Roosting Roosters

My chicken have come home to roost!

Seriously, the farm began sounding like a real farm the day Annie Cariappa brought Vito and Maria Cocklioni over. Of course, she didn't know that would be their names, she just knew them as her noisy naati kolis. But Zui was watching The Godfather Trilogy - Director's cut that season and the rest is history. 

There is quite nothing like the sound of a crowing rooster to make a yard, Old McDonald’s own. Maria laid 13 eggs that ended up in 5 full grown chickens – 1 hen and 4 roosters. Shankaramma’s standing complaint is that this farm spawns only male children. No eggs, no milk, they serve no purpose at all, sell those damned bulls, she pleads, but we just look at Chinna, (the latest in our stream of male spawn) his kind eyes and can't imagine selling him to an unknown future. At some point though, this will have to stop. Lakshmi will have to be kept away from the bulls. Maybe we should acquire another little female calf.

The chickens, meanwhile, have made the wall near the outdoor shower their space. They sit there looking picturesque all day. In the night, they make a flappy, short flight upwards and roost in the trees. 

Notice the number of combs? It'll be a short while before the rooster fights begin. Maybe I'll get some guinea fowl and geese to counter these.

Kothaiah got married yesterday so the whole family is away in Nellore leaving us in charge with help from Narsamma and Narsappa from the village. Yes, they share a name and are very happy to do so.

This morning, I found Anjali (the dark pony) with 4 feet of barbed wire caught in her tail. Try as I might, I couldn't get it out. Everytime I grabbed the wire she ran and I had to let go before the barbs ripped through my palm. Eventually, Narsaiah got it out. Next mission was to get all three horses into their paddock to prevent more of the same happening. It took about 45 minutes and the joint efforts of three of us - Narsaiah, Konarak and me. Call as we might, the horses just ignored us and went about grazing on the new grass that the rains have brought.  No amount of cajoling worked. Eventually Konarak brought out some Amul cheese and a tomato, imagining the horses like pizza, I assume. They ignored the cheese but the dog's got at it pronto. The tomato had better chances but suddenly Zara began bucking and running causing me to run too. Noorie finally walked into the paddock, having responded to my dha dha dha sounds and not to the tomato. Anjali in her short tempered way, followed and got chased a while by Noorie. Zara took sometime, but eventually and most huffily, she walked in too. Phew. I need a glass of wine.

Farm Song: Peacocks and Cicadas

Sunset at Infinite Souls Pic: Chris Burchell

Just after the last full moon, we sat out beneath the big banyan, exhausted and happy, the trees mad with prescient rain-scent, night-excitement and insect-song. Check the crickets, I said and Chris said No, they're cicadas. The crickets just chirp but the cicada make the full on tree hum. And since there are no coincidences, this morning: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/06/songs-of-the-cicada.html

As it happens on lazy Sundays, one thing led to another and I found, lo and behold, an FB group working on photographing and identifying Indian cicadidae. Beautiful, noisy little musicians of the insect world, J.G.Myers wrote of them in his book Insect Singers: "It will not therefore surprise one to find the greatest musical artists of the insect world among its deepest drinkers."

Further, his second chapter is on the appearance of cicadas in Art, Mythology and Literature. Aristophanes, who will appear again shortly, mentions them in The Birds:

"But in flowery meads I dwell

Lingering oft in leafy dell

When the inspired cicadas gladness

Swelling into sunny madness

Filleth all the fervid noon

With its shrill and ceaseless tune."

Aw...

No affection lost there. Perhaps they kept him up, on hot summer nights, with their endless search for sex and drink, those damned cicadas.

One time during the rains some years ago, after many a Dionysian revel, Chalam was snoring about as loud as the thunder and we spent the night poking him with bamboo and chucking pillows at him, to no avail. The next morning he woke up and has complained since about the frogs in the pond and the racket they made. "Brekekekex ko-ax ko-ax brekekekex...."they went on all night long, never making it to Hades, never bringing back Euripides, just going at it, hammer and tongs, in the pond.

"Brekekekex ko-ax ko-ax....

When the revel-tipsy throng, all crapulous and gay,

To our precinct reeled along on the holy Pitcher day, 

Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax."

Aristophanes again, observer and purveyor of all things natural and unnatural. Aeons ago, in The Valley School, my students performed The Frogs chorus one moonlit night around a different banyan tree.

