Rice and shine

I started cooking by myself when I was very young. By the time I was about 12, I had managed to learn how to make a gamut of goodies, from simple mayonnaise to more complex cake, easy-to-do flan and rather more complex bread. Along the way, I also learned the rules of how to create the most crunchy potato sabji, the most green spinach in dal and the most shapely rotis I could ever manage (I must admit that I cheated somewhat at that, I used the lid of a dabba to cut perfect rounds). Gradually, growing up, with some battling with my favourite teacher, my mother, I managed to figure out just why you use asafoetida while tempering rai for sambhar, when to throw the tomatoes into rasam and how to drop a batter-coated round of baingan into hot oil without splashing it all over yourself. With time, I started enjoying the entire process of cooking playing with ingredients and methods to make it all not just easier and faster, but also a lot more fun for me and those who had to eat the results.

And then I went off to college in New York, my first experience of living alone. It had some trauma attached to it, in that the apartment block I called home was fondly called La Casa Cucaracha by anyone who knew that it was home not just to generations of out-of-state and out-of-country students, but also to teeming multitudes of out-of-control cockroaches. I had – and still have – very few inherited fears, but my intense loathing for cockroaches is something my mother gave me. So between attempts at culinary experiments on a recalcitrant stove, I swept and hopped and squeaked as small and large brown arthropods crawled and scuttled out of various crevices and shelves to feast on the results of my endeavours. It was, to say the least, traumatic, especially since I could not get too close to any one of the creatures for sheer revulsion and they stayed just far enough away from me to avoid being hit by the broom I was wielding with all the skill of a Darth Vader and his light-sabre. But a blizzard of boric acid managed to tame them into hiding, if not emigration, and I could play with my pots and pans without too much furtive peeking over my shapely shoulders.

That was the time I learned how to make staples. As in the starchy foundations of most meals, be it pasta, potatoes or rice. While spuds were easy enough to master and spaghetti was a cinch - especially after a protracted very-long distance call to Mother in Geneva, Switzerland, about when exactly to put the stiff pasta into salted boiling water – rice was still a bit of a mystery. And, with me, it was almost murderous in its level of difficulty. I am not an especially logical person, particularly when I am in the kitchen being creative, so the fundamentally routine and rule-governed process of making rice completely escaped me and my variedly-wired brain. It was only a few years later, when I was studying in Colorado, that everything came together and I learned how to make rice. By then, I had understood that reading the instructions on the package was not a matter of wimping out or taking the easy route, but the best place to start.

But cooking in Colorado, especially mile-high in the Rocky Mountains, is not the kind of process that sets the tone for the rest of your culinary life. In fact, it is much like they say the job of a weatherman is – you get it right about two percent of the time; the rest, you wing it or order out. My stabs at rice were indeed bloody trials, almost by fire. On many attempts, the middle would be sticky and overdone, while the edges were woefully crunchy and almost-raw. Or else everything would be like a very soupy congee or a very hard and stiff mould. I almost gave up, except that I was full of sheer pigheadedness and refused to cry Uncle. And, finally, one day, I did it. And we celebrated….with take out Chinese fried rice.