Intro

That I did not know how to cook even as less as four years ago would be a gross understatement. Like many other twenty two year olds from India I came to US with two dozen packets of Maggi and a box of laddoos to keep me alive for the first week until the cafeteria of my university opened for the semester. Making chai was as big a mystery to me as the inner workings of Bollywood. It wasn't until I left the dorms a semester later and started living with other students in off-campus apartments that my real tryst with cooking began. It has been a long, fruitful, satisfying and discovery laden 4 years of learning the hard way. Countless of smelly , crummy creations of mine went down the drain but at the same time opened a Pandora's box of limitless possibilities.

I may sound a bit overly dramatic in my ability to cook because, hey , more than half the population of this earth can do it! But it is the way I feel about cooking! . Even when I created my first cup of chai , it was to get my mind of homework and it worked so miraculously that cooking has been my stress buster ever since. And then it is more than that. See when a child is really small, good parents tend to notice the child's hidden talents and try their best to hone it. Similarly I tried to be a good parent to my inner child and no matter how busy or where ever I was I never missed an opportunity to whip up a meal or a snack and maybe find a hidden secret to add to my kitty of every growing discoveries.

I can safely say that over the years I have developed my own little style of sorts. Two things contributed to the fact. The first was that since I got into the whole cooking thing so late in life and in a different country than my own , I never had the prejudice toward a certain kind of cuisine. To me all are same and equally mysterious , and my favorite cuisine changes ever so often that I unravel those mysteries one by one. The second thing is that being an engineer that I am by profession it was natural for me to not follow recipes but learn the make or break way, so I can safely say that more than half of my creations have been not so endearing and that percentage keeps getting smaller everyday. But in the process I have found and keep finding many gems and invaluable insights. And therein those two beliefs lies my style which i like to call "Anything goes" , a more agreeable term would be 'fusion' but that sounds cliche. My motto was "Good ingredients make good food" until i found a way to make stale rice taste good. So now I do not have any mottoes because I do not have any preconceived notions.

The fact that most of our (and you may not be one of them) palates are so confined to the boundaries set by our childhood and influenced by our culture disturbs me a lot, and I have sort of taken it upon myself to fight the eponymous battle against the conservative eater. I don't intend to do it by antagonizing that kind , but hope to provide a bridge which they can easily cross over into the vast continent of foodies like me and many of you who are reading this blog.

Which brings me to this blog. My main goal in starting this blog is that it provide my readers with ideas to cross that bridge I was talking about earlier.In here you may find my recipes , food articles or just my muses on anything and everything edible. My secondary goal in the case that my blog readership doesn't reach the high standards i expect (about 5 readers) is that it will still remain as a journal of my foodie adventures.

Bon appetit.

Pic courtesy S Dasgupta.