Being in US has thrown up a lot of challenges to my culinary skills I have been cooking for more than 30 years now and have always been trying out newer rceipes and loved cooking and having people over.I had thought about varieties of meals and snacks to be prepared while in US. Mostly because Anand has been away from us for 10 years and in all these ten years we have spent just about 3 months with him, when he visited us. This has always given me a heartache that I have not been able to cook for him all that I wanted or thought he would have liked to eat.(It is another story that he is now least concerned about the variety of meals, immersed that he is in his all consuming new passion, his work.May he reach the heights he is looking up to).
So, immediately after I got over my jet lag,I started preparing goodies which used to turn out perfect in India, but here they were a far cry from what they intended to be.It was very frustrating, as more than ever before, I wanted them to be the best now,It made me try out smaller and smaller batches of everything, from cheedai to murukku to pakodas, without satisfaction.This drove me to a point of despearation. With experience, I realised, it was not as if I had lost my culinary skills half way across the globe, but it had to do with the stove. Back home, we are used to gas burners and here we have only electric hot plates. The electric hot plates are great for pressure cooking and not for making murukku or neyyappam. The reason being they heat up the bottom of the pan only and not heat the pan from all sides.So none of my crispies turned crispies, which was the cause of my frustration.
How I overcame my frustration will be posted in due course.
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