Culinary escapades

I have never been much into cooking. Well, that is actually an understatement considering I probably didn’t know how to make decent tea till I was 16. I know that does not sound too cool. But, well, that is how it is.

So last night, when I put together the yummiest pasta for D with the most delicious white sauce, with a sprinkling of veggies, I was as pleased as punch with myself. As for D, he was exhilarated!

What stood out was that I dished out the pasta in less than seven minutes. Of course, it’s one thing that D did not leave me with any other option with his constant banter of “Mamma patta” (it helped that I am used to working with horrible deadlines and under backbreaking pressure).

D could not wait to dig into his pasta and to my surprise, he polished off the entire bowl. Hell, he polished off my share too! It was an adorable picture – D stuffing his face with the macaroni, French beans, Carrots all of it interspersed with “Mamma yummy”. At the end of it, I felt as if I had achieved salvation!

My son was a gourmand till he turned, let me see, 18 months. He would gorge on food, wrestle it out of people’s plates and act as if he hadn’t been fed for years. He would be ready to eat another meal soon after he had finished with one so much so that I would often be reprimanded by my mother and grandmother that I didn’t feed him well.

Those are of course tales of the yore.

Now, he is as fussy an eater as any two-year-old. Though it’s not a matter of concern (thanks to a doc who has made me realize that Mommies world over go berserk about the same banal and often trivial issues) I have learnt to go with the flow.

So I was mentioning about my culinary skills. I sometimes think the reason why I don’t enjoy cooking so much is because I don’t enjoy eating so much. Well, I seem to have attracted quite a few condescending glares there.

But it is true that I have never been much of a foodie. I have always had these flavours of the season dishes that I would order anytime I ate out. At one point it was puri bhaji (yes I could be that non experimental), then pav bhaji, then the current incumbents pasta or pizza depending on the mood. Also, some of the aforementioned seasons lasted really long -- like the ‘pav bhaji phase’ probably went on for a decade.

After D entered my life, completed six months and reached the solids phase, I wandered into the kitchen to hunt for the right stuff to start him on. It helped that I had an expert guide who suggested great food options.

D loved his beetroot and potato salads/raitas that I tried to make as appealing as possible for his tiny taste buds. I mixed them with dahi, threw in a little pepper and cilantro and sometimes even baked the whole thing.

The khichdi I cooked for D has by now become a hot favourite in the house with several takers. In his heydays of food, D was a great fan of the fare with its myriad colours thanks to the carrots, French beans, beetroot and other veggies that I added. Then there were also some suji desserts that I tried my hand at.

I also took to baking which turned out to be pretty much out of the world to mine as well as several others’ surprise. D would be squealing with delight every time he saw a muffin or a cookie sitting pretty on the cooling rack. The cookies have come in variety too. There have been some healthy oatmeal cookies that I cooked in the pressure cooker and they turned out to be quite yummy.

All these dishes have impressed my son who has otherwise become a little fastidious about his food now. Most often, he smugly turns up his nose at the stuff presented to him in his plate.

I know what I cook for D would not qualify in the list of ’10 interesting recipes for kids’ or some such thing. It’s hardly even experimental. But it’s come from me – with a lot of love for my little fellow. It’s something I have never done with so much emotion for anyone else.

Motherhood brings with it so many firsts!



The banana cake I baked for D