In which nobody will find this interesting, but I’ma write it anyway because I feel like it!

One thing I thought, at first, was really cool about the whole MIU campus experience was the vegetarian (!!!) dining hall. Vegetarian! All of it! I’d gone vegetarian within, I think, half a year of moving out on my own, and like everything at that age, it felt new and right and fresh and moral and wonderful.

Every single meal offered at Annapurna, the MIU campus dining hall, contained rice & dal. So you might go in for a meal and find deeps on the hot bar containing rice, dal, and then mixed vegetables, and maybe veggie burger patties or tofu slabs or beans or whatever the regular menu was. Always rice and dal, every single day without fail. There was always a salad bar and a milk dispenser. Pretty sure there was fresh bread, too? At least there was always bread and toasters. There was always hot milk with ghee at dinner, so you could take some in a thermos back to your dorm to drink before bed (because apparently Ayurveda said boiled milk with ghee balanced Vata or something. It was supposed to help you sleep, at any rate, and there was a big pseudo-scientific explanation about denatured protein strands or something that probably wouldn’t hold up if I could remember it clearly enough to research it, but with a little sugar and a pinch of turmeric it was really tasty).

Breakfast always had milk and cereal, plus something hot, like toast and eggs and/or tofu scramble, but I basically never went to breakfast unless I’d been up all night. There were herbal teas available all the time, but I don’t think there was coffee, I think you had to make your own in your room.

Anyway, most of the food was incredibly bland and unappealing to me then, even the exotic stuff. The dal was always Jain-style (because the place apparently couldn’t discern between “students” and “monks”?) so no onions or garlic, just asafetida, which is super boring. The vegetables were always overcooked. Even Mexican night was inexplicably bland, especially for a place with a spice rack literally the size of a barn door.

I remember that, when I finally understood, after I’d been working first in the kitchen and then on the cook’s aisle for awhile, that the two people who ran the place were both, like, trained professionals, basically experts, who cared about the food and the quality and the taste, I was surprised. Because the food was not good and did not seem, to me, to be the result of caring or expertise? The place literally served “dal pizza” on pizza night, which was made of nothing but dough, leftover dal with cinnamon added (??!), and fucking raisins. Sure, maybe a couple of the self-hating guys on Purusha (a group for dudes who were really on the program: celibate, restrictive diet, extra-long meditations, etc., the fraternity of Mother Divine, which was the same but for women) ate it, but it was absolutely devoid of joy, let alone tastiness or even nutrition.

It turned out they were extremely limited in what they could do because of all the Ayurvedic and other strictures handed them by admin. At the time, the opinion was that Ayurveda said onions and garlic were too stimulating for anybody meditating twice a day, and furthermore required all the fiber boiled out of vegetables. Made for bland feed, especially for college kids, but I guess that’s what admin, faculty and staff, and very “on the program” people wanted, so that’s what they got, even though the paying customers (aka students) wanted tastier food.

Most of us survived on milk, rice with butter and soy sauce, toast, and cereal, and waited for our favorite meal to rotate by again. (Mine was what they served for Thanksgiving: tofu slabs, broccoli, and mashed potatoes with a really awesome vegetarian gravy I still make to this day.)

Anyway, that place was my introduction to Indian food, and I don’t think there was ever roti or chapati served at Annapurna, only rice. So I never learned to eat dal and flatbread back then, even though that’s probably how nearly all of India does it.

But now, thirty years later, I have, and I LOVE ROTI AND DAL!!! It’s so good! Especially for breakfast! It’s just completely delicious and filling and satisfying. And fast, if you make the dal and the dough in advance, then all that’s needed is to nuke some dal, heat up a pan and roll out a ball of dough.

I’ve also recently (recently? uh, within the past half decade or so?) learned how easy roti is. It’s so easy. It’s literally just flour, water, and a little technique.

ROTI

Combine whole wheat flour and water, enough to bind. Work into a ball, place in a bowl and cover. Let rest half an hour.

Heat a pan or griddle to medium high.

Take some dough, roll into a ball smaller than a ping pong ball. Dip in all purpose flour, then roll into a thin disc using as much flour as it takes to keep it from sticking to the counter.

Cook on the hot pan, undisturbed, for maybe 30 seconds, then flip. Press down repeatedly with a rolled-up dish cloth until the roti fills with steam and puffs up. Flip another time or three as needed to complete cooking.

Remove the roti to a flatbread warmer (or another towel), brush with ghee, and cover.

Continue until you have all the roti you want or are out of dough, and enjoy!