The BEST supper!

Yesterday was a ground breaking day in my life… I COOKED, or more specifically I TRIED TO COOK!

Now why on earth would I do something so uncharacteristically outstandingly mindblowingly impossible? The reason was simple: as simple as a rotten gobi, or more precisely, an about-to-be rotten gobi.

Our home has a very simple modus operandi . My flatmate cooks, she bakes yummy cakes and she shops for relevant groceries, i.e. rice, dal, spices, vegetables. I mostly eat out, or order in or gleefully accept whatever she dishes out, and so far I hadn’t really ventured to figure out what we store and where we store, and how all of it looks like. So while I am content with the eggs and the Maggie and the bread, I can hardly distinguish one spice from another and terms like dhania powder, lal mirch and turmeric barely make any sense to me. No correction, they barely MADE sense to me. Please note the past tense! Because since yesterday night, I am no longer a cooking virgin and yes, I know how to add spice to my life, I mean cooking. So far my kitchen exploits were strictly guided by my mom’s expert instructions, but now that I am all grown up and alone, I can manage with valiant directives over the phone, a few downloaded recipes from the net, detailed descriptions on the IM and Q&A sessions with colleagues with a little help from padosi who has more experience in the kitchen than I do.

So it all started with my flatmate mourning about the rotten-to-be gobi and her inability to come home early enough to cook. And since we are both broke, we appreciate the value of each penny and consider wastage as a criminal offence. So clearly letting that expensive gobi rot wasn’t an option. So the only other alternative was that I should cook it, as impracticable as it may sound. I borrowed some money from her and on my way back after managing to convince a very (I repeat VERY) skeptical padosi, we bought rice along with Maggie and pepsi (back up options).

And, ladies and gentleman, at the auspicious hour of precisely 9 pm, I started peeling potatoes and that life changing gobi! The next couple of hours were kind of a whirl that I never imagined I would put myself through as I tentatively navigated through uncharted territories and alien objects like oil, spices, not to mention microwave and non stick pans. My padosi was a little more steady, a little more confident and a little more comfortable than I was. I managed to burn the gobi and what was initially intended to be a curry, ended up being a fried, burnt variety, but which was still edible (or I would like to believe so). Padosi came up with a dal which he proclaimed to be amazing (and in absence of better options, I agreed)
So as we messed up the kitchen, as our sink was filled with dirty utensils (as if we fed an entire baraat), as we sat there exhausted at 11 pm, as we ate our first home cooked meal in one month, I felt so blissfully happy: my first cooked meal, as terrible it was, it was THE BEST SUPPER EVER!