Pic: Chris Burchell

We have another celebrity noise-maker at the farm, Pavo Christatus or the Indian Peafowl. Mornings are wild with their calls, but run as I might, I never get more than a sight of a blowzy beige and brown peahen, occasionally low-flying from one tree to another. Never have I seen that man bird, not a tail feather nor blue strut in sight. This causes me no end of wonder and pissed off-edness. When Arunchala and yes, lots of Auroville is crazy with peacock, how come I don't see them at the farm? When peacocks just laze around the roofs of the ashram at Thiruvanamalai, how come none deign to visit my cottage? When I have seen, with my own very eyes, those vain critters preen in front of a one way mirror studio door in Auroville, why the hell won't they show here? And yet I hear their keening cry so often...

Maybe I should do as Hanumanthappa says and scatter ragi in the lower fields and then rise at 4am to watch them feed. "Mai-yooo" their call goes, onomatopoeic. Mayur.

When Zui was a month old, we were in the Auroville old Visitor's Centre cafe listening to Debiprasad Ghosh play his magical sarod to bring in the new year. Later, drinking ginger-lemon inside we experienced a strange sound phenomenon. Tables scattered all over the cafe beneath the vaulted roofs of the Visitor's Centre, and we could hear, utterly clearly and intimately, conversations several tables away from us.  Our own possibly wandered away to entertain another table. All these many years later, sitting on the verandah at the farm, we hear Zui and Siddharth having a conversation on the hill. 45 minutes away from us through bramble and briar and then up the metamorphic buttresses and outcrops of neighbouring Savandurga.

Another unusual sound was once heard in the very wee hours. Chalam and Johnson, having said bhum Shankar most fervently, were off on a walkabout. The next day they reported a tale of fear and mystery; of foxes and wild dogs circling the farm and passing calls between them like football players. A high pitched, thin sound that volleyed from side to side, now here, then gone, then re-appearing on the diagonal side. We wondered if it was the owls on the tamarind tree, or perhaps Puck looking for some Love-in-Idleness, but they were certain this wasn't an avian sound.

Besides these and the cacophany from the parrots on the young banyans, all we have is the morning bird song. And Nagamma talking to Sankaramma from 3 inches away. Not much else. No traffic or cell phones. The butterflies don't make much noise.

Pic: Chris Burchell

There are other seasonal man-made sounds: the nightly singing when a stray farmer sleeps in his field to keep the wild boar away from his crop, Rame Gowda's radio that he occasionally leaves on to keep away a wandering elephant, the sss-sss-thump-thump of disco bhaktigeete via loud speakers of the temple in Sevanagar and the dull blasts of greed and dynamite that tell me with misplaced authority that these beautiful hills and their resident cicadas and peacocks are on borrowed time.

Blogging from Germany: Of Spargel, Waldbeeren and Baerlauch

In Germany I could easily eat sausage. No problem. One lovely smoky little kielbasa, one grilled weisswurst with sweet mustard and my 10 year meat famine would be done for. 10 years of vege...oops, pescetarianism down the tubes just cause of one nice porky wurst. Sigh...

But I hold out because of all the divine plants and herbs and berries that the German spring has to offer, Spargel, Waldbeeren and Baerlauch being my favourites. And Waldmeister ofcourse, for the delicate grassy magic it makes of a jug of chilled white wine.

Spargel was the first of the trio that we met, on a cool spring evening, in Credi (our set designer) and Anne's garden. Anne had a made a giant pot of boiled spargel and new potatoes. I think there was also a tomato tart and salad. But for me, it was all about the spargel. Dunked in melted butter, some juice squirted out of a lemon and....heaven! Not for nothing is this ivory-white chubby asparagus, virgin, untouched by the sun, called Frühlingswonne or Springtime Delight. A taste so subtle that anything else would kill it, and really, a sensualist's treat: dip, lick, suck, chew. It's no wonder it is also reckoned to be an aphrodisiac. People eat it with Hollandaise, (much like it's chlorophyll tinged relate, green asparagus) with pasta, in quiche, salad and so on. But for me, nothing's better that boiled spargel. Perhaps sometime with some shaved Grana Padano, and that's it.

Waldbeeren or wild berries are omnipresent in Germany. A sour mix of purple and red, tiny berries sourced in the woods; fairy-sized blackberries, rose hip, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, hawthorn... Mix them with natural yogurt or muesli, they make the prettiest cheesecake or panna cotta topping, lovely as a compote with plain vanilla cake. I even had a voluptuous velouté of spargel with sundried waldbeeren that was quite exquisite.

