Was just reading Som's blog ( wrik.blogspot.com ). He has written about how he could eat his first omlette. That got me thinking about my own doings in the kitchen.

My sister and I had this point-system for household chores. Different chores had different points and whoever had the lesser accumulated points had to take up the next chore at hand. We had put this A4 paper up on the inside of the cup-board door where the points were all written down. There were two columns under each of our names. One column contained the points earned and the other contained the cumulative sum. So we could quickly tell who was leading and who was lagging. Quite an ingeneous scheme right? When my aunt saw it however she did'nt seem to think so. Anyways.

I learnt to make dal earlier than my sister did and I made out that it was a difficult job and allocated a whooping 25 points to the activity 'make dal'. Perhaps the reader would appreciate the weight of 25 points more if I listed down what other tasks one had to do to earn 25 points. But I have forgotten. I only remember that 25 points was quite something. To be fair to myself, I did think that 'make dal' deserved 25 points till my sister learnt to 'make dal' too.

To boast a bit I can cook a lot of things actually: Rice, dal, vegetables (bhindi, beans, cabbage, potato), fries (bhindi, potato, karela, cauliflower) and chappattis (starting with raw, dry flour and arriving at round and round phulkas). And ofcourse tea and omlette and boiled egg. When I went home this time I took a step towards learning to cook non-veg when I learnt to clean a fish.

I remember my large partly self-cooked lunches during my college vacations, comprising dal and rice and vegetables and boiled eggs and buttermilk. And the nap till 5.30 in the evening when I woke up to see 'small wonder'. Wow, those were the days.