The gnarly senior citizen with the white beard stands impassively on the pavement outside my window with a sign that reads, “Only 119 days left to judgement day.” On a walk downtown yesterday, I saw a panhandler with a sign propped against his begging bowl. It said: “Need money to fight aliens and impress girls.” A little further, I see poems carved into the pavement. Walking through the campus of the University of California, Berkeley (or “Cal”, for short)—where I am presently on sabbatical, teaching for a semester—I stop to read one of many steel-bronze plates embedded in the ground; this one proclaims that the air above this plaque is “subject to the jurisdiction of no nation”.
At Berkeley, home to more Nobel laureates than perhaps any other place on earth and more restless young people than anywhere in the US (400 were tear-gassed and arrested last month), there are signs everywhere—droll, informative, never boring. But the signs that interest me most are posted in the Berkeley Bowl, a hulk of a supermarket, half the size of the Wankhede. I know the US is the land of choice, and I’ve seen some big supermarkets, but this place drives me to disbelief.
Produce heaven: The Berkeley Bowl supermarket in California, US, stocks everything from 10 types of garlic to ‘pesticide-free heirloom tomatoes’. Photo by Jeff Lockard.
There are signs for six varieties of eggplant (brinjal)—Japanese, Indian, Thai, Mexican, Italian and another I can’t remember; at least 10 varieties of garlic, including black garlic (a type of fermented garlic used in some Asian food); as many of chillies, tomatoes and, oh, every fruit, vegetable and herb you can think of (from lime leaf to curry leaf) and many that you cannot. There are ready foods—I snap up turkey loaf and eggplant lasagna—and wines and spices and a diversity of things. As one blogger noted, the Bowl has “aisles packed with fair-trade cocoa, bulk bins overflowing with every type of spelt pretzel, and a produce section that’ll make you slap your mama”.
A visit to the Bowl and $100 (around Rs4,900) lighter, I am ready to stop eating out at Berkeley’s endless array of restaurants and eager to fire up the gas stove in the little kitchen of our rambling, basement flat on a quiet Berkeley hill overlooking San Francisco Bay.
No one is more delighted than the wife and my garrulous 21-month-old daughter.
The wife, a finicky vegetarian, loves each of my experiments with the bags of organic produce (everything in Berkeley seems to be organic). Let’s see, I’ve cooked something different for almost every meal: cabbage tossed with garam masala and sesame seeds; couscous mixed with lemon juice (the lemon plucked from the landlord’s tree), tomatoes, baby spinach, brie, soy and pepper; steamed beans stir-fried with slivered yellow pepper and finely chopped galangal.
There’s no help, of course, but dishing out these meals takes little time. Everything is clean. The salad is “triple washed, so you don’t have to”, as the packets say, though one friend in Michigan darkly warns of the time a dead frog turned up in one such packet. “Good thing you’ll eat anything,” she says. That’s true, I will. I am gleeful as I toss fresh salads every meal, the latest with edible flowers. What’s that? How many varieties of edible flowers? I counted eight.
I am surprised Americans eat out as much as they do when there is this cornucopia at hand. On some days I cook breakfast, lunch and dinner and go to work or ramble in the park or playground with the daughter. The kitchen is littered with bottles of wine—cheap ($10 on average; $6 will get you a good bottle) and infinitely superior to the sludge at home.
The daughter, who has adjusted to a life without the stuffed parathas and adulterated milk of home in Bangalore, devours a brown-egg omelette every morning, along with a large slice of Mexican papaya and a cup of blueberry yogurt. For dinner, she struggles along with two roasted chicken legs, banana and milk. Today, I stuffed the skin—chicken legs without skin are hard to find—with garlic and marinated the drumsticks with soy, pepper, salt and cinnamon powder.
As for me, I make do, whipping up something for myself after the girls are fed. The day before I had wild Atlantic salmon, pan-fried with a miso-ginger marination. Yesterday, I had spicy, herbed Italian sausage. Much to my displeasure, I had to share both the salmon and sausage with the daughter who yells “Me! Me!” whenever I eat, convinced that I reserve the best for myself. Today, I intend to hide from her the lean, beef keema, which cooked on an open stove within 15 minutes.
One of those signs carved into a pavement downtown jokes how children born in California emerge in the “lotus position”, a reference to the preponderance of yoga, and turn vegetarian— this is the only city in the US that appears to have vegetarian Chinese restaurants.
Well, my child obviously has not seen that sign.
I log on to my Twitter feed to check the latest signs from the Bowl. They tell me of “pesticide free heirloom tomatoes”, pineapples from Costa Rica, Peruvian mangoes, and that I better rush if I want to the catch the end of the California stone-fruit season.
Where’s that bus? As long as I am in California, I will follow the signs.
Stir-fried zucchini and baby spinach
Serves 2
Ingredients
2 tsp Chinese sesame oil (try til oil, though I am not sure it is the same; or stick to olive oil)
2 tsp sesame seeds
1 tsp pepper, freshly ground
2 tsp garlic, finely chopped
1 tsp ginger, cut into thin slivers
3-5 tsp soy sauce
1 large zucchini, sliced into half, lengthwise, then cut into halves
2 handfuls of baby spinach (hard to find in India, hard to substitute with regular palak, try pak choi or steamed beans instead)
1/4 red pepper (capsicum, chopped into fine slivers)
Juice of 1/2 lemon (optional, do not replace with lime)
Salt to taste
Method
Gently heat the sesame or olive oil. Drop in the sesame seeds, and wait till they pop. Add garlic and toss till lightly brown. Add the zucchini and stir-fry for a minute or two (the zucchini should remain firm but not crunchy). Add the soy sauce and toss for a minute. Add salt, then spinach in handfuls. Keep tossing till the spinach reduces, then add the slivered red pepper. Toss for a minute. Add the ginger and toss for final a minute before taking off the stove. Stir in lemon juice, sprinkle the fresh pepper and serve hot.
Salmon with pepper and soy; or sesame oil and red-chilli powder
Salmon is a fish with firm flakes and a strong flavour of its own. You really don’t need to add much.
Serves 1-2
Version 1
Ingredients
2 large pieces of salmon, 1-inch thick
2 tsp black pepper, freshly ground
4-6 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp olive oil
Salt to taste
Version 2
Ingredients
2 large pieces of salmon, 1-inch thick
1 tsp red-chilli powder
3 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp sesame oil
Salt to taste
Method
Marinate the salmon, in either case, with the ingredients mentioned. An hour is enough. Fry in a non-stick pan (adding a tsp of oil) on medium to low heat until the salmon is lightly browned and cooked through.
Cabbage tossed with sesame seeds and garam masala
Serves 2
Ingredients
1/2 cabbage, shredded
2 tsp sesame seeds
1 tsp garlic, finely chopped
1/4 tomato, finely chopped
1/2-1 tsp garam masala
Juice of 1 lemon
2 tsp olive oil
Method
Heat olive oil in a non-stick pan, splutter the sesame seeds. Add garlic and stir for a minute. Add the cabbage and toss for a minute or two, or until it begins to soften. Add the garam masala and mix well. Add the tomato. Stir in the lemon juice. Do not overcook.
Samar Halarnkar is consulting editor, Mint and Hindustan Times. He is presently a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. Write to him at ourdailybread@livemint.com
Also Read | Samar’s previous Lounge columns