Cooking with gas

One of the delights of India is the relative cheapness of household help. This is a delight, because I love household help, but I'm cheap! The daily maid is no luxury - India is so dusty, and the doors and windows so ill-fitting, floors have to be swept and washed daily. And dishwashers do exist, that's the maid again! We've had a part-time maid since we arrived last year, and send our ironing out to the press-wallah down the street (for the princely sum of 3 rupees an item, less than 5 pence!) but have not succumbed to any more help. But now we've splashed out and hired a cook! Bapi comes to us each Tuesday, and spends 90 minutes or so making 20 rotis (chapatis), a paneer (cheese) dish and a vegetable dish. This gives us two family meals each week, for 800 rupees (£10) a month! All I have to do is provide the ingredients - Bapi turns them into dinner. Bloody marvellous as far as I'm concerned!

So Bapi gave me a shopping list, and last Monday I went off to make sure I had all the right ingredients. He said to buy 2kg of Atta (wheat flour) at Big Apple, one of the local shops. I went to Big Apple, and right inside the door they had 2kg boxes of Atta. I bought one of those. And I went to Mother Dairy, the milk stall, and bought the paneer. And I bought a large selection of whole spices I've probably never cooked with before. Maybe I have, but Masterfoods wrote in English on the outside of those bottles. These spices weren't in bottles, nor were the labels in English, so I called on another lady customer to help me identify them. Big cardamon, green cardamon, black cardamon...I'm not even sure if we like cardamon! But I was pleased with my purchases. Shopping for unfamiliar ingredients, when you only know their names in a language not used on the labelling, isn't the easiest job!

Unfortunately Bapi was less pleased with my purchases than I was. He couldn't understand why I had bought that box of Atta. As far as I could see, it was the product he'd asked for, the size he'd asked for, in the shop he sent me to. But it was the wrong kind of Atta. And I'd bought the wrong kind of paneer. It was starting to feel like I was back in Britain, on the platform at Motspur Park, listening to British Rail explaining that the late arrival of my train was because the autumn leaves on the line were the wrong kind of leaves, or the snow in winter was the wrong kind of snow... Bapi was confused as to why I had gone to Mother Dairy (the milk shop) to buy the paneer (a dairy product). The best paneer, he told me, is found in the Sweet shop or at the vegetarian shop. I've told him he's going to need to take me shopping this week. I'd never ever have thought to look in the sweet shop for cheese, and I don't even know which shop in the market is the vegetarian shop. No shop in the market has that written on their shopfront, not even spelled incorrectly!