Love in the Time of Quarantine

I am not a big fish-eater. Given a choice between fish and another form of protein, I will always choose the latter. This is a dark secret that I keep buried deep in my contrite, Bengali soul. You see, Bengalis' love for fish is legendary -- they eat every kind of fish from the tiniest Mouralas to the giant Katlas . They treat fish with utmost respect, giving each critter the head-to-tail treatment, either consuming the whole thing or finding a way to sneak in the head, the bones, or fish eggs into various savory preparations. Bengalis have fish for lunch and dinner, and if they could help it, in other meals in between. No Bengali feast is complete without at least one fish preparation. In fact, it is completely acceptable to skip other proteins like chicken or goat meat, as long as you are serving a couple of different varieties of fish. Given how much my people love fish, I feel like the black sheep of the entire Bengali clan when I express my dislike for fish. Even now, ev...

E arly in the lockdown, there were a lot of "How To Stock Your Pantry" articles with lists of non-perishable items that would help us cook and eat at home while sheltering in place. Many of these items did not make sense for us -- like canned vegetables, fruits, and beans -- but we did stock up on rice, flour, pasta, lentils, and chicken stock. We have been gradually eating our way through all the stuff, complementing with protein and fresh vegetables (which we are still lucky to get). The cartons of low-sodium chicken stock, however, remained unused. Chicken stock is not a frequent flyer in my kitchen, its use limited to the times I make soups in winter. Since the stores were completely out of canned soups, I thought that having the chicken stock at hand would allow me to make some home-made soups. Well, after seven weeks of cooking at home, I still had not managed to make a soup and the weather was no longer ideal for soup-eating. As the towers of rice, pasta, and len...

T he lockdown has resulted in most of the world working from home. For professions that never considered the option of working remotely, the transition was sudden and fraught with several challenges. However, after being at it for the past seven weeks, we have all found ways to operate within the constraints of working remotely and being productive even though we are not physically in our usual work spaces. We have even discovered some surprising perks of working from home. For me, connecting with my colleagues over video calls has humanized them in a way that would have never happened under normal circumstances. Sure, I know that many of my colleagues have families and they balance their roles as spouses and parents while fulfilling work obligations. However, caught up in the frenetic pace of our work routines, our personal lives often take a backseat. In fact, we often downplay the importance of our family commitments to demonstrate our efficiency and dedication to our emp...

T he talented Indian actor Irrfan Khan passed away yesterday. He was only 53. Besides Indian movies, he featured in several prominent Hollywood productions including Slumdog Millionaire , Life of Pi , and Jurassic World .  In India, Irrfan Khan set himself apart from the typical histrionics of Bollywood with his nuanced portrayals of characters. He was skilled at conveying multiple layers of meaning through effortless delivery of dialogs. Even though his expressive eyes often marked the characters he played with an underlying pathos, his comic timing was perfect as evident in one of his last movies, Hindi Medium, where he plays a henpecked husband who is trying to support his wife's social aspirations. One of my favorite Irrfan Khan movies is The Lunchbox.  The movie relates the story of an unlikely romance between a middle-aged widower and a young housewife whose husband is cheating on her. Their relationship results out of a mistaken delivery of lunch boxes -- when the lu...

B eing under lockdown for the past seven weeks has messed up my sense of day and time. Sure, everyone in the family has his/her daily schedule of calls and deadlines, but I am finding that when we don't have to leave the house for those tasks, it is easy to lose track of what month or day of the week it actually is. We also had an unusually cool April in California this year. So, the realization that we had transitioned into early summer did not hit me till this past weekend when temperatures soared to 80 degrees. Instead of heading to the beach to break social distancing rules, we dusted off the backyard grill and officially opened summer barbecue season. I am always impressed by people who say that their typical summer dinners comprise of grilled meat with a salad on the side. For us, grilling is definitely a weekend activity. We are not big meat-eaters, but the meat we grill has to be seasoned with spices, marinated in lemon juice or yogurt before it is thrown on the grill...

One of our major endeavors on a regular weekend is to meal-plan for the whole week. My husband and I either prep for all the weeknight dinners or cook large batches of food that can see us through majority of the week. Over the years, we have developed an efficient system that does require some time commitment upfront, but allows us to have a home-cooked meal within minutes of getting home on a busy weeknight. One of the surprising upsides to the lockdown is that we have been temporarily relieved of the task of cooking/prepping for the whole week. I have been cooking fresh almost every night and relying less on leftovers for dinner. This has also given me a chance to test out small-batch recipes that I typically do not have the luxury to cook when I am tasked with meal planning for the whole week. This beet preparation from Thakurbari-r Ranna,  the food journal of the revered Tagore family of Bengal, is one of those small-batch recipes that I have been eyeing for a while. T...

This week has gone by in a flurry...well, as much of a flurry as this lockdown allows. We have settled into a rhythm of sorts --  calls and virtual meetings all day, a quick lunch in-between, a walk around the neighborhood in the evening, then dinner followed by a show or movie on Netflix. We hardly get a chance to talk to each other during the day, but I am thankful that we are together under one roof and safe. It is amazing how this virus and the lockdown has altered our lives. I went into work briefly one day to pick up some documents. That seemingly routine activity felt like a highly risky endeavor. I discussed the decision with my husband who told me I should only go if those documents were absolutely essential. My kids, uncharacteristically for them, expressed concern about me going into work and I had to assure them that I would be back before they knew it. I had to request permission to go into the office building and certify that I did not have any of the common sympto...