Hemantha Kalam - 67 'Carbonised dish/es'

Around the Valentine’s Day this year, one of the popular and highly visible restaurants in Chennai came out with a novel dosa called ‘Black Dosa’. For the uninitiated, a dosa is a south Indian belly filling meal type snack that is basically made of pulses and rice batter, fried on a little oil, to be crispy and in a circular shape. It is made in many varieties depending on the fancy of the chef and ingredients available in stock.

But ‘Black Dosa’ is touted to be different, as it is considered to be a ‘mourning dosa’ for the singles who couldn’t be smart or foolish enough (depending on one’s perspective) to latch on to a partner. This is considered to be a carbonised dosa made of the usual ingredients added with activated charcoal (whatever that means – the only activated charcoal that I ever knew of was that which was burnt and reduced to cinders/ash finally). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1F-q_JztMc

Picture Courtesy: Google Search

Apparently, quite an amount of research was taken up before finalising on this gem. Now I wonder why did they have to do that? They should have simply asked my dear wife! She would have helped them in a jiffy.

At home, as the division of labour has been by and large clearly demarcated during the COVID-19 lock-down, cleaning, peeling, dicing, cutting vegetables et cetera and later the dish-washing is under the supremacy of yours faithfully. The most important processing chores are in the command of madam.

To my luck (or chagrin?) again it is with a raw banana. Of late, it does appear that my time has come to renounce the banana curry altogether. I peeled a rather large sized single banana and diced them into 96 pieces. Now this dicing is also a bit tricky.

Having been travelling in Andhra Pradesh & Telangana (AP & T) , Kerala and Tamil Nadu (TN), where usage of Banana in cooking is extensive, I noted (by seeing and also by tasting) that the sizes of the diced banana varies from state to state and as the size varies, so do the number of diced pieces per banana. I haven’t come across the usage of banana much in the places I travelled in Karnataka except as fried chips and so I am not including that in here, now.

If you care, given below is a comparative table; but with a caveat – I am not to be held responsible for the accuracy of the size or the numbers of the diced chunks.

So, the above research easily tells you that in Kerala the pieces tend to be chunkier.

Now getting back to the story, my wife prefers the size of the banana pieces to be like mutton kheema, meaning making the 96 pieces I had diced to be, should have been at least 192 or preferably 384.

So fuming on seeing the ‘giant’ size of the chunks diced out by me, dear wife put the wok out onto the burning stove and along with some oil, all the chunks were transferred into the wok for a frying. 15 minutes of some Bhakti channel viewing on the TV put paid to the curry by carbonising of the pieces on one full side. In between tut tutting, all the pieces were turned about in the wok like an enmeshed cake and another 15 minutes on the mobile chat with some friend or sibling later, ensured the successful carbonisation on all sides of all the pieces of the raw banana. Both the curry and the wok are carbonised to a superlative level.

The end result is that not only that I had to eat the carbonised banana dish, but later also had to use all my arm power and ingenuity in cleaning the dish (wok). Sigh!    

So long until the next cleaning time! 

Krutagjnatalu (Telugu), Nanri (Tamil), Dhanyavaadagalu (Kannada), Nanni (Malayalam), Dhanyavaad (Hindi), Dhanyosmi (Sanskrit), Thanks (English), Dhonyavaad (Bangla), Dhanyabad (Oriya), Gracias (Spanish), Grazie (Italian), Danke Schon (Deutsche), Merci (French), Obrigado (Portuguese), Shukraan (Arabic), Shukriya (Urdu), Bohoma Sthuthiyi (Sinhalese) Aw-koon (Khmer), Kawp Jai Lhai Lhai (Laotian), Kob Kun Krab (Thai), Dankie (Afrikaans), Asante (Kiswahili), Maraming Salamat sa Lahat (Pinoy-Tagalog-Filipino), Tack (Swedish), Fa'afetai (Samoan), Terima Kasih (Bahasa Indonesian & Malay), Tenkyu (Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea), Malo (Tonga) and Vinaka (Fiji).

Hemantha Kumar Pamarthy

Chennai, India