Messedup Chef Singapore

Cooking had never been my cup of tea (pun unintended). When I stayed with family, I always got delicious home cooked food, garnished with “Ma ka pyaar”. So, I never took the effort to learn cooking. Then I left home for further studies and my mother tried to convince me to learn cooking but I shot her down, telling her that I had enough stresses to deal with, since I was leaving home for the first time.

I was fortunate that my campus had a nice Indian food place and throughout my student life, I was well fed without any effort. After I left campus, Subway, Ananda Bhawan, Greenwitch salad, Nutella and Kinara prospered tremendously due to my lack of culinary skills.  

My mother isn’t a quitter and used all the weapons in her arsenal to get me to the kitchen…ranging from the usual worried mother of an unmarried girl mode “however modern society gets, you will need to cook for your family” and the self-appointed Shehnaaz Hussain mode “when you cook a healthy meal your complexion will glow and the spots on your face will vanish” to the HDFC relationship manager mode “think how much you will save if you cook instead of eating outside”. I must confess, she did get me thinking at times, but the desire to cook was as short lived as the run of “Ram Gopal Varma ki Aag” at the box office.

When I moved into a new house, I did have the temptation to start cooking and invite friends home for dinner, but the mean jeers of a heckling flatmate when I so much as mentioned this were sufficient to kill my confidence. And then I had a fracture…which changed my life in big ways and small.

 I couldn’t get out anymore and had to order food home. The minimum order size and amount soon reflected on my bank balance and waist line, and I realised that this wasn’t a realistic solution for the entire healing period of my fracture. So, I decided to take the plunge and cook some basic food. Top Cat panicked and declared that he was going to gift me a fire extinguisher as my induction gift but I decided to go ahead anyway.

I have been cooking for a few weeks now and here are some of my key learnings:

1. We need to put water in the pressure cooker when we put in the rice…else we land up with a ton of burnt rice and a charred cooker.

2. We definitely lose weight when we cook-more because of the cleaning up that ensues(especially when you forget to cover the mixer while making a smoothie or open the pressure cooker before the steam has settled down).

3. Potatoes can be peeled even after they are boiled!!

Sneer away, all you Michellin starred chefs, but I have just started and the learning curve has been steep. So far, I have made dal, soup, khichdi and basic boiled vegetables.  And, I have lived to tell the tale, so obviously my food was edible.  

However, the biggest discovery in all of this was that I enjoy cooking! It isn’t a chore anymore and I have voluntarily started visiting cookery websites to find more recipes. Rest assured, my mom is a pleased lady and I suspect that the Siddhivinayak temple has benefited a lot from my cooking due to all the money she must have donated there to thank God for this miracle.

I am almost confident that I will get from Messed up Chef to Master Chef soon…and the ingredients for that, besides the obvious, are lots of burnt and broken cutlery, ruined aprons and mutilated kitchen ceilings! On that note, Bon Appetite!