What I liked most about my profession as a father was taking and picking up my children from school. The oldest is already 23 years old and the youngest is no longer in this world, which is why, in these pre-autumn days, a desolation floods me that I try to pass as I can.
Those of us who are freelance return from the summer season like children who look at the new course with the mentality of the student who has to pass a new revalidation. The feeling is that nothing you did last year serves to face a new working year with guarantees of success. Luckily there are psychologists.
A summer without gastronomic experiences is usually a bad summer and my trip with my partner, Meri Falgueras, through South India helped us to escape, even if it sounds redundant about summer, and discover a gastronomy and customs that opened up a world of sensory experiences. Of course, we avoid drinking non-bottled water and eating in street bars with dubious hygiene. Not out of desire, but because of the desire not to end the trip early due to acute gastroenteritis.
Despite the precautions, we tried to eat in places frequented by the inhabitants of the towns we visited. If there are natives, it is that the place is guaranteed, despite the fact that the tourism we found along the trip was almost all natives, a fantastic surprise. People usually eat with food arranged on banana leaves and with the right hand as a cover. Never with the left, a hand that is destined for other less stimulating tasks.
As in all countries, the gastronomy of the north differs from that of the south, and our tour of the states of Tamil Nadul and Kerala allowed us to discover a world of lighter flavors than those of northern food.
Some Tamil dishes, such as eral kuzhami (prawn curry), nandu varuval (crab masala) and chettinad chiken biriany, which, prepared with coconut milk and spices, are delicious. And as those who lose their origins lose their identity, in the city of Pondicherry, the former capital of the French colony, you can enjoy French dishes passed through the local sieve.
In Kerala, seafood and fish are part of the common diet, but the dishes that brightened our lives were the vegetarian ones, which are usually accompanied by rice. Malabar cuisine, that of Kerala, is the result of its long history as a trading port open to the Arabian Sea, and Arab and European influences have subtly blended with indigenous culinary culture.
Who returns from India, returns with the aromas of coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, cardamom, curry and nutmeg tattooed on the nose.
Back to school coincides with one of my favorite spices, coriander, turned into the best existential elixir. It is difficult to return to this Spain in which everything smells of confrontation. Even in the world of cooking, a review of a restaurant that smacked of reckoning came my way and gave me a laziness of three Michelin stars.
And when the children return to school on the 6th, I will continue to be submerged in melancholy with the desire to exile myself to that corner of India where the god of little things exists, a Brahma child who plays with my son Marc at night. .
