Chicken Makhani
Living in Quebec, trying to be a vegetarian family reminds me of my parents trying to be vegetarian in Kannur. Back then, we had a variety of neighbours. The locals, even the 'brahmins' could not eat a meal without fish of some sort. And then we had the 'Young' family next door. Irene and her husband whose name I have forgotton, who ate pretty much everything under the sun, and on the other side of the lane lived 'Swami' Jayan who made mystical concoctions of ginger ale and various other questionable ingredients and was somewhat of a mythical figure in town.
My parents tried in vain to keep us on a 'ayurvedic' ,'vadakkath' diet. To us, surrounded by the smells of various forbidden, delicious food, this meant 'bland and boring'. So, once we were older, my brother and I, 'popping over' to our neighbours at the opportune hour and being fortuitiously invited to stay for lunch, started tasting and enjoying non-vegetarian food. This meant that my parents started cooking meat at home. To be honest, they themselves had been craving the goods, as shown by the gusto with whiich the vegetarians plunged into the secret forbidden pleasurable world of cooking meat.
And now here in Montreal, I cooked Butter Chicken recently