Sunday, October 24, 2010

A "recipe" for disaster

This post is written for blogeshwarandanubhooti.




I'm not much of a cook, all I like about food is the stage where you get to actually enjoy the glories of a good delicious meal. But my culinary skill were put to a premature test (my cooking skills start and end with making tea) when my mother had to go to her alumni meeting one day. She was in a hurry and just prepared rice for lunch, and I was supposed to heat up the previous day's fish curry. But I wanted something else and still was too lazy to get anything from a hotel. So before my mom went on her journey I asked her how to prepare egg. She told me the easiest way to prepare egg(for normal people) here's the recipe with each step, and also how i messed up each step.

1. get out the frying pan, pour oil on it place it on a stove and wait till it is hot enough.( how am i supposed to know it is hot enough, was I supposed to touch it?- I just waited till steam came off the pan.)

2.break the egg in the middle with a knife. (easy for my mom to say, have you ever tried doing that? I was too scared to do that, I mean what if the "egg matter" splatters all over? so I was hitting it with the least amount of force as I can )

3.pour the "egg matter" onto the pan without any small or large pieces of the egg shell falling in.(the problem with this step was that, I was still pondering over step 2, so I just broke off a tiny portion of shell at the top and started to pour it onto the pan- BAD IDEA, the "egg matter" fell like sand in a sand clock, too slow and too little.So to speed it up I tapped [hit hard] the egg with the knife, and then there was pandemonium- the shell at the bottom fell in, and it dazzled me to such an extent that I let go of the other half of the shell in my hand. Obviously I hadn't thought that through)

4.turn the stove to simmer and add some powdered pepper and salt on top.(but at this stage I didn't turn the stove to simmer and I was picking off egg shells with the knife)

5.turn the "egg matter" to the other side,so that it is cooked equally on both sides, the other side must be light brown (by the time I took out all the pieces of the shell, there was a smell of something which was burnt a little too much. Then I remembered this stage and turned it over to the other side, but instead of a light brown colour there was a dark brown colour bordering on a slight shade of black.)

6.turn the stove off and admire a perfectly good, tasty egg fry.( that's when I realised I haven't fully followed  step number 4. so I turned it over and added some salt and pepper powder(3 spoons each, hey it seemed perfectly sensible when I did it. I mean, I usually add 3 spoons of sugar to my tea[when I made it])

7.enjoy a perfectly tasty egg fry with rice and some curry (went to get the door, post woman came then with new copy of reader's digest. And when I got back to the stove I could smell something that was really similar to the odour of burning rubber. so I turned off the stove and got out of the kitchen to get some fresh air)

When the kitchen was seemingly safe enough to enter again and all the smoke cleared out, I got to see my masterpiece for the very first time, it was shaped like a dog or a puppy I could never be sure. In a way it reminded me of that scrappy character in the old cartoon series scooby doo. (I'm not immature, I really have a good memory of all the cartoons I watched when I was a kid)
                                        And the finished product tasted as bad as it looked and sounded,(with my explanation of how I made it) it was too salty and too hot.[to my surprise] All I can say is, that incident taught me a lot, for starters I learnt that the last thing I do should be to cook food to impress someone.It also made me realize how tasty my mom's food really is. Seriously the best time to get a good perspective, is when you hit rock bottom or in my case when you taste something really disgusting.

p.s if something smells like it is burnt, it most definitely and probably is burnt, so don't eat it. Trust me I know *sad face.

Saturday, October 9, 2010

blind man driving, watch out!!!

As long as I can remember I always wanted to drive a car, maybe because I saw people do it on tv and it felt “cool and awesome”. But a few years went by since I was a 13 year old watching, Vin diesel race in a fast and furious movie. And I finally was old enough to enroll myself into a driving school, which was a complicated procedure in itself. All the documents I had to produce to enroll,could fit in a briefcase and the fee was preposterous. Then the eye test where I had to read Malayalam words in different sizes, I told the doctor I can’t read it; I of course meant that I didn't know to read any Malayalam letters and i could read the English version of it. She just asked me how many letters were in the last row, and then she asked me in a concerned and disbelieving tone “you can see, right?”. And the attested copies of certificates’ that include my caste certificate and voters id. (ya even I can vote!)And the blood group test certificate, I mean why do they want that, to give a drivers license? (Do they say “oh you have an O negative blood group I’m sorry sir you can’t get a license, people with O negative blood group are bad drivers!”) And finally the day came when I was to take my first driving lesson.
                                              The instructor asked me my name and whereabouts, then started a brief tutorial on all the basic stuff anyone must know before they are allowed to actually drive the car. Like the clutch, the gears and the break, he also told me the break and the accelerator needed the right foot and the clutch needed the left foot like air to the human beings. (I fought hard to not laugh at the silly over-dramatized comparison, but I kept my calm) then I switched to the first gear from neutral and my first experience behind the steering wheel of a car began. (Well technically my second, my first experience involved a government jeep with a dented back door and a broken lamp post, but that one doesn’t count) The pull I felt when the car accelerated, hmm I’m never going to forget that. And at the end of my first 5 kilometers the instructor asked me if I have driven a car before that,and the first day's lesson ended there.(Now I laugh at my classmates who try desperately to get a compliment from teachers, but there’s no denying the fact that it absolutely rocks when you actually get a compliment.) But the second day started with the guy driving before my turn forgetting to take his foot of the clutch and getting smacked on the head for that mistake, to top it off when it was my turn it started raining hard (god wanted to have a laugh at my failing attempt to stay cool) and the car we drove was only designed to take as many students as it can for each trip and to have as many shaky, rickety and rusty parts in it as it can, not for silly reasons like driver safety. This I say because the car had no wiper.

                        But I did okay, didn’t get a compliment but I as long as I didn’t get a smack on my head I called it a job well done. And when I was driving it felt like on of those horror movies where the actor was driving through a monster infested forest, and they know something bad is going to happen. All I could make out in that torrential rain were dim silhouettes of on coming vehicles, and each time I saw it, I pictured my mangled carcass photographed as the latest road-kill on the front page of the next day’s news paper with the headline “blind college student crashes his car onto an oncoming truck killing his fellow students”. (I’m not blind by the way I have 20/20 vision, for any of you who may feel an urge to call up and complain to who ever issues the license) But don’t worry my class ended as this new blog post so clearly proves – I’m as alive as a dog chasing its tail. Or am I just imagining to write this post from my after life someone post a comment tell me I’m wrong.