Dvase

Another lame post, be warned.

A Bangalore kid dreads asking the question "amma tindigenu?" - what's for breakfast? Because the answer invariably is chitranna, mosaranna, vangibath, pongal. All varieties of spiced rices. A way of using up the left over rice from previous meal.

We havyaka women are more altruistic - at least in this department. We reserve this left over cooked rice for ourselves. For lunch - to be savored with a lame TV serial and spoon of pickle and a bowl of curds.

But even our havyaka kids never ask "amma asarige entudu" - same question in our own dialect. Because they already the answer. It is always dosa - or as we prefer to call it - tellevu - a very thin dosa.

We eat dosa every day - excluding festivals. Festival mornings are supposed to be purer - we can not eat cooked rice for breakfast. Yes - dosa is also cooked rice and hence impure. Unless you grind it with red cucumber - ensuring that not a drop of water is added to the batter.

So we eat dosa - paper thin dosa each day. And how do you make these dosas very thin. Traditionally banana leaf was used. It would be cut, and then folded into a rectangle. This rectangle is used to spread the batter into a circle on the pan. Quite an art it is!.

Most of us - townsfolk  do not get banana leaves. So people  improvise - women use visiting cards, aluminum sheets  and of course my favorite - fanta cans cut into a rectangle.

And ideally this tellevu should be eaten with tuppa - bella. Ghee and jaggery - liquid jaggery. Again people don't eat ghee or jaggery as they are calorie conscious now a days. They use chutney or other side dishes.

Chutney is another story in our house. My husband does not like chutney or rather he does not like the taste of my chutney. So I try all possible permutations and combinations. I make white chutney with coconut and green chillies, green chutney with coconut and coriander leaves, red chutney because of red chilies, groundnut chutney powder, roasted gram chutney powder, coconut chutney powder. Yes, we improvise. But I never, never, never ever serve dosa with pickle. No.

I was prompted to write this post after watching a stand up comedy about dosa. And the comedian was right - if we do not eat dosa for 3-4 days, we miss it terribly and may go into a deep withdrawal.

But in our trip to US, we thankfully did not have to face this tragedy. We bought dosa batter, there in chicago and made fresh crispy dosas each day.  Isn't it omni-present? Another divine quality!

But what really surprises me is which Einstein would have thought for the first time of mixing rice flour with dal flour and then spreading it on a metal plate and cook it. How on the earth would they have come with such an idea? Unimaginable!!