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Monday, October 12th, 2020
I chose the South-Indian culture because although I don't have a negative opinion about it, I am ignorant and I don't have much knowledge about the culture. I thought a good way to start to learn more about the culture was through cuisine, something I really enjoy. I really like cooking, even though I am not the vest, so I am going to try my best at every recipe I find and decide to use. Of course, I know a bit about Indian cuisine but the information I have is pretty minimal, but I like things like curry and tandoori chicken. I hope I learn a lot along the way because learning about other cultures and the context of other places is really interesting and it helps people to have a wider, more informed vision/perspective about the world.
Tuesday, October 13th, 2020
For today, I started cooking the first recipe that interested me, and it was a spicy egg curry. Since I hadn't tried egg curry before, I thought it would be fun. Plus, I love spicy curry and spicy food in general so I thought this would be something I would like. The preparation and cooking went pretty good, since it wasn't too hard and I had most ingredients in my house, but I had to improvise on others. I was happy with the result; me and my family ate it for dinner. Since its completely meatless, this dish is vegetarian, and it could be vegan if you don't use the egg and exclusively serve the curry with rice. The first thing I found out about the cultural and historical context related to this dish was exactly that: the fact it was vegetarian. The way of eating in India is a direct indication of your social class and how wealthy you are. Based on this dish, I could say it was probably consumed by higher class people, since most Hindus and people from the lower class castes and tribes are mainly meat eaters, while the more privileged have the opportunity to be vegetarian. Apart from that, this dish is served with rice like I previously mentioned, and rice was only for the wealthy in India, specially in the past. Although very simple and easy to do, it is interesting to see how this dish connects to the social context of many people.
Wednesday, October 14th, 2020
Today I decided to take a break from cooking and focus on doing some research, so I will cook tomorrow. I also wanted to answer why I really like this project. Like I've said before, I enjoy cooking and eating, so it was something I knew I would like, but now that I'm actually doing the project I'm also very interested and invested into the investigation/research, wanting to know more about the culture, and it isn't always food related. Something that really caught my eye was the social class thing, and how varied food is depending on that, meaning you can tell which group a person belongs to if you pay attention to where, when and what a person is eating, even with who (potential members of their group). Obviously this is widely influenced and associated to Hinduism and religion in general, and I find it fascinating and interesting of course.
Thursday, October 15th, 2020
Today I cooked something and it was my favorite thing so far. It is something I eat every year, since I used to go regularly to an Indian restaurant I really like. Since I knew about it, I tried to replicate it and it turned out amazing, super tasty. It was a chicken and lentils curry. It is really high on protein and it is not so spicy, so everyone can eat it, I cooked it for lunch after school. It was a bit more complicated than the egg curry, but it was completely worth it. With some research, I found out lentils are native to western and central Asia, and India is the second largest country in terms of lentil production, which makes sense since they have their own types of lentils that are hard to find in other places. They use lentils and other grains in a lot of their recipes, so I want surprised about what I fount out.
Friday, October 16th, 2020
Today I wanted to find out why curry and most of the Indian cuisine relies really heavily on spices, so while doing the research I founds some good information and facts. The thing is, spices help to preserve and keep food from spoiling, and especially in such hot weathers, spices avoid the food from getting bad quicker. I was really interested in this because I noticed how much spices were used, and it gets a bit ridiculous at times. On Monday I plan on cooking some pork curry, since I have pork bits at home and its my favorite type of meat. This also could connect to the reason I'm not enjoying this project, and its the stains the spices have left on my clothes. Now I have two shirts that are covered in spices and I can't get the spice out, which is really bad. I have to be more careful around the spices to avoid this from happening again.
Monday, October 19th, 2020
Like I mentioned in the last entry, today I cooked some pork curry. This was the hardest one to make by far, since I had to prepare a separate spice mix I had to add by taste, and I had to improvise about half of the ingredients. It still turned out really decent, but it's definitely not my best work. Continuing with the spice research, there are some specific things about some of the regular ingredients used in curry. For example, onions and garlic are good bacteria killers, cinnamon and ginger inhibit bacteria pretty well too. The use of oil and butter in Indian cuisine has an interesting origin, main sources of water were polluted so the excessive use of oil prevented the bacteria and pathogens to affect the food.
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