A few things about cooking

So I’ve been cooking for a few years now and my family is used to my garlicky soup and oversalted potatoes and baking meltdowns. But like most other people, curfew/lockdown gave me the opportunity to cook more and try out more recipes. While I have always cooked, I rarely strayed away from the usual pasta, pies, and meats. My baking was usually limited to brownies and cookies and date cake.

But I’ve spent the past two months at home like the rest of the world and I’ve been busy. For one, I was told to handle dinner every day. This made me realise how much effort goes into planning meals on a daily basis, especially with what you have at home. I don’t know how my mother remains sane after doing this for years.

Anyway, back to the point. I’ve been cooking a lot and I’ve been posting pictures of what I make. But as I posted a picture of a pumpkin pecan pie a few days ago, I thought about how much is left unsaid in those pictures and captions.

Added to this, I had a conversation with a friend recently and they told me that they’re reluctant to try out new dishes. My initial reaction was “why not!? Cooking is no big deal.” But can we really say that when we leave out the trial and error process and only posts about dishes that come out well?

So here it is. The slight fuckups that don’t make it to Instagram.

Sourdough bread

A few weeks into curfew, I decided that this sourdough starter nonsense was worth a try. I named my started. I fed it. I kep

t notes. I also spent a good week thinking I’d killed Wilbert. But it passed the floating test so I baked bread, we had it for dinner, and I threw away the starter because it just wasn’t worth it.

So here’s what they don’t tell you about sourdough starters. They smell like the paappa you left out overnight after pasting paper on Vesak kuudu. It requires discipline. Yes, feeding it once a day and maintaining notes on growth and whatnot requires discipline. It’s messy as hell. Try stirring a gooey flour mixture that’s in an old jam jar.

And the bread itself. Heavens. All the videos I watched had so many folding techniques that I just didn’t have the energy for. I ended up trying out this Bigger Bolder Baker recipe and it took me close to a day of on and off kneading. And in the end, I overbaked the bread to get a darker colour and it tasted like cornflakes but I just prefer instant yeast loaves.

 

Kadey paan

And so, once I had acquired some instant yeast, I tried out the Ape Amma kadey paan recipe. The first was tasty but didn’t rise as much but the second one did. It’s tasty, super simple, and goes well with anything.

But…

So the Anita Dickman bread roll recipe that I follow now for pretty much anything uses the old method of activating yeast separately and then adding it to the flour mixture. So happy with my kadey paan and pizza and bread rolls I was sort of okay with skipping this and just adding the powdered yeast directly to the flour. But the universe intervened and I tried the traditional method and the yeast was old/dead and didn’t activate and get all frothy.

So ya, it’s safer to activate your yeast before adding it to the flour. Also always test the temperature of your water. And also activate your yeast in a big enough bowl. I once put the yeast+sugar+water mixture in a tea cup and came back to it 15 mins later to find that the yeast froth had overflowed.

 

Mint truffle

I’ve had two bottles of peppermint flavouring I haven’t been able to use as much as I thought I would so I was flipping through Anita Dickman’s cookbook and came across a recipe for mint truffles. It’s super simple and tastes great. The first time I made it, it was gooey and had to be licked off the cupcake liner I poured it into. The second time I made it, the chocolate seized. But I went ahead with the recipe and the truffle was gooey but pillow-y. It was easier to get out of the cupcake liner and tasted absolutely delicious.

Sometimes the fuckups work out well in the end.

 

Ginger bug

I started a ginger bug somewhere last week. Grating ginger is fun! There’s a slight burn throughout the process and you risk shaving off a good bit of your fingers. Anyway, this isn’t about the ginger itself, which I actually do love but about quantities.

So when I first decided to dry out a ginger beer recipe that didn’t use yeast or cream of tartar, I watched Bon Appetit’s video where Brad makes ginger beer. It needed 500g of ginger but I remembered it as 400g when I ordered. But I didn’t get 400g.

Not paying attention to any of this, I decided to switch to Joshua Wiseman’s recipe once I got my ginger. So the quantities changed and I had enough for the ginger bug but not enough for the ginger beer. So I had to order more.

Everything worked out but it was a reminder to figure out quantities before placing an order and making sure you actually have everything you need before you get started.

I also tried lemon lime soda without the lime and it tastes like bitter lemon. So good! But I had put my ginger bug in the fridge so I hadn’t activated it on time for the lemon soda. It all worked out but if any ingredient needs activating, do that first.

 

Tepache

This is more about self-control. So I can’t consume a lot of pineapple because I end up getting these painful mouth sores that need to be calmed down with sago and king coconut. But I also made a huge jar of tepache and drank most of it.

It’s delicious, easy to make, and you can eyeball most of the ingredients and quantities. I found some old jaggery in the fridge, used white sugar instead of brown because local brown sugar is a lie, and added cinnamon leaves because I ran out of sticks.

