Gastronomically challenged, I

Here’s a typical scene from my dinner outings with friends. They know exactly what they want, which is usually something that was dead at one time, while I sit there scratching my…er…head and going through exactly five vegetarian options listed in the menu for the eighty-eighth time.

Most of my friends are non-vegetarians, which is fine since I have no hang-ups with people tearing away at meat, red or white, so long as it doesn’t smell like dead meat. Right enough they order something that looks pretty appetising and fulfilling. And they are completely relishing it, while my vegetarian dish is sitting idle, looking pretty.

With every bite they take, I feel as if I have been eating ash all this while and not known it! The fact that almost 90 per cent of these people are complete non-vegetarians while my personal choice has been to stop at mushrooms doesn’t escape me. It makes me wonder whether the taste of blood – so to speak – whets the taste buds.

So have I been missing out on one of the greater joys of life? At the threshold of my thirties now, I have often wondered if my lack of interest in either trying out different cuisines or a total lack of interest in cooking is something of a disorder, where instead of ingredients and their measurements on paper all I can see are dancing alphabets swimming in vegetable soup.

My social conditioning since childhood has been that, to be a loving wife and a good daughter-in-law – in short a complete woman, I have to be a great cook first. So as a child I started out by helping mother on the side with cutting salad or buttering the bread for sandwiches. I was later encouraged to watch cookery shows on the only channel there was - Doordarshan – and I soon graduated to doing my own little show in the kitchen after it closed post lunch. I became my own little celebrity chef.

So here I was, a midget version of myself, explaining to a phantom audience plastered on the kitchen wall how to make a biscuit and jam sandwich or a mixture of all that was left from lunch. Sometimes it was just how to make that perfect tea. I found a rather unwilling taster in my older brother who was nonetheless willing to take the risk. Unfortunately, he never went beyond the second bite.

Since then I have constantly heard my mother complain about my lack of cooking. And all her attempts to make me take on the ladle with equal zest as I take the television remote have failed. I do cook today, but only the basic stuff and only when I must. It didn’t help that I wasn’t even much interested in eating. I eat to live and as long as my stomach isn’t secretly eating itself, I’m alright. 

My indifference to gourmet food was to the extent that I couldn’t eat anything the time a friend took me to try a real fancy restaurant in a five-star hotel in Bandra. My food looked so elaborate that I couldn’t tell what I was eating: it looked complicated and it turned me off. Give me Nutella and cream crackers any time.    

There’s another thing that I simply love. Nigella Feasts on TLC. It is by far the most intriguing, deliciously appetising cookery shows on television I have ever seen. And I’m not even a foodie!

Nigella Lawson, a British best-selling author and host of 'Nigella Feasts' and 'Nigella Express', takes cooking to a whole new level. Described as “a delectable series from the domestic goddess herself” by Food Network, the show had me hooked instantly – like so many men all over the world. And she really made me want to cook. And eat. 

What you can’t miss about her is that she looks absolutely happy and completely satisfied simply cooking. Nigella knows how to keep her viewers interested. She doesn’t just ‘throw in’ the pomegranate in the curd but ‘gently crushes the lovely ruby drops so that the curd looks a beautiful pink’. That’s the kind of cooking she does. My favourite part is when she tiptoes to the fridge in the end to make a midnight snack. It’s good to see a celebrity cook taste their own cooking. So what if I can never get myself to do that.