Now if spargel and waldbeeren are the girly-girls of the German springtime, you couldn't find a wilder punk rocker than Baerlauch or Bear's Garlic. Also known as wild garlic or ramson, the treat here are the leaves. You've got to be brave, 'cause this one is seriously strong. It looks like it could be a lilly, but rub the leaf on your palm and sniff... no lilly of the valley, this! It grows wild in damp woodlands and in ditches and makes a beautiful, robust, really different pesto. No basil, just baerlauch. I haven't seen it in India, so if anyone has, please tell me where to get some!

Wild Garlic Pesto

1 large bunch of wild garlic, washed

1 small bunch of parsley, washed

60gms pine nuts, toasted

60gms parmesan cheese

150mls olive oil (no need for extra virgin)

squeeze of lemon/lime juice

salt and pepper to taste

Method

Place all the ingredients into a food processor apart from the olive oil and blitz for a minute or two then slowly pour in the olive oil until blended.

Waldmeister! ah....The infusion of this herb (Woodruff in English) in white wine resulting in the delightful Maibowle is one of those eternal matches. Bogey and Bacall, Raj and Nargis.....waldmeister and Reisling. Reminiscent of la fée verte, but lighter, not so scary.

Apparently Johann Strauss II wrote a lesser known operetta called Waldemeister, but that takes me nowhere. This much I know, all of the above quite made up for the sorry glutenfrei Tofuwurst I tried to cheat my taste buds with. 

Liminality

I've never known this feeling before, except perhaps at international airports. It came upon me like a wave on January 1st 2013 and hasn't subsided. Like burrowing into a rabbit hole and staying put. Hesitant, tremulous and yet feeling on the verge of something new. With Liz Lemon I said "Yes to life, yes to love, yes to staying in more!"

Liminality. That's what it is. From the Latin līmen, meaning 'threshold'. A state of 'in between-ness', so to speak. To exist between states...between solid and liquid? What's that? Like jelly? Yes, no, maybe, ok. It's the feeling in between something and something else topped with a sound helping of the between-ness of  somewhere and somewhere else. Whaddyatalkinaboutgoddammit... Ok, this -

We are currently living in a fragile space between the city and the farm, between 58 St.Mark's Road and Infinite Souls. And now I damned well understand the meaning of liminality and airports have got nothing on this, baby.

Evenings we sit in the garden, lit by the fairy lights and stars, drinking and talking, remembering. By daylight we memorize precious views.

1. The one of Mrs.D'Mello's gabled roofs and her avocado tree
2. The one down our lane where Ramani used to sit, where Geeta watered her tulsi plant, where Mrs. George peered out at us from behind her curtains
3. The one of the bamboo through the alcove and our bedroom window
4. The one of the roof and beams above our studio and soundproof room
5. The one of the tiles of the attic roof that I can't think of without wanting to weep for the quantities of beauty and rapture that went down under those tiles
6. The one of Zui's pink attic wall with black roses stenciled on and Jimi Hendrix peering through his smoke
7. The one of the holy archways created by the Pink Cassia, the Eucalyptus and the Christmas tree
8. The one of Barny parking his Suvega and walking in the driveway "Hi Patta...I've got some whiskey for you from the Army Canteen."
9. The one of the Lovely Room with its blue and white stripes...through the kitchen French doors
10.The ones that only Kuki can see: of Mrs Doherty and her potted cactii, of Gunboard Jack and his motorbike, of the Vedamanikam's and their girls, of the rikshaw man who parked his rikshaw in the garden and in exchange drove Grandma Lil to Bowring Institute to play cards, of Powell Thatha's roasts hanging in the kitchen

The dogs rush around our legs saying to us "But we'll be there. We'll form the bridge between the old and the new. We'll love you as always, unconditionally, yadda yadda woof woof."

We'll be gone, dear home. September's round the corner. We've loved every pore of you. We loved you in the winter when you were at your beguiling best, dressed in Santa curtains and plum cake. We loved you as we lay hot and desiring electricity, afternoons of the summer load shedding. We even loved you at your worst, wet and flooded during the rains, walls damp, mildew filling cupboards and making a mockery of our books and paintings. We are melded to you. But we'll be gone. Would that you go peacefully too.

In the rains...
Pic credit: Lekha Naidu

A Series of Unrelated Events

The team from The Concerned for Working Children and the Saturday morning batch of Theatre Lab began shooting The Voice Bhootha On Saturday 2nd February 2013. They all drove in together with Prudence, the canine star of the show. By the time they arrived and Om declared that he was starving and Nagamma and Shankaramma managed to rustle up their unique variety of jungle eggs (scrambled with curry leaves and chillies) and toast and all the kids had eaten, kissed Prudence, fed her Mixed Fruit Jam, got sticky, got washed and then got into costume...it was 10am. Oh well.

