In the Kitchen
Dearest gentle readers (still not over my obsessive Bridgerton phase), you may have thought I had forever retired my pen (laptop) and stopped my blog forever. You were half right.
My laptop did in fact go bust after I genuinely thought it could survive being left in torrential rain. The point is that I’m back, with a not rain-proof but new laptop, and with some more content featuring cynical humour, and the ever-consistent dilemma of navigating through life being a Maharashtrian Londoner with a serious addiction to thup.
What better way to start again than to concentrate on the home, more specifically the kitchen. I reached a new level of surprising maturity when I moved into my own flat in London a few years ago, so the general habit of helping my aai and baba cook in the evenings was replaced by repetitive dinner orders off Deliveroo. However, I started to lose a small fortune over the months, and after starting to realise my thighs were thundering every time I stood up it made me reminisce over cooking with my family (and then I went on a strict non Deliveroo diet).
Living away from the family can’t compare at all to the simple bonding moments one takes for granted in the family home. Cooking in the kitchen with aai definitely was one of those moments, but also having my hair oiled, or simply sitting in the tv room watching Big Boss Marathi having no idea what is happening in the show but getting to be with the family. In silence. But with the family.
Cooking was by far the most eventful part of the day, the unfortunate part about living in the UK is there are just no people. Which means there are no people to help in the kitchen. Which means, I am the family dishwasher, the vegetable chopper, and tea maker. But it also means the family are forced to work together to cook. I never said it wouldn’t be complete chaos though.
The outfit is everything
Indian cooking is no joke. I hate to say it, but I have always hated walking into a house, and it smells of food. Gaseous particles of tadka and masala permeating through the air seem to always latch themselves onto my favourite coat, the insides of my eyeballs and of course, my hair. So, the outfit has always been crucial.
Coming home after work to then slave away in the kitchen means my aai and I charge upstairs and change into mismatched trousers and a crap oversized men’s Large T-shirt that somehow always has holes in it, before walking back into the kitchen ready to take on the spice dabba. Yes, we do look homeless. I’ve always wondered if I can make more of an effort, but the point here is that I cannot stand the smell of spices on my best clothes.
It doesn’t matter how high the exhaust goes in the kitchen, or how long you leave the doors and windows to the garden open.
It is in fact, a permanent stench of gg paste and mustard seeds. Even using a saucepan lid as a shield whilst battling against popping curry leaves doesn’t work.
Lately when cooking in my flat I tend to add a shower cap to the homeless cooking outfit, and swimming goggles or sunglasses when chopping onions to stop myself bawling my eyes out and then rubbing my eyes with spicy fingers. Thankfully, nobody lives with me, and they probably never will if I keep doing that.
The cooking
If it weren’t for my parents, I wouldn’t be cooking Maharashtrian food simply because of the level of violence involved. The spices spit at you. The oil burns you. The food colouring colours you until the end of time.
Even the cooking utensils are terrifying, I have memories walking into the kitchen and seeing my aaji sitting on the floor with what I thought was a French guillotine, khobra-ing a khobra, wondering how she hadn’t sliced her feet off.
It was a veeli. Weird how its given a cute and slightly suggestive name but looks like it could commit a war crime.
Also, can someone please tell me what the hell asfoetida is?! Wikipedia describes it as “a herbaceous monoecious perennial plant” which might as well have been written in Chinese because that makes absolutely no sense to me.
Generally, cooking vegetarian food is easier I find, nothing beats that white batatyachi bhaaji, or a giant vat of kandyachi aamti with some fluffy Indrayani rice that someone smuggled over in their bag from India. Vegetarian food is safe food, friendly food. Meat cooking takes a different level of patience. Patience that I do not possess, and while I do love a good kheema I do find I have a weird vegetarian attitude.
For example, things like chicken on the bone in curry puts me off massively, I always start picturing swamps with dead bodies. It gets particularly unbearable with dishes that have prawns with their faces still on; so, you will never find me in a Spanish restaurant. I hate eye contact.
