Changing Times !!

I am asking this question now, what is tougher - "Earning bread and butter" or "Preparing bread and butter". I chose the latter for some reasons explained below. But yes, that doesn’t prevent me from taking such adventurous trips again.

Coming onsite makes you a cook for sure. Now the reasoning is simple, you cannot eat in buffet outside daily (harms your stomach and your wallet) and if you are a vegetarian, then you are left with very little options to eat outside (daily). So, I decide to cook my food. What I hate the most is cooking in the morning (waking up at 7:00am). So, I get frustrated when my cooking turn would come in the morning I would do one simple thing, cut onion, fry them and put the mixed vegetable pack (Safeway store) and let it boil for 10 min and I am through. Along with I would put a vessel of Rice in the microwave and would then rush for sleep again.

But other than morning sessions, I love to cook (as many "tagged" girls wished their husbands to cook). I can prepare most of the north vegetarian curries, quite well. But my all time favorite is always, Egg-plant curry (Baigan Ka Bharta) and I prepare it pretty well. But the next problem is getting chapattis. Now, I am from north India, where rice is not eaten day in and out and am used to chapattis. But the chapattis you get here mostly are not of good quality and if not kept properly (which we guys can’t manage) they become too stiff to eat. So I tried this time to experiment with preparing chapattis at home. I know its a very tough task, even for ladies, but I am an adventures guy (not in kitchen only), so I tried to prepare the dough. It looked a very simple act, pour water and keep mixing the wheat flour. But it’s a very slow process and I lost my patience and added a little good amount of water and there you go, I prepared dough good for dosa. So then I had to add more flour and kept on adding it. So, the new size of the dough was 3 times the original size. Anyways, prepared the dough, now time to use the mathematical geometry to make circles. Just understood one thing, keep rolling. But my pressure was varying so the chapatti started to show shapes which start resembling the maps of various countries and by the time I was through, it was pretty close to the map of my Bharat , except that it skipped the north east completely.














Anyways, I was improving with every coming chapatti and by the time I was through with the 4th chapatti , it looked pretty close to the map of Africa. Now this isn’t that bad. So, I was through with chapattis. Now final task, to bake them. Yes, I cannot do these two tasks simultaneously, preparing chapattis and baking them. It’s too risky. So, I started to bake the chapattis, but guess the flame was a little too high and the chapatti started burning but some edges were not baked properly. If I press too hard, the edges would burn. Forget the blown chapattis; I just wanted to save them from converting into ash. After wasting two chapattis, I got an idea. Let’s make it as a parantha, a normal parantha. So I would apply ghee and that did the trick. .The chapattis will not burn and it will get cooked properly and what more, it would even be soft.

So, after a tormenting exercise of 3.5 hours, I was able to prepare 4 chapattis which smelled good(its desi ghee effect). And so finally I had my dinner with Baigan Ka bhrata with my chapattis at around 11:40pm.


Preperation time: 4.5 hours
Serving: Chapattis(Self) , Baigan Ka Bhrata(5)




Ps: Recently, I met a few girls who have come to Bay area for onsite and I was surprised to find that none of them can prepare a cup of tea properly. Looks like all those girls have read a little too much about women liberation or their mothers would have. I guess, the time has really come when we guys have to start taking cooking seriously, as the times have changed and you don’t know, how many of us would end up becoming a permanent cooks, thanks to the "Women Liberation Era".