Cooking and cleaning up killing you?

Growing up in Mangalore (sans malls era), the day of the month when we went out to buy groceries was my day of freedom. I could slip in anything into the cart at the grocery store without my parents making a fuss about ‘did I really need that?’ (a sentiment I would embrace only much later in life).

Unsupervised spending

Five years ago, I moved to Bangalore to pursue a Master’s degree. My parents supported me by sending in money as I needed. “Money never stays in my hands” that’s what my dad fondly told me. My boyfriend indulged me as he drove me around to every branded clothing store and I coveted all the clothing.

A few years into this unhealthy obsession, I realised it was time to stop buying clothes (because I was fed up of hauling them when moving houses), my buying obsession didn’t go away. It simply morphed from “buying clothes” to “buying home décor”. I now wanted a house as in interior design magazines. I bought everything that would make my shitty rental house feel luxurious. From linens to rugs to kitchen gadgets.

and believe me when I say I’ve lived in shitty houses.

Groceries galore

I splurged on groceries, after all what is a home without a well stocked pantry? Every time I bought I would think “Ok this should do it, am done buying after this”. Who was I competing with? Would I really make that dish? Nope didn’t think, looked shiny on the shelf, just tossed it in the cart and proceeded to checkout.

The Learn-Introspect-Simplify loop

My minimalism journey was riddled with subtle mistakes. I stumbled upon the right idea but executed it badly. I understood as my living space got smaller I needed stuff that would multi task. I understood that you don’t always need stuff, you need skills and where manual skills are worthless unless you are a robot, add gadgets.

I knew that there was no way am gonna be that master-chef in the kitchen who can chop an onion in 5 seconds flat. I bought a vegetable chopper but a big one. Cleaning it every time I chopped a single damn onion was irritating at best. I replaced it with a smaller one. Then it occurred to me as to why I didn’t consider the volume of such a gadget before buying, whether all of it’s aspects really fit my need.

You kitchen is not a showcase

I am pretty convinced that there is a nexus between companies that make storage jars for edible dry goods and their producers. Why else would there be a need for storage containers? True, grains when exposed to air and moisture spoil quickly but you don’t need a frikkin’ box to store each and every item of dry goods you have! Putting a bag clip on them will do just fine! especially the dry goods that are small in quantity.

I boxed all my dry goods in this:

Most items have a bag clip which makes the original packaging pretty air tight. The storage bin itself is pretty secure which I shut close when needed. Should I really need to store something in a box because the original packaging it came with is flimsy or torn, I have a reserve of take out containers as a result of previously indulging in take-outs (Thanks to the food delivery culture I got sucked into).

Skill builds skills

• Are you constantly tired from making meals for yourself?
• Have you been told to get a cook but can’t find the one that works out for you?
• Have you been told not to waste your time?
• Have you reached for your favourite delivery app because you were too lazy to cook a meal?

It was a quite a learning curve when I started out pursuing a master’s degree, changing 3 buses to get to college, living on money my parents sent me and cooking for my brother and me. I learnt the basics of cooking alright but I never truly bothered to learn what suited my palate. I was almost always eating with the idea that a meal meant stuff that looked like out of a menu or stuff my parents made.

My parents made full 3 course meals. My dad and mum cooked up these meals in the morning. They were 2 people. I was just 1 inexperienced person trying to emulate what my parents had learnt over 35 years. Big mistake.

I then chucked the idea of a eating a dish (as I was told over 24 yeas of my existence as a sheltered child) right out of the window. I was ready to learn. I made simple meals from recipes from what I already knew, foraged Pinterest for recipes and ate what I cooked even at times when they were edible but not tasty. That takes guts (haha, see what I did there? ;)

Infinite possibilities

With every meal I made, my brain magically re-organized information and learnt what to do, what not to do and most of all simplify. Who says you need to chop onions for a Channa Masala? It’s after all cooked in a sauce of tomatoes, why can’t I just mince everything up in the blender in one go and cook it up? Turns out I could! With this new found confidence, I was no longer a slave to recipe instructions. I had finally gained enough skills to know how not to fuck up a meal.

