What can be the most frustrating thing if you're not a cook and you're trying to cook something to satisfy your craving?

The thing you're cooking turning out a big flop or not working out at all!!

I've been craving kadhi for quite a few days. Not the Punjabi kadhi with gram flour pakoras but the Gujrati one...lighter yellow in colour, thinner consistency (like soup) and flavoured with curry leaves and green chillies!

Guess what happened once I started cooking it...the curd curdled!!! Grrrrrrrrr.....

I ran out of yogurt and curry leaves so couldn't give it another go. Then I went online and figured out my mistake. 1) I was using low fat yogurt which does not have the emulsifiers of full-fat/regular yogurt and tends to curdle when cooked, 2) I took yogurt straight out of the fridge and started cooking it whereas I should've used yogurt at room temperature.

The recipe I was referring to used low fat yogurt and didn't mention anything about the possibility it could curdle, but I'm asuming the woman is a domestic Goddess that can make the impossible possible, I'm totally not. So I will be wiser tomorrow (hopefully) and give it another shot because I really really want to have goddamn kadhi. Oh, how I miss my cook from back home :((

Life sucks. Thank God there's chocolate.

And Happy Father's Day, Daddy.

Masterchef India : The Verdict

Masterchef is a one of its kind cookery-based reality show where amateur cooks who have no food industry experience but a passion for cooking, fight for the title of ‘the best cook of the country’, a.k.a. Masterchef. The show has been running super successfully in the U.K. and Australia and has now started airing in India.

The format has been adapted to the Indian market which means that the show is going to have liberal doses of emotions and melodrama. Because, you know, India is a land of excessively emotional people who need melodrama in everything. Drama constitutes a large part of our daily diet. Or so the channel airing the show and the show's producers would like us to believe. So, if you're expecting Masterchef India to be anything like Masterchef Australia, which is currently being aired on Star World, you're in for a major disappointment. As I was :(

For one, India is the only country in the world where Masterchef is hosted by a Bollywood actor. Now, by no means is AK a food connoissuer. He may have worked briefly as a chef in Thailand (that too was decades ago, mind you) but he would not have the kind of culinary expertise that continuing professional chefs would have. The two chefs on the show - Ajay Chopra of Goa Marriott & Kunal Kapoor of Leela Gurgaon - are merely there to save face, so the show can "legally" claim to have stuck to the Masterchef format if ever taken to court by the owners of the format. The chefs are completely sidelined - most of the challenges are thrown and judged by AK. In fact, in one of the episodes AK was even described as "the most talented chef in India". What a joke!

There is a lot of emotion, drama and religion on the show because, you know, this is India. Participants on MC Australia rarely shed tears except when they've been eliminated. The judges don't kiss or hug them either when they make something delicious. Neither do they run to the pantry with contestants.

While the judges of MC Australia criticize each dish specifically mentioning it's flaws/strengths, all AK does is mouth cheesy lines such as 'meri kamiyabi ki buniyad cooking hai' (really now?), 'khana nahi, jeena aur marna ban jayega', 'jung maidan mein ho ya kitchen mein, chahiye himmat', 'aapke husband show dekh rahe honge, aap unse kuch kehna chahengi?' Puke.

Then there is the compulsory dose of religion that must feature in every Indian reality show. A lot of “wahe guru” happened on the first weekend, and one aspirant put a napkin over her head and prayed when she arrived before the jury. Tons of punjabi bonding happens as well. Aunties say things like 'yeh apron meri izzat hai'. More gag.

The participants on MC India 'ooh' and 'aah' every time AK appears, as if he and not cooking is the reason they are there. Thank God AK sticks to the script, rather than obliging fawning star-struck fans.

Finally, given the quality and background of contestants on the show, I seriously doubt we'll be seeing any world/international cuisine being cooked. Unlike in MC Australia where invention tests often revolve around Japanese, Indian, Spanish, American, British, Mexican, Asian or French cuisine, I have a feeling MC India will revolve around Indian cuisine only.

Clearly, the makers of Masterchef India are confused as to which direction they want to steer the show in. Or are they? Read this quote by Anupam Vasudev, executive vice-president, STAR Plus, "MasterChef India is not a cookery show. It is a competitive game show with cookery happening in the background." (Source: http://www.afaqs.com/)

That says it all about MC India. It kind of seals the fate of the show, at least as far as I am concerned.

As far as I know, Masterchef Australia never claims to be anything but a cookery show, and it definitely doesn't attempt to put cooking in the background. Cooking and chefs are the mainstay as well as the backbone of the show. Kind of goes to prove how Indian channel heads misuse the right to "adapt" a show to the Indian context.

Do Not Try This At Home

I’m talking about making Tandoori Chicken on a gas stove. Which moron tries to do that, you ask?

