View: When you start dreaming of anda bhurji, Desi style, its time to go home
In this, the component of the 'new' can also be replaced by settings and things to which you return after a gap. Excited and happy, you use both the limitations and advantages of the locally available materials to engage with whatever surrounds you.
As it is with art, it often is with food and cooking.
After a long immersion in desi food, when you reach a European place, especially one where there is no great presence of Indian raw materials, vegetables or spices, you find you have a beautifully blank and challenging canvas in the shape of someone else's western kitchen.
Suddenly, there is no paanch phoron, no bhindi or karela, and no decent goat meat to fall back on when considering what to cook. There's chicken, of course, gorgeously corn-fed with a covering of rich golden skin.
There is pork, beef and lamb of variety and quality you do not get at home.
There is fish and seafood, and then there are the usual suspects of eggs and butter. To go with these, you have foreign salads, capers, olives, and cheese.
You could, of course, trek across the big European city to desi dukaans, but why would you? This new world of foodery is your array of new shades of paint and new drawing materials that you must learn or re-learn how to use, and this — if you enjoy the challenge, this is extremely happy-making.
So, your cooking habits change across the weeks, and your palate shifts somewhat.
You go for months without daal, sabzi or roti; instead of kachha kachumbar, you delve into salad-making, splashing and slashing like Jackson Pollock with new combinations of dressing.
Despite the heat outside, you explore the joys of roasting stuff in the oven. Breakfast becomes a moment of deepest pleasure without once touching anything warm;
