Do opposites really attract? Yin and Yang, are they really meant to co-exist under one roof? They say that opposite values are complimentary. And yet with every passing day we struggle to strike the right balance.
Why is it that a hot and sour soup is incomplete without the sour? Why is it that chocolate marries a stinky blue cheese so beautifully? How did a fresh, tart strawberry fall in love with whipped cream? And what made sweet coconut milk engage so beautifully with hot chillies? It is all about striking the right balance.
It is world of paradoxes; where good and evil, hot and sweet, night and day co-exist. There was an interesting verse that I had read by Kahlil Gibran, it talked about marriage. It says,
“Let there be spaces in your togetherness, and let the winds of heaven dance between you…
Stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart”.
When it comes to co-existence of contrasts, it is important that one doesn’t step on the others shadow. You see, that hot and sour soup will not taste so perfect if it is just “Hot Soup”. Strawberry will not be so great on its own as it will be with that sweet cloud of whipped cream! It was easy for the proud, tasty chocolate to believe that it worked well all on its own, until it met blue cheese and realized what flavour nirvana really meant.
You see, the right marriage of characters can make you grow to heights that you didn’t know existed, it can make you happy like you had never been before. But a wrong marriage, like one between green tea and lima beans can really crush the beauty of both.
Sometimes the world disapproves, like we all would never have thought cauliflower would get involved with coffee, but it turns out that strange pairings can also make sense when they help each other grow.
In a world so full of itself, sometimes we forget that our tea needs a rusk, our cheese needs a cracker and our cereal needs some milk to make it perfect. We often walk around with the pride of a custom-made artisan chocolate until we bump into some almond and realize that this is what we had been missing all along.
May be it is time to step out of our ignorant cocoon and acknowledge those that really help us grow, and un-pair ourselves with what crushes our true nature.
FoodMantra 