The joy of crooked cooking
and the story of Masterchef Stuti in the making
All food is art, but not all art is food. So if you find Picasso’s painting chewy, it’s probably not the overcooking.
When was the last time you had a really really satisfying meal? By that, I mean one that jostled your tastebuds and sent them in a symphony of culinary delight? For me, it was a simple spring onion sandwich, doused in oodles of garlic butter, slow toasted & served with a side of the evergreen Kissan ketchup.
Being a foodie opens you up to a world of whimsical surprises & exploration. Growing up, I loved food because just like a person, food can have many moods. I for one, would always anthropomorphize food items, which is just a fancy word for imagining food to have different personas. A chai is a romantic person who reads Mirza Ghalib’s poetry, a butter chicken is big, bold & unfettered, most likely to be a soloprenuer, a dosa is the beautiful crush with chiseled jaws, and idli is peak marriage material, well, you get the drift. An active imagination and a true zest for trying new food led me to have plenty of delightful experiences over the years. But this edition is not about the art of tasting food, it’s about the delightful discovery of learning how to cook.
I have been lucky to stay with my parents for the early part of my twenties, which means that cooking food for sustenance wasn’t a necessity. Sure, in the last 24 years, I tried my hand at cooking an odd dish here and there, but full-fledged food preparation always seemed like a humungous task I was not ready to take on. Come 2024, I had some time in my hands - and plenty of time to go down the food shorts rabbit hole on Youtube. In the 30 seconds duration of each Youtube short, I began seeing everything from KFC styled chicken at home, one pot spinach noodles, no-waste plant recipes to no-bake cheesecake. Needless to say, it sparked an intrigue, an inspiration to give cooking a shot. Oh, and I would also get really really hungry.
So there it started, I figured if a Rat from Ratatouille could do it, so could I. My very first meal was Spinach Pasta. This was befitting, considering that I was deeply inspired by Pixar’s Ratatouille to don the chef’s hat. This dish was especially delightful to prepare, because I enjoyed preparing a healthier version of an otherwise calorie dense dish to suit my health goals, my taste buds, and my wallet - which would otherwise go bankrupt ordering from ✨ restaurants italiens. I did receive a bit of help from a Pasta Making workshop I had attended the week earlier to give it a shot at home.
Speaking of help, like any novice beginner that is learning to cook for the first time, I decided to turn to Youtube for a variety of quick girl dinner ideas on the weekdays. My absolute necessities for learning how to cook was that it had to be an easy preparation, well balanced & wouldn’t take more than an hour to make. Fortunately, Your Food Lab & Ranveer Brar had plenty of ideas to keep me going. In the past 1 month, I prepared a variety of dishes which included Stir Fry Broccoli Chilli, Chicken Chilli, Bajra Risotto, Bengali Aloo Chechki and Kadhai Mushroom. Cooking on all of those days felt thrilling, like there was nothing like the joy of learning how to create and savor the results of your hard work immediately after. I believe a huge part of liking the process of cooking was that the gratification was immediate, or more accurately, no over or under an hour.
One of the few moments that stood out to me through the instances of cooking were the crooked shape of my chopped vegetables. It was Ranveer Brar who poetically quipped in one of his videos that chopped vegetables were like the various members of a family that help put a dish together, and a dish in which the vegetables looked evenly chopped made for a pleasing culinary experience. Suffice to say, the first month of my crooked cooking chronicles debuted a family of chopped vegetables that had all sorts of issues to work through. My own family of critics on the other hand, which included my mum, dad & sister - were especially supportive & encouraging of my experiments with their tummies.
This is also the reason I decided to document my journey under the chronicles of crooked cooking, apart from the fact that it is such a fun phrase. When you just take up a hobby or a passion, chances are that you are not very good at it in the beginning. Celebrating those imperfections makes the journey a lot more fun, and helps suppress that overly critical critic in your head. Needless to say, I will be doing a lot of crooked cooking in the next couple of months. And if you are a beginner, just like I am, I invite you to give it a shot.
That’s all for today. For all those who are visiting for the first time, I would love to know what your first cooked preparation was, or will be. Tell me in the comments below! If you are a non-subscriber and you have enjoyed this read,
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