khicheri
Last night Yoko and I practiced music and she made a delicious Indian dish called khicheri. Incidentally, it’s a specialty of Mumbai, where a few of the fanciest hotels in the country’s entertainment and cinema capital were recently subject to an itchy outbreak of terrorist attacks. I doubt any of the guests were served humble khicheri, but it interesting that we ate a regional specialty only days after that region made global headlines.
I’d never had it, but had heard of it, mostly because Joanna says she used to date someone named Khicheri, after the dish. He is some kinda Hare Krishna or guru-cult child. You’d be surprised how many people you may know who grew up in guru cults. They don’t all have obviously weird names, either. My mom was a pretty die-hard Ram Dass fan, (aka Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary’s right-hand man and devout prophet of LSD) and a few friends of mine grew up in the Meher Baba community which has centers all over the country. Anyway, Khicheri the man was one such individual, so I’m told.
It’s one of those foods that is unquestionably healthy and wholesome, and is prized in ayurvedic cooking as very easy to digest.
It started with soaking basmati rice and lentils, mung or adzuki beans (we had adzuki) in water for an hour or more. Then you chop up some root veggies and fry them in ghee with spices, add some water, the rice and legumes, and cook til it’s all a big mess. The soaked rice cooks down into a sweet pasty porridge which basically was my favorite part of the whole thing. I ended up sort of picking around the veggies and just going for that. So much for mature eating habits.
I think the ghee is key here. Ghee is this weird semi-opaque clarified butter, which is simmered after clarifying, and which is often made of buffalo milk in India. Other equatorial cuisines use varieties of clarified butter, such as Moroccan “smen” and Iranian “yellow oil.” This makes a lot of sense, since these rendered butters can keep for a long time without refrigeration before turning rancid and can be more easily used for frying and sauteeing than fresh butter. They also have mysterious health properties and taste delicious. 
Khicheri is the kind of food one should eat when one is a)ill b)cleansing or c)a spiritual vegan. Evidently it is not the best thing to eat when you are very hungry, have PMS and are in wintertime nesting/fattening mode, since we blew through several bowls each and I was craving pizza by the time I got off the subway in my neighborhood. Unfortunately the pizza joint was closed, so I had to scurry home and make due with some weird-ass pasta salad leftovers from this weekend’s invasion of our apartment by a group of friendly neighborhood folks who needed a space to gather in. I nuked the pasta salad and put parmesan cheese all over it, only to learn that the creamy reddish sauce was not vodka sauce or alfredo, but mayonnaise mixed with juice from the halved cherry tomatoes.
It was actually kind of good. Hot mayonnaise pasta salad seems like something only perverts and elderly Depression survivors would even consider eating, but I was feeling frisky, and more than a little economically depressed. There was a car alarm blowing out in front of the house, I Robot on the TV, and a sense of impending adventure and excitement about whose origins I can only speculate…
