Cooking is not just a chore

Since the advent of mankind, cooking has been a necessity. The early man times consisted of very crude methods of cooking mainly because the sole purpose of cooking was to suffice hunger. Times have changed and cooking has evolved into a form of art, providing a very rich and out-of the world experience. Food is forever under scrutiny to understand every ingredient and its importance in a dish.

Cooking is a blend of art and science which needs to be experimented with and refined and mastered perpetually. The whole process of studying and analysing every edible raw ingredient and its properties with respect to the colour, aroma, flavor, texture and the best method of cutting, cooking and serving requires all the senses to act at once. This is because, when we feast our eyes on a dish, all our senses are activated simultaneously. Our eyes capture the colour of the dish along with the way it is presented; nose inhales the aroma of the dish; sometimes the sizzling, stirring, whisking of the dish during the making also captivates our interest through our other sense of hearing. Hence, before our sense of taste is put into action, all the other senses play their part which will signal the brain to proceed with the dish or turn away with repugnance or disinterest.

Though we consider the world to be a small place, the type of cuisines that exist today is over-whelming. Moreover, the creation of new cuisines with a mélange of traditional ones keeps the list going on.

Molecular gastronomy is one of the advancement in the world of food science and a quick google search can tell you what it is all about. I was awe struck when I had a first-hand experience of one of the techniques of molecular gastronomy. It is called spherification – where liquid is made to undergo some sort of modern culinary process to transform it into a sphere.

 In one of the gourmet restaurants we visited last year, we were offered a very cute looking wobbly orangish-yellow ‘sphere’ on a typical Chinese soup spoon. It was a special creation by the chef in-house and the waitress went on describe that it was a mango-ginger spherification and all we had to do was just put it in our mouth and it would pop. Now that sent like 100s of questions to my mind. What does she mean by ‘pop’? Would it burst in my mouth like those popping candies which I used to love as a child? Its appearance was gelatinous with a glossy look. But what interested me most was the flavor – mango and ginger concoction. That sounded so exotic to my ears and I was trying to imagine what it would taste like. So with great anticipation, my husband and I took our respective mango-ginger spherification and slowly popped it in. What happened next was the most remarkable thing I have ever felt! Now I need to choose my words accurately to describe what I felt because it is really difficult to word it. As soon as I closed my mouth, all I felt was a very delicate crack or a tear or maybe a “pop” which was extremely gentle. It was so swift that it felt like it never really happened and then I got a tang of the mango and ginger which lasted for few beautiful seconds. The whole experience did not even last a minute, but it was so tantalising and splendid that we had to sit back and take a recount of what just happened.

For me, cooking is a beautiful experience and food science is just another world out there which has always spellbound me.

What are the most important days in your life???

The two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

- Mark Twain

I stumbled upon this quote one sleepy morning while scrolling through one of the communities in Google + and it sure did make quite a forceful impact on my brain to get me fully awake. Many thoughts rushed into my head when I read this over and over again and like always it doesn’t take my brain long to pull out all the ‘forgotten and buried’ incidents in my life.

Ideally, the day you were born would have been your parents’ most memorable day in their lives. But that doesn’t stand true for every life being born into this world. We do not have control over our lives when we arrive into this world from the cosy womb of our mothers. Today, I am writing and you are, in turn reading this because our parents vowed to take care of us. Well, I cannot really comment about the unfortunate who have lost their lives before they could see themselves grey and old. What I have been meaning to touch upon is the children who are smothered, poisoned and killed in the most cruel ways that is hard to imagine – infanticide. So the most important day in one’s life goes unrecognised and is snatched away from the very people who are meant to safeguard the life until it is strong to be on its own.

I believe everybody is born with a purpose and it is our duty to identify our purpose, but can we make it our sole purpose in life to keep seeking the purpose or just go with the flow and expect to realise our purpose during the course of our life? Our purpose in life need not be something that would alter the world for good – our life does not have to affect the world at a large scale. ‘Five people you meet in heaven’ by Mitch Albom beautifully depicts the purpose of life and explains how we affect and in turn get affected by others in life. What goes around, comes around is so very true! The force of karma definitely revolves around the cosmic realm and touches every life on this earth. This is the reason we are taught at an early stage by our parents and teachers to always do good to people around us, help the needy, respect elders and all the other moral sciences. The cycle of life is exactly the same for everyone and the case of Benjamin Button is curious as ever.  

So how do we find the purpose of our birth? Rewind your memory to the most possible extent and recollect all the incidents that stand out. There would be some which you wouldn’t have considered important enough to be remembered but there is a plausibility of it being to the person it had an impact on. Or you might not have to go that far. Think about who you are with now and consider how you have influenced him or her for the better. I have matured tremendously in life and for me, now life is all about enjoying what I have in hand now, living in the present and trying to spread the joy to as many people I can around me. I am not aiming to change the world – but I would be happy if I can bring a smile to at least one person, when I am being remembered.