Healing food for hard times

When the best way you know to show love is to cook, sometimes simple is best

Last night I went to my dear friend Rachel’s house for dinner. Her parents are visiting from Mumbai for the first time ever, which means we her friends were the very lucky beneficiaries of Rachel’s mother’s absolutely bananas Indian vegetarian home cooking. We feasted on light-as-air Gujarati-style papadams and fluffy steamed idli with a huge pot of sambar with plenty of curry leaves and eggplant and drumsticks (a.k.a. the new-to-me moringa plant, which I did not know you were supposed to scrape out of its fibrous casing with your teeth and not simply pop into your mouth whole lol). Grand discs of crisp, steaming dosa flew at us every 30 seconds from Rachel’s mother station at the stove, her hands deftly wielding the ladle that spread out the circles of batter on the griddle at precise intervals until paper-thin. While I have never made dosa, I immediately understand it is an art form you can devote a lifetime to perfecting, like pleating dumplings or knife-cutting noodles.