Zen and the Fear of Cooking

I’ve been mortally afraid of cooking for most of my life. As long as I was living with my parents, I never as much as held a ladle in my hand and boiling water was the closest I came to cooking. The kitchen was simply “the room in the back that tasty food came out of”. As far as I was concerned, it was a black hole into which my mom disappeared periodically, only to reappear with breakfast, lunch or dinner.

The first time I was forced to venture into cooking was when I came to the US. My first cooking experience was a seminal event in my life and I still have a photograph capturing the moment for posterity. But inspite of faithfully following the vastly simplified recipes prepared by my mom, my attempts were unmitigated disasters (and so was the kitchen, which looked like it had been hit by a hurricane). The rasam was simply glorified tamarind water and the less said about the sambhar the better. I gamely kept going but got the hint when my otherwise thrifty roommates opted to eat out whenever I cooked. So I did the right thing. I moved out.

It still amazes people when I tell them that I lived for a year and a half in a house that had no kitchen. But that’s exactly what I did. Armed with an electric rice cooker and podis in every imaginable color, I lived - or should I say, survived - in a kitchen-less house until I graduated.

By the time I came to California, the Indian ready-made market had advanced quite well to serve the needs of bachelors like me. So the stores stocked ready-made rasam and sambhar, pastes to which you just had to add to water and boil. Even I couldn’t screw that up! With help like that and frozen, pre-cut vegetables from the local Safeway, my cooking repertoire was considerably expanded.

With my wife taking care of the cooking, my cooking-free days continued after marriage. But the fact that she did all the cooking and I was clueless about the efforts that went into it led my wife to have a really strong, psychological hold on poor, clueless me. This is how an evening conversation between us usually went:

Me: Hey, I picked up the kids from school and bathed them and fed them and put them to bed and finished the laundry and chopped the vegetables and washed the dishes and cleaned the house.
She: I cooked. So we’re even.

Driven to desperation by the one-sidedness of these conversations, I finally worked up the courage to plunge into cooking again. And you know what? It’s not that tough after all! I have since made rasam and sambhar the old-fashioned way and a whole bunch of vegetable curries. And my wife knew I’d broken off my mental shackles completely when I recently made bhindi masala, an item which even she hasn’t attempted to make so far!

I know I’m not gonna give up my day job any time soon. But my recent cooking, though a small step for mankind, is a giant leap for me! It has helped me break through a psychological barrier and given me a huge bargaining chip in future arguments with my wife. So this is how I imagine a future conversation between us will proceed:

Me: Hey, I picked up the kids from school and bathed them and fed them and put them to bed and finished the laundry and chopped the vegetables and washed the dishes and cleaned the house.
She: I cooked. So we’re even.
Me: No we’re not!
She (sheepishly): Yeah you’re right. Lets go get that big screen TV you’ve always wanted.