Writing Prompts: Cooking

The aromatic smell of eight different Indian masalas seeped through the hallway, along with the sound of sizzling mustard seeds, churning cumin, and the rather loud air vent.

My mother is a spectacular cook, and I don't exaggerate when I say that people traveled from far and wide for a taste of her food. She pretty much whips up a miracle every time she sets foot in the kitchen. 

My earliest memory of her food was home made puffs stuffed with potato masala. I distinctly remember her taking it out of the oven in our little apartment in Atlanta. Even then, when I knew nothing about cooking, I was fascinated by how she had made thirty soft and flaky puffs with three layers that melted in your mouth and a tangy potato center, from - powder, basically. 

Growing up, the only 'cooking' I partook in was when my cousins and I got together over the summer. My mom would encourage all of us to bake cakes as a group activity (though now I realize this was to keep us occupied enough to not have to deal with our antics that were, more often than not, dangerous to a deadly degree).  I'm positive that I agreed to this baking exercise only so I could sneak a few licks of batter and of course, a large slice of cake at the end of it. 

As a teenager, I was an adamant and naive feminist (or that's what I called myself). I believed that feminism meant a lot of great things that make sense to me even now, but I also believed that it meant women shouldn't cook. I admit, this was a very simplistic view of things. I refused to set foot in the kitchen based on the belief that I was truly breaking gender barriers here. 

For years when people asked me about cooking, I joked and stated that my mom's amazing cooking genes just skipped me- when in honesty I had never even tried. Through university, I was surrounded by amazing cooks and found no necessity to attempt any possible/probable disaster in the kitchen, when home-food was a knock away. So at the end of my twenty-fourth birthday, boiling water was the only real culinary skill I had.

It wasn't until my brother soon blossomed into an amazing cook that I really sat down and rethought my life choices. When I visited him that summer, he whipped up some of my mom's signature dishes for me. I must admit that I was quite ashamed of myself. I had clearly let my adamant and childish views of the world get in the way of what could have been a great skill to have.  

I'm not sure if it was competitiveness, shame, being broke or just basic hunger that resulted in me finally deciding to grab a spatula. One thing I will say is, once I started there was no turning back. What started off as an evening ritual of dumping all the vegetables from my vague attempt at grocery shopping into a pot, led to some pretty elaborate spinach ravioli from scratch, healthy cauliflower crust pizza and complicated South Indian dishes packed with coconut, curry leaves and spices. 

My mom has a hand written cookbook. Though she no longer uses it (given her years of experience I believe every recipe sits safely in her brain), I know it still exists somewhere in her treasure trove. I always thought that I would never want or need it, and had come to terms with the fact that my brother deserved it more than I did. But with the recent turn of events, i think we are down for a battle for the cookbook. May the best child, I mean, cook, win.