Swashbuckling Gastronomy

My first experiment with cooking was when I was eleven or twelve.  "Raita".  I even wrote down the recipe and all.  If I remember it correctly, it had yogurt, salt, raw oil, and raw mustard seeds (because somehow salt in yogurt would cause an exothermic reaction and heat the oil to chemically produce tadka?  I don't know).  My parents must have felt really sorry for me, as they decided to buy me a book titled "Cooking for Children" immediately after this.  Roughly a decade later when I moved to the US for college, cooking became more of a necessity and less of a देखो मेरा बेटा खाना बना लेता है.  That is when I made my very first serious dish - aloo curry.  Although it involved nothing upward of nuking some frozen French Fries in the microwave with garam masala, I felt proud that I could make something to fill my stomach.  That was in the fall of 2006.  By the time winter came, I had become savvy enough to celebrate Pongal with a bowlful of sakkarai pongal.

Apart from guidance from my mother every now and then, my current culinary competence is a result of copious empirical trials with my roommates in the bachelor’s kitchen during my Akron days.  From adding biryani masala and cheese to ramen, to sprinkling grated raw potatoes on frozen paratha to make a paratha-hashbrown, to making kadhi with wheat flour because besan was costly, to sautéing a store bought garden salad with random masalas to make some sort of jalfrezi (and learning in the process that lettuce turns nasty when heated), to smearing rava kesari onto a nonstick pan and slow-roasting it for 2 hours to create a sweet rava papad, to converting overcooked kanda pohe into a dal like substance, to reducing tomato sauce to a thick paste to roll into tomato laddoos, my roommates and I have seen and done everything would give Gordon Ramsey a stroke.  I strongly believe that it is because of living through all this irrationality that I have acquired the discerning wisdom needed to appreciate a good recipe.

While today I can whip up dishes that taste at least semi-authentic, I sometimes feel like going back to basics and making a ketchup sandwich I learned to make from the "Cooking for Children" book; ketchup smeared between two buttered slices of bread.  I have specific memories of making myself this sandwich and eating it while reading a Garfield comic book.  As kooky as it might sound (the sandwich I mean), it's a decent snack.  If you would like to try it, here's a valuable piece of advice from the book: The butter prevents the bread from soaking in ketchup and becoming soggy, so don’t skimp on the butter!