Cooking with Shona – as described by Anitra

Shona asked me to write a few words about the first day we spent cooking at her place. I say here and now that there are no few words to describe it; one could use a multitude of words and still not be precise. But having to render it down to a few words, I would pick would be spice, smell, taste. There is no such thing as brevity when cooking with Shona.

Most of us are doing good to have a spice rack, our Chef Wannabe, has Cabinets (yes that is plural), chock-full of spices. I am not talking about the powdered cinnamon, nutmeg, paprika… canned varieties that I grew up on; I'm talking about jar after jar of stuff like star anise, black cardamom, Japan chili peppers. Even commonplace seasonings, come an extraordinary forms: not cinnamon, but cinnamon bark; nutmeg shows up as the whole nuts; salt is sea salt. If you've ever seen one of these old movies of a witch's reagent shelves then picture that's our Shona spice pantry. And she knows how to use them all!

Just you try asking her for a recipe; she will comply oh so nicely, saying it's just a cup of this, teaspoon of that, a pinch of the other. However, when she puts it together in the precise measurements she first gave you she will add a handful more this, just a half cup extra of that, a few additional shakes of the other and something so far out in left-field, that wasn't in the original recipe, it leaves you wondering just what were we making. For example:
a cilantro mint sauce for Shona’s illustrious “Katti Rolls”, we start off with a bunch of fresh cilantro from the Asian market, a bundle of mint, a lemon and sour cream. When we started cooking Shona remembered she had some cilantro in the fridge to finish off, so we added it in; we blended it in with the mint and added the lemon juice (you got to see how Shona squeezes a lemon); I digress. She decides not to use the sour cream, but instead, yogurt; I can’t remember why. The yogurt isn't put in by any precise measurement, but by gosh and by golly. “It needs a little more lemon and a pinch of sugar” AND PREST-O CHANGE-O AND ALEC-KA-ZAM! Cilantro mint sauce, that was so delicious I was sampling it out of the container on the drive home with my bare finger.
But I tried making it at home on my own, and it just didn't have the same pizzazz.


-------Anitra

How about a cuppa tea?

Just because I grew up in a tea plantation, I am supposed to be some kind of tea expert. Truth is I don’t know much about tea, only that I drink a ton of it. Sometimes as much as 5 to 6 cups a day – fully loaded, full-bodied CTC Assam with milk and sugar. These are moments when time ticks slower, the soul lets out sigh and life becomes pondering moments. I see a miniscule fly stretch its gossamer wing to capture a sun diamond in its tip and notice the ocotillo has just sprung a new bud. Tea times are quiet times in my day, a small stretch that helps me level out before I head back to the computer to work on a design or off to a meeting.

Tea times are social times too. There are things you would tell a friend over a cup of tea, you would never tell otherwise. Tea talk is soul talk. All my friends say I remind them of teatime. Anitra swears she has a Pavlovian reflex to put the kettle on every time I call. In my childhood, the kettle hissed, teacups tinkled and the doorbell rang almost without stop.

If I am caffeine-buzzed all the time, I just don’t know it. I sleep like a baby at night and sometimes the last thing I drink before I go to bed is a cup of tea. I don’t think I am hopelessly addicted either. I have gone for days without tea and had no violent thoughts towards another human being or myself. I just miss it, like you would an old familiar friend.

As I sit here with my second cup this morning, the sun peeps over a big jagged rock and paints my patio with a big swatch of gold. I think to myself, La Dolce Vita. It’s the sweet life indeed.