Murungakkai / Keerai rasam or low footprint cooking
I remember the war of words my mother and her mother used to have over mom's naturally low foot print habits: Preserving the stems of the various greens (keerai), when tender, we bought for making a daal/sambhar. Cooking with radish/knolkhol/turnip greens. Making Bassar (a sort of soup) with the water from cooking french beans. Pouring rasam into sambhar to extend the sambhar for every one's dinner at night ... My grandma considered mom's cooking weird, she primarily liked English Vegetables, she hated keerai and found using stems and leaves of regular vegetables a tad cheap. She also stuck to traditional methods of cooking. My mother on the other hand, had a insatiable curiosity about all the different kinds of vegetables/daals and different ways of cooking them up. She collected recipes voraciously and even played around with traditional desserts (Sacrilege!). I hated it. In my ignorant childhood I prefereed my grandma's straightforward cooking to my...