daughter enjoyed tasting it all but what she could not get enough of was the soft, pungent, slightly salty cheese from Burgundy. Apparently Napoleon was a fan of Époisses. I thought it was fantastically good, more complex than Brie or Camembert, a cheese you could keep on spreading on bread and devouring. With its distinctive strong smell, however, it was not quite the cheese I expected an 8-year old to dream of and wake up requesting.

But I should not have forgotten that at 9 months she ate artichokes with relish. At three, she tried bitter fenugreek greens cooked in the style traditional to my native state, Maharashtra (on India's west coast) and liked them, a dish I would never have eaten at that age though as an adult I appreciate its complex, bitter flavor!

It was a beautiful shared meal, the Époisses evening, as we watched with delight her first bite, the ‘Umm’ I knew she would instantly utter, her commentary as she tried the other two cheeses and compared them, unfavorably to the Époisses, and her final dedicated consumption of her favorite.

Now every time I am at Surfas, I must stop at the cheese counter and pick up another wedge. One day it was so wonderfully runny that when the round was cut open, it literally started dripping off the cutting board.

What a ferment my daughter is fortunate to grow up in and around. “Global foods”, “seasonal”, “local”, “organic”, “made from scratch”, these are the words she hears and experiences on a daily basis. She can taste a French cheese one day and eat a Marathi vegetable the next with equal enthusiasm.

For her, it really is a Shared Table, shared not only with her parents at home or her friends at school but also with an anonymous French cheese maker, with the California farmers whose fresh fruit she samples every week at our favorite farmers' market, with the recipes from her great-grand-mothers (look out for more about these), with her taste buds inherited from many families and regions in India.

Can there be a better way to learn about agriculture, economics, environmental consciousness, ethnicity and cultures, about the world?

Some months ago, I taught my first multi generational cooking class to 8 year olds, some of their mothers, grandmothers and one grandfather! Food Trippin' Across Indiais a class I teach through my cooking school, Un-Curry, and my students are usually adults.

But here was a group of kids and they loved every minute of it. They tasted all the spices, the sweet jaggery and the sour tamarind; they pounded cumin and coriander seed enthusiastically in a mortar and pestle; they watched as I popped mustard seeds and curry leaves into hot oil and reveled in the aromas, marveling as vegetables they might ordinarily refuse to touch were transformed into flavorful dishes they could not wait to taste.

Somehow, it all comes down to food, doesn't it? And to sharing because when we share food, sit down to a well-cooked meal at home or at a favorite restaurant, exchange recipes or take a cooking class, we are not only learning about each other but about ourselves, sharing a part of our wishes and desires, our likes and dislikes.... So in this blog, at this shared table, I want to share my world which is made up of food experiences here in California, back home in India and in other parts of the world. Please join me. Bon Appétit.