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EATING FOR SUMMER TIME
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EATING FOR SUMMER TIME

Eating is Fun / Eating is Yuck! - A variety food column, Life & Living, Mar 14- Mar 20, 2026 March 13, 2026 , by

HONESTLY, in the last quarter of one’s life one should be more disciplined and not take one’s body beautiful for granted no matter how well it has stood by you so far! I always say with the bad I must have done something good too for although I have a bad heart, I’m still not living in the “valley of dolls” — like so many other seniors who have to pop a motley collection of shining pills to keep blood pressure, blood sugar, diabetes…insulin resistance and the temptation of piling on weight in control – courtesy all the wonderful or indifferent or dead food we keep shoving in our mouths all daylong either at tables at home or out at a slew of homely or fancy restaurants!
 Really, our homely Goan eateries are far more health-conscious and one may even ask for jowari chappati if one is having a thali meal out, at one of my favorite places, in this case specifically Humyog down town Panjim. It’s the only eatery which offers a pair of jowari chappati, in lieu of usual wheat chappati/puri/ tandoori roti. The less gluten millet roti or chappati are most welcome, I usually eat one, wrap the other one in a tissue paper or a clean hankie and bring it home, to turn it into a crunchy khakra…slow roasted on the tava to eat like a biscuit later on with tea or something.
Others may be hooked to their tea and coffee but I’m not. Though I do stock up on the little mawa cakes or cinnamon roll from Carasid’s or the methi puri fryums from the Women Commission outlet located on the ground floor of the Menezes Braganza Institute down town Panjim. They’re easily served with tea if someone drops by to visit.
These days I’m soaking kabuli chana or chickpeas overnight, pressure cooking them the next day – eat them in lieu of rice or bread, they’re easy to turn into a soup too. For that matter any bowl of beans can serve as a filling protein rich meal. A friend of mine says she’s taken to making whole masur dal-rice kichadi come the early summer heat with springtime quickly over by end-March/early April in Goa.
The slightly liquidy or denser-styled khichadi of all kind are best eaten with buttermilks seasoned or just spiked with black salt (“sanchar”). Summer months crave for liquid meals most often and so enter salads, a slew of soups…I like my seasoned buttermilks with cucumber/orange/lemon juice added in, can sip on the rocks if you like with mint leaves swirling in it. Have you ever chewed a bunch of mint leaves? Try it. The big hydrophonic cultivated mint leaves are very juicily minty and make for a great mouth clean-up post meals.
Come summer I also dream of easy-to-fix relish called “thecha” – it’s basically a Maharashtrian household favorite, a concoction of crushed peanuts/green chillies/garlic/coconut kernel/cumin seeds/salt…crush in a mortar pestle stone to get a mass of savory chutney, temper it and lace it with rice, or eat with one of the unleavened breads of our traditional homes.
Thecha is a real quick fix thing to do and one may even make it out green mango, green tomatoes, or some other veggies in season. These days my fancy friends are boycotting white rice and white bread in favour of northeastern or southeast Asian white sticky rice or black rice…in Meghalaya I remember once savoring a most memorable black sesame seed moong dal with sticky white rice.


But to stay with the secret of thecha or relish – primarily it is to make pain cooked rice palatable with flavor, from fresher ingredients, to better serve one’s immune system. Eating right is about happy microbiome in our gut environment…so the more fresh and fermented side-dishes we include in a meal, the better. Most of the usual run of the mill Goan meals one may be eating are terribly acid inspiring if you’re asking me, that means more inflammation, more rejection, less vitality.
 BUT these days I’m concerned about the pesticide residues in the food we eat. A Harvard study has yielded that even that today’s runaway cognitive decline from memory lapses orloss, dementia, Alzheimer is due to brain cells dying because of “brain glucose hypo metabolism” (a type 3 diabetes) – because of a pesticides and heavy metals environment. It seems the big time culprit is the toxis cadmium chloride and not the build-up of plaque which doctors talk about to prescribe drugs which don’t work but create side-effects of more suffering. Bill Gates who funded a lot of research has come up with some supplement called “MemoGenisis” — reportedly it makes memory cells come back to life in three months or so…do some homework if you wish with a Harvard study on Alzheimer’s which afflicts a lot of folk out in the countries of the West.
It seems the people who enjoy sharp memory retentiveness are the folk living hard happy lifestyles in the Blue Zone countries like for example, Mediterranean island Sardinia – ere they drink and eat pure honey powered by “lithium” – and there are no toxic residues in the fresh farm food they eat, the soil is rich with micro rich with nutritious antioxidants and so is the wild food like blueberries. Not surprisingly, Sardinians live into their ripe 100s with quiet tranquility and no cancers.
ALL this apart what is important is we individually and collectively understand the need to clean up our air, earth and water, to arrive at an organic lifestyle in a myriad ways – or all bad things connected, we may look forward to a quick doomsday one of these days! But while still alive at least clean up your ways of loving yourself and others around you with more kindness, reach out to help in cash and kind, whatever you can afford without killing yourself in mind and body, heart and soul before you actually cop out or so to speak.

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  2. SUMMER IS FOR COOLING SOURS… Or probiotics like ‘pez’ and ‘kanji’
  3. THE SAMOSA STORY IS INTRIGUING!
  4. THE CHARMS OF FINELY MADE `MO MO’

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