The first sequence involved a bunch of shots in the fruit orchard with Kaya and Sharanya doing a scene around the trees. Om and Siddhanth were armed with Handycams and got busy documenting behind the scenes stuff. 10 takes later it was blisteringly hot and Yash declared, brightly and loudly, that he was bored. So I delivered him into the able babysitting hands of Thirpal who gave him a stick and got him to start whacking the huruli that was drying in the round rehearsal space.

Sonakshi and best buddy Prudence

Then there was Siddhanth who had to be shoved up a tree (push by Santosh, pull by Kutta) for his Bag-Snatching scene. The twins, Sanjana aka Dottyamma and Shivanka aka Juttamma, messed around in their matching skirts and beads while trying to retrieve the bag. The whole while Kritya whinged and whined that she wanted to be up the tree herself. Sonaskshi entertained herself with Prudence and the teenagers...well, they're unintelligible and communicate in grunts and giggles, essentially a 4 member law unto themselves... so we just ignored them.

Resting between shots

Learning Sign from the boys from Association of People with Disability

50% of the teenagers who grunt and giggle

By the evening we were a large crowd including two guys from Association of People with Disability who were there to teach the kids Sign Language, 5 members from the CWC team, Nikhil Bharadwaj who would play the Police Constable, 10 kids, Shankaramma, Thirpal and me. In this way day turned into night and night turned into Sunday and Kavya arrived with 10 more actors from CWC and a box of brownies. Thus our numbers grew...

'Wherefore art thou Romeo...'

The PC's hat and stick

Shooting the "Waiting for a Bus" scene

Setting up for the roadside scene

Waiting for the bus...

Police Constable Nikhil Bhardwaj

Still waiting...

Kutta prepares...(just before he heads off to the Kumbh Mela)

Ashwathi directs

PC Nikhil chats with Santosh and Ashwathi...

...and rescues Ridhi 

Marching forward...

....the Child Brigade arrives

Best Friends Forever

Hanging out in costume

More hanging out...

Juttamma

Stick Insect

Prudence in costume

Consider this....

About 10 days ago, three elephants graced our farm. This in itself is not unusual, especially now, in the dry, dry season. But this time they had wandered right up to our cottage and there was dung besides the pond. Thirpal said there were probably two cows and a calf and that they came by at 12 midnight. I have no idea how he knows this for sure as he falls asleep by 7.30pm and is terrified of stepping out of his cottage alone, but still.

Bamboo Flowers
Photo Credit: Bakki Kudva

Photo Credit: Bakki Kudva

Elephant dung near the pond...

The day after the kids left I was walking around the farm with Viju chikki, Vidu chikki, Arun Uncle and Bakki Uncle when we came upon something unusual hanging from the bamboo. At first we thought it was a nest of some sort. Wasps or gnats perhaps. But on closer examination we found it was efflorescence - the bamboo was in flower. I had a vague memory that this was a very rare occurrence resulting in bamboo rice and meant something, but what, I had no idea. Perhaps elephants like the smell of bamboo rice the way the bears come for the sickly scent of borum and jackfruit?

Google to the rescue and sure enough. Bamboo only flowers under very rare circumstances, usually at the end of their life cycle and when there are climatic or soil changes that trigger the efflorescence. Thus both in India and China. bamboo flower is seen as a curse, an indication of bad days ahead. The logic for this is that bamboo, food of the elephant, dies on flowering, causing the subsequent starvation of elephant populations. Also, the bamboo rice attracts in droves the elephant's vahana, the rat, and this leads to the destruction of the farmer's crop.

Check out Shalini's wonderful article on Bamboo Rice and cooking with it in Coorg...

http://www.acookeryyearincoorg.com/?p=1129

Talking about food (I've written about this before) can only only only bring to mind my three chikkis: Sowju, Viju and Vidu. Amma and her three sisters talk about food all the time and this weekend we had the truly spectacular pleasure of having all of them and their respective husbands stay with us at the farm. I told you our numbers just kept growing, much to Nags and Shanks delight. The idea of my chikkammas as well as Amma being at the farm simultaneously was causing them to spaz at regular intervals. Of course lots of food was cooked, could you possibly expect anything else?! From Amma's superb Prawn Biriyani to the unbelievably simple delights of wood roasted sweet potato and melting butter under a starry sky. But the meal that had everyone gobsmacked was cooked by Nags and Shanks for Tuesday's lunch:

• Massaopu
• Ragi Muddhe
• Gongura pachdi
• Alugadde pallya

The gongura is grown on the farm (in honour of Kuki's love of Andhra food) and Thirpal brought in a tender bunch of leaves, delicate and edible raw. Shanks cooked these down with red tamarind from the kitchen tree, but I missed the other ingredients. This much I do know, the raw chopped onion added at the end just nailed the pachdi.

