Midday Musings

My relationship with food goes a long way back. Way back to my childhood days. I've always loved to eat. With eating I am always in love but my relationship with cooking has been a love-hate kind of thing. I have fallen in and out of love with cooking. As a kid when my mom used to cook I used to stand beside the stove and watch her perform her magic. A bit of this, a bit of that, stir a bit, simmer a little and the end product was so good. Watching her I would sometimes help her by stirring the pot, or watching over a dish so that it didn't get burnt. In return I got to taste the food. And if the food in concern was a meat or fish dish nobody could make me budge from the spot. This was when I was in grade five or six.

After I grew up, i.e. when I was in grade nine/ ten I was considered a cook amongst my peers. The reason being I could make omelettes and egg rolls and chili chicken and fried rice. Once in grade twelve I invited my friend for lunch and cooked a meal of chili chicken and fried rice for her. And it was done entirely by me, except for the rice. My mom cooked the rice and I turned it into a fried version. The same me went to this same friend's house one day when her parents were not at home. We were very hungry and decided to boil some eggs. After a lot of thinking we decided on the appropriate pot, measured out the water, put the eggs in the water and put it on the stove. After a while both of us decided that enough time had passed and the eggs should be ready by now. So we promptly turned the stove off, drained the hot water from the pot and put the eggs under running cold water in the sink. As we tried to crack open what was supposed to be a hardboiled egg by now, out came a whitish liquid. The shell still stuck to the egg and it was a total mess. All our combined efforts couldn't even produce a proper boiled egg, not even a half-boiled one. Not knowing what else to do with the eggs we left them in their current neither-solid-nor-liquid state for my friend's mom to come back and take care of it. On her arrival at the scene she was flabbergasted that the two of us couldn't boil an egg. What will happen to you girls, she sighed. And then she turned to me and said, what happened to you today? At least you can do better than your friend. I don't know what she made of those eggs. I felt ashamed to ask her.

A few years later in high school and college I developed an aversion to cooking. I still hung out near the stove on and off but when it came to real time cooking I was nowhere to be found. Instead I opted to do every other household work starting from mopping the floor to cleaning the dishes. And when guests came I helped my mom but not by cooking. Instead I played the role of assistant. I chopped the vegetables, cleaned the meat, ground the spices, made all the pastes and cleaned the house.

Our house was perpetually in a mess. Amongst the four of us my brother was the one who kept his room in a more or less mess free condition. Mine was sort of messy with books strewn on the bed and clothes piled high. But the winner was my dad. The entire house was his playground, rather dumping ground. He'd come from office and his office bag would be the first thing to sit on the dining table followed by all the cash that he carried in his pocket. In his entire life he has never used a wallet. He just carries all the money -- coins, bills, everything -- loose in his pocket. So at the airport when it is required to empty your pockets he has a hard time fishing out the last coin from the depths of his pocket.

Coming back to the point. Throughout my college life and even after, I had an aversion towards cooking – sort of. I avoided it as much as I could. I made the occasional alu tikki and the dimer chop, which took so long to make that my father commented that people would die of hunger if they were to wait for me to finish cooking. Now come on, dimer chop is a complicated recipe for a young girl like me. It is basically a croquette made of hard boiled eggs, potatoes and a combination of spices.

Even when I stayed with roommates I avoided cooking as much as I could. People considered me a fool because any other job other than cooking was a thankless job in the sense that you didn't get any appreciation. Nobody lauded if the dishes were sparkling clean or the vegetables were chopped uniformly and symmetrically. But still I preferred it that way. Why take the trouble when there were four other people who were eager to show off their culinary skills?

So four of us stayed in a rented house and all of us were foodies. Other than me the rest loved to eat as well as cook. I was the one who only ate. All I made were salads. And when everyone else was either too busy or didn't have any energy left, which was very few, I cooked. Once there were only two of us and I gave my friend the privilege of tasting my food. I cooked a dish of spinach and baby corns with soy sauce and vinegar. But, the overdose of vinegar led to a frantic search for antacids which weren't that effective and my friend spent the rest of the afternoon throwing up. So much for giving her the privilege.

After my marriage, cooking was no more an option. It was a necessity now. I heard stories of my husband's culinary skills from his sister-in-law. Apparently he was famous for his Kashmiri Pulav, which his sister-in-law vouched for. It was definitely good to know that he could cook something complicated like that. But you can't have it every day. That's party food. What about the regular food…you know daal, chawal… By the way, speaking of the Kashmiri pulav, I am yet to have it and it's almost three years now. I am not too hopeful about it now; then again hope is what keeps us going!

Anyways, without putting much hope on my husband I set out to cook. After marriage I moved to the US and the cooking system was entirely different from what I was used to (mostly seeing) in India. Here my kitchen had four burners and they were all electric ones. I had never used an electric range before. The four burners with their controls seemed quite daunting. I had to think very carefully before I turned on a burner. Quite a few times I have put a pot of water to boil on the right rear burner and gone off to do something. I come back after 15 minutes to find that the water is just as I had left it. as I extend my hand to feel the water in the pan, I feel the portion between my elbow and my hands starting to get warm. It is then that I notice the red glow of the right front burner! These things happen even now though.

And then there was a huge oven. I had never seen such a huge oven in my life. I had heard of ovens and seen them but they were tiny compared to this thing. For the time being I forgot about the oven. Our next concern was to buy cookware. All my husband had was a pressure cooker, which had some melted blue plastic stuck to its side, and from its very look you could tell that it hadn't been used in a while, and by while I mean in a long while! And a pasta pot. The pasta pot was in good shape and it served me well. And he had a complete dinner set. So we didn't need to buy plates immediately.

