I had been to my friend’s place yesterday and stayed over with her for the night, since her father’s still in the hospital recuperating and she was all alone. With a few more of her friends around the locality we then decided to have an impromptu Pajama party. The dinner menu was decided as idli sambar (a South Indian preparation of fermented rice cakes eaten with a spicy vegetable mix) and I and my friend were in charge. We both are really novices at cooking, we just barely put together some food, never have we cooked anything for more than two people and finally coming from two different cultures with different food preferences and cooking styles to cook together was quite a feat (and a very enjoyable one at that). We managed to assimilate the requisite vegetables and chopped them all in different shapes and sizes debating on which ones should we peel, which ones deseed, what would be the process, cleaning techniques, how big or small it should be and a whole lot of such stuff. For everything there was a - : We do it this way at our home!!!”
An hour later we had all the requisite veggies chopped and ready to be cooked, a process that our mothers finish within 10 minutes. Nevertheless we moved on to the spices, now this sparked some fresh debates, I swore by the spices I knew about and had seen my mother use and she stuck with the spices she knew. Thankfully she had some faint idea about how much would be required for the whole concoction and we blended all the spices we both knew about and added them and cooked. None of us dared to pretest the final product though it smelled good and looked delicious. Once served and approved by friends we tasted and we were amazed. It tasted perfectly fine, the vegetables were a bit overdone, but the spices were just right and we had a wonderful dinner. The whole preparation took us a good 2 and 1/2 hours but it was worth the time.
We then sat and chatted into the night…not for too long though, most of us had had a long day at work and needed to get back to work the next day early in the morn. One by one all of us dropped off to sleep and….. erm….I was the first one!!!
An hour later we had all the requisite veggies chopped and ready to be cooked, a process that our mothers finish within 10 minutes. Nevertheless we moved on to the spices, now this sparked some fresh debates, I swore by the spices I knew about and had seen my mother use and she stuck with the spices she knew. Thankfully she had some faint idea about how much would be required for the whole concoction and we blended all the spices we both knew about and added them and cooked. None of us dared to pretest the final product though it smelled good and looked delicious. Once served and approved by friends we tasted and we were amazed. It tasted perfectly fine, the vegetables were a bit overdone, but the spices were just right and we had a wonderful dinner. The whole preparation took us a good 2 and 1/2 hours but it was worth the time.
We then sat and chatted into the night…not for too long though, most of us had had a long day at work and needed to get back to work the next day early in the morn. One by one all of us dropped off to sleep and….. erm….I was the first one!!!
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