My (Our) Experiments with (the) Truth (about cooking)

Well, I thought I should touch on a lighter subject for my next post, and cooking was a good one that came to mind.

My grandfather has always teased me about the fact that the best thing I knew how to cook was Maggi, and he would always sigh and say, “When do you plan to learn some Brahmin cooking?” My reply always was that I would learn when the time came, but I never thought that time would be this.

Well, as soon as I got my admit, I promised my mother and myself that as soon as I came back from Bangalore, we would commence the cooking classes. Alas, all the plans went right down the drain because:

1. As soon as I got back, my mom had me running to finish the visa paperwork.
2.    After getting the visa, everyone was tired, and decided to laze around a bit.   
3.  I started shopping, and notorious for my long hours to decide about one pair of pants, we often came back home way past any time considered decent to cook.  
4.  My grandma moved to Mayapur, or else she would have kept me busy with cooking class.
   

Well, nonetheless, the days flew past till we reached an arrangement. Amma would make one dish in the morning, and I would make another in the evening so that I eventually learned something. This turned out to be a bit of a comedy show, because I would half listen to what Ma said in the morning before leaving to work, so that by the evening I would forget her directions. An emergency call would be made to her office, and instructions taken down on a post-it note. The cooking would finally start, and somewhere in the middle I would have to rush to make another call to clarify something, or my mother would forget I’m cooking and call (She’d get worried if I did not pick up, and keep calling). Luckily, I did not char the food all that much (this was true considering my father never had any comments about the food).

I finally got to Philly, and then began our cooking (mis)adventures. I will only post the ones that really stuck with us. And those of you who follow Archana’s blog might have read some of them. These are listed in random order.

I’ll start with the funniest so far. We got tired of eating pasta and got wheat flour to make chapatti. Archana enthusiastically mixed the dough, and we got busy rolling out the chapattis. Of course, I inherited my mother’s ability to make chapattis in the shapes of all the continents (No offence, Amma!), and Arch was equally inept, so Sug took over the rolling. We were in charge of roasting them. I guess in all our excitement, we forgot that we were in America, and you have things called smoke detectors. So it came as a rude shock when in the middle of our third or fourth chapatti, a shrill ki-ki-ki-ki noise went off, and refused to stop.

At first, we could not understand what the noise was. Then it struck us as being the smoke detector. Arch and I ran to the living room and dragged a chair under the thing and tried to shut it off. We managed to do something and make it stop. Much to our chagrin, we had charred the chapatti that had been roasting. The noise stopped for a bit, but in another five minutes it went off again. It being too cold to open any windows to let the smoke out, we pulled a Phoebe (from F.R.I.E.N.D.S for those who don’t watch it), and yanked the entire contraption from the ceiling and left it on my shelf (where it lies to this day :D ).

One of the other masterpieces (read fiasco) that we cooked was dondakai curry. Archana took over responsibility for the entire thing, since Sug and I were busy with Biosim assignment. We went to the kitchen when she asked us to check the salt. The vegetable had to cook so we decided to cover it with a lid and let it cook for a while. Now, we did not know that Arch could not be separated from her room for too long, and so we never realized that she assumed that we would check the curry. It turned out that all three of us had retreated to our respective rooms, and it was only past a half hour when we saw no dinner being announced that a light went on in our heads and we all rushed to the kitchen to see the pan smoking on all sides.

Inspection revealed a layer of charcoal, nay, charred vegetable having formed a layer at the bottom of the pan. Since we had nothing else to eat, we scooped out the un-charred veggies and ate them. It took a lot of scraping to get the burnt ones out, though.

We also had this phase where we ended up melting several plastic items. A spoon by accident, a plate not quite by accident, and a certain roommate of mine is of the idea that plastic things do not melt when kept on a burner that had been in use (on high flame) for nearly an hour. :D One plate melted because the dish tray was piled with dishes, and we did not see it fall off right next to the burner.

Sug’s disaster included reheating a SPOONful of cauliflower curry for an ENTIRE minute in the microwave, which came back burnt, and left a charcoal-y taste in your mouth. Mine was the underestimating of the strength of tamarind, which resulted in super-tangy rasam.  Minor experiments gone wrong were miscalculations of rice-water proportions, and leaving curd out in the open till it was spoilt.

Besides these small incidents, we have pretty much smoothed out all the rough spots. You could say that we are decent cooks now, and you can certainly come over to enjoy a meal of pasta, if not traditional cooking. We are yet to master that art. But we are surely all much better than we were when we first came here. I guess that would apply for Arch and me, if not for Sug. She has been cooking longer than the two of us. Anyway, try us! J