My Experiments In The Kitchen

I am lousy with household tasks that girls are generally supposed to be good at. I'm primarily talking about cooking here. Totally unlike a lot of my female friends, I don't even feel the inclination to go into the kitchen and try my hand at it.

There is this incident that my brother and I enjoy relating to people. It was some time in January 2000. We'd just moved into the house where we currently live. My grandparents, who'd just moved back into our ancestral home in our native village, wanted to send some stuff over. My grandmother called in the morning to tell me that she was sending some distant cousin of mine with the stuff. This was a time when Delhi was going through a bit of a cold wave. My grandma instructed me to make some tea for the guy when he came over. Obviously I had to do that, because it was that cold and he was doing us a favour. My mom was at work and only my brother and I were home. So, well, I had my grandma give me step-by-step instructions over the phone. I just served the tea and disappeared from the living room after that. My brother claims that the poor guy's expression seemed to show that he was drinking some sort of bitter medicine. Never again did I try my hand at tea. There was never any real need, actually. In our house, most of us do not like tea. Only my Dad does. And my mom is usually there to make it for him.

Then there is the pulao struggle. The first time I made pulao, it was a little undercooked. A little may be an understatement here. I actually do not remember all that clearly, because this was twelve or thirteen years ago. The second time I burnt it just a little bit. No understatements here. And then there was the time when my vegetable pulao was cooked just right, but I clean forgot to put in the vegetables which had been washed, peeled, cut, ready to cook.

Since then I've made reasonably good pulao a bunch of times. I could survive on vegetable pulao if my mom goes away for a couple of days. But I've never had to.

I've always enjoyed baking sponge cake with my mom constantly supervising me. I've done that a number of times. But of course, without supervision, I'll mess it up. It'll either be hard enough for me to knock somebody on the head with, or soft enough to require a spoon to eat.

This morning I made something decent for my breakfast. There's this sweet variation of French Toast that my mom makes sometimes and I totally love. I made a couple of slices for myself today. It needed just another pinch of sugar, but it was not bad at all.

I just need a bit of determination here. I'll learn the ways of the kitchen someday.