The Backup Tiffin Plan

A meal at Shilpa Mansukhani's house always needs a back up plan. With all good intentions, Shilpa better known as Bestie goes out of her way to lay a great spread, but the food lacks the bite to take it to culinary excellence. 

 

A great hostess, her house is artfully decorated, crockery and cutlery all set on the table. Juices to ice cream are stocked in the fridge. But the food.... 

I always play safe when I am invited to her house. I ask her to make egg curry because one can rarely screw up that dish. The second back up plan is that I bring some home cooked food as a goodwill gesture, but more for my gratification than anything else. This time round, I had cooked fish kalia, a bengali dish.

But Bestie had shifted house and had a new cook. The dal

has always been good, but the suspect has  been the mutton dish. When the lid was taken off, the aroma of the  mutton rogan josh assailed my senses. I dug in without much ado.

You know the mutton curry is perfect when the meat is just tender enough to bite without breaking into slivers in your hand and when the marrow slides noisily out of the bone into your mouth and the curry looks like hot molten lava, without the chilli powder but from ripe tomatoes. 

The alu fry was just perfect to have with dal and rice accompanied by some chicken kababs. A meal like this is best had with the hand. Bestie smartly postponed her manicure date until next week. No ways the manicure would have survived the finger licking experience without tainting it with yellow food stains.

I sat cross legged on the dining table chair and did full justice to the meal, never venturing far from the mutton curry. And that my friends, is the polished plate.

Mint saunf and tamarind golis were served to me after lunch. This is Bestie, a girl who can't boil water and has never fried an egg till date. Memories of her, our buddy and soul mate, Meetu come crashing as we loll in bed after such scrumptious meals, either at my place or Meetu's. 

Bestie finally unearthed a gem in the kitchen and has ended a long standing tradition of me getting a tiffin from home.

So all our lovely friends... bravo, we have found a new address for our luncheon meets...