Hari Bhari Tokri is an initiative from the Mumbai Organic Farmers and Consumers Association (MOFCA) where you pay a deposit for one growing season of 3-4 months and pick up a packet of vegetables that have been grown locally, organically and picked fresh every week.
The importance of those first two criteria can be debated, but the last really cannot. The bhindi is so crisp and succulent, the greens so fresh, not wilting as they are in most markets , the beans so bursting with flavour that its worth putting up with the slight inconvenience of doing the pick up and not being sure which veggies will be there each week. And even here there was one near constant — ridge gourd has been such a regular feature that I wondered if they shouldn’t call the scheme Turai Bhari Tokri!
This may sound like a complaint, but really it is not. The regularity of finding those long rigid furrows when I dug into the packet forced me to get to grips with a vegetable I have often overlooked. It is easy to do that with gourds (with the exception of attentionseeking karela). Perhaps it is because their flavours are mostly mild, or because they grow so easily and copiously they tend to be cheap, or simply because their solid , slightly comic forms make them an ideal base on top of which vegetable vendors can pile up other vegetables.
