The great, the edible and the disgusting!

There is great food. Lip smacking, delicious, all the ingredients are doing a perfect tango and something with which you wish you could be left alone. There is edible food. Passable, good enough to kill the appetite and you cannot quite make out what is missing but you are certain that something is. And then there is disgusting food. Whose flaws leap at you like the scary creatures in a 3D movie. I possess the ability to make all the three kinds. I most definitely do not have the brown thumb, which the women, one generation ahead, have in my family. Give them anything and they will turn it into something extraordinary.

Last week I set out to be a culinary Indiana Jones. At least that's what I thought. Well, I fell flat on my face. I tried making green papaya chutney and.., here's the story. I had never really used green papaya in my cooking earlier. But that idea had been playing in my mind for a while, and the logic was confirmed when I peeled and cut open the green papaya. It was tasteless and smell-less, a perfect foundation to cast into a chutney. I diced half the papaya into an inch cubes and sautéed them with green chiles and a spoon of oil. I should have smelled a rat early on as the papaya pieces took a really long time to cook - more than 20 minutes - and even after that I could just about pierce the piece with my wooden spoon. When this mixture cooled I ground it in my mixer with 1/2 a tsp of tamarind paste. What came out was unimaginable and disgusting! Suppose you put wet clothes in a plastic bag and tie the mouth, for a reason of unexplained origin - and forgot about it for days together! How will this blasted bag smell, when opened? That's how the chutney smelled! It was awful! Tasting it was out of the question! Since my grinder is small and the cooked papaya pieces had not shriveled up the way many vegetables do, I ground it in batches. The assault on my nose had aroused my curiosity and I compared the ground and the un-ground version. Though the cooked pieces did smell offensive per se, when I brought them close to my nose, they smelled funky. Something happened to the papaya in the process of cooking, which got amplified after grinding!

I was not yet ready to throw the rest of the papaya. Heat being the culprit here, I decided to make an uncooked papaya chutney. Here's how I made it and it was actually tasty!

Papaya chutney

With what

• 2 cups grated green papaya,
• 3/4 tsp salt,
• 1/4 tsp red chile powder,
• juice of 1/2 a lime,
• 1 tbsp vegetable oil,
• 1/2 tsp black mustard seeds,
• a pinch asafetida
• a pinch turmeric

How to

Combine the grated papaya, salt, chile powder and limejuice and top it off with fodni. The oil, mustard seeds, asafetida and the turmeric are the ingredients for the fodni, a word in Marathi, a language spoken in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, the state whose capital is Mumbai. Fodni, made by heating oil with mustard seeds and seasoned with turmeric and asafetida, is a topping, which is added to the chutney just before eating, to make it tastier, creamier and homogenous, not unlike a swirl of the finest olive oil on pizza or a salad. Heat the oil in a small pan (In India you get special pans, the size of ramekins, with handles especially to make fodni). Ensure that the oil has heated up. One way to do that is to hold your hand over the oil and if you feel the hot vapor it means that the oil is hot enough to proceed. Now add 1/2 tsp black mustard and 1/2 tsp cumin seeds and cover with a lid right away. Mind you, the splattering mustard seeds are nasty. They will sting you (as if someone pinched you with sharp nails), if you are not careful.

How to eat Eat this chutney like a salad. Or spread cream cheese on a cracker and spoon the green papaya chutney for a tangy appetizer.