The chat
The issue with cooking is that you need to get it right particularly as you get older because if you don’t then you’ll hear this sentence a lot from your aai: “When I die how will you eat” or “how are you still alive living on your own”. When I think about it rationally, it does make sense. If I have children, I might just say this to them to see if they can cook or not. However, then there is the other side of the conversation – if you cook something well then you get the more popular statement: “I cannot wait for you to make this for your family”. Yea. This family.
This statement then grudgingly gets followed up with “so there’s a wonderful man your age, his name is Jobrapal Mendendedekar and you should call him”. A word of advice ladies – don’t call him. Because then you’ll mess up whatever you’re trying to do in the kitchen. Don’t call him because you best believe one of your parents probably already have. Don’t call him, concentrate on dodging the mustard seed bullets snapping out of that pan.
When the conversation in the kitchen turns to this topic, I like to swerve it back to checking the salt content in the food. Trust me, women, especially mothers freak out if you tell them there isn’t any salt in the dish. They either go into complete emotional denial, I’ve seen this, their eyes water, as if you ran over their plants; or they forget all trail of previous thought, dart to the salt dabba and sprinkle it into the pan. But the best bit, is that they forget about the previous conversation do with Mr. Mendendedekar. Try it. You will not be disappointed.
Men in the kitchen
Now hear me out. I am all for gender-fluid roles, and there are obviously a lot of famous male chefs out there, but we are talking about the regular Joes of the world, and it always makes me anxious when men walk into the kitchen.
My baba, a curiously ADHD character has lately taken to labelling the whole kitchen. One day I opened a cupboard to find each shelf of sauces labelled as the following: English, Chinese, Indian and Western.
Following this I opened another cupboard with a large label in red capitals labelled “pressure cookers”. Bearing in mind we have only one pressure cooker.
At this point I am very surprised that we don’t have the kettle labelled as “kettle”. You know, in case we mix it up with a washing machine or a hairdryer. While helpful, it does make me question what I am actually looking at.
Brothers are also a curious species and I have noticed a pattern. They generally tend to march into the kitchen puffing out their chests, practising some sort of cricket bowling technique before perching themselves on a stool at the kitchen counter waiting to be served. Watching and waiting with bulging eyes followed up with the statement, “is it ready yet” every five minutes. When the food actually is ready, if you blink for more than three seconds you will find that your brother has inhaled the best part of the dish, or the whole dish, at least seven polis and then runs. He vanishes. I don’t know where they go but it’s a swift exit. Generally speaking, the kitchen becomes a stressful and confusing environment when men are involved. Apart from heavy lifting of course, then they come in slightly handy.
The kitchen apart from being a warzone of cooking does pose a perfect environment for catching up over the newest Netflix series too and trying out the latest Vicky Kaushal dance moves. I don’t think anything can really beat watching my parents genuinely believe they can do the “Tauba Tauba” hook step, when it’s really just a chaotic spasm of lunges combined with falling over. Simply adorable and concerning at the same time but it’s the genuine effort that counts. It’s great that Vicky Kaushal will never actually see it.
Bear in mind that eating at home is distinctly different to going to a restaurant, a very stressful experiences when you have a family obsessed with processes. While most families probably love going out to try new things, my family and I tend to race over to our local Chinese restaurant, with a set order (I haven’t seen the menu in over twenty years) and we never EVER try anything new. It’s against the rules. The peanuts and kimchi MUST be on the table before we arrive, and we absolutely do not ever order dessert. We then race home and sometimes I wonder whether it was a dream or if I actually did eat dinner that evening.
Cooking is probably the last thing I would think of when it comes to the kitchen simply because of the genuine memories made that are far less stressful than going to a restaurant. Which is probably why I keep coming home every other day. That, but also to steal samples of baba’s homemade kairicha loncha or aai’s fantastic kheema. Before my brother eats it all.
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