The strong smell of smoke was assaulting my nostrils. A loud beeping noise was piercing the air. I was coughing, and each breath of air I took made me want to cough even more.
“What to do?” I desperately thought.
I looked around and saw that all the windows in the room were closed, and I rushed to open them.
This was my first experience attempting to cook.
Well, I cannot say that it was my first ever attempt. Toast, scrambled eggs, rice, sunny side up eggs, boiled potatoes, boiled eggs, a few more kinds of eggs, and a very crude pizza which was essentially a cooked pita bread that was topped with cheese and thrown in the toaster for several minutes, were all some dishes that were part of my cooking arsenal when I was a child. But these were all basic, simple dishes which could probably be prepared by a monkey if given enough practice. As for proper cooking which required focus and some skill with a pan… well you can see just how well I fared.
It was actually due to that experience that for a long time, I didn’t really enjoy cooking. On the contrary, I quite disliked it. I saw cooking as more of a chore than anything and I also viewed it as a gamble; It takes a lot of time and focus to cook a good meal, and even after all the effort put into it, it may still be bad was essentially how I felt about cooking. There are so many variables (different proteins, different vegetables, different spices, different oils, different pots, different cooking styles, different cook times), and in turn, so many different spots to mess up. If you add too much salt, it tastes bad. If you don’t cook certain ingredients enough at the start (i.e. onions, garlic, chillies), it tastes bad. If you cook it for too long, it tastes bad. If you cook it for too little, it tastes bad.
Evidently, I was looking at all the negatives about cooking. I felt you always had to achieve a certain “sweet spot” in all the categories of the dish (cook time, cook temp, spices, etc), and rather than viewing this as a fun and adjustable challenge, I saw it as a rigid benchmark that I needed to meet else the dish would be bad and my time wasted.
I retained this mentality for several years. Sure, I would eventually need to learn to cook, but my parents did pretty much all the cooking I needed and I loved (and still love) their food. And if we didn’t have enough food left in the fridge for me to eat lunch or dinner one day, that wasn’t a problem as I could prepare myself a basic dish and eat properly the next time my parents cooked, so what was the rush in learning to cook? I kept telling myself I would learn in the future when I needed to, but really I was just putting it off because I did not enjoy cooking nor was I confident in my cooking abilities.
I kept this routine up for a while, eating only the food my parents made, when we didn’t have food in the fridge, cooking (sometimes, preparing would’ve been a more apt term) simple things like scrambled eggs and toast, peanut butter and banana sandwiches, and milk and cereal or ordering food from outside. This usually worked but as I later discovered, I was not able to maintain this system forever.
One week when I was in 9th grade, my dad had gone to India for some time and my mom had been very busy with work so there wasn’t much food being cooked at my home. Initially I didn’t mind too much as I was comfortable with eating eggs, boiled potatoes and eventually takeout. But after 5 days of doing this, I was sick of the food I had been making and did not want to get any more takeout. I decided that I was going to cook that day and chose to make a dish called palak paneer. I called my mom and bugged her for her recipe, taking note of every small detail. After 10 minutes of pestering and 15 minutes of sifting through my kitchen, I had my recipe ready, my pots ready, my ingredients ready, and I was ready to start cooking.
You may be thinking that this was the turning moment in my attitude towards cooking, that I managed to make this dish flawlessly, and that I gained a newfound appreciation for not only the dish produced, but also the process used to create it. If so, you are absolutely incorrect. It did not go as planned, and I was having trouble even just at the first step; I was not sure how to defrost the spinach I was using and ended up deciding to simply toss the entire block of the frozen vegetable in the microwave and heat it up for a few minutes. This didn’t go too well and I ended up with spinach that was still rather cold and now largely splattered across the inside of my microwave, but this didn’t deter me and I continued onto the rest of the recipe. I poured the oil into the pan. Once hot, I threw in some cumin seeds. The seeds were soon sputtering, I could hear the pop of each seed flying off the bottom of the pan and my nose was filled with the strong aroma of fried cumin. From here, I put in onions and fried them for a few minutes, soon after I did the same with chopped cloves of garlic, ginger, and green chillies. The aroma was now very intense and I had realized that I again forgot to open the windows. I decreased the flame, opened all the windows in the kitchen, and returned to the stove. By this point, I was already feeling better than the last time I had tried to cook (as the smoke was not nearly as bad, I was quite sure that I had followed the recipe properly, and I was not afraid to remove the lid from the pot and look at what I had what I had created). This time I felt I was getting somewhere, and after throwing in chopped tomatoes, pureed spinach, and cubes of paneer cheese, the dish was complete.
Soon came the moment of truth, it was time to taste the dish. Even though I was relatively sure that I at least somewhat properly followed a recipe this time, I was still hesitant to try it, but I did. And it wasn’t bad. Would I say that was good? No, I wouldn’t say it was good but it wasn’t particularly bad either, I’d say it was a solid 5/10 meal. It was much better than the last time I tried to make it, but it still had some flaws. The garlic was not cooked through enough, I had not put in enough chillies, and it was seriously lacking salt, but the simple fact that it wasn’t bad gave me some satisfaction; the cooking process didn’t go perfectly, and I’m not even sure if I can say that it went well, but it went well enough. I was sure I could do better the next time and would be able to make an actually tasty dish, and this confidence lasted for longer than just that day.
Later on, I decided to attempt to make a pasta dish, penne with roasted vegetables. This time around, I went in with more confidence. I chopped up bell peppers, onions, zucchini, tossed them up with herbs and spices, roasted them in the oven for some time, then mixed in pasta, tomato sauce, and cheese and put it in the oven once more. By the time it was finally time to take it out, my kitchen smelled like olive oil and oregano. I assumed I was doing something right and this assumption turned out to be true as the pasta ended up being almost perfect. There was a crispy cheesy crust that had formed on top, sealing off the rest of the pasta and ensuring it stayed moist and was infused with the flavor of the vegetables. Overall I was very pleased with what I cooked that day, and I’d say it was this experience that made me start to properly appreciate the process of cooking. Fast forward several years later, and I am much more comfortable in the kitchen. I no longer see cooking as solely a tedious chore, but rather as an opportunity to try new things and create tasty foods (I still sometimes see cooking as a chore, but that is because sometimes, it is quite literally a chore that I have to do when I would rather be doing something else). The variety in ingredients which used to somewhat frighten me, I now look upon with glee and fascination. I now see cooking as an art; the rainbow-colored assortment of vegetables, herbs, spices, and meats, my paints; the utensils, my brushes; and the pot, my canvas. I also see the kitchen as my laboratory, where I am free to experiment with new foods, new ingredients, new methods, and more. The results sometimes turn out good and sometimes not, but it doesn’t matter as they can always be adjusted later. I now somewhat enjoy cooking and am not afraid to try new recipes or even create my own.
