Reviving this blog.

I have made an art of starting blog posts and not completing them. The number of drafts on my blog is WAY higher than actual published posts. Sigh, you live and learn I guess. A couple of week back, I had started yet another draft about reviving this blog. On one of my other blogs, I was writing about entering my thirties and in one post I wrote about getting back to blogging about food and recipes and things about cuisines that excite me. The next morning, on my daily morning call with my mother, she mentioned how a friend of hers asked if the Nayana Cariappa that blogs about Kodava food is her daughter. And the sucker I am for signs, in my head I immediately thought "this is it, I need to restart that blog!" Quite frankly, I have only written three posts on this blog and I need write so much more about the beauty that is kodava cuisine and I have so much more to share now. In the last couple of year since I started and stopped writing on this blog, I have discovered or rather re-discovered, not just the cuisine of Coorg, but the people and their culture, the land and it's lush beauty, it's forgotten folks dances and folk songs, the significance of the tiny celebrations in an otherwise devoid of ritual wedding & other ceremonies. In an effort to capture all that and to introduce to myself and to the world, I am expanding the scope of this blog to a lot more than just  kodava cuisine. I now intend to write about the kodavas and their culture, about food not only from coorg and india but food in general and much more. I'm excited about what I discover on this journey, where recipes merge with landscapes, where the roads lead not just to the estates & paddy fields of the kodavas, but to the breathtaking country that India is. The picture above is me taking off from a lovely AirBnb in Venice, but i have added it in here because it signifies this journey I am about to undertake with the 2.0 version of this blog. I'm also renaming it to Ainmané - more on that in an upcoming post.

One of my all-time favourite food shows is Highway On My Plate hosted by two lovely gentlemen :
Rocky and Mayur. I've spoken earlier on this blog about the love for food that my family in general possesses and  how fiercely they nurture this passion. But if there is one man that has taught me to appreciate good food and be grateful for a delicious meal, it is my grandfather - thatha - as I used to call him. That is not to say that the other members of my family do not have that same quality, although not as gorgeously expressed as thatha. My father shares the same passion, and right now as mom is preparing her lip-smacking mutton biryani, my father and i looked at each other like small kids with eyes glistening with immense anticipation of devouring that pot of deliciousness that my mother is making with so much love and care. It is he who introduced me to HOMP almost ten years back and since that day I have watched episode after episode of Rocky and Mayur traversing through Indian highways eating everything from Raj Kachori in Jaipur to Christmas Plum Cake in a bakery in Ooty. I've salivated watching them eat at local dhabas in the north and road-side "meals" places in the south. From the minute the episode started until the end with their mad "food quote" my family and I would be glued to the television, not moving at all, just in case we missed their description of the dishes as they dug into the beauty laid out in front of them. HOMP was the first of it's kind back in the day, when travel show hosts rarely went out to indian towns and cities showcasing indian cuisine and eating at restaurants and eateries that weren't super popular nationally or internationally but were love & frequented by locals.

Since then, there are many shows where folks travel to the interiors of India and sometimes in really tiny villages learning how to cook from a village grandmother over fire made with dung cakes - as rustic as it gets. But no one matches the enthusiasm and the love for food that one experiences on HOMP through Rocky and Mayur. The meat-eater Rocky and the vegetarian Mayur make a great team. Watching them talk and travel and eat reminds you of your own group of friends - some mad some sane, but all equal lovers of food and all things delicious. It's fun to watch them simply because they seem to be having so much fun themselves bringing all this to us and sharing all of their emotions associated with their travels and food. There have been many times when I have watched an episode again just because of the way they describe the dishes and the pleasure that reflects on their faces and in their banter when they are relishing these cuisines. My army upbringing related to their travels through the country and I could connect with the different locales and dialects and food and cultures that they showcased because I had been to these places and lived amongst these people and watching the show was a sort of homecoming for me. By the time I started watching the show we were kind of permanently based in Delhi, as i was completing high school and college - so I recounted and reminisced about my childhood travels by watching Rocky and Mayur take off week after week to a new part of the country.

I've grown since then - I've eaten at many renowned restaurants across the globe and sampled cuisines that have taken me to foodie heavens multiple times, but even today when I watch Rocky and Mayur eat a samosa chaat in Delhi - my mouth waters and I want to be there with them digging my eco-friendly wooden spoon into the eco-friendly bowl made from leaves, cut through the chutneys, the sev, the masalas and the dahi (yogurt) and pierce into the hot aalo samosas and see that vapour rise cutting through all of that mixture. When I visit mom and dad, and an episode of HOMP is playing on TV, we all still sit and watch them rate various restaurants and giggle on their very stupid but somehow funny jokes. They are in Australia right now and seem to be having the time of their lives - but their true love for food jumps out when they are in India, really. And I relate to that, I love my Kaya-Toast and Kopi in Singapore and I will not think of the calories when i eat a plate of chicken rice or when I bite into a gorgeous plate of ragu in Italy or a delicious burger in New York or a plate of goulash in Budapest - but as the fragrances of my mom's biryani wafts through my mom's kitchen everything else pales in comparison. This is the food that really makes my heart sing - and this is the food that I will mostly be sharing on this blog going forward. And I will also be sharing many more Rocky and Mayur stories, simply because they inspire me so much - they love what they do and do what they love and it shows. Also, I love their twitter handle.

I'll end this post with the promise of writing more often, and also a food quote from Rocky and Mayur :

"We should look for someone to eat and drink with, before looking for something to eat and drink"

Touche.