Adding a new superpower: Cooking!

Fending a quality meal for myself has long been my shortcoming. During home alone times and longer trips out of the country, the easier option was to dine out. In case of limited choices, I always had a suitcase full of noodles, oats and other heat-and-eat stuff!

Nevertheless, staying away for long without access to suitable restaurants has always been a concern. Cooking has been a skill that I couldn’t master, nor did I devote quality time to.

Practical challenges

Apparently, the easy access to thousands of video and picture recipes online simplifies the conundrum of converting ingredients into edible formats. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve been befuddled with several fundamental issues.

I’ve always googled for universal standards on what ‘a cup of vegetables’ measures, or a ‘pinch of spice’ comes to. I’ve spent a lifetime wondering what the ideal table spoon or tea spoon looks like. More confusing have been qualitative instructions — ‘add salt to taste’, ‘garnish with seasoning’ — not an easy declarative syntax to follow.

My Experimentations

For my current travel to the US, I was half shocked to see my wife pack a mini kitchen cabinet of spices, seasoning and other raw materials. While I had no clue on using any of these, the bigger worry was they taking up my Maggi’s space. My emotions were those of carrying an entire armoury into war, when all you knew was to throw stones.

Forced into transporting all these and with the bossy influence of a master-chef friend who shared my apartment here, I unwittingly took the plunge into cooking food last month. Starting out as a dutiful apprentice chopping vegetables and observing the skilled chef, things got complicated when I had to start cooking alone. There have been indelible moments:

• Using ayurvedic hair oil to cook food on the first day. The weird taste lingered on in the vessel for 1 day and in my palate for 10 days.
• Charring food in the oven beyond recognition.. and desperately running around fanning the air to avoid tripping the home’s smoke alarm.
• Discovering the age-old enmity between boiling oil and water, the tough way, with bursting oil droplets landing on the eyelids. While the paranoia took weeks to fade away, I had protective face gear on for a few weeks while cooking.
• Spraying tomato purée all over the walls, at times from a full cooker or a mixer. This time the protective gear of a wall of plates had to be built around the utensils.

Going through a series of life-threatening cooking encounters back-to-back, there were times I felt safer in the forest amongst black bears, than standing in my kitchen, spoon and vegetables in hand!

The learning curve

Thankfully, left with minimal options, I persisted for over a month by pushing myself. To my pleasant surprise things started easing a bit and turning around.

Cooking sessions started becoming after-work stress busters and quite strangely I started looking forward to these. Accidental discoveries and enjoyable food propped up the morale.

Though expertise is some weeks or months away, I’ve begun experimenting with newer dishes and started mixing recipes to create something new and exotic (a relative term!). Thankfully the fear of tablespoon measurements is firmly behind me and I’m in the phase of adding ‘ingredients to taste’. Maybe sometime soon you could ask me offline for some of the recipes ;-)