Culinary misadventures

Note :-  About the same topic as that of the last post. Might even have a couple of common points, what to do, that's all I felt writing about.


Being in your early or mid twenties and staying away from home, in a city, for work or for studies is probably one of the most decisive phases of your life. For most people, it’s the time when you start realizing, or at least start contemplating about where you want to head, and which waters you want to tread. Besides that, it could also be the time when you start having a serious stint in the kitchen. 

While I had started living in Chennai, eating out was a very convenient option. But later on, I started missing home food more and more, and trying out the different hotels and the roadside eateries, that Chennai is pretty abundant of, didn’t seem good enough. So I decided to test my culinary skills, in case there was any. Needless to mention, everything went catastrophically wrong, in the early days.

Cooking is an art. A unique vision on how the work of art will turn out to be in the end, is what separates an artist, from the others. Similarly, a good cook will have a vision on what kind of an experience the food is going to be, in the end; a quality that I completely lacked. My mind was always expectant of the impending doom, as I cooked. But the cooking maneuvers, or rather, misadventures, did teach me a few things.

During the early days, I used to order pizza, after I had messed things up in the kitchen. But soon enough, I learned that my cooking will never improve, and my confidence that I will never cook anything edible, grew manifold. So I would order pizza and then start cooking, so that by the time the disaster was complete, pizza would have got delivered.

As days passed by, I managed to develop a common procedure, to cook almost all of the vegetables, using only the essential ingredients. And by essential ingredients, I mean the things that are absolutely necessary to make it edible. For example, if you are going to prepare carrot fry, you can do without curry leaves or mustard seeds, but not without carrot, unless you are the people from my office cafeteria. There, they have these delicious meat rolls which, even if you dissect and examine, won’t be able to find any trace of meat. Also, I remember a hotel in my hometown, where you can consider yourself extremely lucky if your curd vada has either curd or vada. 

Sometimes, I used to call my mother, in order to ask for instructions. The conversation would go something like this.

“Amma, I have 350 grams of ladies finger, two onions and one tomato in the pan. How much salt should I add?”

“One and a half spoons”

“Okay”

I add one and a half spoons of salt, and later on, realize that the spoon that I am using is much larger than what we have at home, and probably I have added enough salt to shoot up my blood pressure to soaring levels.

“What about chili powder?”

“Which variety of Chili powder are you using? Is it Kashmiri?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“Yes. Can you check?”

I have already put the chili powder in a can and thrown the cover away, so I frantically search the trash to find the cover, while my dish continues to get cooked. I take out the trash once in a long while, so I am quite sure of finding the cover.  I find it finally, but by that time, whatever I had in the pan has already burnt, and there is no need to add anything to the lumps of carbon, anyway.  

As I try to gobble up whatever has been cooked, I think of my mother. I think of how she used to prepare breakfast, prepare lunch, pack it for my school, and then go to work by 10. That’s probably your story too. Remember how your mother used to cook something different and tasty, everyday. Have you ever thrown out the lunch that your mother had packed? Think of that.

 Try not to cry.

Now, cry all you want.