Come next year, I will celebrate milestone 30th birthday !! I have stayed on my own since I was 19 and every place has had its own culinary styles. There were times when I had to cook at least for myself & may be one more person - that being roomies, friends.
My very first cooking was at home when my mom had to go out and was going to be late. All I had to do was cook rice in the pressure cooker. I had some novel reading going on in the background. I am not a novel-buff; but if I lay hands on something that gets my all attention, I would complete it at my best speed. (Sometimes I cheat and read the last page when I cannot wait till I reach last page). Anyways, my mom as usual gave me instructions while I am not listening and went away.
Thanks to high density of Mumbai(Commercial Capital of India) , we have houses stacked up in apartments and I could easily listen cooker whistles from the neighbouring houses. My alert sub-conscious mind instructed me to get up and go to the kitchen. Now I have seen my mom cooking rice for over 15 years before this; there was no room for mistakes. I put the cooker with rice etc on the gas and got back to my novel. It must be after 20 minutes, I realized the air in the house wasn't carrying a very pleasant smell. Again my alert sub-conscious mind tried to check the details of this smell to ones stored in my senses. It returned back with results of this being a burning smell. Zoop, I sprung out of my bed and ran to the kitchen. Somehow I have a big log-keeping memory. I ran over the logs of my process and realized that I hadn't added any water in the cooker. The cooker had a funny black look and I was trying to cook up a story to justify the instance. Well, I have this big logging memory, it gets slower when it is time to work. Mom had got home even before I could look for a justifiable excuse. But they say 'Mom knows it all'!! She wasn't surprised ; she had it all spelt out without me uttering a word. Apart from late dinner, I had others teasing me over this story for a week or so.
Its been a long journey since then. I learnt few basic dishes as survival techniques. Every time my first attempt at anything has been memorable!! It's like you read whole chapter and when you take a sample test at end of the chapter , you realize things you didn't register while reading. Since I have been usual away from home, most of my cooking education happen either through some memory or online.
Some interesting milestone being 'chapati' (Indian-bread), kidney-beans curry.
My husband loves fish. During our 'pre-courtship time' - in an attempt to find way to his heart through his stomach- I cooked 'green-fish-curry' for him. I added everything that was green in his fridge. I used to eat non-veg food occasionally then. I had eaten and asked for recipe of a green-curry dish at a friend's house once. Apparently, that was chicken curry (& way too well-made then what mine turned out to be) !! I think he almost vowed that day not to marry someone like me. I will spare of you rest of the story how we still ended up marrying each other.
Now my husband comes from a completely different eating background than mine. I did learn few things from his mom; but when I cook its 'deja-vu' to taking a sample test at the end of chapter just finished reading (if you are wondering what this is - it is something I have used earlier in my blog; this is exactly how I feel!!). So my coach is 'Google' - its actually 'Google.co.in' & show pages from India :)
(& a mantra from my sis - sprinkle a little soul of urs in addition to all the ingredients!! )
The Internet -of course through google- not only offers basic recipes; if something goes wrong I search through blogs under the recipes and find out why & how to fix it.
Recently I tried a steamed-rice floor-cake dish called 'puttu'. Initial 2 attempts were returned with something like 'Unknown Error'. Even after steaming it for 20 minutes, a bowl of rice floor would come out as it was. Going through the blogs was a solace to know that I am not the only one. I guess that's the best thing about blogs anyways. Questions, comments straight-from-the-heart!! Well, this was just an attempt to contribute something to this world of ramblings.
