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Designed Living

A box of spices that looks so good (and so outrageously expensive) is probably not for real people who have to fix dinner while multi-tasking between laundry loads, vacuuming, hollering at the kid to pick her toys up and answering the phone just when the oil is smoking hot.

It belongs to a designer kitchen where the perhaps the only thing used is the microwave to heat food that was ordered in.

My grandmother used empty jars of Horlicks for her spices many of them dating back to the 50s. In a broken China bowl that stood on the window sill, she put some soil to sprout fresh coriander - sometimes fenugreek. The food she laid on the table was ambrosia and she made it look effortless.

In the time of designer Masala Dabbas it may only be fair to require a compostor in the kitchen to be able to grow one's daily dose of fresh herbs in the kitchen.

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