Off late I have been staying with a colleague of mine as a make-shift arrangement, as my company sponsored hotel accommodation had surpassed its day limits and I haven’t yet found a roof for myself yet. My colleague who is shortly planning to get settled has made this place a ‘proper home’ unlike the transit-camp like bachelors home. Every morning I used to wake up late shamelessly, and used to find him making some breakfast for both of us. Today was different, I woke up and the kitchen was waiting for some one to come and use it. My colleague had gone to his hometown for a ceremony. It was an early morning hunger and old habits die hard. Subconsciously my hand opened the refrigerator and found nothing but milk, water, jam nothing of which could be eaten as breakfast as it it. Ok I could get a pack of bread from the store down, if it was open. If you are planning to have bread in the morning, postpone your breakfast till atleast 11 am. That’s when the shops open here, take it or leave it – that’s Raipur for you! So bread-jam was out of choice, I raided the kitchen to find one packet of maggi, and I was unsuccessful. My tummy kept growling and I couldn’t think of something to keep it quite. I suddenly recalled, once as my colleague was making poha, I casually asked him, how is it made and he had told me the recipe like a quick tip. Being from Indore, poha came naturally to him. I had the entire kitchen with me and this was possibly the best time to experiment, there is no one to laugh! So I took the plunge and tried recalling and doing the steps –
1. Take some poha, salt, garam masala, haldi powder. Some? This is the most difficult aspect to start with, you don’t know exactly what is ‘some’. Is it a handful? 2 Cups, 1 teaspoon, pinch? You will just not know it unless it is made and eaten. The next time when you make it the ‘some’ changes and it keeps on changing after each attempt till you have mastered the art. Its like repeated iterations till you find the perfect unkown in an equation. (Ok if you dint get this, not your fault, we engineers have learnt a lot of useless stuff which we like to flaunt whenever we get an opportunity to relate it with real life. This was one of them!)
2. Wetten your poha and add ‘some’ garam masala, Haldi powder and Salt to it. Mix them well and you can already smell the masala which boosts your confidence.
3. Chop onions and green chilly, ignore the shape of onion pieces you have cut. It will never match your mom’s. So leave it like that, start liking it. Any ways its gonna go inside your tummy.
4. Take a tawa, heat it. Hell! Why isn’t the stove not burning? Tick, tick, tick! Failed! I bend down to see the cylinder knob. I look closely whether the position is really ‘close’ or ‘open’ and what is exactly close or open. This is what happens when you use the stove after a really long time. The last time you used it was when you had to make maggi when your mom had went out and you were hungry.
5. Back to the tawa. Carefully add drops of oil and let it heat till ‘some’ time. Now comes some audio part – Rai Fodni! This is something basic common denominator for most of the Indian food. I gave my mom credits for this as the mustard seeds fell from my hand into the oil. Add the chop onions and chilly to it.
6. Now add the wet poha to this tawa, stir it with some utensil, I don’t know what it is called. After doing this for a while, remove it from the stove and add some bhujia to it. (Atleast bhujia would be edible for sure, since I haven’t made it.)
Tadaaaaa! Hopefully I have made something reasonably edible. I prayed as I put one spoon of it in my mouth. I didn’t want to throw it in the garbage bin. And Voila! The poha tasted surprisingly good with a pinch of salt more than required, which can be forgiven. In case you actually read this recipe religiously just a warning: I was plain lucky!
