Cook,eat,live

This family loves food and most of us in it love to cook but our ways are so different one would never imagine we are sisters.My mom is the best cook of the lot,she has a mine of information about food,tricks to salvage all those kitchen disasters and loads of healthy dishes that even taste fantastic.Now in her 80s she has forgotten most of them and its my job to jog her memory.Some of the ingredients she wants have gone away with the old lifestyle of being close to nature,so we have to learn to do without them and stick to supermarket stuff or grow our own food (very difficult in hot climates and no garden space)My middle sister is what one would call a perfect cook.She hates cooking but lives in a world that requires a woman to be a good host and therefore serve good food and with formal settings.She entertains much more than me but you can be sure to get starter,main course and desert at her home.She can follow a recipe book to the tea and will churn out good food but god forbid you share kitchen space with her.You cant carry on a conversation as she hates to be distracted,she will measure every bit of what goes into the dish and is terrified of loosing count so we cant ask any questions.Best left to herself you can be sure of good food though you may wonder why it took so long

My eldest sister is a great cook if one is to go by what all her hangers on and friends claim.She can stir up a three or four course meal in minutes and with what ever is available in the house but she is a suspect cook in some ways.Sometimes I wonder if she gets away with it because she live in a world that's full of foreigners,she being the few Indians around.She usually cooks for large groups of 30 to 40 people and will have many dishes on the table,but when I think of chips and junk food listed as dishes I shudder to think what her guest have let themselves in for.My mother refuses to have anything to do with her cooking as she is convinced that her eldest daughter has learnt a mish mash of things with no logical sequence or just no sense.Two days ago when she told me that she was using low quality rice to make a meal and then told me later that it tasted like a lovely risotto,I decided that I will cook for myself when I visit her.But she does have plenty of good food up her sleeve but make sure you get invited when its just her and her husband and the need to play to the gallery is not there.She love a performance and has taken Shakespeare to heart so to her all the worlds a stage including her kitchen.

Me,I learnt cooking late in life only because I married someone who had no clue about cooking and I had no intention of starving to death.It was s skill born out of necessity.The only things i knew when I started were the dishes that BBC good food put on air and being of the English kind it didn't go down well with the husband.In a effort to save our marriage from culinary disaster I learnt to cook by calling my mother everyday and having recipes dictated on the phone.If that failed I called my mother in law for her kind of recipes (polar opposites of what I was used to ).Having to learn vegetarian cooking was also a big deal.Having been a meat and fish person,who ate non vegetarian food for all meals it was somewhat a shock to discover that there are people who don't eat meat ( I knew then of course but never had to live with one).Lentils my pet hate soon started becoming a staple on out table,while i settled for curd.Today some fourteen years later we actually eat all kind of vegetables and I cook them .Recently when I was told that my chicken curry sucks,I discovered to my utter horror that I may be on the way to becoming a total vegetarian cook.Well i hope not but I must admit that there are times when I do dish up a all vegetarian meal and can surprise myself on how good it tasted.But the final verdict is that for all our experiments and our differences as cooks,my mother still wins hands down when it comes to taste.

Battle of the bulge

Its been four years now since I started on a fitness regime.What was the reason?...well suddenly i was beginning to look like dawn french minus the pretty face,and also because I had to do something to keep healthy.Having been thin as in really thin for the better part of my life it just didn't seem right to seem so fat so with all good intentions I hit the gym for three years,started yoga and continued for two years and learnt to swim and have been doing three of the above regularly.I also read most of the articles on diet and health and the papers are full of them so one cant really ignore it.Today for instance there was this article which had a headline that really caught my eye.It was about how to loose a flabby tum and wobbly thighs.Considering that this is a battle that i don't seem to be winning ,I decided to read the fine print.Stupid me to think that solutions come in newspapers.Well needless to say that after reading it with all the good advice about Mediterranean diets and exercise,I was deeply disappointed.Now the conclusion is that either I am and exception to every diet and exercise rule,or my body has a total mind of its own and I need to accept that I have no control over that mind.How else does one explain why I( who do a full 60 to 90 minutes of exercise everyday and don't eat junk food and don't drink power drinks and don't eat out etc etc) am still struggling with the same problems that are supposed to be zapped with all the good advice that I follow.It obviously means that I should ignore all of these diet and exercise advice and do exactly what i want to do and not worry about the weight.Like someone said its all about staying fit,but how would i know I am fit until I drop dead.Pretty obvious that this is a subject that most people worry about hence the reams of newsprint and tv time spent on this topic....discouraging it is but I shall keep trying.

Bobbin battles

At the best of times needlepoint and me are poles apart.I went to an all girl school that had needlepoint as a subject.The headmistress has this mistaken notion that we would all end up industrious young woman who would make our own clothes and sew out own curtains.Her confidence wasnt misplaced.Many of the girls ended up doing just that and are very good at it,but some like me fell by the way side.In the last year of school when an exam paper asked that we make aprons,my desperation to get out of school and enter university no no bounds.For the first and the last time ,I cheated at this exam.Having spent the better part of my life outside the classroom punished for bad craftsmanship,I was doomed to failure.The long and short of it was that my friend bailed me out.So why am I not surprised that for a month now I have been struggling to master that great art of bobbin threading.Now lets face it this is after all a sewing machine with standard features and understanding how a bobbin works cant be rocket science....or perhaps it is when the person is me.I have watched every video on you tube,read as many pages on the science of the bobbin but to no avail.I have developed a permanent lop sided look that has my head at a strange angle,and i am pretty sure I have become cross eyed also but the bobbin only threads after five tries and when I have said a prayer or two.Nothing less than divine intervention gets it going.Not the type to give up easily I continue my battle with the bobbin and have already amassed a few in my utilities box thanks mainly to the fact that its not expensive.So today wonder of wonders the bobbin behaved itself and i managed to get some sewing done but the main needle has started playing up.As a firm believer in one god I have a nasty feeling that he is likely to ignore my requests if they get far too many so before the good lord gives up on me ....may i master the bobbin and the machine.