I love massopu and muddhe. Nags makes it so uncomplicated, just mashing down cooked barke soppu and togri with tamarind and tomato, and seasoning it with crushed garlic, green chillies, curry leaves and mustard seed. Yum yum yum, I swear to God, and all grown locally. 

Amma's Fab Prawn Biriyani

1kg cleaned and de-veined fresh prawns

1kg Basmati rice

1/2 cup oil

4 inches of cinnamon sticks

6 cardamom pods

8 cloves

4 bay leaves

6 medium onions sliced

1/2 cup fresh, made-from-scratch ginger and garlic paste

6 chopped tomatoes

8 sliced green chillies

1 small bunch chopped coriander leaves

1 small bunch chopped mint leaves

salt to taste

Fry the cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, bay leaves and onions till the onions are cooked and fragrant. Add the ginger-garlic paste and cook till the raw smell vanishes. Add the green chillies, tomatoes, coriander and mint. Stir for a minute or so. Then add the prawns, rice and salt and cover with enough water to cook. I calculate it at approximately 1 and 1/2 cup of water per cup of rice. Put it on a low flame till just cooked and turn it off.

You can garnish it with a mixture of more fried onions/coriander/mint.

Serve it a simple grated cucumber raita.

The Voice Bhootha

'.....a bhootha has stolen the children's voices and taken them away in a bag'

Look, if nothing else, voice is what we have, as surely as opinion, possibility and desire. Voice is also what we can damned well choose to exercise or not. Our voice, that which we speak with, sing with, cry with, or...choke, is singular, for sure the only voice of its sort ever to be heard over aeons.  RESPECT may belong to Aretha, but ain't nobody gonna sing it like YOU. It figures, therefore, that voice, can be passive or active.

Children, largely, have active voices screaming to be heard, understood, loved, looked after. It takes an enormous amount of energy and social conniving to turn an active voice passive. But enough well-intentioned advice to shut up, pipe down and keep their opinions to themselves, in mitigating circumstances, can render even a child silent. We're hugely self-involved, us adults. Like KVK Murthy says...

Vanitas Vanitatum Omnia Vanitas

26th January 2013

The Theatre Lab kids are working with The Concerned for Working Children to shoot an episode for a a year-long program they are producing on Rights of the Child. Urban, middle class kids, my Theatre Lab, they're brought in all the wrong costumes. Anything Indian has now been turned into 'ethnic wear' so the langas and pyjamas that were 'normal wear' of yore have been turned into things of bling. 'No, no....' says Ashwathy the director as the Shiny and Glittery emerge from plastic bags. What happened to old faded cottons and mulmuls, I wonder, till Sharanya, a student at The Valley School, and thus well versed in soft and well work khadi, brings out some old kurtas. 'Oh...." mouths Sonakshi, slowly getting it.

Ashwathy making notes

Selecting costumes

Khadi kurtas always work

Santosh and Hemu setting up shots

They're staying at the farm from Feb 1st-3rd for the shoot. 

31st January 2013

Yesterday Hemu took the army-like provisions across - rice, dhal, sugar, oil, pasta. Enough for 10 children and 8 adults. He also went to the Bachanhatti and Motaganahalli panchayats to get permission to shoot around there. A film shot by young adults and featuring children. The story is called 'Swarabhootha' and was scripted by Nandana. It tells of a bhootha who has stolen the voices of children and how they go, led by a boy called Nagaraj (much like our own Nagaraj who built the cottages at Infinite Souls) to retrieve their voices from the bhootha's gunny sack. 

Nikhil Bharadwaj, who played Ganesha in our play - The Wedding Party - has joined the gang and will be playing a police constable. He will come straight to the farm after playing Inspector Bertozzo in Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist at Chowdiah for the Deccan Herald Theatre Festival. Love joining those dots...

