Potatoes can make you gritty

Have you ever had the same meal every single day for at least 1 week or longer? I have found that unless the meal is nutritionally balanced, or you’re absolutely in love with it, or you find creative ways to cook the same thing, it can get rather boring.

However ‘poverty food’ or ‘famine food’ is eaten every single day with little variation or complaint. So poverty really is relative to each of our countries. I may get bored eating the same meal for 2 weeks, whereas elsewhere someone may be grateful for receiving their 365th bowl of gruel.

In the shitty drab council estate I grew up in, called Basingstoke (UK), times were pressingly difficult. So much so, that the choice of food and our purchasing habits were driven by how much money was ringed up in the till of our shop that day. Of course since our fledgling shop business was hardly thriving at the best of times, this impacted the food-buying decisions in our household.

Now here’s the crux, despite having little spare cash, and despite not being able to afford the very frozen pizzas, chips, crispy pancakes, pot noodles (and other crap we sold in our shop to our ‘lucky’ punters), I was actually raised on delicious, nutritious, home-cooked food.

Here’s some context, money was tight. And although we had food stocked in our shop freezer, we weren’t allowed to help ourselves to it.  Ironically, I so loved and craved the processed junk we sold in our shop. Think frozen alphabet chips with dry mash inside, crispy pancakes filled with goo they called cheese, cardboard pizzas topped with dry tomato paste and sparse shards of rubber cheddar that would melt so deliciously in the microwave. 

There was even an ultimate food innovation that Birds Eye launched called KETCHIPS….Chips with ketchup inside them! Genius. We were treated to Ketchips once in a while, and my not-so-developed taste buds found them divine.  Ketchips sadly didn’t survive a long time.  I’m not sure if it was the vinegary lava mixed with sawdust mash potato inside, or the nutritional content that had them taken off the market. A great loss for the food industry in the 80’s.

Anyhow, I grew up craving these western delights. This fine British cuisine would have me mesmerized.  My eyes would widen, and mouth would water at the sight of canned spaghetti bolognese, and stodgy tinned macaroni cheese (the type that when opened, would plop out on the plate in the same shape as the cylinder tin). It was a total treat when we ever got to try these delicacies.

Aside from not being able to afford school lunches and the fine western delights mentioned above, mum of course knew that nutritious food was cooked fresh at home and not in a microwave. So she would slave away with her day job, return home, cook our meals, and return to her 2nd job to mind our shop and listen to the abuse from the racist locale. I’m sure she would sit as cashier by the till, silently praying for someone to buy some bread and for our windows to not be smashed that night. 

So if I wasn’t eating our shop stock dry, what was I eating? Well, quite the contrast, mum would prepare home-cooked nutritious Indian food. Lots of vegetarian dishes, lentils, and what seemed like 100 different types of potato curries served with steaming rice or freshly cooked chapatis. Of course I still wanted the Ketchips and cardboard pizzas.

The truth is, mum was creative. Grit made her creative. When options are limited and money is tight, if one possesses grit, one becomes resourceful. And one of the places this showed up most, was in our humble kitchen, by my own gritty mother.  

She could cook those cheap potatoes in so many different ways, you would have no idea you were eating the same vegetable almost every day. Those lentils would be prepared in traditional ways and in her own fusion style. 

I believe mum practiced fusion cooking way before it became a trendy cooking modality in the celebrity kitchens of today. She was an expert of looking inside the kitchen cupboards, seeing what food was left, and whizzing it all together to create something tasty and nutritious. Note, I still wanted Ketchips. 

A left over potato there, 1 tomato here, oh there’s some mung beans (lentils were cheap to buy, so we always had that in the pantry). Bish, bash , bosh and a new dish would be served. I still craved Ketchips.

Grit creates creativity as you strive to become resourceful, and make the best of what you have in whatever dire situation you are in. This theme shows up in the studies of the ‘immigrants mindset’ (more on that another day).

Back then, I didn’t appreciate the creativity and effort that went behind preparing home-cooked nutritious food on a shoestring budget. At times I would get bored and embarrassed about eating Indian food all the time.  Bored because I would see the processed alternatives in our shop every day, and as a child I wanted what I couldn’t have. 

And embarrassed because unknown to me, sometimes the food would create a stench that most Indian food is known to create. And of course this stench would follow me like a loved-up puppy. I soon learned to get out of the house during times when a meal laden with spice was being freshly prepared. Or I’d changed into fresh clothes right before leaving the house, discarding the offensive stinky numbers with disdain. 

But I was occasionally reminded through not-so-kind comments from the kids on the street, that the stubborn turmeric had indeed managed to follow me out.

I can’t blame them, they were not used to home cooked Indian food. Perhaps they were at home enjoying the cardboard pizzas served with stodgy Ketchips, whilst I ate yet another potato curry.

Written by Dee Allan-The Gritty Girl, Speaker, Writer and Entrepreneur.

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