Cooking

Cultural Identity in Cooking

Singed and tattered towels; burnt pots and pans; metal utensils on nonstick pans: my journey with cooking began with catastrophic damage to the kitchen and a pair of immensely regretful parents. The summer before my junior year, I made a resolution to meal-prep all my food moving forward as a personal objective of independence, and the kitchen, with its daunting unfamiliarity, morphed into my unconquered arena. 

While "burnt" perfectly encapsulates the dawn of my cooking voyage, I gradually found myself able to distinguish between a panoply of spices, estimate ingredient quantities, extract ideal flavor combinations, and incorporate nutrients in creative ways. My dishes ranged from baked falafel salads drizzled with homemade cheese to peppers brimful of chickpea flour stuffing. After a year of cooking, I surprised myself and my family with two entirely unexpected outcomes: for one, I was regularly producing edible, desirable food, and second, I desperately missed my mother's Indian cooking. Despite being able to whip together a week's worth of Thai red curry in 45 minutes, my strenuous attempts at preparing daal– the most basic of Indian staple foods– likely had my ancestors turning in their graves. All year, my Indian food reflected a consistent incapacity, never failing to elicit a few chuckles from my parents. It was utterly abysmal, and I longed for the rich flavors and tantalizing aromas of my mother's food. Her cooking infused the house with spectacular sensations, from the sound of her egg curry sizzling in the kadai pot to the sight of her handmade rotis ballooning on the gas stove. This new absence in my daily routine felt like a piece of my own identity had been painfully carved out of me. 

Moving into my senior year, I decided to redefine the goals I had set for cooking. My persistence in learning to cook had blossomed into palpable results and certainly augmented my self-reliability and independence, but with my last year of high school came the prospect of an impending culmination to my casual dependence on my parents. The future held innumerable opportunities for me to cook for myself, but I could not say the same for how frequently I would be able to enjoy my mother's food. In an effort to reestablish my background and maintain my culture, I still cook my lunches but now relish in my mom's food for dinner. 

Rice paper rolls stuffed with saffron rice; palak paneer embellished with my mom's affection; a bowl full of daal cooked by two: my story with cooking ends with a satisfactory reflection of who I am. 

Dinner I made for New Year's Eve 

In the process of making beetroot ravioli 

Spaghetti squash with different salad combos meal-prepped over the weekend