Lunch is a variety of salads that consist of more seeds - "sprinkles", according to my wife - generously scattered over salad leaves grown in terrace pots that we can tell aren't lettuce, but which she is convinced have morphed because of excessive composting. "I could swear those were rocket leaves when I planted them," she'll muse, "perhaps the fertiliser has got them to change character." "Or maybe we're just eating grass," mutters my son, but out of her hearing. There's nothing worse than a mom's cooking thwarted, a lesson he learnt early in life, and which has stood him in good stead since.
One week, we're into exotic cooking that features quinoa, of which the less said the better. Another week, it's slow-food time, which means we'll be served all members of the gourd family - from bottle to snake, and then zucchini, which is just cucumber pretending to be snobbish. Entire meals have been composed of bell peppers and gourds, while refined flours have been replaced with whole-wheat variants, taking the joy out of everything from pasta to noodles. It's a sad day when bread must consist of coarse grains that remind one of the horror stories about prison food that Sanjay Dutt has been sharing.
In the guise of summer, we're being offered all manner of fluids - a thick concentrate of neem leaves to stave off the heat, karela juice to control sugar and its lauki equivalent to prevent grey hair. For some reason, she's taken the war to the dairy front, banning milk, butter and cheese; fried and processed foods have been proscribed and the driver bribed to tell should we stop for an ice cream during the daily commute. Corn on the cob is fine but not sweet potato; fruit juices have been forbidden because they might contain the residue of carbide in which they've been ripened, which is why, even though it's the height of summer, no mango has dared pass the hearth on to the dining table. Leave alone beef, neither fish nor fowl has found favour in the kitchen, leaving the cook to protest about cooking with spinach and amaranth.
Clear soups - boiled water with some vestige of lentils or vegetables and a dash of paprika but somewhat less than satisfying of salt - forms the bulk of dinner and is closely supervised to see it isn't drained surreptitiously down the sink. Carrot and cucumber sticks and tomato slices accompany home-made hummus made with chickpeas but robbed of a generous drizzle of olive oil, so it forms a sticky plaster that requires the bland soup to wash it down. It also leaves one hungry - no wonder I'm such a fan of lotus seeds in the morning, even if they taste like paper. Maybe I should try newspaper instead - printing ink is bound to taste better than alfalfa sprouts and sunflower seeds.