Well, you get three guesses & the first two don’t count!

Why did I do that? Because a) I don’t have a tandoor oven or a gas tandoor at home but I really wanted to make tandoori chicken, and b) A friend of mine made it on the gas stove once & it came out looking just like it looks at restaurants.

You want to know how mine looked? It looked like a chicken dish without the curry!

To be fair to myself though - and to my dearest gas burner - it didn’t taste bad at all. It tasted quite good actually, thanks to my superior marination skills. I beat some yogurt, added generous amounts of ginger-garlic paste, lots of tandoori chicken masala (in the hope that the damn chicken would come out looking red as it does in restaurants, but it came out as pinkish-orange at best) & kept it in the fridge for 24 hrs. It tasted awesome…just that it didn’t look like tandoori chicken at all!

I must get hold of my friend & torture her until she spills the secret as to how she made hers look just like professionally made tandoori chicken.

On an aside, I’ve been going for a jog/walk since Monday. Have made it 3 days in a row! Let’s hope it continues.

There is a huge lake about 100 meters from my house that I’d never seen the face of in the one & a half years I’ve been living here. On Monday I decided to go. It was a momentour occasion in the history of mankind, I tell you, because I’ve been planning to go for a jog around the lake for about a year now. There is a nice jogging track and tons of people walking, jogging & doing yoga & all kinds of weird exercises. There are companies peddling health food/drinks at the entrance, and food stalls. The grossly obese uncles & aunties who come for their “morning walk” – because their arteries are choked with cholesterol & the weighing scale threatens to shatter under their weight – put a nice end to their walk by gulping down kachories deep fried in oil & jalebis that are saturated with sugar syrup. I wonder why they bother to get up in the morning & come for a walk at all, because trust me, it’s a BIG pain to do so!

It takes all the motivation that I can gather to wake up at 7am (I set my alarm for 6.30 & hit snooze at least 3 times before I get up) with the prospect of having to torture myself physically. No one likes to exercise, accept it. The motivation for me is that I need to lose 6 more kgs (yes people, I have lost 6 kgs already!!) , and the bonus is that I get to watch rowers glide through the lake in their boats & lech at their toned, muscular, dark glistening bodies jog by my side after their rowing sessions. You see, the lake is home to the Calcutta Rowing Club.

The One Thing I'm Not Destined To Do...

...is to cook. And I say that with my hand on my heart.

I'm a miserable cook. I can NEVER EVER boil milk without spilling it. When I make rice, it either sticks to the bottom of the pan & gets burnt, or gets wet & sticky. Rotis? I can make them round but they turn out to be partly burnt & partly half-baked.

With Durga Puja going on, the entire city is in a celebratory mood. The smell of kosha mangsho (mutton cooked Bengali style) & luchis (Bengali puris) had been wafting through my windows, seducing my olfactory senses since morning, like a cruel joke. To make things worse, my cook didn't turn up today. Oh, the horror, the horror!!

I figured if I have to cook, I might as well make a feast out of it. I really wanted some nice mutton curry & pulao, but it seemed too much of an effort, and I didn't really have the patience to stand in endless queues to buy mutton (not that I know how to buy mutton, but I was willing to learn), so I settled for the next best thing Bongs love to eat - luchi & alur dom. Well, in case you're wondering, I'm not Bong but if it's Durga Puja and you're in Calcutta, you've got to celebrate it Bong style!

I figured I might as well go the whole hog and decide to make payesh, or kheer as it's more popularly known.

I burnt the grated onion-ginger-garlic paste that forms the base of the alur dom. The potatoes themselves were half-cooked in parts, the luchis were partially burnt, and the kheer? Oh, don't even get me started on the kheer! I burnt it. Charred, to be precise.

I started with the proportion of milk : rice my mom had instructed me to use, but the milk seemed too much for the rice. So, I added some more rice to it, and then some more. As the kheer was cooking, I realized how important it is to follow what mom tells you...the rice was eventually too much for the milk, and since I had added them in three batches, they were different degrees of 'cooked'! And the bottom layer was charred! So much for preparing a feast.

Really, for folks like me who can't cook, the smartest thing to do is to simply hire a cook and leave the feast up to her. Your families will thank you for it, trust me. And in case the cook doesn't turn up, just order in!

The Journey From Bong to Thai :)

Once the crazy hormones have subsided, life can be calm and serene once again. After having fought with A for no reason at all on Friday night (I was PMSing hardcore...he wanted to come over...I wanted to meet him but at the same time didn't...so he ended up getting thoroughly confused & pissed off by my erratic behavior, and we ended up having a big fight), I decided to make it up to him by cooking him dinner last night. For company, I asked my sister & brother-in-law to join us.

