The Kitchen in My Unpaid Internship
There is a marked distinction between cooking for recreation and cooking for sustenance. I haven’t fully learnt to differentiate the two. The side effect? I am trying to recover my breakfast failure and I get delayed for work. Perhaps this is the burnt toast theory in action?
Living independently in a new city is like having an additional job. An unpaid internship of sorts. It drains you — financially, emotionally amongst other things. But hey, it’s all about that little big thing the world calls experience. In this unpaid internship I do (aka Life), I painfully set up a kitchen from scratch. In theory, it was just buying stuff. Buying a cooking stove, vessels to keep atop, and ingredients to cook within those vessels.
In practice, it did not feel as simple. It got me questioning my identity.
Born and raised in a Kannada household, my eating habits were stereotypically south Indian. I need my dose of dosas and idlies frequently. Coconut is a staple for chutneys, garnishes and dishes from my coastal heritage. My favourite regular is bajil, a classic breakfast snack from Karavali aka Coastal Karnataka. It’s just flattened rice with an oil tempering with a masala of red chillies, cumin, coriander, jaggery and of course, coconut!
And coconuts need a mixer. And did you know, that mixer must be of 750 watts or higher grades? The regular ones are too basic for coconuts. Is south Indian cuisine the prima donna of cooking? And this extends to idlies as well. A two-litre pressure cooker is adequate for a bachelor or two. But if you want idlies, the two-litre or even three & half litre cooker won’t do. Idly moulds require a five-litre cooker minimum. And again Idly moulds are not standard sizes. I had to hunt, buy and return purchases until I found the perfect fit.
So much to just set up a kitchen? Where is all the good design when it comes to one-person cooking equipment?
After much ado, my kitchen was set up. And in it, a recent experiment of mine went south. I was making dhokla. One of my personal hacks is to add red chillies and white sesame seeds to the oil-tempering garnish. It adds a new dimension of taste and texture to the yellow spongy breakfast. But coming back to my failure — a line which takes courage to say.
But hey, what’s the point of all that dhokla protein if you don’t have the (emotional) strength to deal with an unpaid internship?
I had poured excess water into the batter. It was no accident; I just had no idea when to stop pouring. The instructions behind the packet were proportioned to prepare the entire packet. And I was cooking with the second half. The first time around, things were great — the dhokla and my tadka topping. But this time I messed up. What do I do? The dhokla packet, like all food packing, was very informative by design — vegetarian green dot, cost per gram, allergy warning and other legal needs. But this design offered no help to alleviate my failures.
It was just me, a watery dhokla batter beside a 750-watt mixer.
I thought and thought hard. I had no gram flour or eno, or any of those 108 ingredients which the internet suggested helps. Amidst this, I was struck by the white rice flour version of dhokla.
But did I own any rice flour?
No.
But Did I have flattened rice?
Yes, I did.
So, in went the flattened rice into the 750-watt mixer, to create rice flour to go into my watery dhokla batter. And guess what? It worked well…enough. The dhokla was cooked but not to be perfectly spongy.
Meanwhile, in my unpaid internship, I learnt old milk packets don’t easily double as butter paper for thalipeeth. On another day, I made bisi bele bhaat. It was meant for lunch, but my mismatched proportions made me have it again for dinner. And then? I surprised myself with an eureka creative output — a Kannada poem, and its loose translation :
a union of many vegetables
with the camaraderie of ghee & boondi
it appears in the colour red
it’s taste is of festive memories
it is, our very dear bisi bele bhaat
Apparently, kitchen begets creativity. Not just in food preparation, or disaster management but also much beyond. The unpaid internship may be worth it after all!
