The Dinner Tonight



A TV Dinner
It is a mind free of the stress of greed, fear, anger and other such encumbrances that is the first step to good health and happiness. Next are sunshine, pure air to breathe and natural healthy food followed by a life style that includes physical exercise that is built in to the life style and not contrived. Most Ikarians work on their farms, gardens, orchards etc. and live in a hilly terrain that incorporates walking up and down hills just to get on with their daily routine and abundant socializing. Just like the residents of Neeltal in my novel – Nude besides the lake (the title has ‘besides’ not ‘beside’ in case you search for it online) – the Ikarians have an afternoon nap and drop into visit each other for the late afternoon or early evening tea followed by a glass of wine over greetings and laughter.

As regards food, the Ikarian food includes the healthiest of ingredients and natural health supplements. The diet is usually vegetarian and includes honey, herbal teas, home grown food and young home brewed local wines. The oil used in cooking is the healthiest of all cooking oils available on the planet – Olive Oil.

Inspired by the Ikarians, I have been trying to make changes in my own diet here in far away India. Yesterday, I procured a bottle of imported Spanish olive oil. Until last year this oil was prohibitively expensive in India but this year due to large imports from Spain the prices have crashed and it has become affordable. The olive tree was somehow not grown in India but now young plantations of olive have also sprung up in India recently with the help of global knowledge (in this case primarily from Israel) and more of this good oil is likely to become available locally in future. It includes the benefits of a heart tonic along with those of a tree food as opposed to a ground crop.

Therefore, the dinner last night was Macaroni stir fried with mushrooms, grated carrots and sweet green chilies as shown in the photo snapped before dinner to share with friends. The Macaroni dish was spiced with garlic. tomatoes, a tea spoon of vinegar, grated cheese, a beaten egg and a pinch of MSG with salt to taste. I usually have my dinner in the living room while watching the local and BBC News with great economic bytes from good friend Aaron Heslehurst (His link is http://www.aarontv.com/), whenever we are not entertaining guests or the children are not on a visit and that is most of the time nowadays. The photo shows the bottle of olive oil that had a best before date in 2014. A little of it was used to fry the macaroni and a little was sprinkled on before eating. The plate on the side includes young freshly plucked and uncooked spinach leaves from the back garden with a sour cream dressing and a sliced hard boiled egg procured from free range birds. A hard boiled egg is one of the nicer foods on the planet especially when sliced with an egg wire cutter. Do get the contraption unless you already have one to decorate the simplest of salads and dinners and spinach for a salad is so simple to grow that it can even be grown by apartment dwellers in a box by the window. It is not safe to eat raw spinach from the market.. There is glass of a two week old white wine that is still milky indicating that the yeast is still alive and active. A wine clears up when the sugar in the wine is exhausted and that would take another couple of weeks. Live yeast drinks are a great health tonic to build up the intestinal flora. The dinner also includes a slice of an iced chocolate cake from the neighborhood bakery. Hope this post inspires you to rake up dinners that are delicious, simple, nutritious, healthy and inexpensive.

The photo also shows bits of newspaper that we use as paper napkins with meals and in the kitchen. It is one of the many uses we put our daily newspaper to so as to save at least a few trees on the planet. if everyone did that then the production of paper napkins would come down and with that the cutting of trees required for their production. Eventually, the world may switch completely to electronic newspapers but the time has not come yet. Perhaps within a few decades we shall see a nano folding screen that updates the newspaper daily and changes the page to next when you touch a dot at the bottom of the screen. In our home nice looking paper and cloth napkins are pulled out only when guests arrive, lest they feel slighted.

Comments

Ashok said…
Hi, there are no comments here but I shared this post with my class mates in an email group and on facebook with more friends and received the comments there. They said the pic was great and the food mouth watering. Do drop in to share a bite when in the area :)
Ashok said…
Just to add on what was said about live yeast in the post, if you go for it do not expect results in a day if you suffer from IBS or something like that after a course of antibiotics etc. but hope for them after a week or two of such regular consumption. For me it takes around ten days, ot take what your doctor prescribes from the store instead, that may be a better variety of yeast fro the purpose coming in neat little sachets and a complex sounding biological name such as sacchro---- something for a variety of yeast ( there are many) .
Ramakrishnan said…
Certainly looks yummy & my hunger pangs have already set in ! Good you are imbibing the Ikaraian life style. You are planning to live a looooong & healthy life:)
Ashok said…
Thanks Ramu, Do drop in to share a bite if you are in the area.
Ashok said…
Do not really care to live a long life since I believe in reincarnation I look forward to new ones in younger bodies, but do look forward to avoiding health problems for the years i do have. thanks for your good wishes anyway Ramu.
Ramakrishnan said…
Thanks for the invite. An visit to Jaipur would be incomplete without an enthralling evening with you. Hopefully in this lifetime.
Ramakrishnan said…
Correction: Read "An" as "A". :)
Ashok said…
Look forward to it Ramu.

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