A thank you note and some cooking shooking..

Thanks a lot for you comments yesterday, definitely made me feel better. And some sun, a talk with friends and a happy Zini made me realize that there is not point in lying in the ditch for long.. There is lot to be enjoyed and I should start doing that!! Once again thanks a lot for your lovely comments..Means a lot 🙂

So I read Chatty Wren’s post about her relationship with cooking and as always decided to use the old prompt for a new day!! So yes, today you will be treated (!!) with my thoughts on cooking!! Not that I haven’t already shared my thought on cooking already, you can read more about it here.. So what’s new I am bringing to the plate? My cooking memories!!

My first cooking memory is with my grandfather. He was an expert cook. He made some mean pickles!! Actually it was he who would make yearly pickles for us too!! And he maintained a big organic garden where he grew white baingan, sargavo, lemon, roses, karela, tulsi and some other stuff!! During my 4th stardand vacation I went to stay with him. After countless games of Rummy and dhaglabaaji we got bored and he asked me if I wanted to cook something!! And dhokla being my favorite I said, yes, let’s make dhokla!! And then I had my first cooking adventure that day!! He let me decide all the ingredients and executed as I asked him to!! Though the dhokla were not as I imagined them to be they were decent!! Then he told me the secret behind the dhokla tasting different!! It was the fermentation part that was missing!! He knew it all along but never corrected me, he let me make mistake to learn!! To say  I was very fascinated with the whole process would be an understatement!! 

My mom didn’t let me cook a lot and frying was a complete no-no!! But I was so eager to do the frying that one day I decided to do it when mom had retired to the bed room after dinner. And then hot oil splashed and some of it dropped on my hand. I quietly turned the gas off, washed my hand and came out. Mom saw it but waited for me to blurt it out. And when I saw a big boil where the oil had dropped I panicked and blurted everything to mom!! Needless to say, after this incidence I started my frying career very late in my life 😉

But I was still not over experimenting. As a result of one my experiment one of my mom’s pateela still sports a burnt and blacked out look!! I decided to make Maggie in this pateela for me and my brother!! The only catch was that we didn’t have maggie at home!! So I used sarevada (a dried rice sev, to be fried and eaten like papdi) in place of noodles. After some time whole kitchen was filled with smoke as the water had evaporated and sarevada had not cooked yet!! My brother refused to eat any of it. So we discarded it all before mom came back. But of course the smokey smell and the burnt pateela did pol khol for us…

My papa too can cook decent meals and he too does experiment at times. Once mom had some office dinner, so papa was in-charge of cooking for us. And he decided to make bhajia in place of daal and bhakhari!! We knew all the theory so we were confident. But it turned out that the theoretical knowledge was not enough. We ended up adding a lot more water to the batter than needed. As a result our bhajias were more like chips!! In the process we exhausted all our besan. Thankfully, mom turned up soon and got some more besan from our neighbours and made some yummy bhajia for us 🙂

As I have already mentioned I hated cooking when I got married and was solely responsible for cooking. To my disappointment hubby didn’t know anything about cooking. And when I tried to teach him to do basic things like cutting onions, I got really scared with the way he held the knife. I was sure he was going to cut his finger. Looking at this, we started using a food processor!!

Of course now I enjoy learning new dishes and doing experiments, my food blog is a result of the love for cooking and baking!! I do mess up some times, but I learn from the mess…