Cooking – An everyday habit or an occasional hobby?

My circle of friends and family – Mostly women! They learnt to cook when they had to do it. Soon after their marriage, when they moved into a new place, a new family, when the need was there. My mom, granny, and my aunts – all have the same story. Trial and error, they learnt to cook, every mom passed on their recipe books to their daughters. 

My dad and uncles claim they know to cook. As they studied away from home, they learnt the basics. But I haven’t seen them cook on any occasion. 

My mom cooks 3 meals a day, plus coffee/ chocolate milk in the evenings. I fascinate about it today. And each meal would consist of 2-3 dishes. My goodness, today I struggle to cook a single dish per day. Call it laziness or convenience. 

In today’s world, both women and men from my country equally learn cooking at around the same time – obviously when the need is there. When we are away from home. Be it for work or for studies. When we start living on our own is when we call up our mom to ask her doubts on cooking and actually step into the kitchen. Most of us in that phase develop an interest towards cooking. And there’s always the vast information on any topic on the internet. I google for a recipe and give my on tweaks to it as I make my meal for the day. 

I like cooking as a hobby. I love to experiment new recipes. I open my fridge, check what vegetable I have, google in them and say Indian curry or recipe, and surprise there’s a recipe! Different dishes I have tried so far are Banana Payasam, Pineapple Rasam, Bread Halwa, Bread Jamuns, Peanut Curry, Cabbage Vada, Beetroot Chutney, Dosa Pizza, etc. 

Now cooking daily… Oh man, I would have just been done with the dishes and in no time the sink would be full again. I would like to eat healthy and cut down on rice, but make those chapathi’s, oh man… they aren’t too easy. It’s an extra work. Rice is much simpler. If I cook a lot and store it for the next day, it isn’t appealing to eat it. And then there’s differences in taste from person to person, if you live with others. Be it your hubby or others in your family. Errr… Cooking daily is a pain. 

How do you handle it? Ideas welcome. Please do drop in your thoughts and suggestions.