Unless you experiment you would never know what’s possible. Did you know scrambled eggs and left over pasta make for a great quick meal? Who says you can’t have instant dosas apart from rava dosa? You can make pancakes out of pretty much anything! chickpea flour, green gram, yellow gram. If you have been brought up in north india, the term ‘cheela’ might be familiar but I wasn’t! I learnt it from a friend. The day I tried it, it wouldn’t get off the pan. So, my experimental instincts kicked in.

I remember dad adding wheat flour if the dosa wouldn’t come off the pan easily. So I took out a small part of the batch of my green gram cheela and added wheat flour… that didn’t work for me. How about egg I thought? That tasted real good! Purist be damned, I like my cheelas with eggs now ;)

I loved playing around with cheelas in different ways. I already knew that ‘neer dosas’ got really soft and fluffy cause of the coconut in it and so I tried green gram cheela with coconut in it while blending the batter. Not bad!

P.S: If you like watching youtube videos, here’s a recommendation: Brothers Green Eats and there’s always the effervescent Vah Chef!

Clean out pantry month

My parents blame their busy lives for not knowing what they have in kitchen. In some ways that’s true, just because my dad is retired doesn’t mean he doesn’t have things on his mind or errands to run. But there always comes a point when you have to do something about a kitchen full of stuff that’s expired. Especially if the manufacturing dates were from 2006.

My boyfriend too was a grocery hoarder. There was one weekend where I took it on my self to ‘fix’ his kitchen as my project. I faced a lot of flak from his roommate for throwing away stuff. Expired stuff mind you. We middle class indians don’t like parting with stuff do we?

Very few stop to think that it comes to the point of throwing away because you let it accumulate it in the first place! So throwing away expired stuff is simply the first step but not the end. Stuff accumulates cause you don’t use it! See the vicious cycle?

The recipe is called “Winging it”

After I started boxing my dry goods in one centralised place. I realised how much I had, how little I used, what I used most and were one-off impromptu (expensive, one-recipe-i-saw-on-the-internet-requires-it) purchases.

Then I trained my brain to work a little like supercook.com. I would take a look at what I have and the thought process that followed it would be “Hmm, so I have blah, bleh and blooh in the fridge. What can I make from these? Let’s google”.

At this point something interesting will show up and if I decide that it sounds palatable to me, I proceed to making it. Should the recipe call for an item I don’t have and I really don’t wanna buy, I either avoid such a recipe or google in “Substitute for <item_name> in recipe”. Over time your skills and your food information in your head will have you googling less and build it’s own unique database that you can quickly conjure up. If you can’t remember what you have, you are buying more than you need.

Food, Food everywhere and not a morsel to eat

My parents visited us (my brother and me) often and when it was full house so was the refrigerator with groceries. After the weekend hublaboo of 3 course family meals, my parents would leave back to their place. We’d then be left with a fridge full of groceries and cooked food. Now, cooked food is easier to deal with cause you can re-heat it and save your cooking time in the week. By the time you finish up the cooked food, all the fresh produce has just wilted away and is as dead as it looks.

I hated seeing so much fresh produce going to waste simply because we couldn’t use it in time or we forgot to use it given our busy lives. Produce was not only becoming more expensive but also had shorter shelf lives. Has any of you ever managed to keep coriander fresh in your fridge for more than a few days? Write to me!

Weed is not the only thing you can dry

My boyfriend was ever loving and indulged me in a lot of crazy things I came up with. One good thing that came out of it was him buying me a food dehydrator. Ever since I don’t have any produce to throw away. I simply dry it up!

Not only do I dehydrate and store excess fresh produce but also something that’s available, cheap and in-season because not every sabsi store has everything at all times. Some days I want to have peas pulao and lo! I pull out my stash of dried peas. Frozen peas taste like diluted peas honestly. Plus do you really remember what’s in your freezer? Out of sight, out of mind, I always say.

Dehydrating not only makes food store longer but also saves you prep time. I make a really tasty eggplant tomato pasta but when am in a hurry I would appreciate having cleaned prepped eggplant to go. So I just pull out my dehydrated eggplant, pop it in with the pasta to rehydrate and cook. Mince the eggplant and tomatoes and put everything together with some cheese. Easy peasy huh? You could the same with any vegetable you want!

