South Indian Breakfast: Part I, the Parota Addiction

While waiting for the parcel service dude to open his shop on this fine Sunday morning in Trivandrum (he only opens at noon, and we got there at 9:30), and as our we got stuck checking out of the hotel at 8:00, we decided to write a short post. After having a delicious breakfast at the Ariya Nivas we decided to tell you about some of our favourite breakfast foods. There are just too many for one post, so we have decided to break it up into segments.

One of our all-time favourites are PAROTAS. These are not to be confused with north Indian Parathas, which are also very tasty, and usually are like stuffed chapattis. The Parotas of the south, however, are flaky, delightful, griddled flat breads. We already discovered them last year in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, and to tell you the truth, we became so addicted that we decided to attempt them at home. Many Saturday mornings were spent with various recipes downloaded from the internet, attempting to whip up parotas with limited success. Usually, we would start at around breakfast time, it would take us until lunch time (and half a bottle of vegetable oil) and we would devour them so greedily that we would be too full to contemplate dinner. But still, the result was about 6 parotas, flatter than we wanted, slightly singed rather than golden, and all this after two hours of fiddling with the dough and saying words we aren't going to write down here.

So how does Parota magic happen? we were very happy to run into a local parota master in Hampi and and tried to extract some of the trade secrets through careful observation and many photographs. So here is how the pros do it: First you need the dough. We are not sure what's in it - probably flour, oil and water, we are yet to find out the exact proportions, but this guy's dough looked very smooth and flexible. You divide your dough into little balls (the master did it by squeezing the dough between his thumb and forefinger, into little, perfect, mushroom-shaped balls). Then, you whack it against a very well oiled table (master had a shining black marble slab) to an oval shape, so thin you could read your morning paper through it (at home it took Boaz about half an hour with the rolling pin). Then you origami it into a fan, followed by a snail and set it aside. It took the Master about 10 seconds (we timed it) to form those little snails, but it took us more than ten minutes to do this back home... Then, you get your helper to roll them out flat and place them on the griddle (the helper not yet being worthy of whacking and shaping). Once they have been browned to golden perfection on both sides, you set them aside in a stack, and wait for the master to do the final touch. The most important part about making the layers separate is to clap the whole stack between your two hands (sideways). This trick takes years to perfect, and hence only the true master should do it. They are then served with the "curry" of your choice, usually sambar, and sometimes egg curry but always coconut chutney. A standard order is two parotas, but we are often tempted to be greedy and get a third just because they are so tasty!

BARFI: This barfi is about jewellery. In the west, jewelry is considered frivolous and decorative, but here in India, jewellery is like a women's savings account. Everyone is all decked out with solid gold earrings, nose rings, necklaces and bangles for the most mundane of everyday tasks (for example, street sweeping and cement mixing). After finding out how much gold costs, we looked at these women in a whole new way. On a hot day, after a big lunch we decided to relax in an A/C jewelers shop and look at some silver jewelry (much to everyone's amusement since no one over 12 wears silver jewelry here). This made us realize something else about Indian jewelry: they are a bit like IKEA furniture: you can always add an other little component as your husband grows richer. You start with studs, and then you can add little bits to dangle from them, you can also attach thin chains to loop over your ear, to connect to your nose ring, hairpin, or husband... you get the picture. We found several very nice earrings and happily took them home. The closings were not the "butterfly" backings found in the west, but rather the earrings actually screwed shut. I guess that it makes sense if it is your life savings and is the essential component of this modular system. At home we realized that we had a small problem. Because Kim wears mostly very small earrings, with very small posts, the new earrings had posts 3 times the size of the old ones and were not, with any amount of pushing or turning, going to go in. How embarrassing. We might try to find an intermediate thickness and "stretch" the holes a bit. In the meantime, feeling like sissies, we saw an older, possibly tribal, woman on the bus who certainly did not have this problem at all....in fact she had about a kilo of solid gold nuts and bolts (quite literally, we kid you not) strung through her earlobes. And her holes were about 10 cm long.

Congratulations to googling queens Genevieve and Ghislaine, who tied in the contest to find out about the turmeric paste on the face! Genevieve will be the proud recipient of a brass key hanger and Ghislaine wins a hand carved wood-block for henna application. Turmeric everyone can get back home - and as we read, it will certainly make you more beautiful!