Flap Jitenders

Like flap jacks, except with an Indian name. Get it? Well, I thought it was hilarious.

I made eggless flap jitenders over the weekend to bring to KLB for Principal Ramdev to try, and they went over very well. In addition to those, I also made chapatti chips and hard-crack candy. Why? Why not, Sundays are boring, and I was looking for stuff to do. Ramdev thoroughly enjoyed the candy, but he wished that it could be made into individual, regular shapes. I had just poured the molten syrup on a greased metal plate and cracked it into pieces. If you want shapes, you need molds, and that’s something that you can’t really get over here.

Which brings me to the subject of today’s blog post: jugard, a very popular Indian saying. It means “to manage,” and it’s what people around here do all the time. They make do with what they have, and I have seen it every day in every place, but mostly in the kitchen. I’m the kind of guy who, while not super high-maintenance, likes to have specific tools and pots and pans for his cooking and baking. I like things that multitask, so my stuff needs to be good quality and good for a lot of different uses. Yet coming here has opened up my imagination to what you can do in the kitchen with very little.

When making brownies here, I use an upturned portable space heater to melt the butter. It saves gas, don’t you know? I use a fork to whisk, because there are no metal whisks. I use a large spoon as a spatula, because plastic, rubber and silicone aren’t very common. No cooking spray, so I just use my fingers to spread a little bit of oil in the pan. To heat water for washing, it is very common to attached coiled metal to a wooden stick and place that whole contraption into a bucket of water. It doesn’t even have a proper plug for an outlet. You just take the two exposed wires and stick them into the socket. No, it’s not very safe at all, and I almost electrocuted myself unplugging it once. Everything is reduced, reused and recycled.

Even in the mud hut’s kitchen, I make do with so little. All of the pots and pans have no handles except for one, because they all broke. Shammi uses a filed piece of scrap metal as a knife (whereas I’m the kind of guy who has no problem spending 80-100 USD on a good quality chef’s knife). Need a container to store food? Just put a plate on top of that metal bowl and stick it in the fridge. Who needs Tupperware? Oh, and my favorite kitchen hack: to light the gas burners, instead of using a match, we use a lighter whose gas has run out. The flint still works perfectly, thank you very much.

I am sometimes amazed at Indian ingenuity, but on a closer look, what they do have is very good quality. It comes from 5000 years of using the same recipes, so you know how to do so much with very little. For example, every house has at least two, usually more, of good quality stainless steel bowls with a copper-plated bottom. Stainless steel is a very poor conductor, so it’s bad for cooking evenly, but it’s cheap, durable and easy to clean. Copper, while being an excellent conductor, is expensive, reactive with many different foods (like tomatoes), and a pain in the butt to clean and maintain. So, by coating the bottom of the stainless steel bowl with copper, you have a very strong, durable and cheap cooking bowl that’s still very easy to clean and lasts for years. You don’t have to worry about acidic or reactive foods spoiling the copper. And Shammi’s prison shank that he uses as a knife? Very good quality metal and very sharp. I almost cut myself a few times because I assumed that it was dull, when in reality, I was just the dull one.

So when I told Principal Ramdev that it would be almost impossible to make regularly-shaped candy without molds, Akshay, the architect at the college, suggested buying some in-shell peanuts. I could shell the nuts, save the husks, and pour the hot sugar into the empty shells. Once it cools, I could crack off the shells and have peanut-shaped candy. I was stunned, because there is no way I would have thought of that.

Jugard is starting to rub off on me. The first time I made something in the hostel kitchen, it took me forever because I was so used to using my silicone spatula, my good mixing bowl, a good oven, even burners, and all the space that I wanted. I just kept slowing down because I expected things to be the way they are in the states. Today, when I made pancakes again to show Malkeet, it was a snap. It was even quicker than making them at home, because I didn’t have so much unnecessary equipment to worry my mind. I make like Nike and just do it.

Maybe it’s the homemade syrup from scratch, maybe it’s the good quality ingredients, or maybe it’s the absence of any other decent American food, but I’ll be damned if Indian pancakes (flap jitenders, I swear its funny) aren’t the best ones I have ever eaten. Whatever the case may be, I owe a lot to jugard.