The simple in the Cooking….

There’s cooking, and then there’s cooking with passion, creativity, and love. In my kitchen I firmly believe that the energy and love I put into a recipe is just as important as the ingredients I use.

Talking about cooking I must say ‘Cooking’ is that one subject that I have seen evolve in my lifetime. As a little girl growing up in a small industrial town in a state of north India, I have seen my mother literally taking pride in her culinary skills. She was the ‘guru’ for all the newly wedded young girls and a ‘guardian angel’ for all the ‘good food starved’ bachelors of the small cluster of quarters, that housed all the administrative and worker class of the sugar factory where my father worked. She would take so much pride in making all the pickles, jams, sauces, chutneys and innumerable snacks. Cooking to her was like love and it should be entered into with abandon or not at all, she believed. During her cooking concourses , I was given a piece of flour dough to play with and often I ended up making figures of animals and insects out of that dough, never did I try to roll out a chapati or a puri. I enjoyed having all the goodies though that my mother prepared! I still remember the endless servings of samosas, puris, pakodis, vegetable rolls, kachoris, aaloo tikiks etc, that came out of my mother’s kitchen and numerous mouths that have enjoyed her cooking and hearts that have blessed her to bring joy and delight to the people of that small colony. Basically, I want to convey here that I grew up in a household where food and cooking was given a lot of importance. I remained interested in the ‘food’ part not too much in the ‘cooking’ during a large part of my growing up. Even my mother’s mother, my grandmother, I remember was a great cook and we enjoyed her cooking a lot when we used to visit her during our summer vacation or when my father would suddenly go out of job because of either factory shutting down or as a part of  downsizing. But these two women have had a great impact on my life, in the sense that the importance of ‘cooking’ had been embedded in my head, though practically I never thought of it much. In my heart I had hoped that somehow I would escape the ‘cooking’ part of life. But my mother’s proud look when she cooked a new ‘kofta curry; and my Grand Ma’s,” Lalla jara baith, char poori kha ke jaa, naik si der mein ban jaate hain sookhe aaloo. Desi ghee kaa chhaunk laga ke doongi. Khaye bina naa jaaye lalla tu” had kept me interested in the trait. If you are a chef, no matter how good a chef you are, it’s not good cooking for yourself; the joy is in cooking for others and my maa and grandma loved cooking for others.

The aroma of desi ghee, heeng, jeera ki chhaunk of my mother’s and grandmother’s cooking has been too strong to escape my mind. However much I wished that life would keep me away from ‘cooking’, I realized that as years turned into decades , I became another extension of my mother and my grand mother and began looking for comfort in the simplest of cooking that I mostly did for my sons. Chutney sandwich, sookhi bhindi, egg curry, aaloo paratha, simple peeli dal and matar pulao, aloo tamatar and gobhi aaloo, gajar matar and paneer bhurji , dahi waale aaloo, and pakoda kadhi, moongodi ki sabji and bharwan baingn, dal ki kachodi or namak ajwain ki poori, khataa meetha kaddu and chiwda matar, all the simple food that my mother and my grandmother used to make for me and all the simple food that I thought I will never make, I ended up making myself. How ever much I took pride in the fact that I over the years I taught myself how to cook Chinese, continental and gourmet dishes, the aroma of desi ghee and heeng jeera ka chhaunk has never left my mind. I still love cooking that drumstick ki kadhi and sookhi ajwain waali arvi when some one special visits my house. I still take pride that my Grand Mother made such tasty bharwan karelas , taste of which has stuck with me and I can replicate it even today! I still rejoice in the fact that I can make besan ki pakode waali kadhi as expertly as my mother used to make. I still find joy in cooking simple food and during this COVID 19 pandemic, I have revived all my lost love for simple cooking. So, guys, pull up a chair. Take a taste. Come join me. Life is so endlessly delicious.