All fed up!

I am a true blue, die-hard, staunchly determined foodie. Which means that I like eating, do my share and more of it, and am on an eternal quest for something new, improved and yummier to eat. But at the same time, some little well-doctrinated, completely inculcated bug within me demands that I eat healthy, with wholesome ingredients made in a way that keeps almost anything I eat or cook low fat, low spice, high fibre, still appealing to tastebuds and eyes alike. It isn’t always easy, especially when the planner of all meals in my house is me, and sometimes my sense of permutation/combination wants a rest, perhaps even a well-deserved one. But at those times I go wild, eccentric, dishing up meals that only a fond parent can eat and still say nice things about. And they do, dutifully and lovingly, sometimes even to the point of making me deeply suspicious about their veracity.

What is more fun for me than eating is creating food. All my life I have watched cooking shows on TV in various languages, read cookbooks and food books, scoured the Internet for inspiration, talked to friends and relations alike to find out more about how to make what, when and why, and conjured up stuff that does, at some abstract level, make sense and, at a more concrete level, actually taste good. My father and mother have been willing – for the most part – participants (or should I call them ‘victims’?) in my culinary adventuring, only very rarely refusing to try something before the meal itself. I have cooked up more than my share of disasters, too, like the lamb kababs that stayed raw even after two hours of leatherising in the oven, idlis that obdurately remained sticky in the centre no matter how long they cooked, stuffed eggplant that was so salty that the whole lot had to be thrown away and scones that were more bitter than uncooked karela!

My culinary career is all about memories, most good. Perhaps the earliest is sitting with my father on the floor of our vast kitchen, slowly dripping oil into a blend of eggs, vinegar, salt and mustard to make mayonnaise that had, I squeaked in my excited treble, “Fish’s tails, Papa, fish’s tails!” I was, of course, teased mercilessly when the mayonnaise I made by myself curdled, on a few unfortunate occasions, but always praised on the times I proudly showed off bottles of perfectly emulsified sauce. With that as a base, I diligently chopped onions, gherkins and other veggies into excruciatingly tiny bits and mixed up batches of what I imagined to be Thousand Island dressing. I soon graduated to making more complicated food, like breads, cakes and cookies, first with parental supervision, later on my own, once I was trusted enough in the kitchen not to slice my fingers off or burn my hair or blow up the pressure cooker.

The last I could not possibly have done. I have always been terrified of pressure cookers – they make strange noises, they let off vast amounts of steam, they have bits and pieces I can never put back together once they are taken apart for washing and I have heard too many stories about them blowing their lids off to feel totally comfortable dealing with them. So when I finally gathered up enough nerve to use one to make dinner for my cat, it was all together an excessively traumatic process – I would load the contraption, check it about seven times to make sure it was all fitted together properly, and then watch it warily, Cat keeping me purring company, until it started hissing with the collecting steam. Then, when it finally let off that pent-up vapour through the appropriate aperture, Cat and I would flee the kitchen in one concerted rush, to return only when the smells got too tempting for him to resist and the pot had become silent enough for me to investigate.

And as I found myself getting braver with gadgets – pressure cooker being perhaps the greatest trial, even though microwave, spice mill and can opener were other hazards I needed to master – I got more adventurous with recipes. And that we can talk about after Sunday, the day I do all my cooking for the next week. Who knows, I may have come up with some new recipes by then!