My recipe book

Dear Appu,

Remember many, many years ago in Bahrain…when we decided to take a walk to that stationery shop…what was the name of it…Awal Stationery? I don’t know if you remember that evening…but we walked there and I wanted to buy a special looking book and use it for recording recipes. And we saw this cute hard bound book in green, with bright red apples, and it immediately caught our eye. I even liked that it was a little taller than the standard notebook we usually see and I picked it up right away.

It has been almost 10 years now. Yup. That long. And I started off writing down recipes from Amma which I had begun to practice, post-engagement, pre-marriage days. Then all my MIL’s special recipes made it into the book when I was in training with her. And then, Akhil was born, and it all came to a standstill. I used the book to write down his feeding and pee-poo schedules. LOL. Those were the days, when I was a paranoid mother and unerringly counted the hours in between feedings, to make it to a precise 2 hours. Anything less than that and I would panic…that this guy was being overfed and would never come on a schedule. Anyways, I digress. For that brief interlude of a time, it stopped being a recipe book. But then, I started again, I know not when. Maybe after a year or so…when life settled in a bit and he stopped being the sole and utter focus. I still have those pages in the book and haven’t torn them out.

Before, I used to write out the recipes perfectly. In neat handwriting. With numbered pages. With an index. With cross referencing. With little underlines for the headings and sub-headings. But NOW. Now…I hurriedly scribble on it, as Amma rapidly fires off the ingredients from the other end of the line. After typing out so many emails, my handwriting has decimated to a very rudimentary print, hardly legible to anyone except myself, and the pages are smudged with the colours of the food, as I thumb through the pages in the midst of my cooking. In short, it has attained character!

I know you remember this book. That is why I chose a nice spot in the sun today, set it down on a warm, white, fleece blanket and clicked a picture of it. What better picture to adorn the top of this page, than this book that binds us both? And as for the measuring spoons…well, I found this nice little image on the web, and I loved the idea of spilt spices. It suggests a lovely imperfection to the whole thing, which I think is the entire cornerstone of learning to cook. You are a beginner, I am a little way ahead of you, and we are both imperfect cooks, who will make tons of mistakes. And then we will label those mistakes and a whole new style will be born out of it.

Good enough explanation for a blog header huh?

-Thara.