Kerala style Mixture

Since her retirement, Amma often has this urge to attempt the unnecessary (or what would qualify as the impossible for a lot of us!). YouTube is her savior from endless hours of boredom and the go-to source for all such elaborate experiments. Unlike the regular, lazy folks like us who would buy stuff that we crave for at a store or head to a restaurant, I’d find Amma hunched over her phone with the YouTube app open and going through multiple variations of the same recipe. That day, she had got it into her head to make what the Mallus lovingly call ‘micher’, our version of the namkeen or the spicy mixture of crunchy munchies.

Once her intensive research is done, you can see the energy of a super-being flow through her. She methodically tackles one step after

another and in what feels like no time to us (the regular folks again), she has done it. With a gentle dusting of her hands and the satisfied look of a job well done, she gets to cleaning up the mess that is the kitchen now.

The next part is even harder for me to wrap my head around. Instead of pouncing on this home-made deliciousness, Amma will wait until tea-time to relish the snack with a hot cup of tea, just the way it should be. I wonder why are we (meaning I) the only greedy ones here? But only until I find her secretly binging on it the next morning. “Like father, like daughter”, she’d joke and I’d console myself thinking ‘like Amma, like daughter’.