By Tara Narayan

IT’S THE SEASON for all kinds of foodie delights, veggie foodie delights! I tasted my first sheervodeo and choon …freshly, perfectly made, and I’m still bewitched by the austerity of the combination. The moment one discovers a new flavour to fall in love with is unforgettable. I could relish this sheervodeo and choon day in and day out for breakfast or a light teatime snack. It’s that delicious a combo looks wise (a study in white and dark brown), taste wise (food of the gods), substance wise (all kinds of good things for body, mind and soul). What is it? Don’t laugh. It’s just freshly steamed rice vermicelli (or fine noodles) eaten laced with a mixture of freshly grated coconut and palm jaggery.

Hardcore country Goans will recognize it from their childhood days, today it is taken so much for granted that I dare say many sneer or look down on it in favour of more up market fare. But I’m seriously in love with this austere combination of rice vermicelli, grated coconut and jaggery, which turns up in with minor differences all the way down the Konkan and Malabar coastline and as a matter of fact throughout Southeast Asia. And patodeo i.e. rice pancakes stuffed with choon. Choon is nothing but freshly grated coconut mixed with palm jaggery, sometimes spiked with cardamom or nutmeg powder. I’ve decided to keep choon on standby for every day use at home from now on …because I rate this multi-purpose darkly delicious concoction superior to ice cream, superior to chocolate, superior to jam and whatever else you can think of. Give me sheervodeo and choon, and patodeo, wrapped up in banana leaf…it’s like unwrapping treasure.

SFX PLANTS SHOW
I’D TURNED up at the St. Francis Xavier High and Higher Secondary Schools in Siolim on Saturday morning. Their 13 th Plants and Flowers Festival was being inaugurated and cartoonist and artist Alexyz who had invited me, clued me up about it. This was the pioneering show which had grown from strength to strength, “Last year the show’s theme was the coconut tree, this year it’s vegetables…that might interest you.” So I trotted off looking forward to a happy day ahead! I’m getting to know and appreciate the most fascinating Alexyz, who’s a Bombay-born and bred boy. But, he confided, he and a couple of other Bombay Goans had decided to pack their bags in the early 70’s and come and make Goa their home. The Goa of wide open green paddy fields and lush watery fertility…sun, sea, sand, fields, hills, forests, rivers, red earth, xit-coddi. I can tell Alexyz’s love for Goa goes beyond his own creature comforts.

Life imitating nature at the St. Francis Xavier's School annual plants show. . . (left to right) beetroot, brinjal, carrot, corncob, tomato and a surplus of carrots!

How come he’s acquired such fraternal feelings for SFX, Siolim? He lives next door and over the years he’s become familiar with the village and its people, although to be honest Siolim is rapidly losing its rural ambience. Alexyz & Co. have been the driving force behind the eco-consciousness of the school. Way back in 1992 he’d got a warm response from the Parent-Teacher Association and its chairperson, Lawrie Fernandes, when he’d come up with the idea of holding of a plant show to motivate students into taking an interest in nature, wildlife, the human contribution which keeps the good earth blessed, bountiful and yielding …the diversity, the unity, the symbiotic relationships between life and life which make life on earth pleasant.One may hate the world of human beings but never Mother Earth because She is the greatest teacher of them all, no?

Alexyz remembers, “I still remember how we hired a tempo and went around persuading villagers to participate in the first plants show in Siolim…” The rest is history. The school now has a Green Heritage Eco Club guided by Diego Pinto (a music teacher amongst other things), principal Fr. Paul, neighour Alexyz and other local residents. This is to say the 13 th Plants & Flowers Festival at SFX, Siolim, was a multi-extravanganza of an exhibition of all kinds of plants for the garden and home, nurseries with fruit and ornamental plants for viewing and sale e.g. Parijat Nursery in Chopdem (they have some beautiful good-luck bamboo plants), Garden Glory (all kinds of garden and gardening tools). There was a vegetarian cookery competition and a fancy dress competition with primary school students pretending to be corncob, tomato, radish, brinjal, pumpkin! In one classroom students were engaged in cooking vegetarian recipes, in another they were turning out paintings of familiar vegetables…and on a stage put up in the spacious school compound the older students presented eco-conscious skits with carrots and radishes in hand. The prizes comprised of decorative pottery made by the students.

I noted that they (students) are quite conscious of the fact that the Goan countryside and hillside is being systematically destroyed by open-cast mining, how mining has and continues to murder village farms and rivers. One student had created a tableau of one such horror mine; it deserved a prize, I thought. (Do you know that it is during the monsoon season that these mines literally strip away inches deep of soft, rain-soaked earth, to facilitate drilling and blasting of naked rock face when the dry days come??? The precious earth washes off into rivers…silting, polluting, killing them with hateful mining reject dumps.

LOCAL BAKERIES
NEEDLESS TO say I’ve decided to keep a date with SFX’s annual plants and flowers show henceforth. It is to the smiling Lourdes and Gabriel D’Souza of St. Sebastian’s Bakery, Siolim, I owe a debt of gratitude for introducing me to honest-to-goodness sheervodeo and choon and patodeo! A familiar couple in the village, they had a stall up at the show retailing Goan goodies ranging from potato bebinca, kokada, coconut bolina,doce da grao, sannam…he offered Alexyz and me a freshly made patodeo i.e. a soft steamed rice pancake rolled up with choon. Then I saw the silky white lacework of sheervodeo topped with choon and I was lost. And bought a whole lot of it to take home. Hey, school principals should make arrangements with local bakery caterers Lourdes and Gabriel to supply schoolchildren with freshly made Goan snacks like sheervodeo and choon, patodeo, sannam, savoury or godshe fau (fau or fov is blanched rice flakes, often called pohe in local parlance) by way of breakfast or mid-day snack.

If anybody were offering me sheervodeo and choon to go to school I’d go to school! Although, of course, it’s a disgraceful tragedy that in modern India children have to be tempted to go to school for the sake of a decent breakfast or snack. Poor little rich India if you know what I mean!

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