Rakesh Reddy Kandula

First cooking experience

July 12th, 2010

Though I have been staying out of Hyderabad for 5 years now, first 2 years were in hostel. And after college, once I moved to Bangalore we had a cook always (even now) and never had to really cook. In these 3 years in Bangalore, I could only perfect making tea and cooking rice . Yes, that is how great my cooking skills are . Somehow, I always hated cooking – One because if I start cooking when I am hungry, it will be at least an hour to be able to actually eat and two I always felt that cooking was not for me.

The cook I have now comes only for 6 days (dinner on weekdays and saturday lunch). I generally get a biryani or pizza/garlic bread with chicken wings or go out with a friend on the other days. Sometimes, when I don’t feel like going out, I just make rice and have it with a pickle. Now finally, I got so bored of having the same old biryani that I decided to make something myself at home. Inspite of a failed attempt at making egg burji just a few days back, this time I decided to give it another attempt. And not only egg burji, I decided to make some rasam as well .

Went out to get a rasam powder and then called my mom for the recipe. She tried to make it as simple as possible for me and then I started out with her instructions. In parallel started making egg burji in my own way. Last time just for egg burji, I ended up using 2 kadai’s and still it did not turn out to be that great. This time after the previous experience, I was careful to make use of single kadai and complete it. It took me an hour to make rasam, egg burji and then rice.

The result – the rasam turned out to be horrible but then somehow made some changes to it and finally it turned out to be great . Also the egg burji was much better than the one I made before.

Key take aways from this experience are -

- Cooking requires lot of patience.

- Always cook with the burner in sim and not high (if not you will end up using two kadai’s ).

One thing that I could not understand is, just after half-way through cutting an onion, tears were dripping from my eyes but I see my mom or cook cutting onions with no issues. I am sure onions would definitely not know who is cutting them but then surprised what could be the trick .

If I get bored again, I am thinking of making chicken .

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