Cooking is a chore. Anyway you look at it, it is, if done from scratch, a cumbersome process. The end result might be a veritable feast for the senses, but the process to get there? Long and laborious.
I am sure some of you are shaking your head, going,"Nah,I don't think so!!" Well, let me give you my perspective.
We had a maid(my most favorite person in the whole world) in the house when we were growing up and she was the one who cooked for us. I remember her going to the market in Kodambakkam every single day and purchasing vegetables and fish and then coming home, cleaning and chopping vegetables and fish, grinding the masala on a grinding stone, soaking tamarind if needed,cooking them and also making rice the old fashioned way in a pot and draining the excess water through a lid that was half a sieve. We did not have a mixie/blender and no refrigerator.Which meant food wasn't left over for tomorrow. You cook for today and eat it today. This process was an everyday affair. Like rinse and repeat. I haven't even mentioned grinding dosai batter the old fashioned way yet.
We purchased a fridge and blender once we moved to a new house when I was about ten, and things became easier for her, but she was still steeped in her habits(in hindsight, really healthy ones) and did not like operating the blender. So my sister and I were given responsibility to grind masala every time she needed it. The fridge gradually became a life saver-storing milk and dosai batter and yogurt and even vegetables and eventually meat in the freezer.
So we got into this habit of eating, get this, stale food-if food is actually dead stuff, which it actually is, we were actually eating, ahem, rotting stuff, except we delayed the rotting by putting it into the fridge and we still ate it.
The transition was not abrupt so we didn't really see what we were doing. But what was noticeable was the fact that life seemed a little easier for whoever was doing the cooking. Time was saved, and reheating was a miracle(especially for food from two days ago!).
But for me, as a young kid, the absolute extreme of quick cooking was Maggi!! It came with its own masala packet for crying out loud!! I still remember seeing sugar crystals in the masala. Tart and sweet and spicy all at the same time. No one worried about MSG back then!
The two minute noodles.Wow!! Remember the mom lovingly say,"Two minutes!"? She holds two fingers up while saying it.The image is seared in my brain. The world is yet to come up with an ad campaign that reaped such astronomical dividends. Nestle nailed it!
Sixth standard, we were all sitting in the oratory and we had people hand out a Maggi noodles packet to every single kid. I didn't even wait to get home to eat it. I crunched through my whole packet in school and came home and begged my sister to share hers with me. But boy, was I hooked.We all were I think. I am sure for a lot of kids growing up in the eighties and maybe nineties too, cooking Maggi by ourselves was a rite of passage. Can you make Maggi by yourself was probably a question every single kid of the day had to answer affirmatively to prove their independence! Maggi can be gussied up a ton of different ways, add veggies, add even meat, mess with the masala, add a bit of herbs, a bit of hot sauce sometimes, maybe ketchup? But Maggi straight up with its tastemaker, is Maggi. Everything else is Maggi lite.
We all have at some point used our limited culinary skills to make ourselves a bowl of Maggi and inhaled that fragrance when it was bubbling away on the stove, and closed your eyes in ecstasy while slurping down the whole snaky mess. And Maggi became a heaven sent savior for a lot of working moms. Kids coming home from school to a locked house can safely rustle up a packet of Maggi if they were hungry.
New brands of instant noodles kept popping up but Maggi had its hold on the younger generation.Top Ramen, Yippee? Whatever!
My husband mentions Top Ramen here in the US back when he was doing his Masters degree and says he has had a boatload of them and never wants to eat another packet of noodles EVER!
I used to buy Maggi from the Indian store here but gradually that habit tapered off.
Fast forward a gazillion years and you've hit the Coronavirus Era.And what seems to be flying off the shelves at stores? Instant noodles.
I bought a four pack on a lark, the first time I went shopping during the stay at home period and then noticed that it was being rationed like toilet paper and eggs. I had never noticed instant noodles being a high demand item.
I brought it home and made it the usual way and my kids loved it. I bought some more the next time I shopped and this time MSG and chemicals and all sorts of things danced in my head and I skipped the tastemaker. I found a recipe for the dressing, on some funky website, and while it worked out fine, it still wasn't ..Maggi. I bought yet some more the next time around, but it is still sitting there, no takers yet. My kids aren't exactly instant noodle fans and I have not been able to use the excuse of being a working mom to let them have that unique experience of rustling up their own pack of noodles.
I haven't lived in India for almost twenty three years now and while there, haven't exactly gone hunting for Maggi noodles and so I am not actually in on the current avatars of Maggi. Oats Maggi? A gazillion other flavors? No clue.
But I can close my eyes and suddenly hear the rustle when you tear open that yellow packet. Waiting impatiently for the water to boil, breaking up the noodles in twos or fours and adding it to the water, sprinkling the taste maker and clockwatching for the next two minutes, foot tapping impatiently, and voila! It's done. Find a comfortable place to sit and savor that feast, that antithesis of everything healthy, but no your mind has cleared out any rational thought and gets ready for that hit of spice and gooey yumminess that will transport you to a different dimension. Nirvana!
