A few months back, I was helping my mother clear out her loft, and I came across her 20 year old Diary. It was more like a record of household expenses, with a few recipes pencilled in along the margins. I was glancing at some of the entries when\u2026 hey, hey, hey what’s with the fascination for raw mangoes? She bought 5 kilos of them on June 5\u2026 and she had already had her kids by then! I made a quick call to Mama to solve this mystery.<\/p>\n
Anticlimax! It was just the pickle season! Mama and her sister-in-law used to get together every summer to make pickles for the whole year. They would buy spices, roast and grind them, and spend an entire afternoon making jars of the delicious condiment.<\/p>\n
<\/a>How life has changed! Today, all I do is stroll into a supermarket to pick up a jar. I told my mother that, and she pointed out that for the price of a medium-sized jar, she would have enough pickle for the whole year! Oh well, inflation and all that, plus of course, the need to grab a few extra winks on weekends \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n But I decided it might be fun to keep my own notebook, just for a while, and compare it with mom’s\u2026 just to find out how much life has changed, and to give my kids something to compare when they grow up!<\/p>\n June 25, 2013<\/strong> <\/a>I wonder if Mom’s generation would still have taken all this trouble, had they had convenient options available. Seeing my mother at work even now, I suspect the convenience marketers would have gone out of business.<\/p>\n July 3, 2013<\/strong> Advantage Mama. It’s ironic, that today, we spend extra to buy milk which has the fat removed, and then spend again to buy back the fat in the form of butter and ghee.\u00a0 And if that weren’t enough, we wonder if we are eating too much of processed food! The price we pay for convenience. Sigh!<\/p>\n
\nTwo weeks of note-keeping and I already entries ranging from atta to dosa batter to pasta sauce to farsan and of course bread. Mom’s page is filling up at a gentler pace, with entries like urad dal, besan, wheat, ajwain and salt. Then it occurs to me that we both wanted the same things! The only difference is that I have bought the ready product, whereas Mom bought the raw material, which she would then soak, grind, mix or cook to make the yummy finished product.<\/p>\n
\nIt’s funny, but for someone who is always singing praises of ghee and butter, there isn’t a single mention of the sinful stuff in the notebook. Called my mother to tease her about it, and she immediately admitted that she never used to buy ghee or butter \u2013 she made both every week, right at home! \u201cYour kids don’t know the joys of pure butter, because your pricey slim milk doesn’t have the power to make good homemade butter or ghee\u201d she sniffed.<\/p>\n