India is rich in millets and pulses. These are the superfoods that my granny and her generation swears by. When I talk about quinoa, she makes faces and talks about ragi instead!
I never bothered about what I ate before kids. I mean I ate home cooked meals or healthy foods but was never bothered about what is it made of or why is it better. All that changed when my older kid arrived. I started Googling my way to understand what food is best for an infant’s growth. After my granny heard about my research and kitchen experiments, I had a earful from her.
Here is a blurb of the funny incident that happened with me that I wrote about on Slurp farm
‘Have you started Ragi porridge yet?’
This was a rather reprimanding inquiry by my grandmom over the phone many years ago.
As a young mom in a different city, I was still coming to grips with all things expected from a new mom. With no one around, I relied a lot on ‘Googled information’ for deciding what to feed my kid. My mom was as usual scandalized when she heard about this. I on the other hand had a very basic problem of not knowing the local language well enough to go hunting for specific ingredients in the market.
As my infant turned 8 months old, I got this call from my granny.
She is a soft-spoken person, so I was surprised by her tone!. Apparently mom was scared of what experiments I was running on my infant and her fear had prompted my granny to pick up the phone.
What’s Ragi? I had asked baffled.
It is what nachani is called down South, where you are living currently. Nachani is what finger millet is called in Maharashtra and I had grown up eating nachani in various forms but never knew about the finger millet nutrition.
It was after this discussion that I realized that local food is no less than superfood. Eating what is local ensures that we eat fresh and it is suited to the climatic conditions that we live in. After this my grocery lists started having a lot of nachani, bhajani ( a combination of various flours like jowar, bajra, millets etc.) dry chutnies and grams. I also started experimenting with various flours for making cakes, pancakes, rotis and more.
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