Kitchen Attempts

#215

Faced with a new kitchen layout since day 1 - daunting but not so daunting. I was excited to try my hand at cooking in a new country with different produce and ingredients. Thanks to a colleague who helped us with an initial lot of Indian items like turmeric, tempering ingredients (mustard seeds, cumin seeds), ghee (clarified butter), tur dal (TIL it’s called ‘pigeon peas’ in English), basmati rice, sesame oil, tamarind, dosa batter, and shredded coconut, we were able to make home food for a few days such as sambar rice, mixed vegetable with gravy, rasam, and tomato onion dal. Going to the supermarket (there’s a WFM aka Whole Foods Market a block away) was also an equally time-consuming task due to the sheer number of choices of every single thing, but let me save that for a different post.

Initial days, it took me almost an hour to figure out what pots and pans to use to cook (we had limited cookware at first) for which item, where to cook each item (there was a grill oven, a microwave oven, the stovetop - gas, not electric, thankfully, and an electric rice cooker), and how long things would take (good to keep enough buffer in case things don't work out or take way longer, which they do most of the time). So, the first day, it took around 50 minutes to cook 1 mixed vegetable, rice, and dal but two days later, I was able to make mixed vegetable, rice, dal, and rasam in under 30 minutes. I went with the same menu to get accustomed to making the same thing in lesser time. 

Apart from the new appliances and veggies, the knifes were slightly different too - sharper, but sturdier. Felt like I was in a Masterchef kitchen operating the cutlery. I was also able to make decent small-ish dosas using a pan (due to lack of tawa/flat pan). We were able to enjoy yummy dosas (see above image) for breakfast for a week with home made molagapodi (aka gunpowder, a dry-spiced powder made from mixed dals and chilies).

Overall, it is slightly different to cooking in India because of more appliances to help with simultaneous prep and more space in this house, but like I said earlier, it takes longer to cook despite the parallelization, probably due to the cold weather.

P.S. I had titled this post ‘kitchen struggles’ but thought of renaming to a more positive word to give myself motivation to keep trying. Experimenting is fun!