Cooking for two, alas three

I take Mysore as the golden period in my life where I must do everything I have ever desired in life because I am unlikely to get the oppurtunity to be in such a small and crappy city again. The city sleeps at nine-thirty. Mysore is small and I spent a miniscule amount of time commuting. This gives me time for a lot of other things. Also I am likely to be on bench for a long long time right now. This may be depressing for many but I adore the idea. I get time for myself and there is no overtime pressure.

So among the things that I always wanted to do was to learn to cook. Now I could always cook a bit but that was very scarce.

Out here in Mysore in the south part of India, the taste of food is rather unsatisfactory. Initially when I was being trained, I could adjust as I thought it was temporal but later when I got posted here I knew it could not continue. So what do three engineers do in front of an intractable problem about taste?

They start to cook dinner.

So while breakfast and lunch during the weekdays is at the work place we mostly cook the dinner. Tragically its still limited to vegetarian fare. But we can cook the entire Indian meal- daal,subzi, chaawal and roti. Along with stuff like raita, desserts like sevain,halwa etc also frequent.

How much have I progressed. I am not very good with the subzi but I can cook the dal and chaawal independently along with some types of vegetables. I am also the weekend breakfast specialist which ranges from dalia, upma to chanae as well as varieties of halwa.

But the most difficult skill I havemastered is rotis. Ladies and gentlemen, kneading the dough or aata is one simple looking skill which is hard as a nut to master. Getting that right consistency is tough and adding water is an art. So many times I ended up with a wet slurry that had to be then added to an equal amount of dry atta. I would be bad mouthing rotis trying to remove all the atta from my hand while my patient flatmate would be improving my disaster. Poor dharam, he really had a lot of patience. He was the only guy who had prior cooking skills worth mentioning.

Now of course I tend to get the consistency of the dough right and my chapattis are large, thin and round. This is a thing which many girls cannot boast of. And I say so because so many girls I know go like "Wow, your chappatis are round.(envy there)". Ladies, the rotis take effort.

And this is an appreciation for all the ladies who cook for thei families. Kudos to you all. Its a hard task. And from my mom to so many women around also work. I would want praise every-day if I was to cook.

A measure of my progress came when some days back we prepared wonderful chole bhatoore, a punjabi dish. It was superb. I said to myself we have crossed a level.

Anyway I have to go now. There is dinner to be cooked. Planning for matar-paneer , daal and rotis. Maybe rice also