Adventures in Paratha-Making, Comfort TV, Meditations for Mortals

It is mid-August and summer break- camps, pool-time, excessive popsicle consumption- is now over. The highlight of the past week was the start of the new school year. The kids are adjusting the their carpool schedules, new routines, new teachers in 4th grade (upper elementary) and 8th grade (last year of middle school). 

Another highlight of the week was that V and I went line dancing! It was a fundraiser for a local org, and my friend who is on the board talked me into buying tickets. I had no clue what line dancing was (other than it is a country thing) and now I know. An enthusiastic dance instructor taught us three different dances; there was a DJ and everything. It was great fun and I'd definitely do it again. 

Our youngest turned nine last month (I'll share his birthday cake next week) and V and I are giddy with new-found freedom because he's officially old enough to occasionally stay home with his big sister and play video games while we go out in the evening. It feels like a new phase of life. 

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I consider myself a fairly proficient Indian cook, but with one glaring gap- I am unskilled at making any of the Indian flatbreads like rotis, chapatis, naans, parathas, phulkas. Considering how iconic and central these breads are to most Indian cuisines (one's livelihood is literally called "rozi roti"), this is quite irregular! 

I wrote about my attempts in this post but 18 years later, roti-making remains elusive. To the consternation of several blog readers, I put rotis in the "buy it" pile in this post. I pleaded a lack of time when I used whole wheat tortillas to make kati rolls. You can see this has been an ongoing issue. A few tries over the years resulted in unpleasantly chewy rotis, and it just did not inspire me to keep trying. Lack of success leading to lack of attempts- vicious circle and all that. 

Last month, my sister (an expert roti maker) visited us for four days, and when we found ourselves with a free evening, she selflessly offered to spend the time making a couple dozen aloo parathas to stock my freezer. 

The parathas were great and we enjoyed them over several meals, and now I have a good bit of atta (fine whole wheat flour) left over from that episode. Time to give roti-making another go to use this flour up. I vaguely remembered reading that you can make very soft rotis by using boiling hot water to make the dough. And I also now own a stand mixer which is very convenient for kneading dough. Those were the two new things I tried.

This is the recipe I used, following the instructions quite closely but with much less oil in the dough. The dough came together quickly in the stand mixer (although I was unsure how to tell when it is kneaded enough- is there a trick?), and after resting the dough, I divided it into 12 balls and started rolling them out. 

Because I'm not good at rolling out perfect (or even imperfect) circles, I made a triangle paratha which I feel is a more forgiving shape. I lightly roasted the parathas on a cast iron griddle on my electric stove. They were incredibly soft and tasty. This feels different from all my previous attempts. I am sold on the boiling water dough. (There's some neat chemistry behind how hot water reacts with gluten in flour to make the resulting dough less chewy.)

We froze the extra parathas. At subsequent meals, we just pulled out a frozen paratha, sprinkled it with water on both sides (important to get a bit of a steaming effect) and put it into the air fryer at 350F for just 2 minutes. It puffed up and reheated beautifully, and was soft and flaky and fresh. I couldn't be happier with the results. I'm in disbelief, as a matter of fact. This is definitely the best flatbread I've produced in a long time. The question is, will I get these results consistently? Stay tuned, and please keep me and my rolling pin in your thoughts. I will report back. 

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Our neighborhood poem-of-the-week disseminator sent around a poem recently that I loved. It is called Prayer for Uninteresting Times by Brian Bilston (read it here.) It was written during the pandemic but boy, does it resonate today. 

A line in this short poem invokes the comfort of "a re-run of Murder, She Wrote". And I am definitely the kind of person whose idea of a perfect evening involves an adult beverage and a quiet evening of watching that exact show. (You can watch Murder, She Wrote free on the Tubi app). 

This is just one (but I must say, a particular favorite) of many cozy mystery shows I've enjoyed over the years. Other notable mentions: Midsomer Murders, Father Brown, Death in Paradise, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries.

