Tweak it or quit it?

Being born in a family of foodies, some of my most wonderful childhood memories are associated with food. My mother has always been very fond of cooking and has never stuck to just tried and tested recipes. Due to her love for experimentation in the kitchen, there was never a dearth of exotic food on our dining table and despite all her busyness and lack of time in the days when we were kids and the whole family was together, we were always sure of being treated with delicious food for every meal she cooked.

It is quite natural then that all of us siblings have inherited this love of food and cooking from her - actually love of food from dad and of cooking from mom! However, it seems that unlike my brother and sister who have also inherited my mom’s patience in the kitchen, I have totally missed it! I am as disgusted at the thought of labouring endlessly over a dish as I am excited by the thought of cooking .I love to cook but I cannot imagine myself sticking to elaborate recipes to the T.Quick fix cooking is more my style!

The moment I enter the kitchen, my motive is to churn out something edible or rather deliciously edible and presentable but not necessarily done painstakingly. I am so averse to the idea of doing it “the proper way “every time I do it that I often give an impression to people that I probably do not know how to do it .I have great admiration for those who love their cooking and treat it with a reverence I normally reserve for God knows what! However, expect me to do the same and I think people would get to see me as someone who hates cooking and never enters the kitchen.

That said, I do love my occasional elaborate preparations but that is a very rare thing. And the same applies to the preliminaries as well - so much so that I once had a friend remark “You love to cook but you need to be more respectful of food .You just cannot chop your veggies mercilessly LIKE THAT! “

However, I am in a dilemma now. The thing is that I have now developed a penchant for baking and after trying numerous recipes, some of which were outright fiascos, I have realised that experimentation or rather careless experimentation does not go down well with baking as a process. If there is a recipe that asks for .567 tbsp of baking soda, it has to be just that much of baking soda or else, the cake might turn into a brownie or a brownie might turn into a stone hard cookie!

Thus, I tried sticking to measurements a couple of times and the results were wonderful. This has obviously forced me to rethink if I want to continue to nurture my baking or just be content with wherever it is right now. I tried baking bread once and the whole process of yeasting and waiting for the dough to rise was a test on my patience. I am not totally disheartened and tired yet but its not that joyous and exciting as I thought it might be - though I must say the whiff of aroma of freshly baked bread more than made up for any lost excitement.

So I think I will continue with it for some more time.I am sure once I reach a higher level of expertise, I will figure out ways of circumventing the carefully laid out recipes. There must be a scope there, I get the feeling. Till then, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do!