100 Happy Days: Day 13 Chopping Veggies

Happiness is ‘Chopping vegetables the way you wish’.

Chopping Vegetables is a skill and an enjoyable activity. I can never understand why people depend on helpers to do this task. Some even dump their veggies into the food processor to get the quick results. Okay, I agree, I do that too sometimes. But chopping vegetables is an art. The act of slicing through the soft flesh with sharp knife, and getting the sweet fragrance of the veggies is a pure joy.

There are different ways to chop vegetables. When you wish to make Chinese fried rice, veggies should be chopped very fine and slant wise. When cooking for noodles, it needs to be chopped lengthwise. For biryani it is in big square pieces, and in curry, you can just dump it whole after slicing off the ends.

With carving knife, we can give good shapes and make artistic visual presentations on salads. There is art everywhere that only chef understands. Chopping veggies is the extension of cooking because only the chef knows what taste will emerge from the veggies chopped in a certain way. If done wrong, there are chances of veggies half cooked or overcooked and soggy.

Chopping veggies is an art that I love as much as the art of cooking itself.

So here I am, with the project of ‘100 Happy Days’I am posting pictures each day here on my blog then sharing the link on my page on FB too. You can enjoy my work either here or on my page at FB at Pushee’s World

vegetable seller at corner stall

The lane in Bandra, off linking road, is to be converted into line of six malls. The road is broadened and construction is still going on. Once upon a time, this lane was the busiest street with hawkers occupying the foot paths on either side. There used be so much crowd that traffic and people, dodged each other for an easy movement. Now this street is free of hawkers, except for few vegetable stalls at the far end of the street. Although there is a big heap of fresh vegetables in these stalls (like always) unfortunately, there are very few shoppers. The vegetable sellers have stubbornly occupied the footpath, but only few passing people are patronizing these stalls. Only those, who do not wish to walk few extra steps for just buying few sprigs of coriander leaves. This is because, few meters away from these stalls, is a giant supermarket with competitive rates. The vegetables and fruits are fresh and cheaper. There is a huge variety of grocery and fruits and everything is available under one roof. I am wondering how long can these vegetable sellers at corner street survive? Gradually, their vegetables will decay and they might not have enough money to roll. They cannot compete with giant malls and they are not educated to enter IT world. What is the alternate business that they can be qualified with? I think that the malls that have sprout up at these places, must have offered their first job preference to these people who have lost their business because of them. But one wonders how many of them have compromised and taken up the jobs instead of stubbornly hanging on to their street corner hoping that things will improve.