Cooking

Alert Reader Rahul Singh commented:

I dont know anything about kids but i can imagine that your pista and kishmish are real angels, although you may contradict some times when they r in a mood of crying, otherwise you have to agrree with me. anyways i like to read about them and i am reading abt them from quite some time. just a question why r u keep bloging the "how to be a cook" kind of blogs in between your regular blogs.

Thanks for the comment, Rahul Singh, and may I say: How the hell did you find my blog?? Seriously, I'm shocked. I thought it was my two friends reading this thing, and that's it.

About the cooking, I should clarify.

My original issue was that I wanted to deal with the problems and complications and confusions and learnings that arose when I turned into a housewife and then into a stay-at-home mom. This being an Indian household, many of those problems and learnings and so on have revolved at some point around food and cooking. First it was my learning how to cook stuff my husband and I would both like. (Well, first it was figuring out that I was going to be doing all the cooking except for fried peanuts, which my husband can cook.) And then it was learning how to cook all our food without spending the whole day in the kitchen. (And at one point, it was about learning how not to allow the kitchen door to swing closed behind me, so that I'm locked for hours in the kitchen while A. sleeps the entire afternoon away in the bedroom, oblivious to my cries for help.) Lately, it's been my learning how to deal with servants--having two servants, telling them how to cook stuff, coaxing them into not using all the oil in the house to make a single subji, and getting over my fear that they are going to poison me and steal my children/laptop. (That last fear deserves its own post. Maybe later.)

So I imagined Desperate Chickoo as a place where I'd tell great stories about my life as an Indian housewife, all drived by a recipe that brings the whole thing together. But you know what? It's too hard, so I gave up immediately. And now I'm just adding random recipes that connect tangentially or not at all to the rest of the blog.

For example. . .

A.'s Fried Peanuts
Take some raw peanuts in their skin.
Throw them into a kadhai/wok that has hot oil in it.
Stir the peanuts around in the oil until they are brown and done.
Take the peanuts out of the oil, add salt, and eat.