I can cook!!!

In my family everyone cooks. I do mean everyone. My little sister (ok, she’s like 21 now, but she’s always gonna be little to me!) has been interested in cooking ever since she could walk, and is an awesome cook right now. My mom does most of the everyday cooking, and special occasions are taken care of by dad. Me? I make the Sunday lunch. Actually I make the interesting things like Chinese style stir fried vegetables and chicken. I don’t do boring stuff like rice!

Now my mother and father have always maintained that to be able to cook well you need to have a feel for two things, first, how much salt to add, and second, what combinations work well and what don’t. Thing is, Indian cooking, particularly Bengali cooking, with it’s twenty gazillion different spices, has a lot of combinations, and a lot of rules, miss one and you’re…well…not screwed, but you will end up with a less than awesome meal. And what’s worse, these aren’t things that are written in any books, these are things that your mom knows, and you just kind of find out; which means you have to mess things up more than a few times to know exactly what you’re doing wrong.

Case in point, almost no cook book will tell you that you need to split the green cardamom before you put it in the hot oil, but then you have to do that. Why? Well, otherwise it explodes, like a FIRECRACKER! It is most startling, and because it causes smoking hot oil to splatter everywhere, pretty dangerous, and it makes a mess. Same applies for green chillies; if they’re going in whole, you’ve got to split them, or else, you may end up with green chilly seeds in your eyes!

So I’ve messed up a few times, and still continue to, although with decreasing frequency and the reason why I continue is that I really enjoy cooking. I feel most alive when I cook. The preparation, the planning, the frying, the spices, the smells, the sounds, the constant staying on your toes, the nervousness, it’s all very heady.

I decided to try my hand at cooking chicken when on vacation recently. I really didn’t have any idea what I was doing, and I didn’t follow any recipe. I just did what I thought would be a good idea, and it ended up tasting pretty damn good! I came back and explained to my mother exactly what I had done, and she gave me a proud pat on the back, “My little boy can cook” (well, ok, so I’m 28, but I’ll always be her little boy, won’t I?).

And as I lie in bed at night, alone with my thoughts, it occurs to me that I don’t see eye to eye with my parents, particularly with my father, about almost anything. It’s difficult for me to share a lot of things with them. After all, they don’t watch science fiction films or listen to rock and roll. They don’t really know who Jim Morrison is, or what the significance of the red and blue pill is. When I freak out after watching Black Hawk Down, I really can’t share my euphoria with them. But then, I realize, I am who I am because of them. My love for films, for music, for food, for cooking, everything that adds up to who I am, is inherited from them. I’ll never be as well read as my father, as considerate and loving a person as my mother, and I may never have the magic touch that both of them have when it comes to cooking. But whatever I have, whoever I am, and everything I manage to accomplish in life with it, is because of them. People have many fancy, philosophical and well thought out answers when asked what their parent’s greatest contribution to their life is. I have only one word, ME.



P.S. – if someone wants the recipe for the chicken curry I invented, please put in a request in the comments section, and I’ll post it.