Good food is the fuel for great thought. The creative juices brew best when you have your tummy stuffed with good food. Through simple analogy, since Words Kraft has been finally gaining notable momentum, we can assume that food has undoubtedly played a crucial role in fueling our high-spirits. Since my personal culinary skills are very questionable, I owe it to my wife for the good food.

Well, good food and fresh recipes don’t pop out of some “magical” food vending machine.

Improvising and ‘discovering’ new recipes, selecting the right blend of spices and ingredients, deciding on the right proportions and cooking it to perfection is a process which needs pure manual skills. It cannot be automated. There aren’t any shortcuts to it.

Now, here’s the problem.

• Every passion demands a certain amount of time. We are a generation of Instant noodles, Instant mix, packaged curries, soups, and pasta.
• Cooking demands quite some effort too. Especially since the Indian weather isn’t particularly soothing. With average annual temperatures hovering around 35 C – 43 C (95 F – 109.4 F), cooking a four-course meal thrice a day, every day of the year demands abnormally high determination and enthusiasm.

We crave for tasty food each day, but hardly have the time and patience to cook it regularly at home. Depending upon time, effort and determination, we can broadly segregate cooking enthusiasts into three categories:

The bunch of cooks who aren’t devoted to regular cooking. They find regular cooking too “regular” and boring. Only “special recipes” fascinate them.

It’s like those “One Night Stands”. The sub-conscious traits of a chef hidden within their dark inner self usually spring back to full life during weekends and National holidays.

Triggering a situation of chaos,  panic, and urgency mostly amongst the in-house enablers (Husbands mostly). We usually find these humble facilitators speeding through shopping centers trying to assemble all the essential, often obscure ingredients in record time.

The Social Networking Chefs: Our generation has been in love with Facebook and Instagram. And Photoshop has played a pivotal role in this match-making.

From brushing up the skin tone to making the most humble serving of Bread & Egg Poach look like an exquisite royal delicacy.

And rightly so!! Remember, a large proportion of our opinion about people and things is influenced by how it is made to look on social media profiles.

The social networking chefs take immense pride in honking their culinary skills through a thousand pictures in the social space. This probably further increases their social media appeal. Stylish, beautiful, successful, emotional and a great cook. Keep counting the Likes and Shares.

The Appetite Ninjas or Food Ninjas: They are regular, consistent and amazingly perfect – each day. It’s easier to cook when you have an ample choice of raw supplies. Stallion Chefs are the appetite ninjas who manage to cook something magical from a very skewed supply of available material. And temperature, weather, and circumstantial detriments can hardly mellow down their passion for cooking.

Well, Good food is the fuel for great thought. And my wife is one of those Stallion Chefs, who made sure our lunch and dinner platters never looked bland.

From classic Indian delicacies to a plethora of custards and puddings, her enthusiasm to cook has often surprised me. Believe me, you cannot maintain such consistency unless you absolutely love cooking.

In fact, homemakers are often not appreciated enough, probably because they aren’t aligned with the mainstream professions. Simply put, they aren’t contributing monetarily.

Fact is, homemaking is one of the most humble, underrated yet very demanding jobs. The responsibility of cooking a tasty meal before the family gathers for breakfast, packing lunch boxes before you leave for office or the kids leave for school, monitoring household chores, taking care of laundry, managing the kids, helping them with studies, preparing a sumptuous dinner, etc and etc. That’s a long list of roles and responsibilities.  Minus any fixed work hours, personal leaves, weekends or holidays. Its a 365 Days job. We will talk about that in the next post. But truly, if homemaking was a profession, most house-wives would have won “Employee of the year”…Every year.

Well, I have been asking her to start a food blog and publish her Kitchen chronicles. But she isn’t finding much time to get it all together. So here I am, trying to lend a helping hand, with what I do best.