Friday 29 August 2008

Chef Alok

Tall claim, surely. Bordering on the atrocious, even.

Still, if it were a relative evaluation, I might just about qualify. For someone who has never really cooked in the 36 years of his life (my activities in the kitchen always limited to doing the dishes, cleaning up, and occasionally, very occasionally, cutting up the veggies), living away from family in Oxford has resulted in me becoming a little adventurous in the kitchen.

It started too late, perhaps in the last quarter of my year here. And it started with one disastrous attempt, followed by slightly more successful ones. Edible food, and gradually, reasonably tasty stuff. Often made with the help of ready-made sauces and gravies topped up with onions, tomatoes, and additional spices! And my repertoire depended on the type of gravy I could buy. My flatmate Varun often turned out to be the catalyst, suggesting we cook in rather than eat out. Incidentally Sebastian, my other flatmate, has never been around when I've cooked. Sheer coincidence though, each time, Seb. Honest

Antonio recently cooked an Italian meal for a bunch of friends at my place. I helped, but my help was limited to cutting the meat, peeling the potatoes, and the like. On another day I cooked some chicken together with another guy at Pranav's house - used some ready sauce to prepare some pretty decent stuff.

One is certainly more tolerant of one's own cooking, and so I persisted - for a while. Until the limited taste and range prompted further experimentation. For the first time, recently, I cooked butter chicken - from scratch. Yes, I took the help of a recipe I found on a random website, but the chicken turned out to finger-lickingly good. Ask Varun, Pranav, or Jitin for testimonials! Last night's chicken was pretty good, too!

For all those cooks sniggering away, trust me when I tell you it is a big deal for me! So who knows, for someone who has never really understood the point of cooking for several hours only for the food to be eaten up in 15 mins, this might just be the turning point. I might just turn chef - one day!



Top

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Cooking is one of the main skills that gets polished when u are far from home and hearth. The experimenting part is really the fun pat but the big issue arised when someone asks u to replicate something u created by trail and error..
Nice post BTW