I’ve lived alone for most of my life, long before the days of easy home delivery, and having money that you can justify spending on home delivery. Living alone taught me a few things about myself:
- I am not a hoarder like my parents. In fact I actually enjoy a clean/neat space with minimal furniture and fuss.
- I am not a recipe-based cook. I love to experiment with what’s in the kitchen. I skim over recipes at best and pick and choose the ingredients I want to use.
- All my teachers were correct — I lack discipline and am easily distracted.
The lock down and pandemic panic shone on a light on how much I rely on breathers between sporadic bouts of cooking. It showed me that while I grocery-shopped pretty frequently, many a vegetable has been forgotten and sacrificed to the crisper drawer in my fridge.
At the start of the lock down, I was stocked up and ready for the apocalypse. I had itemised lists of ingredients divided into perishables and packaged foods, and another long list of possible meals I could cook out of every conceivable mix and match of ingredients.
I googled which food groups could be frozen and how best to ensure they lived a long life (for weeks to come). I prepped and wrapped and segregated until my fridge looked like the display case in a museum.
And then I cooked; delicious-looking (and tasting) meals that were carefully plated and photographed for instagram. While I neither baked nor gave birth to any sour dough starter babies, I still managed to do fun things with food that kept me interested and engaged.
And of course there was fatigue, just like everything else that bobbed up and down, my joy at cooking dipped and dropped and bobbed up again.
Swiggy and Zomato started up and I gave in to the ease of having food delivered to my doorstep.
But food from outside just doesn’t feed my soul. It is a band aid to my laziness, causing me to burp and belch and hate myself a little bit more. I regretted ordering in even before my meal had been consumed and digested.
So I bought a new (wooden) chopping board, I invested the same energy in getting ingredients that I spent in putting things into my Swiggy cart. And I got back to cooking/sometimes photographing, and eating at home. With exceptions for treats on days when I truly needed a break.
The biggest motivator though is still discovering new ways to cook with the same ingredients. Learning that there are no rules and no limitations to what I can make and what my palette will praise.
From adding jeera and mushrooms to my bhurji to making delicate prawn curries and kadi, or my new obsession for fruit/nut/yoghurt smoothies — there are no limits.
The menu is constantly evolving and so am I.