The "affair" begines ...

For the first 23-24 years of my life I thought that I am born ‘kitchen hater’. As a kid I used to find thousand reasons to not help mom in kitchen. All I could manage to learn was how to make tea. I couldn’t even cook plain rice. The story of ‘how I used aata in place of besan (gram flour) in a dish and made a sticky mess’ is still famous in my family. After that fiasco dad never allowed to go near the gas-stove. Sis having natural talent in cooking would cook different dishes for me and I would dole out orders to her. My mom and all the other ladies in house used to have sleepless night thinking about ‘Kya hoga is ladaki ka shaadi ke baad ?’ They had chalked out plan of going into hiding for few years after marriage so that the husband’s side won’t find them to curse about me not being able to cook :-D.

My life seemed to go the ‘Happily ever after’ way, just when I was thrown to a land far far away called Bangalore where they served nothing but rice and rice. For a girl, not eating rice for weeks altogether this was hard to digest. There was no way to get out of it unless I start cooking myself. First few moths were very difficult; to learn to get the right amount of pressure for daal, how to turn the roti so it becomes round and not shapes of different countries, and what ingredient goes with what and in what sequence. There was so much learning you see and my learning curve was pretty fast, with help of my roomies and of course numerous calls to mom. As I started cooking, I discovered that I actually love it, not only that, I enjoy inviting people over and making different dishes for them. I should tell you that moiself along with roomies have hosted quite few successful parties like the bridal shower we had for a friend, Ganpati pooja when I tried putran-poli for first time. With time, calls to mom have reduced and variety in the food in increased. Now I aspire to open a restaurant of my own some day.

Till then I thought of putting some simple recipes together for new learners like me and some experiments that I try out, and some dishes that I love to make again and again. Any contributions or suggestions are more than welcome :-).


PS: I might tend to use lot of Marathi/Hindi names for the ingredient names I don’t know.