Culinary skills... or the lack of it.

Chef, n.: Any cook who swears in French. --- Source unknown.

Some people are born cooks, some acquire culinary skills and some, like me, have cooking thrust upon them (with due apologies to Shakespeare). I have found that being a vegetarian, heavily addicted to Indian cuisine, my food choices are very restricted. (Word of advice: Avoid having principles which do not conform to the general norm, life is much easier that way.) In order to survive, it was inevitable that I learn how to cook and feed myself. Also, once in a while, comes the unhappy obligation to show off your culinary skills (you have bragged a lot about how you cook your own food) to your colleagues and peers (read: they invited you to dinner and protocol demands that you return the favour).

Luckily for me, there is a lot of variety in Indian cooking. The recipe for a certain dish varies from state to state. Heck, no two families agree on the right way to cook sambar. In fact, sometimes the only thing that they would agree on is the name of the dish. Also there is a lot of disagreement on the right way to eat a dish and/or what dishes can be eaten with other dishes. For example, some Keralites (or Malayalees or just Mallus) like to eat uppuma (also try upma and uppama) with a banana, a notion which is often revolting to a person from Tamil Nadu (or Tamils or Tams). A Telugu (or an Andhrite ?) would balk at the idea of eating some curry simultaneously while you are eating sambar with rice. It is always rice and a dry/solid curry, rice and sambar/rasam and finally rice and curds or buttermilk. Sometimes there is a rice and pickles (not the American pickles, mind you) before rice and curds. Order is of utmost importance. As I said earlier, there is variety (obligatory Obelix quote "These Indians are crazy!").

Now you are wondering, how can this much chaos be a good thing? I have realized that with a little but of cleverness and a complete disregard to moral scruples one can use this confusion to their advantage. Take for example, myself, a pathetic cook. Suppose I screw up while I cook a dish and let's just say it tastes a bit different. Depending on the crowd I am serving it to I can call it a recipe variation from the state which is not represented that night. You can always say you got this recipe/idea from a friend by email and no one would suspect you.

Of course, it is much easier to get away with a botched recipe when you are entertaining people who are unfamiliar with Indian cooking. You inivite them to dinner and they ask you, "Hey! What is this brown thing that you have cooked?" (Shhh! They don't know it is burnt!) You say, "Yeah, that is pulao." They say, "But we had some vegetable pulav at Mrs. Patel's and that looked a lot different from this. It had peas and carrots etc." At this point you say, "Vegetable pulao was it? Oh! No wonder! This is Shahi pulav. You see, (showing them the burnt brown mass of vegetables, it has mutter (peas) and gajar (carrots). Oh! I forget the English names for the vegetables at the moment... What? ... Do I have some of the vegetables?... Err... No, I used them all up for the dish. I can google it if you want." Your average guest is hungry and more concerned about eating something, so (s)he is not going to bother and you get away with Shahi pulao. It must be perfectly understood that I am in no way condoning the behaviour mentioned here. This is just an extreme example to illustrate the ambiguities involved in Indian cuisine which allows you to get away with murder, so to speak.

Now your average colleague is going to eventually talk about this dinner to another Indian colleague, who knows the tricks of the trade. This average Indian guy would then try to get you to invite him to a dinner. The way he sees it, if you mess up, he exposes you and if you don't, he gets a good free dinner (it has been a year since his last visit to India). Either way, he wins. Eventually, you succumb to his vile plan. So here are a few tips which might come in handy:
1. You can never have enough spices in your dish. The only reason you did not add a certain spice is because you forgot to pick it up from the store two hours earlier. If it is in your apartment, then at least a teaspoonful of it goes into the dish.
2. You can never go wrong with fried onions, large quantities of it. Doesn't matter if you intend to make carrot curry. The ratio of onions to carrots (or any other vegetable for that matter) is always 10:1. Just don't be stupid enough to call it onion curry, then they will laugh at you.
3. If you go overboard with the above suggestions, add a lot of tomatoes. Sauce is good.
4. Be very careful with salt. There is no fix for too much salt, at least not that I know of.

Being the idiot that you are, you will eventually mess up even these simple instructions and your friend arrives in another five minutes. (Yeah, they are punctual only for food!) At this point, the only way out is to add two or three teaspoons, nay better yet, tablespoons of chilli powder into the dish you botched up. An average Indian guy will never admit that he is not man enough (see here and here) to handle the spice.

Gender equality proponents might be miffed at the conspicous absence of any mention of the average Indian girl. There is a reason for it. The average Indian girl is sensible enough to realize what imbeciles men are in matters of cooking. So they cook their own food, and if you are nice to them, they will even share it with you. This is the reason why so many Indian men (even those in their early twenties) are happily married. At least, this is my theory.