Dehydrating also means you can snack on interesting healthy items as you go. This summer I made dehydrated mangoes with ginger, chilli flakes and sugar. A stash I almost always kept in my bag with me so I can eat some whenever I was hungry. It lasted me well past the mango season. Thank you, Mary Bell!

Getting unsolicited advice from friends and family

In an urban setting, it’s common to prioritise career over survival skills like cooking. That’s fair, cause a job pays your bills. I too learnt all of these skills while having a full time day job and commuting 2.5 hours every day in horrendous traffic. It’s totally doable if the commitment is to becoming self-reliant.

I often heard unsolicited advice such as:

“oh just get a cook”
“order food, don’t cook”
“why are you training yourself to be a housewife?”

You could possibly outsource your food to a delivery app or a pay someone to come cook for you. That would would work out great if you employ a cook who cooks well and/or should you live with friends but didn’t for me because my brother wasn’t keen on spending for it. Hiring a cook to feed one person is not very practical. Most of my friends who went the “hire a cook” way complained of not eating great meals a few months into the plan. They complained of repeated meals and same taste in every dish. I always have the last laugh hearing such pitiable stories.

As for eating out of restaurants, has anyone ever made this work for the rest of their lives without consequences? I’d like to hear that story. Feeding yourself has nothing to do with a spouse who stays at home. Sadly, gendered roles and stereotyping have permeated this far into our psyches that skills like cooking and cleaning up after yourself (something every able bodied person should possess) is looked down upon or something to be delegated.

The other face of this coin: Cleaning up

Each of us have different responsibilities in our city lives, professionally and personally. From someone who feeds strays and takes care of their dogs everyday to people who volunteer their time in the weekend for a good cause — cleaning is the last thing one wants to do. Whatever else that takes up your time and leaves you too tired to clean, think again. Is that it?

The person I know that makes food for stray dogs and their own dogs also has really huge dish ware for cooking their own food. Dish ware that can cook for about 5 people in one go. Perhaps if that person got themselves smaller more manageable dish ware, cleaning up won’t be as tiring. This is just one example. I can’t think of anything better but trust me when I say cleaning up after yourself needn’t be as off putting as it looks in the sink.

I do dishes every day, making 3 meals and I probably weigh half as much as you do and can’t stand 5 mins on a treadmill. It isn’t about physical energy so much as it is about your willingness to do it.

There are cleaning tips like “Don’t want to scrub? Pour hot water with dish soap over your dirty dishes and let it sit” or “wash as you go” or my own “wash similar items first” or just plain ol’ common sense — re-use dish ware!

I use my well tuned discretion when making food portions. Will I eat rice again in the next 24 hours? Yeah? Make some more and stock left overs. Thinking ahead, portion control and having appropriate dish ware all take time. That is part of the learning curve of becoming independent.

Maid(s) in India

Once you do, you will never ever have to wait on a maid or go hungry because some person doing that for you hasn’t showed up that day. Plus how nice it is not to haggle a salary raise or watch them break your glassware unapologetically.

You wipe your ass after a shit, don’t you? Then why can’t you wash your own dishes?

Cleaning up after myself isn’t something I learnt as a child that was inculcated in me by my parents. I was a stubborn child, blatantly refusing to do any chores to a mother who constantly worried about “what will people say that I have taught you?!”. My mum gave up beyond a point and la la life happened. Living on my own, chores were dreadful and I was tired of struggling. There had to be a way to do this that caused less pain. Then of course, optimisations I stated above were brought into place. Cooking got easier with skills and cleaning got easier with skill + some handy tools.

Ready, let’s go!

I led and continue to lead a lifestyle that isn’t bound to the clock or another person’s availability. I used to leave from home to work when it was convenient to me. I cook when I am hungry, I clean up quickly. I refuse to wait on any person so I could have clean house, laundry or hot food to eat. You probably don’t need any external help if you are cooking for one or two. For a family? I don’t know :) Point is, substituting domestic help for skills in a small scale requirement is a sign of sheer laziness.