Why I Cook What The Lake Gives Us

The power goes at least twice a week during the monsoon. Sometimes it’s off for an hour, sometimes four. You learn to keep candles where you can find them in the dark, and you learn not to schedule anything important around electricity.

But that’s also when the frogs start, and the rain hits the tin roof so loud you have to lean across the table to hear each other. And honestly? Those end up being the meals people remember most.

What comes out of the homestay kitchen

Breakfast is usually puttu and kadala curry, or appam with a thin coconut milk stew. Simple things. The puttu steamer hisses on the stove while the morning mist is still sitting on the paddy fields, and you can smell the roasted rice flour from the veranda before you even sit down.

Lunch is rice, sambar, a thoran made from whatever vegetables came in that week, and fish if there is fish. Dinner is lighter — maybe a kanji with pickles and papad, or a vegetable curry with chapatis. It depends on what the kitchen has and what you feel like eating.

Meals here follow the market, not a menu

Every Thursday I go to the market near the Punnamada jetty. The vegetables there are not the vegetables you see in a Kochi supermarket. Tomatoes are smaller and sourer — the good kind, the ones that actually taste like tomato. The beans are stringy and need topping and tailing. The shallots make you cry when you peel them.

Some guests ask for a menu at check-in. I understand the instinct. But if I handed you a printed card, I’d be lying to you, because I don’t know what I’m cooking on Saturday until I’ve seen what’s at the market on Thursday.

That’s the honest version of how this works. The kitchen here cooks what’s available, what’s in season, and what looks good that week.

The fish question

People always want to know about the fish. Fair enough. Karimeen — pearl spot — is the one everybody asks for. It’s a backwater fish, firm and sweet, usually fried in coconut oil with a crust of rice flour and chilli. When it’s fresh, it’s one of the best things you’ll eat in Kerala.

But here’s the thing: I can’t promise karimeen on a Tuesday. The fishermen bring what they bring. Some days it’s karimeen, some days it’s prawns, some days it’s a small silver fish I’d have to look up the English name for. The kitchen cooks what arrives.

Look, if you want a guaranteed seafood platter with a printed menu and a wine list, Alappuzha town has plenty of that. No hard feelings. Some guests disagree with me on this, and that’s fair. But if you want to eat what this lake actually gives up on a given morning, you’re in the right place.

I’m biased, obviously. I grew up eating this food.

Why this matters more than the view

We get a lot of guests who book because of the photos — the veranda, the lake, the boat ride in. Six minutes across the water from the jetty, no road, no cars, the whole thing. It looks peaceful in pictures, and it is peaceful in person.

But the thing that keeps people here — the thing they write to me about months later — is usually the food. A retired teacher from Pune comes back every January. She stays in the same room, sits in the same chair on the veranda, and eats the same breakfast every morning. She told me once that the routine is the whole point. The puttu tastes the same as it did five years ago, and that sameness is what she drives twelve hours for.

A French couple stayed with us one monsoon. The power went out during dinner — third time that week — and we lit candles and kept eating. Later the man told me it was the best meal of their entire trip, better than anything they’d booked in Kochi with a sommelier and a tasting menu. I don’t think he was being polite.

There’s something about eating rice and fish by candlelight, with the rain hammering the roof and the frogs going absolutely berserk outside, that a restaurant can’t replicate. Not even a very good one.

What the kitchen won’t do

We don’t do room service. We don’t do a la carte. We don’t do “can I get the fish without the bones” — the fish has bones, that’s what fish is. And we don’t have a coffee machine, though the filter coffee is good if you drink it the way it’s meant to be drunk, which is strong and sweet and not in a paper cup.

Also, the generator. If the power’s out long enough, we switch it on, and it hums. It’s not loud, but it’s there, a low diesel drone under the rain. Some people don’t notice. Some people notice immediately. It’s a small island; there’s only so much we can do.

The mosquitoes come out at dusk, which is annoying, and we provide nets and coils and a plug-in thing that works about half the time. The phone signal drops during heavy rain. That one you can’t fix with a net.

But you knew that when you read the words “homestay off the grid Alappuzha” — or you’re starting to understand it now. Staying here means the kitchen knows your name by day two, and your breakfast preference by day three. It means eating what the lake and the market provide, on a schedule that follows the weather and the boats and not much else.

If you want to know what’s likely to be on the table the week you’re thinking of coming, just ask. I’ll tell you honestly what’s in season and what isn’t. And if you have a food question I haven’t answered here, write to me — I’m usually up early, and I usually reply before the boat leaves. You can also read more about the place on Evaan’s Casa if you want the logistics side of things.

Most people skip this, but — the best meal you’ll have here is probably the one you didn’t plan. Ask me about it when you arrive.