In the spirit of what will go down this weekend, learn more about The Concerned for Working Children who were just nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize -

http://www.concernedforworkingchildren.org/

And here's an interesting article about the longevity or lack, thereof, of instamatic pics - 

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/shoot-hip-or-die/

In a Pickle and a Jam

Yesterday’s riches were these: Lemons (from the Arunachali tree that Minz planted over Laddu’s grave), Limes (massive and delicious smelling), Sapotas, Alsande, Green chillies, Dried red chillies, Tamarind, Tomatoes, Rosemary, Drumstick leaves and flowers and a sack full of Amla. It’s like having our own organic box delivered from a nearby farm except, woo hoo, it's our farm :) The drumstick leaves and flowers are best scrambled with eggs to eat with hot chappaties, the rest will all vanish over the next week. But the amla?? Hmmm… I’m going to have to pickle and jam. 

In the Adyar house, our Nynamma used to put to work everything that the thotakaar brought in from the garden. 

Wood apples: Mushed with jaggery and put into small earthenware bowls for breakfast.
Raw baby mangoes: Pickle
Pomellos: Bitter marmalade
Limes: Lime squash, lime pickle
Sapotas: Laid out in baskets to ripen
Thaati nungus: Straight to the fridge to be eaten cold
Tamarind: Dried on the verandah and nicked by us children to be eaten with salt and chili powder

Every season of the year, there was pickle pickling, a jam boiling somewhere or vadams drying on the terrace.

Amma made a nellikai pickle one time, from the abundance of gooseberries that were left over after we had eaten our fill.  She made hers with hot groundnut oil, mustard seeds, curry leaves. But eventually I decide to try a mustard oil pickle. My quantities are all rather slap dash, so I suggest you do the same. I have neither the diligence nor the flair of my mother, aunts and grandmothers - but this is definitely an homage to them. But I warn you, just keep tasting along the way and don't write and tell me all the things that are wrong with these recipes!

Amla Pickle

I kg (approx.) amla 
1/3 cup methi seeds 
1/2 cup saunf seeds (powder them coarsely. I forgot to do this, but I used fine Lucknowi saunf, so...)
1/3 cup kalonji seeds 
1 1/2 tsp asafoetida (hing)
1/2 cup chili powder
4 tsp haldi
250ml kacchi ghani (mustard oil)
Salt to taste

Boil the amla for about 10 minutes. Drain and cool. You could cut them and seed them, but mine were comparatively small, so I didn't see the need. Mix everything together with a seriously dry spoon in a seriously dry and clean dish. Bottle them in clean jars that have been given the once over with hot water as well. The jars need to be 100% dry. Leave the bottles in the sun for about 5 days and gaze smugly on the redness of the oil, the jeweled beauty of the amla, the flecks of methi, saunf and kalonji as the sunlight streams through the jars.

Last but not least, do not take my word for anything except that last sentence, being as I am a wholly untrained and inexperienced pickler....so store your pickles in the fridge.

Amla Murabba

Here is what I did with the remaining 1/2 kg of amla (all the while furiously recollecting my Bombay aunt, Viju chikki's winter amla murabbas): I put those amlas in my favourite orange Le Creuset with about 1 1/2 cups of sugar, 6 Kashmiri red chilies, 8 cloves, 4 large sticks of cinnamon, 1 tablespoon of peppercorns and about 1/4 cup of water and stewed them till the mixture was thick, pinkish and smelled gorgeous. Bottled as well. Delicious with anything - chappaties, rice, roast pork, on toast...

Drumstick Leaves with Eggs

My daughter blanched at the idea, but ended up eating copiously. This is made in many different ways, with coconut, with roasted and powdered ground nuts etc. But mine was a simple porial. I just like the idea of the free-ness of it: Pick some tender drumstick leaves and flowers from someone's tree and cook up a storm. 

Oftentimes, Sathya (from India Garage) will bring me some from his home in KGF. But today, I had a wealth of leaves and flowers from the farm.

Strip about 2 cups of the leaves and flowers off the stems. Wash and drain. The go about things as you would for any porial:

Heat oil, add mustard and allowe to splutter, chuck in a dried red chili or two, a couple curry leaves. Then add the leaves and flowers and 1/2 cup of water to cook it in. In the meanwhile, beat three eggs with salt and haldi. Once the greens have cooked, add the beaten eggs and stir as in scrambled eggs till cooked. Eat hot with chappaties. 

Ps...Just in case you didn't know...

http://www.ayurvedatips.info/amla.shtml

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-01-16/health/35226758_1_amla-health-benefits-joint-pains

http://www.whyfoods.com/vegetables-eating-benefits-drumstick.php