Our first outing to the kitchen was close to disastrous. In our quest for the perfect Sambar rice, a meal which mummy would snap up in 10 mins, we almost brought the house down. It took us close to an hour and a half of bitter struggling to manage this meal - This AFTER she had left everything ready minus the seasoning(read: tadka) in the deepfreeze. As I wrestled with the microwave oven in an attempt to defrost the sambar, my dad decided to cut us a salad. 25 minutes later I figured it out - The defrost function had been conquered. EEEEHAWWW.... By this time, dad had even finished cutting an onion without the use of a band aid strip... What a man.... Bravo!.. We were on course to having our half-course meal
The next challenge was to make rice. So we put our chef's hats on again and put the water to boil. How much rice could 3 men eat? I reckoned about 4 cups. Dad wasnt very hungry... He being a top executive who has seen the world and me being that first class engineer that I claim to be, together redid the math and came to a mutual consensus that 2 and a half cups would be about enough (note: only later did we find Mom's note that we were to use only HALF A FULL small cup if we were really hungry)... I will leave it the reader's imagination as to what happened when we realised that raw rice absorbs water and expands in the chemical reaction that converts it to cooked rice. We dint cook rice again for a week.
Anyway, when we finally left the kitchen 2 hours later(completely exhausted, back pain, head ache and the rest of the jazz), it was closer to tea than lunch. Never the less, we were ravenous. The kitchen looked like two 1500 pound polar bears had just finished fighting for a mate as fur (read: bits of raw and cooked rice) and Sambar pools were all over the place.
It tasted good.......................................... ( Im sure...... to somalian refugees who hadnt eaten in around 47 and a half days......)................. Ahem.... No really.
We were too tired to turn on the washing machine so we retired for the day. It is then when it struck me that MOM IS SUPERWOMAN. She could make that Sambar Rice with a coupla side dishes, finish putting the clothes out to dry, watch her favorite soap opera, exchange juicy gossip with the neighbour, supervise the maid's efforts to clean the house, set the table for lunch, learn her musical instrument(the piano) AND look after us all in that time that we dedicated whole heartedly to come up with the "spread"(in the process seeing to it that the kitchen needed new interior decorating)
Mommy came back last night much to our relief. She made us a simple meal of Rice, Rasam and a side dish(20 mins mind you).... How we lapped it up!