I think a trip to the Indian store is in my horizon!!
I am sure some of you are shaking your head, going,"Nah,I don't think so!!" Well, let me give you my perspective.
We had a maid(my most favorite person in the whole world) in the house when we were growing up and she was the one who cooked for us. I remember her going to the market in Kodambakkam every single day and purchasing vegetables and fish and then coming home, cleaning and chopping vegetables and fish, grinding the masala on a grinding stone, soaking tamarind if needed,cooking them and also making rice the old fashioned way in a pot and draining the excess water through a lid that was half a sieve. We did not have a mixie/blender and no refrigerator.Which meant food wasn't left over for tomorrow. You cook for today and eat it today. This process was an everyday affair. Like rinse and repeat. I haven't even mentioned grinding dosai batter the old fashioned way yet.
We purchased a fridge and blender once we moved to a new house when I was about ten, and things became easier for her, but she was still steeped in her habits(in hindsight, really healthy ones) and did not like operating the blender. So my sister and I were given responsibility to grind masala every time she needed it. The fridge gradually became a life saver-storing milk and dosai batter and yogurt and even vegetables and eventually meat in the freezer.
So we got into this habit of eating, get this, stale food-if food is actually dead stuff, which it actually is, we were actually eating, ahem, rotting stuff, except we delayed the rotting by putting it into the fridge and we still ate it.
The transition was not abrupt so we didn't really see what we were doing. But what was noticeable was the fact that life seemed a little easier for whoever was doing the cooking. Time was saved, and reheating was a miracle(especially for food from two days ago!).
But for me, as a young kid, the absolute extreme of quick cooking was Maggi!! It came with its own masala packet for crying out loud!! I still remember seeing sugar crystals in the masala. Tart and sweet and spicy all at the same time. No one worried about MSG back then!
The two minute noodles.Wow!! Remember the mom lovingly say,"Two minutes!"? She holds two fingers up while saying it.The image is seared in my brain. The world is yet to come up with an ad campaign that reaped such astronomical dividends. Nestle nailed it!
Sixth standard, we were all sitting in the oratory and we had people hand out a Maggi noodles packet to every single kid. I didn't even wait to get home to eat it. I crunched through my whole packet in school and came home and begged my sister to share hers with me. But boy, was I hooked.We all were I think. I am sure for a lot of kids growing up in the eighties and maybe nineties too, cooking Maggi by ourselves was a rite of passage. Can you make Maggi by yourself was probably a question every single kid of the day had to answer affirmatively to prove their independence! Maggi can be gussied up a ton of different ways, add veggies, add even meat, mess with the masala, add a bit of herbs, a bit of hot sauce sometimes, maybe ketchup? But Maggi straight up with its tastemaker, is Maggi. Everything else is Maggi lite.
We all have at some point used our limited culinary skills to make ourselves a bowl of Maggi and inhaled that fragrance when it was bubbling away on the stove, and closed your eyes in ecstasy while slurping down the whole snaky mess. And Maggi became a heaven sent savior for a lot of working moms. Kids coming home from school to a locked house can safely rustle up a packet of Maggi if they were hungry.
New brands of instant noodles kept popping up but Maggi had its hold on the younger generation.Top Ramen, Yippee? Whatever!
My husband mentions Top Ramen here in the US back when he was doing his Masters degree and says he has had a boatload of them and never wants to eat another packet of noodles EVER!
I used to buy Maggi from the Indian store here but gradually that habit tapered off.
Fast forward a gazillion years and you've hit the Coronavirus Era.And what seems to be flying off the shelves at stores? Instant noodles.
I bought a four pack on a lark, the first time I went shopping during the stay at home period and then noticed that it was being rationed like toilet paper and eggs. I had never noticed instant noodles being a high demand item.
I brought it home and made it the usual way and my kids loved it. I bought some more the next time I shopped and this time MSG and chemicals and all sorts of things danced in my head and I skipped the tastemaker. I found a recipe for the dressing, on some funky website, and while it worked out fine, it still wasn't ..Maggi. I bought yet some more the next time around, but it is still sitting there, no takers yet. My kids aren't exactly instant noodle fans and I have not been able to use the excuse of being a working mom to let them have that unique experience of rustling up their own pack of noodles.
I haven't lived in India for almost twenty three years now and while there, haven't exactly gone hunting for Maggi noodles and so I am not actually in on the current avatars of Maggi. Oats Maggi? A gazillion other flavors? No clue.
But I can close my eyes and suddenly hear the rustle when you tear open that yellow packet. Waiting impatiently for the water to boil, breaking up the noodles in twos or fours and adding it to the water, sprinkling the taste maker and clockwatching for the next two minutes, foot tapping impatiently, and voila! It's done. Find a comfortable place to sit and savor that feast, that antithesis of everything healthy, but no your mind has cleared out any rational thought and gets ready for that hit of spice and gooey yumminess that will transport you to a different dimension. Nirvana!
I think a trip to the Indian store is in my horizon!!
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