Chef Cheenu

Cooking is my passion.

Creating artistry in kitchen is my dream. Envisaging the finest blends of aromas with mouth watering tastes is a life time goal to achieve and gets finer day by day. Being the ardent student of food and its components like ingredients, processes, sequence, proportions, energy management and finally an impressive garnishing that often makes people just to stare at my creation in amazement even when their loins longing for a gastronomic treat is… my destiny.

I keep watching cookery shows on You – Tube and always cheat my own famished senses to a gluttonous greed. My tummy rumbles and lips get lubricated with oozing desire in cherishing the imagined taste of something that’s just shown in pixels and MPEG compression.

And I get fascinated with colors that create a mini rain bow or a mini landscape that’s so beautiful to look at on your plate either steaming delicious enticement of frozen fascination is another dimension of my chosen love.

I am openly envious to my feminine counterparts who seem to have acquired culinary skills congenitally. I fail to see what addition ingredient they add when no one’s looking around but they always turn out to be a treat that’s worth dying for or murdering. Not to humiliate my fellow men I observed that whoever male cooks well is someone who worked hard towards his excellence. But women seem to have that ability intrinsic in their blood.

Now the bigger problem is I realized that I am not even a bad cook or worse cook.

I realized that I am no cook at all.

Past few days I have been struggling hard to make some meaningful thing out of utensils, rice, eggs, water, cooking oil, salt, chili powder and butane gas ring. And I am ending up creating a private disaster. This calamity not yet affected people who are around me in general as I am conducting my Frankenstein experiments in the middle of night behind closed doors. No one screamed expletives in courage or exiled in terror. But of course I do not cook to seek admiration.

I tried boiling eggs and watch water bubbling in volcanic anger as they juggle eggs inside the pan. With my own patience at the brink of impatience I scream in mute how many minutes more. Then in a proactive move I swept the tortured egg on to spoon off its hell and tried some method that happens to come across. Spin the same on a plane surface to see how fast it spins. If it spins not or wobbles like a fatso dancing ballet, it’s not cooked yet.

But even eggs seem to have learnt tricks. That egg… in fact all three of them spin in accelerate enthusiasm and made me believe that they are ready to enter next dimension in their exodus towards my hungry mouth. I absolved them from boiling further and gently tried disrobing their calcium shells with engineering precision laced with a lover’s compassion.

I could tap it and created a dendrite crack… and that’s it. From there I could get nowhere. And with every succeeding second my fury mounted along with frustration hand in hand as I saw chunks of jelly white getting dislodged off the walls of the so called “Boiled Eggs”. I could not think of returning them to their torture cauldron as it would get me nowhere. And I tried my best to rip off the shell and ended up with yellow yolk splattered all over my palms.

Urrgggggg… I screamed and… tried compiling the messy mass in a plate.

Now I looked at the scene before me that’s not less than a war ravaged nation of medieval century. And I was feeling hungry too. I could not find any alternate at the middle of night and I was rude enough to be dependent on my untested talents. I mean I did not buy anything apart from eggs. I could have bought something that could be eaten readily without going through the ordeal of insulting me.

Then I had this brilliant idea… why not fry the mess I created in cooking oil??? Oh yes… I used a fry pan and poured oil and with the grace of unprofessional Chef… (I wanted to say “Grace of Professional Chef”) and let the oil run along the walls of death well look alike fry pan. Then when the moment was right I pushed the mess of less than half boiled eggs in to the fry pan with spatula.

I sought my sadistic pleasure when my tormentors (Read “Less than half boiled eggs”) made spluttering sounds and started getting coagulated and solidified and slowly started acquiring crispy brown texture that looked yummy and smelled yummy too. Wow… I told myself… I am transforming in to a good cook from a bad cook the way a caterpillar transforms itself to a butterfly. (OK Guys… I know a caterpillar could not transform itself to a butterfly without becoming an imago in between. But sometimes you need to tolerate by budding imagination that’s so imperfect and running towards perfection).

Then comes seasoning that invention… Is it invention or discovery??? Frying eggs and boiling eggs must have been invented long back. Eggs and cooking was discovered even long back. But I wish to proclaim my exclusive right to the non patented process of boiling eggs first (Ok… Less than half boiled eggs first) and then frying them to make them look, smell and taste yummier. Then I sprinkled salt and red chili powder.

Now the world war two here happened is… I just sprinkled. Not without a sense of ratio or proportion. It sizzled even encouragingly and coated the crispy brown looking eggs with hues, shades and tints of red and on the cruel side they looked like victims of bloody massacre.

Nevertheless I shrugged in relief that my achievement towards filling my own tummy with the things I prepared on my own reached its fruition. Rice boiled mixed with few grains of pulses and boiled friend eggs seasoned in salt and red chili. It felt nice when I addled all the contents of the misadventure I created in plate. It felt even nicer to see steam rising upwards like mist in dawn to greet a new day. And the sense of feeling the energy within the food by my finger tips gave me an added pleasure.

I told myself… I can’t wait anymore…

And I swallowed my… first swallow…

Then all hell broke loose. It was not food but a salt mine. My palate heavily resisted its progressive movement towards my throat further. My eyes were in tears and my sense of taste screamed at me. It was a true moment of JIHAD (Inner Struggle) for me. I could have simply dumped that trash in to… trash and be saved.

But my own ideals about not wasting food and my own sense of self recrimination kicked me in to life. For a few brief seconds I meditated on the wisdom of life… wisdom that is pertaining to assumption of responsibility towards our actions. And how could I possibly waste something that is as equally as important as my own existence (I was referring to rice, eggs, cooking oil, metals of utensils and energy through natural gas)??? Besides I added by own worthy labor and I am supposed to get nourishment… if not appreciation for whatever I did.

I took a deep breath and shoveled that food the way they showed lose earth in a burial pit after the coffin is lowered. And I gobbled that food in unilateral rebellion to the collective resistance of my pleasure senses.

Now I seem to have discovered another reason why I prefer to be single. If I plan to make my hypothetic wife happy with my romantic dinner treat done with my own hands she would dump the plate on my head and the attorney general even without referring to jurisprudence would grant diverse. Why risking such calculated wrath???

On the other hand I fondly remember similar effort by her. The very first dish she made with her own hands and budding sense of a cook laced with pure love... for me was… a chocolate pudding. The amount of butter was a little more. The Marie biscuits dunked in coffee tasted a little bitter. The cocoa molten was little lumpy in places. The layers of pleasure within were a little disoriented. But I loved that tiny gesture of love she gave me years ago. It brings me tears in my eyes when I think that at any given point of time.

Later she perfected her art at her own time and her loyal fan remained her Daddy dear. She even mailed me the photographs of her greatest achievement. A prawn curry that was do profoundly admired by her dad who possibly not only wiped the dish clean but also his fingers clean. She could have learnt so many things as time went by and now she is cooking her own food somewhere on the other side of globe and treating her friends and loved one with her love and care. I probably do not deserve what she prefers not to give me.

A pleasant feeling that’s relished only in silence and sliding tears…

But…

I mean it. I wish to be a great cook…