After reading Meg’s interesting write-up on her experiments with the truth, I could not resist posting this one - My experiments and the truth!

Cooking is magic. This is the first truth. If you do not agree with me then you must be an expert chef/magician and this write-up is not for you. My friend labeled his kitchen as ’testing lab’ and in that sense I too have a lab in my flat. If you are new to cooking then read on. Let me show you some experiments in my lab, you will know the truth yourself.

Me being a typical, pure, unadulterated, south Indian my experiment started with Sambhar. I had the recipe in my hand .. you know, it looked simple. Let us see how it came out ..

Sambhar

Unable to control an urge to make Potato deep fry as side dish, I peeled off 3 potatoes cut them in halves and put them in Microwave for 7 mins. I thought the potatoes will become soft the meantime I make sambhar, and that I can cut them easily. I know what is running in your mind right now, "Whaat??! Deep fry and microwave?". Comeon, this is not Kitchen. This is Lab and we are doing experiments. Keep this in mind as we proceed.

And the Sambhar was onion sambhar, so I had to fry the Onions. The key for successful experiments is having the right equipments and containers. Though pipettes and conical flasks as in chemistry lab would be ideal to measure quantities mentioned in recipes, we will not get all those for our experiment. So have atleast minimum vessels to store right things in the right way. Me being an expert chef need not follow all this and I poured the oil into the pan directly from the bottle. I poured a little too much this time, you know, to err is human. Experiment cannot be stopped for just this, so it continued. I put the onions, I fried it, poured tamarind water made it boil .. then added the sambhar powder and salt with shivering hands (not that it is going to blast, but if you put more salt ..oops, you know it yourself!!) ... everything boiled together and the perceived result and the actual result was the same, luckily. Hurrah, the result was Sambhar.

Potato something

"Potato deep fry contains too much of oil, it is unhealthy". For all those who tend to say that, let me tell you something; It is healthier than eating nothing! As soon as I removed the Potatoes from the microwave and put my knife into it to cut it, I knew the end result - that it would be fantastic except that it cannot be made into a deep fry! It just became too soft and wasnt solid enough. So what? I still followed the same recipe for deep fry and ended up with potato something instead of potato deep fry. It was tasty nevertheless!

Observations

As in every experiment, you must note down the observations everytime. The following are the observations in the above experiment:

1) Follow the recipe, Strictly! If you are going to fit-in your ideas in between, don’t say you followed the recipe
2) Do not name the dish until you have made it

The truth

Isnt that obvious? Yes, the truth is that I am a fantastic cook! You have seen it :)

Thanks for reading. Happy cooking in 2007.

Please do RRC
-Vinayak