Another one was Rosemary & Thyme- two women, Rosemary Boxer and Laura Thyme, meet as strangers, each reeling from a shattering life event, and quickly become friends and co-owners of a gardening and landscape design business. In episode after episode, they travel around as visiting gardeners, transforming picturesque gardens and solving murders. This show first aired during 2003-2006 and I remember watching it on PBS then or shortly thereafter, but I haven't seen it again for decades. Imagine my delight when I stumbled upon it on the free Tubi channel (it is also on the free Roku channel). It has been a joy rewatching this show. 

The other recent great comfort show discovery was The Great British Sewing Bee. This one is also free to watch here on the Roku channel. While my mother was visiting, she and my son and I happily watched many episodes together. This show is like Project Runway in the sense that it is a garment sewing competition with contestants eliminated in each round, but different in the sense that it is much more focused on home sewers and practical garments, and not on fashion designers and couture garments. It is like the Great British Bake-off in the sense that there are three rounds and different themes for each episode (round 1, you follow a pattern; round 2, you alter a garment; round 3, you design and sew a garment for a model), and in the grace and camaraderie of the participants, but different in the sense that you won't get a mad craving for sugary baked goods while watching it. 

I did get a mad desire to start sewing my own garments. I am starting very small. I've owned a sewing machine for years but have never progressed beyond simple projects. The Great British Sewing Bee is sparking dreams of doing more. So far, all I have done is tidied up my sewing space and altered two T-shirts that were too long. (Thanks to the great little video from a Tik-Toker who showed a neat trick to hemming T-shirts beautifully with a home machine.) 

Over the years, I have amassed a small collection of cotton block-printed fabrics and would love to sew simple little tops or skirts with them as a start. But garment sewing is intimidating. If you have any tips or resources to share, I'd love to hear them! 

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While browsing in the library new books section, I found the recently published Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. I like the author's work (he is a recovering productivity guru who now lectures about living in the moment), so I borrowed it and breezed through it. The book comprises a series of 28 chapters (designed to be read as a daily contemplation for 4 weeks, and not the way I binge-read it), about Burkeman's philosophy of imperfectionism or, in the author's words--

This is a book about how the world opens up once you realize you’re never going to sort your life out...

This book is relatable and fun and inspiring. The one confusing chapter for me was on looking for the life task. "A life task will be something you can do only by effort and with difficulty, the kind of endeavor that enlarges you rather than makes you feel immediately happy". I guess in my heart of hearts I feel like I have some kind of life task that I haven't identified yet, and this chapter is not helping me find it (LOL).

The book mentions something called "scruffy hospitality" and I realized that I practice this already! It means inviting friends into your home just as it is, without necessarily cleaning it any more than usual or cooking anything special; just letting them visit you and partake in whatever you happen to be making that day. 

Here's a taste of some other things from this book:

• We have limited time and limited control over that time. Once you stop struggling you get to relax and “play in the ruins”.
• We would prefer a sense of control, as captain of a superyacht, calm and in charge, but in fact, to be human is to occupy a little one-person kayak, borne along on the river of time.
• Insecure overachievers feel like they begin each day with a productivity debt which they have to pay off over the course of a day to justify their existence on the planet.
• Worry at its core is the activity of a mind attempting to picture every bridge that might be possibly crossed in future, then trying to figure out how to cross it. But most bridges we worry about never end up needing to be crossed at all.
• The trick to finishing things when the prospect seems overwhelming is to think of them as a series of small deliverables.
• If you want to get good at something, you should do it a lot, preferably more days than not.
• The point isn’t to spend your life serving rules. The point is for rules to serve life.
• We unconsciously assume that at some point we will make it to the phase of life when we won’t have an endless list of things to deal with. But life is an unending series of complications, so it doesn’t make any sense to be surprised by the arrival of the next one. Aspire not to a life without problems, but to a life of ever more interesting and absorbing ones.
• Be the kind of person who gets on with things, regardless of how inspired or fired up you happen to feel.
• Other people’s negative emotions are ultimately a problem that belongs to them, and you have to allow people their problems.
• People-pleasing isn’t even an especially effective way of pleasing other people.
• A commitment to clearing the decks leads inexorably to a life spent unendingly clearing the decks.
• You don’t matter much, yet you matter as much as anyone ever did. 

Do you practice scruffy hospitality or are you a more polished host? Do you have roti-making or garment-sewing tips for me? What have you been reading and cooking?