Cooking - an adventurous sport!

Cooking is fun as long as you try out new stuff. If you keep cooking the same thing over and over again, then you might end up bored. Being a beginner in this noble art, I found myself extremely bad at it initially. Everybody is sure to have their first cooking experience a memorable one. I had several.

I tried my hand at cooking when I was 19. I planned to make curd rice. The curd was ready and all I had to prepare was the steamed rice! Tough job, isn't it?! I did everything as my mother had instructed me. I kept rice in a bowl inside the pressure cooker; I had poured enough water; I waited for three 'whistles' to be blown. But when I opened the cooker, I was really shocked to the see that the rice was exactly as I had left it before. I tried the whole procedure again and still the result was same. I got very frustrated. I started looking if the cooker was functioning properly or were there any pressure leaks. After several attempts, I gave up. I called up my cousin for help and I explained to her in vivid detail what I did so far. Suddenly she burst out laughing on the other end and said "Dude! you are supposed to pour the water in the bowl along with the rice! Not outside the bowl in the cooker!". Well, it wasn't my mistake. My mother should have explained clearly. Probably she had thought that her son was intelligent enough to interpret "pour two cups of water". Well I wasn't :)

Experience with Rotis were much more worse(tried doing it yesterday). I placed an ISD call to my mother to find out how to do it. As usual, she said "keep adding water to the flour until it becomes soft and hard at the same time". I did and it was turning into a some kind of chocolate paste and totally wasn't representing what I had intended to do. Not even realizing that, I tried to make it into small balls. It was sticking all over my hand and the bowl. I poured some oil into my hand and continued and I was doing perfectly fine (note that it is still in semi-solid state).

I continued with flattening the small balls with a cylindrical wood and that's when all hell broke loose. Some wet flour stuck on to the bottom and some to the cylindrical thing I was using. It really was a gory sight. I added oil to the flour to make it less sticky and I added too much for it to break into too many pieces :(. I had to place an emergency to call to my mother again to clarify what I had done. "you probably poured too much water" was what she said. I was cursing myself 'Water again!'. I added more flour and tried to go back in time. I was partially successful. I ended up completing the procedure with rotis of various sizes and shapes. Kids would have thought it was cool to make such rotis just like the way the animal shaped biscuits were! I had spent around 0.5 hours to make a mistake and the twice that amount of time to rectify it. Not bad!

But I can cook the complex things in a much better way. I cooked veg-biryani(see image) without any issues (and my friends liked it too!) and I made an excellent chicken curry (I had to eat the whole of it:)). Probably I won't try making roti again not because I had such a bad experience the first time, but because it wouldn't be much fun the next time :)