I was initially planning to cook Bong food for the lot...rice, kosha mangsho & eelish (was borrowing a recipe from The Knife)...but my sister vetoed it. In fact, she vetoed anything Indian. My other options were Chinese, Thai & Italian.

Now, Chinese food, I think, is best left to restaurants. Home-cooked Chinese just doesn't taste as good, maybe because we don't add the fatal ajino moto to it when we cook it at home! So I turned to my ever favorite pasta, which was shot down by both A & my brother-in-law, at the last minute (hmpfff...shouldn't men just be thankful they're getting cooked food magically on their plates)?

Then a friend & her boyfriend called & asked if they could come over. I suggested they stay back for dinner.

With just a couple of hours to go for dinner and an undecided menu, the panic button was pressed. After a quick inspection of my fridge, my sister, who's an expert at damage control of any kind (I stand & hyperventilate while she goes about finding a solution to the problem/crisis at hand), spotted Thai green curry paste, fish sauce & soy sauce, and came up with the idea of making Thai green curry with chicken & Thai fried rice.

While I made a mad dash to the grocery store to buy boneless chicken, she went about boiling the rice & chopping the ingredients. She had also brought along a caramel pudding mix (I would suggest not bothering with the mix, it has too much sweetener & vanilla essence in it...it's much better to make caramel pudding from scratch at home, though it's painful). We quickly ordered a couple of starters from a nearby Chinese restaurants.

What we ended up with were two decent starters - crispy fried lamb & red chilly pepper fish, a good Thai green curry (though it was more white than green courtesy all those cans of coconut milk) & a disaster of a Thai fried rice.

You see, neither my sister nor I have quite mastered the art of cooking rice, so we have pretty much resigned to the fact that our rice will always be limp, sticky & more like 'mashed' rice. The caramel pudding too was a mild disaster. We tried making it with skim milk (mistake # 1 - the mixture became too thin in consistency), added too much of it, and tried to do damage control by adding some custard powder to it (mistake # 2 - the mix became lumpy).

Over dinner, we pretended every dish was made from scratch and no readymade mixes were used, but men who stay/spend a lot of time with women who can't cook know better, and our bluff was called! That's when I decided to drop the bomb and said I should've just stuck to my original plan of cooking Bong food. I heard a collective scream of "NO!" go up. You see, all three men at the party were Bongs :)

A New Found Appreciation for Food

It's a rainy Saturday morning and I have nothing to do...nowhere to be! It's heavenly!

I'm sipping on my morning ginger tea - my life force! I can't function fully without my morning tea.

The weather is awesome and I really want to write, but I don't have anything particular to write about. So, I'll write about the evil influence that The Knife has had on me.

I consider it an "evil" influence because I was never one for cooking. Until I started reading his blog.

I used to detest cooking...considered it "burning of one's time" in the literal sense of the word. I never understood how people could think of painfully chopping vegetables and standing in front of the gas range for hours as means of de-stressing!

However, ever since I started reading The Knife's blog, I have started experimenting with cooking. Not the dal-chawal type of everyday cooking but more exotic weekend cooking - Italian, Spanish, French, Thai, Mediterranean cooking.

Almost every weekend I’m cooking something and inflicting it upon A & my sister. And if their feedback is to be believed, I’m pretty decent at it :)

I hunt online for recipes during the week so I can make something new over the weekend. Sometimes I pick recipes from The Knife’s blog because they are practical and easy to follow.

Ever since I’ve gone on the GM Diet, all I can think about is food! I dream of food. Yesterday was the ‘chicken & tomatoes’ day. I was way bored to eat boiled chicken & raw sliced tomatoes all day, so I got a little experimental with Italian herbs and came up with this delicious chicken preparation that had all of 1 tsp of olive oil in it! So here’s what you’ve got to do :

Take skinned boneless chicken breast (or leg pieces if you find chicken breast too chewy). Grate tomatoes and marinate the chicken in the pulp for half an hour. Add salt, pepper, chopped fresh basil & parsley, dried oregano (though keep oregano to a minimum because it can overpower the taste of all other herbs) & red chilly flakes.

Heat 1 tsp of olive oil in a pressure cooker and sautee crushed garlic in it. Once the garlic turns brown, add the chicken along with the marinade, shut the lid on the pressure cooker and let it cook for 3-4 whistles or until the chicken is fully cooked. You wouldn’t need to add water as the tomato pulp is enough. You can then remove the lid from the cooker and let the gravy dry up a bit. This can be served with garlic bread.

This chicken dish is easy to prepare and tastes good even though it isn't loaded on calories.

In a way, this weekend is going to be really sad. I associate weekends with good food and eating out, but my diet doesn't allow me to. I have 2 more days left to go and can already see my plate of spaghetti carbonara screaming out to me! Get that plate of ham & bacon with spaghetti in a cheese sauce ready, babe :)