Wokay!

Phirni Rocks- shrewt (Quotes 2:45)

It’s tempting. It’s not like I’ve ever tasted it before.- Mriduben (Quotes 3:28)

… so we were soon out of there and out for some good indian grub- Mridu (Quotes 3:41)

My life’s all about a sugar rush.- Anuj_Himself (Quotes 4:9)

Chawal Chawla donon ko khaoonga- Adi Bedi (Quotes 9:8)

I love prawn- Ghodi (Quotes 11:28)

Iski dieting aise hai, TK vaise hai- Big Man (Quotes 13:37)

you’ve reduced me to a domesticated spaghetti making idiot- Comfortably Bum (Quotes 14:25)

oh come now, surely ervery1 knows dat….even nirula’s hv had viennese coffee on their icecream menu since time began!!!- Mannis (Quotes 14:21)

I had a conversation with Mrs Vanita Mehta recently. Breakfast was one of the things I talked to her about.

Breakfast is my primary incentive to come home on weekends. Cutthroat long distance telephony price wars and the march of technology ensure that I can always stay in touch with my family and friends (and my enemies, but who wants to talk to them) whenever I like, from the comfort of my hostel room. Should I ever feel like gazing upon their visages- well, a digital camera, the GIMP, and a printer take care of that. The college ‘Net line is 2Mbps, compared to the 64 kbps DSL at home. I like Linux so much now that I am loath to go home where I will have no alternative but to use Windoze. Moreover, Delhi’s superior markets and ‘hang-outs’ lose some of their sheen when you realise that the are infested with monotonously homogeneous young people who all look and talk alike (that’s a repetition, but some of you may have thought I meant chemically homogeneous).

But there’s one thing I can get at home that I can’t get in Patiala and that’s a decent breakfast.

Nutritionists acknowledge breakfast to be the most important meal of the day. I should know- my mother is one (nutritionist, not breakfast). But aside from the nutritional aspect there is also a sociological side to breakfast. A civilisation that does itself well at breakfast will do itself well in other fields as well. Most people fail to make the connection, but the British Empire was at its peak at the same time as the British breakfast was at its peak. When World War II intervened, and prevented Britons from getting their regular supplies of tea and bananas, the Raj collapsed. The post-War geopolitical dominance of the United States is easily explained- it, after all, is the birthplace of breakfast cereal. And France and Germany would not have been so successful in preventing war as they did recently at the United Nations, had the healthful European breakfast not being making a comeback.

Keeping all this is in mind, I’ve decided that one should ideally have breakfast twice a day- once for breakfast, and then again for dinner. My ideal meal scheme is detailed below:

For my morning meal, a sweet breakfast over an hour, consisting of:

• Apples, bananas, and/ or grapes
• Honey covered corn flakes or muesli
• Fruit juice
• Nutella and/ or jam sandwiches
• Danish pastry and doughnuts
• Cold coffee, or Earl Grey with honey and lemon

For my afternoon meal, lunch over half an hour, consisting of roti, one sabzi, dal, and kheer- either phirni or seviyan wali. The object of lunch would be to build up my fat reserves- $deity knows I need some.

For my evening meal- ideally beginning at seven and proceeding over an hour and a half or more- a salty breakfast, consisting of:

• Chicken soup with lots of vegetables
• Green salad, ideally consisting of lettuce and other assorted green leafy vegetables, jalapenos, artichokes, walnuts, and/ or apples. With a vinaigrette (sp?) dressing.
• Toasted cheese sandwiches on garlic bread. With the same stuff that goes into the salad.
• Scrambled eggs with paranthas or fluffy omelettes on toast.
• Chococcino

The great advantage of having breakfast for dinner is that you can prepare it and eat it at leisure. The rate determining step is how long it takes you to cut up the vegetables- once those are done, mixing them into a salad takes negligible time, grilling or toasting them into sandwiches is just a matter of arrangement- your OTG does the rest. The only things that would really require personal attention are the eggs and the soup. Also, dishwashing would presumably be simpler with this sort of dinner than with a dal, dahi and two sabzi meal- you’d just have to clean one frying pan, one soup pot, one salad bowl; and two mugs and one plate per person. And the mugs and plate wouldn’t need scrubbing- just rinsing and wiping.

Of course, at the hostel mess what you eat is what you’re given (WYEIWYG), but with a five day interlude coming up, I intend to put this meal system into practice at the earliest. As always, you will be informed of all successes and failures (of the economic or digestive variety).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2003 at 3:09 pm and is filed under The W-Fillets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.