I believe in working on core strength, from the birth I have done full justice to temptation of eating food. From the most benign with guava with salt and chilli (raw mango, sugarcane juice – recently one of the “high end restaturant” I tried 50 Rs sugarcane juice – which must be the record fleecing of any kind – thanks to Kanua) to the complete course meals. Unfortunately I was deprived of the joy of preparing and serving the stuff to others through growing years.
Mom always believed I was qualified for cleaning vessels or at the most cleaning the rice, pealing the cover of peanuts, cutting the “shankar pale“/”karanji“/”mixing the chivda“, or at best rolling the laddus(besan, ravae).
Anyway coming to present times , I was blessed to have friends like Ram, Keshav who were urbanized version of maharaj of ancient times. Ram’s gojjus, tovve, upma, Keshava’s dosai, idli, sambhar, rasam are stuff of dreams. Prakash Anna’s paneer dishes, dosai(s) with chutney/potato filling, italian fares and suahasini’s Bengali style vegetables/rice/daal – something I have not had success of emulating to her quality levels.
One thing I learnt was that, it is labor of love, one needs to like and love cooking as an art form to do justice. I was complete nubee with all these gaints around and part of it rubbed on me and I have been giving fair shot at trying the items. I can not forget Krishkp’s pongal/avial – it was literally like god serving you the food. I am not exaggerating about the quality level here.
Imagine seattle in winter with drizzling rain and friend suggests let us cookup bhajjis 
, we have done that many of the times with various right accompaniements. So this post is for all the foodies and the host in them who takes the pain to cookup those delightful foods. BTW check out PBS’s food series.
