My culinary crimes!

I am a well read lady. Or so thinks my mother! My parents hardly inducted us into kitchen skills earlier in our life. My mother especially believed that we needed no culinary coaching (as we were supposed to be busy studying!). “Jokhon dorkaar hobey, nijei sheekhe jaabe”. She meant that we will learn when the time (and need) would arrive!

And I did learn. The hard way!

During my hostel days I had discovered the royal Indian recipe of preparing the Horlicks. And my experiment begun and ended with that! And not that I did extremely well in studies! I was ultimately ‘na ghar kaa, na ghaat ka!’

Of the various skilled culinary culminations (read crime!) I can recall, the first one was during my first posting at Hazaribagh. The time (and need) had arrived, finally!

My brother had arrived on the occasion of Rakhi. We were five colleagues staying together, maintaining a common ‘mess’. And what a mess that was! Four of my colleagues were great cooks, we also had a very skilled hired cook and that left me alone; being the only one who had very little clue about the cooking secrets!

With the arrival of my brother, the affectionate sister within me woke up in a pursuit of dishing up something special for my ‘Bhaiya mere bhaiya’. Till then, my skill had reached to ‘anda curry’. So, I ordered “Takhliya...” or “You leave” and out went our cook. My colleagues were in for a surprise that day!

So the onion, garlic, garam masaala, tomato, ginger, chilli, and whatever, were perfectly done on the pan and the already fried eggs and boiled and peeled potatoes were waiting for their fortune to be dipped into the gravy. I already could smell the food and boy! Did it smell good! So the andas and aloos were in the gravy at last. I wandered if the gravy would be enough to feed seven hungry mouths. So I added some water and then little more and then more. My cook was by then vehemently pleading, “Bass Didi Bass” but I knew the appetite of my giants! So more water and more went into the curry.

The onions were now floating and the curry had lost its aroma. But there were so many famished skeletons I had to supply food to!

So dinner was announced and I requested them to bear with the anda “jhol” (soupy liquid curry). And then this proud me had all the famished skeletons pouring out their heart in disgust at the very sight of the curry. One of them, the lesser famished one played with the soup by dipping a ladle into it and pouring it into the same pan, over and over again and laughing her heart out! I was not the one to be hurt so easily! I said well, we could have the eggs and ignore the rest. In a moment the army of the great cooks were inside the kitchen, trying to prepare some edible stuff for my Bhaiya.

Our cook at Hazaribagh made the best Parathas in the world. One day all the other colleagues (the accomplished cooks) were out on tour and our cook had to be at the head office for the entire day. My colleague’s sister and I decided to prepare some parathas. We fought with the wheat, oil, girdle and all the other paraphernalia until we could finish making those edible maps made of wheat! Even at the end we were not sure whether the oil should be put at the centre of the paratha or from the edge. “End taq pata nahin chala!”

After the cooking was done, we sorted out the best of the (okay, comparatively better) parathas and separately stored them for our cook, to spare ourselves from his stark remarks. The two of us satiated ourselves with the rest of the black elastic carbon parathas!

Well, I have come a long way from that point in life! My mother was correct, everyone has to learn, some learn fast and some has a pace of one’s own but the roads are not always easy..

Iss Mod se jaate hain
Kuch sust kadam rastein
Kuch tez kadam raahein...

So we all cross this lane, some are slow and some are quick. Gulzaar saab, maaf karnaa mujhe!


Photograph source: Web