Why I cook at home (and how I learnt cooking)

I had never cooked in my whole life. I wouldn’t say that I’ve never been to kitchen and don’t even know how to light a stove bla bla….because those are not true. I could light a match AND a stove, could make some instant noodles in emergency situation and a really really good cup of tea, if I may say so myself. But real food from store bought ingredients? Not my cup of tea (pun intended!)

But what do you eat when you are a young couple living in one of the most expensive cities of South Asia working hard to save some money? You can’t eat out much often, that’s for sure! Not only we had to do with home cooked meal but also couldn’t manage a large budget on grocery shopping. So I took matter into my own hands and started to cook, just like that!

Now I didn’t have any miracle recipe or any special skill or knack for cooking. But I’ve seen my mom, aunts and grandmothers cook since I was a child. I’ve seen how they used to do things, put one ingredient now and another later, and another one in the middle. How they used to make different curries using same vegetables or used different pots for different dishes. Those moments are all intact in my memory.

Another thing is I understood that cooking is all about science. If I want to boil some potatoes, I should cover it with a lid, so the potatoes will be boiled faster due to building of high pressure in the pot.

Cooking is also a lot about common sense. If pasta were sticking together with each other, I can put a few drops of oil during boiling them. Oil would let them glide on each other and not let be sticky.

Besides all these, I had YouTube to help me…I mean the assortment of cooking channels and multiple techniques it presents is completely unbelievable. One can't get this much resources together in any cooking school even!
And I was not after gourmet cooking or anything, just trying to make meals to survive.

However, earning any skill requires practice and perseverance. Not every day my sweating in the kitchen produced edible food. Once half a kilo carrots, one liter of milk with couple cups of sugar turned into some orange-y slime with carrot smell instead of gajar ka halwa. Another time, I had to throw away two big papayas because even after cooking, they tasted and smelled like raw papaya! These were not only waste of energy, time and money but I also got extremely frustrated with myself for my failure to be a kitchen queen!

But as all of you know, Rome wasn’t built in one day etc. and bottom line is now I can produce edible food. If you too are frustrated about your cooking skill and want to fix your mantra in the kitchen, my suggestion will be to
start now. Take whatever help you can get, don't, I repeat, don't search for perfection! that doesn't get achieved so fast and sometimes may not be achieved at all. For example, all the pieces of my vegetable may not be of the same size, and the thinly sliced shallots may not be so thin, and often the pots has more burnt residues in it than what is put on the table…but you’ll never know these from the taste! 😉