It gave me my second mouth sore during curfew.

But guess who has another batch fermenting in a jar?

 

Chocolate cake with peppermint frosting

This was a Mother’s Day treat for Amma. Bon Appetit’s chocolate cake and a buttercream frosting with peppermint flavouring. So we had this with vanilla ice cream but the margarine I used was quite salty. I didn’t realise this when using it and the cake and frosting were just a tad bit salty.

Not in an oversalted soup way but in a salted caramel way. It still tasted good but it was a good reminder to know my ingredients and brands.

 

Cheese

One of the first curfew meals I made was pizza. We didn’t have cheese so I topped it with white sauce. It tasted great. But it wasn’t cheese. So I set out to make cheese. The first attempt was a failure because I didn’t heat the milk enough so I ended up with vinegar milk that separated. The second time, I made paneer. And the third and fourth, I made cream cheese which didn’t ball up like the videos.

I’m trying to get my hands on some raw milk to try that out but the cheese experiment drove me mad. I wanted to get it right but there was so much that was going wrong.

But this is what cooking is. You end up with quite a few failures but that’s how you learn.

You learn that you must always start with a small quantity so that you don’t end up throwing away half a carton of milk.

 

Choux pastry

Amma has been telling me to make choux pastry for ages but I always thought I lacked the skills. Turns out, choux pastry is pretty easy to whip up. But this was not the kind that held its crispiness for hours on a bakery counter but the kind that is soft but still delicious.

While the choux pastry worked out, my one and only rubber spatula snapped in half and died on me. Now I struggle to scrape food or mixtures out of bowls using spoons and it’s just not the same.

So take care of your equipment, especially during these times when you can’t just waltz into a store and buy whatever you want.

But not having a spatula made me realise how much can go to waste when you can’t scrape bowls clean. Athamma always told me to use the side of my thumb to scrape mixtures off bowl and this is what I've been doing.

 

Dalgona coffee

I hated on dalgona coffee because I thought it was wasteful to use so much milk in a cup of coffee during the first few weeks of curfew. After things had settled a bit and it was easier to access goods, I decided to make a sponge cake with a coffee whip.

And it tasted great. But I ended up with a huge bowl of coffee whip. So we made dalgona coffee for a few days. Milk, a bit of sugar, brandy, and coffee whip. I’m not lying when I say that this is what the gods up in the clouds sip on while they gossip about us earthlings.

But this is about getting your quantities right. We had a use for the extra coffee whip but sometimes, you end up throwing away food because you made way too much.

 

Blachang

We bought prawns a few days ago and I wanted to use the shells to make chillie paste. Except that all recipes I checked either used dried prawn or koonisso or didn’t use prawn at all. So I decided to follow the Anita Dickman blachang recipe. Except that the recipe was for 900g of dried prawn and I had 20g of dried prawn shell.

So I decided to go rogue. I added various things to the mixture until I got a brown paste that tastes great but is neither blachang nor chillie paste.

 

Lemon, garlic chicken

On Saturday, I decided to follow a recipe for a savoury dish for the first time in my life. The only changes I made was that used karapincha instead of rosemary and added more garlic than the required six cloves.

And it was nice to taste a dish that wasn’t my usual spice mix and soy sauce flavour. I tend to stick to the same things when I cook and this made me stay on course and realise that with lemon and garlic and onion to add flavour, salt and pepper was adequate seasoning.

 

Shakshuka

Somewhere in February, a friend invited a few of us over for lunch and made us shakshuka. It was incredible. Last week or so, I decided to make it myself. I made the sauce instead of using store-bought tomato paste. And it was good but it didn’t look that good and the eggs went everywhere.

When I posted about this, the friend who invited us over told me that I could have just checked with him about it. And it was a good reminder that cooking should be about sharing recipes and tips and helping each other. I only have one recipe I don’t share with people and that’s because my granduncle made me promise I won’t share it with anyone.

But anything else, I’ll happily share with people. I don’t know much about cooking but I’d love to figure out what went wrong with people. And most of all, I love to share food with people.

Cooking with people, sharing food with people, it’s one of the best things you can do. It gives me so much joy to cook for people and one of the worst things about curfew has been that I can no longer share food with friends.

Because cooking is about filling your tummy. It is about experimenting and learning. But it’s also about making something and sharing it with people you love. This, to me, is the joy of cooking.

 

(Of course, it’s always best to give your friends some pepto-bismol or gripe water along with your food).

Notes to self

A few things I would keep in mind when cooking:

Take down quantities when you are trying out something new or combining two or three recipes. I once made a good bibikkan that came out well but I never wrote down the quantities or process.

Watch the cooker/over. Recently made pizza and the pie was overbaked and cracker-like. Once forgot a pancake on the cooker and it ended up looking like that black moon emoji.

You can add more salt but it’s difficult to take salt out of a dish.

Don’t be afraid to improvise.