The Kitchen Artist

 

Today I was having a fun discussion with my friends at office. The topic was food. One of my friends was saying something about food doing the rounds across Whatsapp statuses these days. One of her friend’s Whatsapp status read:

There are three ways to my heart:

1. Buy me food
2. Make me food
3. Be food

We had a good laugh at the joke.

I wasn’t much of a foodie earlier, but since engineering, my taste buds seem to have developed themselves.

I have earlier spoken about food issues on this blog, since I came to Bangalore. The situation has improved a lot since then. My weekends are usually boring (yes, even after borrowing Kwench books and watching Dilwale and Bajirao Mastani back to back on the laptop). So I have made a decision to cook myself (and my roommate, if she is there) some nice stuff on the weekends. The idea is to kill time and at the same time make the mouth water.

So yesterday I made Gajar ka halwa (carrot pudding) as an evening snack, which turned out to to be totally yummidelicious! Earlier at lunch I had made some egg curry, which came out pretty decent as well.

This evening, after I came from office, I decided to put on the magical cooking cap and make some banana fritters. Okay! Did your eyes just go wide at the mention of banana fritters? Well, let me explain.

At home, whenever bananas turned over-ripe and would not feel so nice to eat raw, my mother made fritters out of them. The recipe is simple: Mash the bananas, mix it with flour and sugar. Next, make small balls out of the dough and fry them in oil. That’s it. If you have a sweet tooth, you’ll love it.

I had two bananas which were dangerously close to becoming rotten, so I thought why not bring mummy’s delicacy to life? Well, today I got yet another lesson on how much there is still left for me to learn in cooking. I had mixed flour alright, but it wasn’t enough to make firm balls. I had only made fritters with chickpea flour before when I was home, so I trusted that the bananas to cook in the same manner. However, they were too sticky and when one side over-fried in the oil, the other side was too pulpy to turn over.

In the end, I switched off the oven and ate the half-cooked banana pulp. Worst part was to clean up the sticky fried mess in the pan (Dear Mr. Ram Kapoor, have you ever really cleaned utensils with Vim? Yes, I am talking about the naya Vim with 100 nimbuo ke sakti, which is supposed to clean every sticky stain in one minute).

Anyways, like the title of this post declares, I call myself a kitchen artist. I may fail disastrously, but like all great artists, I do not give up!

In order to rest myself, I was earlier thinking of making 2 minutes oats (yes, you read that right!) for dinner tonight. But then I thought about the rich taste of onions and potatoes in a delicious egg curry with some handmade roti. As the thought came, I found myself going to the kitchen and chopping up potatoes and putting them in a pan to boil. The rest, as they say, is history! It was almost as tasty as I thought it would be, only it was more of an aloo-dum than egg curry. Nonetheless, every artist needs time to develop and bloom. And I am only an infant by that standard!

What about you? Do you enjoy cooking? Share with you memories from your kitchen in the Comments below.