A short story involving the pasta pot. My husband's brother lives 20 minutes away. They helped us move in and after all the shifting was done, we freshened up, got dinner from outside and settled into sleeping bags for the night. Now the next morning, it was time for tea. In what do I make tea? All I had was the pasta pot, and a frying pan and a 2 liter pressure cooker, (which I brought from India, both of which were wedding gifts, and useful at that). Isn't one always surprised at the weird gifts one can receive at weddings and other occasions. This is where the concept of a gift registry comes in handy. So I take the pasta pot and put in four cups of water for four people. The water comes to a boil, and after it had boiled I put in the tea leaves. Now I am used to measuring out the tea leaves, but this time I just eye balled it and dumped the tea leaves. Not being a tea addict, I forgot about it and when I rushed into the kitchen after remembering I realized we didn't have a strainer. So I pour the concoction into the big mugs, add sugar and serve them. After a few sips, my brother-in-law said it was too strong, so he poured half of it in a plastic glass and added water. But nothing could correct what I had made. In the end we decided we were better off without tea. I am sure my husband was very embarrassed at his wife's tea fiasco, because I remember he asked very mildly, in a casual sort of way, "Have you made tea before?"

How was I to explain to him that I had made tea before, that I used to make tea almost every evening for my father. My problem here was that things were huge. The cups were of enormous size. Tea cups in India are probably 1/4^th of the size of the mugs we were using. And on top of it, I had no measuring spoon. I was not used to making tea like this. But necessity and circumstance is the best teacher and you learn from them.

I don't remember exactly what I cooked each day but there are two things which I remember distinctly. Both of us are very fond of shrimp, so one day I decided to make a spicy shrimp curry and rice. The rice went well. Now for the shrimp. One major thing with shrimp is that it has to be cooked perfectly, otherwise it can be tough or it can disappear inside the gravy. Now how to do that? Using a pressure cooker would be perfect except I had no idea how to use one, in the sense how much water was required and how many steams you needed. So I gave up the idea.

As I was settling in I had found a big plastic colander and a nonstick pot which must have belonged to the previous owners. They seemed fairly new and I had washed them with hot soapy water and they were good to go. So now I had two pots. In one I put the shrimp, some oil and water, covered it with a lid and put it on the heat. Almost an hour passed by before they were anything near tender. Next in the pasta pot I made the gravy. (I couldn't use two burners at the same time then.)

After the gravy was done I dumped the shrimp in it and let it simmer for a while. When it was dinner time my husband was very happy to find out that it was shrimp night. We sat down to eat and I had to literally fish out the shrimp because there was too much gravy. You had to scoop it from the bottom of the pot. The pot was a deep one and my estimation skills weren't quite right yet. They are not perfect even now, but they have definitely improved. I asked my husband how it was, and while fishing for shrimp from the pot he said it was very good. I was a bit surprised that he said it was good, because though it tasted good, there was obviously too much liquid in it, but I believed it to be his honest response. I needed to believe in it. It was later when I had improved that he told me how scared he was that day. In his mind he had already started looking up Indian restaurants which served home style meals while hoping that I'd improve.

Another day I made khichuri – a one pot dish of rice and lentils and a few spices. It is usually made when the weather is all rainy or cold and anytime you mention khichuri and ilish mach bhaja to a Bengali, just wait and watch him drool. There was a problem with the liquid again, only this time it was drier than it was supposed to be. And then there was the issue of quantity. We ran short of khichuri. Time and again my husband told me, "Remember I am a guy. We guys eat more than girls. So please make some more next time." I nodded but I just couldn't get it right. Having four girls for room mates for two years wasn't helping here.

Almost after a month or so after I came to the country I was to cook for the first time for a guest. The guest in question was my husband's friend whose wife was visiting family in India. his friend called up one Saturday afternoon, and before long I heard my husband saying into the phone, "come over for lunch tomorrow". And my brain screamed "what! Lunch? Tomorrow?" I kept hoping that his friend would refuse, at least for his own sake, but apparently he had accepted very happily. You don't go to friend's houses for food within the first few months, unless you know for sure that the cook is a good one. By this time we had bought a cookware set and I managed to cook a simple meal of a curry, lentils and (hold on) fish! Luckily, for all of us everything turned out well. They were very simple, not quite what moms would dish out for guests, but I was nowhere near the level of moms. Apart from the food being simple this time there was no shortage in quantity, except for the lentils. I had made one big pot of lentil, and was pretty confident that this would be sufficient. But the way the two men gobbled up the lentil, I actually stopped after one ladleful, and that saved the day.

And after all the friends it was the turn of the in-laws. My in-laws came over to spend the summer with us. After all the great food cooked by my mom-in-law I thought I should treat them to something. So one Saturday afternoon I decided to make a tray of baked vegetables. I had made this before once with excellent results. I chopped up all the veggies into big chunks, drizzled olive oil, seasoned them with salt and pepper and then put it into the oven. It was to be a matter of an hour before lunch was served. But after two hours at almost two o'clock, when I opened the oven the vegetables were shriveled up, dry and half burnt. I didn't quite remember the temperature right and that was the reason of the disaster. Luckily for everyone bread and eggs saved everyone from starving but it didn't quite save me from embarrassment. To this day my father-in-law remembers the fiasco and asks me if he'll be able to have some decent food the next time he comes over. And he's visiting us this summer. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

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