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.

Dosas and a couple of other things

The author of this blog currently lives in a rented house in Chennai, and cooks by himself. Insignificant.  Just saying.

Last week, I was talking to a friend of mine. She was telling me about her love, and the hurdles that she would have to cross, in order to manifest it. Things were hard for her, since she and her lover belonged to different castes. Not as hard as the dosas that I make, though. (Pointless reference. Sorry for that). But we just can’t love, taking all the other factors into consideration. Love just happens.

“What to do, I fell in love” -She said in a naive and funny way.

Her parents had already started the groom search for her. She didn’t show any sort of interest and her mother accused that something was wrong with this whole generation.

When I heard that, my immediate response was, “Every generation thinks that the previous one is outdated and the next one is immature”

After saying that, I felt highly overwhelmed by my own ability to say something like that, spontaneously. Or at least, I could pretend that way, till you find out the source from which I copied.

Later on, when I gave it a thought, I felt that there are a couple of things that I don’t like about our older generation.

First one is that, they are, tech retards, mostly. Sending a text message from a mobile is a huge task for them. Just like making a circle shaped dosa is for me. But technically speaking, all the dosas that I make are all circles. They are circles with different radii in different directions, I would say.  And besides, in the Wikipedia definition of dosa, it has not been mentioned that dosas should always be perfect circles. So, I assume, the cook can have the liberty of choosing any shape that he or she wants. You people should have seen the one dosa that I made last week. In the shape of Africa. It was awesome!  

Am I deviating from the topic here? Considering the kind of a ridiculous heap of sentences that this post is, I presume there is no such thing as deviation, mainly because there is no topic as such, to this post.  

The second thing is that, the older generation is way too conservative. They stick to their principles, just like the dosas that I make stick to the pan, and refuse to come off in proper shape.

I don’t know if I have given you people a bad picture of my cooking. Whatever that I told you so far, are just minor glitches, that come along the way, during my usual routine of cooking dosas in the morning. I have done some fairly good work so far, and have received a decent amount of appreciation also. Last week, I uploaded a picture of the dosas that I cooked, in Facebook. After seeing that, my sister immediately sent me a text message. ‘hey, very nice Idlis you have cooked, there. Good effort. Even though the thickness is just perfect, the overall size should reduce. Take care’.

Not quite the kind of appreciation that I would have wanted. But still. Sigh.

So, that’s all about my life, at the moment. Adios.

Between, is any of the institutes offering a short term dosa making course or something? TIME, may be? No, not that I need it. It’s for a friend’s friend you know. It’s ok, if there isn’t any. I myself will give the poor chap a couple of lessons when time permits. That’ll do. That’ll do.