Cooking with Shanti

Shanti, Uttam’s 17-year-old daughter and I have become friends. Shanti’s busy life amazes me. She leaves for school every morning at 5:30 am and hikes about an hour to get there. When she returns from school in the late morning, she then begins teaching at Saping Medaka Family School. Shortly thereafter, she begins cooking for herself, grandparents, mother and sometimes other family members. I have had the incredible pleasure of eating with Shanti and her family and it has been a great experience

Shanti cooking

Cooking

The people in Saping take “made from scratch” to a whole new level. Milk, yogurt, and butter come from their buffalos. Flour is made from the corn they grew and so is the rice. Eggs come from their chickens, and goat meat comes from their goats.

Using the coals to soften vegetables

Rice

I love watching Shanti cook. It is such an amazing process and takes so much time and effort. As I watched her cook many times, I realized how wasteful I really am. Shanti reuses everything. She cooks using oil and then fries something else using the same oil. Small leftover amounts of seasoning she has in her hand gets put back into the container it came from. She uses rice water to soak dal in and then reuses the same rice water to soak soybeans in. Water is used over and over again to rinse vegetables, utensils and hands. She  also uses corn cobs to burn as fuel.

Corn cobs for fuel

Clay oven

Shanti probably spends over two hours every night cooking dinner for her and her family.  She starts at dusk and then cooks by firelight or flashlight for the majority of the time. Everything needs to be softened in water or in the coals and she uses rocks as a mortar and pestle. As she needs different seasoning and ingredients, she calls down to her other family members who live around her and her young cousin brings her what she needs.Everything is cooked over a flame on her clay stove. Her kitchen has a mud floor and small wooden planks to sit on.

Family sitting in the kitchen

Enjoying the warmth

All the work  that goes into cooking makes the food taste even better than it already does. Shanti is an amazing cook.