In the last couple of years vast areas of bamboo forest have flowered and died in Kerala’s Wayanad district and also in Coorg. Early in 2011, I got to see some of these once vigorous thickets of bamboo in a whole different avatar – leafless, and heavy with pale, straw coloured blossom catching the slightest breeze. A few months later, the bamboo clumps had withered and collapsed upon themselves, the skeletal remains covered in robes of morning glory.

In cultures around the world, the occurrence of mass flowering and dying of bamboo is generally viewed as a portent of doom- of famine or worse to follow. Well, for the people of North East India, particularly Manipur and Mizoram, they might be justified in their unease. The PBS film, Catching Rats,  documented in grisly detail, the phenomenon of an exploding rat population, feeding off the abundant bamboo seed and then subsequently overrunning the rice and other crops of people living in that area. Fortunately, this hasn’t been the case in Coorg, though I wonder if it has perhaps occurred in the past, when there was much more area covered by bamboo forest.

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Vancouver’s markets have a way of constantly springing delightful surprises on me. Sometimes it’s the unfamiliar that draws me, other times it’s the unexpected encounter with something so much a part of another world I inhabit, that it just has to be invited home for a meal. Like those fresh green peppercorns, the other day. I have seen them before in specialist food stores, but this time around, I was dazzled by the unusual abundance of those green beaded twists on the store shelf. Of course I bought far more than I needed for simply tossing into soups and salads – time to get busy!

The pretty, climbing pepper vine, clinging to shade giving trees, is a common sight on any Coorg coffee estate or homestead. Enter a provisions “store room” and the sharp aroma of dried black pepper rises through the muddle of rice, cardamom and coffee. Pepper is known as “nalla malu” or “good pepper” in the Coorg language. And how aptly named it is! This wonderful spice more than lives up to its name, be it in the kitchen or the medicine cabinet.

We have come to rely, in so much of our cooking, on the heat and flavour provided by chillis, that it’s hard to think of a time before the New World imports, those “parangi malu”* or “foreign peppers” weren’t on hand. Yet, there was a time when pepper was the spice that launched a thousand and more ships, all searching for this spice of life! For a fascinating and informative account of the history of the pepper trade, read this article by food writer and culinary historian, Ammini Ramachandran, whose home state of Kerala is at the heart of the “pepper trail“.

Now, back to the kitchen!

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It’s Puthari once again, and this year I’m hearing how the standing rice crops have been badly affected by unseasonal rains in some parts of Coorg. In other places, large areas have been destroyed by elephants, wandering further in search of food, after the mass flowering and subsequent withering of large tracts of the bamboo forests not long ago.

As every farmer knows too well, all the year’s work can come to nothing in the blink of an eye, and losing that precious rice crop means hard times for the family and community. Rice is the staple of millions of people around the world, and of course it really is the heart of Kodava cuisine. Where would we be without akki ottis and all the many kinds of puttus?! When those new grains of paddy are sprinkled on the Puthari payasa, it’s a moment of thanksgiving and hope for the year ahead.

With the easy access most of us have to foods grown far from the place we call home, Puthari is a good time to pause and give thanks to those anonymous farmers whose hard work puts the food we eat on our plates.

One food that is closely associated with Puthari celebrations, is the Puthari kalanji – a variety of yam that is harvested at this time of year.

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November can be the most challenging month in Vancouver. It’s wet, cold, and windy. The weekly weather forecast usually sounds something like “rain, rain, showers, heavy rainfall warning, cloudy with a chance of showers, rain and windy conditions, and a Sunday special – more rain!”

It really is impossible to tell what time of day it is by simply glancing out of the window, because the sun makes rare guest appearances. Sometimes it appears just around sunset, cracking a little break in the clouds to remind you it’s still sunny somewhere else on the planet. Forget fifty shades – Vancouver natives probably have a hundred words for November greys! It’s too easy to get really crotchety, craving sunshine, light, and colour, or hoping for some snow to come along, just to pretty up the scenery.

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After all that reminiscing about early mornings in my grandmother’s kitchen, I just had to rustle up a batch of my favourite chutney ever. I may not have hot off the fireplace akki ottis available to me at breakfast too often these days, but this chutney, on a bit of toast, goes a long way towards satisfying the craving 🙂

Ellu pajji

A spiced sesame and coconut chutney, with just a hint of smokiness

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My trusty old Indian pressure cooker, a gift from my mother, finally gave up on me. After enduring many, many years of my eccentric usage, it finally blew its gasket. Well, it blew its safety valve, actually, sending up a steady spray of its contents ceilingward, in a geyser  quite worthy of an Old Faithful. Perhaps word had got around that a shiny, new model was on its way, and that did it in.

I couldn’t blame it, really. Feeling like old faithless, standing on a step ladder and mopping toor dal off the ceiling and walls, I thought about all the good times we’d had together. I will miss the gentle conversational, steam driven bobble-babble of my kitchen companion, punctuated with its occasional shrieks of excitement. I hear its replacement is a bit on the quiet side.

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