Recycling kitchen bloopers...

I think most women will empathize with me in this blog. Be it working women or not, any woman (or man) who runs the kitchen will sure see my plight and offer their sincere sympathy with me in here.

I am not very experienced in cooking. It’s been only 2.5 yrs since I started this adventure, willfully. Still I haven’t gone much further from where I began. But, now at least I can cook ‘edible’ things. Some people have this special knack for cooking. And I totally envy them. I cook because I ‘have to’ cook. And I put a lot... honestly… a lot of hard work in that - especially because it’s a skill that I lack genetically. So, after such an effort, whenever my ‘experiments with masala’, fails, my whole world crumbles before me. I panic, scream and sometimes I often end up at the verge of tears.

To add more depth to my woes, my husband has a heightened sense of taste, that he can identify even the minutest burn/problem in food. Sometimes it’s good for me that when ever I have a ‘fluke’ success, he praises me lavishly. But mostly I won’t be able to repeat that success. Then, he sternly refuses to eat it, no matter how much I beg. The result will always be the dish ending up in waste bin – with a lot of my tears. My heart-break mostly lies in the fact that I put all those hard work, after my office hours, mostly after 8pm.

So, the day after my migraine session, I told my husband that I will cook dinner as I didn’t want him to eat take away continuously for the third day. I decided to make this mushroom-cauliflower-prawn kuruma(dry), which he likes. The original recipe (posted by Sabiha) is only for vegetables, but as my husband likes the prawn-taste, I usually add some cooked prawns into it, to get that taste. I was overconfident because last time it was an incredible ‘fluke’ success and my husband finished the kuruma within a day.

I was to make rice, kuruma, moru-curry(kerala dish with buttermilk) and dry-fish fry for dinner. While making moru-curry, my concentration slipped from kuruma for some seconds and it ended up a little bit burnt - just very little. Also I had put a little more ‘garam masala’ than needed. I swear it was just a pinch more.

We started eating dinner and my husband proclaimed that the dish tastes ‘horrible’. I was eating the same and couldn’t notice any problem (my dishes always taste bland for my tongue!). I was shocked. From 8 pm to 9:30 pm, I was toiling in kitchen, after working in office, and this is what I get? And what about those dish left? He told me “Please don’t ask me to eat this, I really can’t” and pushed the plate away. I heard my heart crashing into a ten thousand pieces!!

The next day, I was determined NOT to put my hard-work into a bin. Five years back, I happened to hear one of my friends telling about turning vegetable kurumas into cutlet for her kid, who hated eating vegetables. But I being a dumbass in the cooking area, had no idea about the process behind that. So, I googled for the cutlet recipe and found it in here, and here - the kerala variety. Then I got a sudden inspiration from nowhere and got all the traditional recipes for Uzhunnu vada, Ethakka Appam etc and decided to challenge myself this long weekend, replacing all the kerala ingredients into similar ones available here.

Yesterday evening after office, I entered kitchen with a new kind of enthusiasm. I took half of the kuruma left and blended it well into a paste in the mixer. Then added boiled, mashed potatoes into it and mixed well. Then shaped the mix into cutlets, covered in egg-batter and then in bread crumbs (I didn’t even know how to make the bread-crumbs, till I found it in the site!) and made 5 cutlets. I didn’t taste it, determined to make my husband the scape-goat.

When my husband came at 10 pm, I served them with sauce. And within 2 minutes, the plate was clean, even without the crumbs. He wasn’t even asking me what it was.

Then I asked him, “Did you know what you ate, just now?”

“Cutlet”

“Did it remind you of anything?”

“No. what was it”.

He was getting panicky- haaaa…revenge is so sweet!

And I said, with a Jhoom Barabar Jhoom Barabar Jhooooom kind-of- move, “It was yesterday’s kuruma, mixed with mashed potatoes. I had vowed that I WILL make you eat them, relishly! I succeeded. I am not bad. I am not bad at all. I am the best recycler in the world”

After 10 minutes of gloating and dancing accompanied by my hubby’s confused face, I went to bed determined to do some more efficient recycling of my future cooking-bloopers, which I knew had more than 99% probability of happening!