Traditional Kerala Food

Funny title eehhhh 

Last week i woke up late as usual   I realized it only when i saw the time in my mobile.
Oh God, today also i am late, i need to move faster. Usually i skip my breakfast and go to office, thinking that i will pick up something from near by shops in office. But usually it never happens, when i reach office, its busy schedule as usual and i forget/don’t get time, to eat.

Lately i decided never to skip breakfast, and so this time also i decided to cook. I cooked something and while i was doing the cooking i was executing parallel threads of activities also, including brushing my teeth. Finally i got ready and also cooked my break fast and lunch in 1 hour, thinking that i will take my lunch box.
So far so good. Then while i was getting ready, i always had the thought in back of my mind, am late and i need to rush. So i took my break fast and started having it in a rush. In one minute i had half of it and left the remaining in the fridge and went to office.
While i was walking this thought came up in my mind, which became the title of this post.

Yes, we do take 2 hours to cook food. But how often you take 20 minutes in eating by enjoying the food, allowing the taste buds in your tongue to realize and recognize what you are eating. I feel never. Rarely we do that….

I have seen my mother, being a house wife, spending hours cooking food. She enjoys watching me have my food. That gives her pleasure. But most often, she forgets something or other to be served, because i am always busy (or acts busy) and am on top of her head. So she also forgets what all she cooked and tries to feed me in the limited time. And i complete the food in 2 minutes and run after washing my hands. I don’t remember even a single time i complimented her about the food she made or said thanks to her. Why is it so?

I noticed many times she eating her food, usually she will be having it walking, because she has a lot of things to do in home. She is busy with the regular house hold activities including cleaning, taking care of husband and kids and what all. She doesn’t even care about her self or what she is eating.

Well, Thinking along the lines and talking to couple of friends i realized its a common aspect everywhere. People don’t care much for what they are eating and how they are eating. Are they giving enough time for enjoying the food? No.. they are not.

Most of us can say, yes there are times when i enjoyed my food. When? Well, whenever i am watching TV or a sports channel or a good film, i take time to complete my food. Oh Oh!! Boy that’s news. Did you realized ever, that you are not enjoying the food you are eating, you are enjoying the film you are watching. Still you are not realizing what you are eating, your eyes are glued to the TV set or the paper in your hand, rather than anything else.

I remember one teacher saying in a class of Art of Living, have you ever realized or felt your breath. Everyone raised hands, yes i had. Because thats what is giving me life, if it stops i am not there..
The next question was, whenever you are filling in breath inside, whats the reaction of your stomach, is it coming outside or going inside? All sorts of commotion, different answers. Some how i thought logically, thinking that you are filling something in, so stomach should come out.

I was lucky, i made the correct answer. But it was not because i realized what i am doing. Since breathing air is natural, we forget to track the same. And we dont realize it is happening and it is an automatic action, with no reaction from the body. But then on her request, when i started feeling my breath, i could realize whats happening in my body, which all components of my body is participating in this function.

Similarly, the same thing is happening with food, we dont realize most of the times, what we are eating, and how we are eating. We dont see our mother spending hours to cook the best and tasty food for us, we just spend 2 minutes there and finish it off and move out. Its a routine stuff for us. Neither do we thank our mother/wife nor we motivate her by appreciating the dish.

We call ourselves busy, are we really busy? I dont think so, we are busy. We spend time to check mails, send forwards, chat with friends, see TV. That means we dont understand the importance of food or understand the importance of having it on time and enjoying it. On the contrary we say, i work all the time for bread and butter. waw…. nice thoughts, yes we work for that (may be). But we don’t spend 1/100 of our day to enjoy it.

Thats the beauty of life, we spend most of our time, running behind worldly pleasures, but never look or care about the basic things. For that matter we generally never care of the things which we accomplished in life. The reason being its a routine stuff for you and you rather feel that it was better if it would have been automated.
This is applicable in our daily life too. We can correlate this analogy with our routine life.

I think this gives you a feeling or an idea of what you missed all these days…. !!!!!!!!