Rule 1 : Names do not matter

Don't get confused with names. They are diabolical inventions to ensure you remain puzzled. Do you honestly believe a half a foot long french name has any function but offer an excuse to rip you off ?


Let's look at a salad and a sandwich. Salad conjures up a certain image and Sandwich conjures up a dfferent image right? Now remove the crusts of bread from the sandwich. Has it become more like a salad? Or take any salad and place it between bread. Do you see the metamorphosis of a salad becoming a sandwich ?

Let us continue on the salad theme for a while. A soup is nothing but a liquid salad or risotto is nothing but a salad where rice dominates. Or if you think interms of sandwiches, risotto is a sandwich where rice takes the place of bread as a major imgradient.

Rule 2 : The basics can be learnt in a few minutes

Eat them raw.

If you are hungry, you can snack on many veggies, fruit, even eraw boiled pasta or raw cooked rice.

Now as most of us are'nt exactly starving when we sit for a meal, we need stuff slightly fancy to make it more edible. We learnt to heat foods to improve ther tastes. Now this heating can be done in many ways like baking, stirfrying, microwaving, frying, steaming etc etc. But the basic principle of heating ( or cooling ) food to improve its taste has'nt changes in a million years.

So if you cant eat the raw, you cook them.

The less hungry we are, the mre fancy the meal we demand. Maybe that explains why cleopatra drank pearls dissolved in vinegar. As we prospered, we grew less hungrier and went beyonf raw food to cooked food. Now the next step was flavor.

If you cant eat them cooked either, try flavoring them

A ton of spices have been discovered and cultivated with the sole aim of making foods palatable.

If you cant eat them still, try mixing a few stuff together.

If they remain inedible, probably mixing them with better tasting stuff will make them edible.

So I guess we went through four phases, each phase becoming shorter and shorter

Phase 1 : Eat 'em Raw
Phase 2 : Eat' em cooked
Phase 3: Flavor them
Phase 4 : Mix stuff together.

Fodstuffs and way of cooking the evolved in Different countries , in different ways, leading to the 'cuisines' we have today.

The cookbook mafia

Have you ever eaten spagetti with chocolate sauce ? or fish sauteed in honey ? Well, I'm all with you if you shudder , but hey, we have every right to do so if we want right ? Ofcourse, there would be some of you who would probably enjoy these dishes. And for all I know they might have some fancy french names too. What pisses me off is the smug self confident chefs who perform a ritual and expect you to dutifully duplicate it.

A couple of days back I read about this Sona noodles master who boasts " it takes 20 years to make a good Soba noodle" And what the hell are Soba noodles anyway that it takes more time to learn than deciphering the human genome ? They are nothing but two kinds of flour made into a dough, which is cut into noodles. Thats it.

Well, I know the 80/20 rule worksmost of the time. 80% of the soba noodle making can be learnt in say the first couple of minutes and the rest ( getting the texture, flavor, color exactly right ) might take a lifetime. But what the hell is exactly right anyway ? Is Soba noodle making codified in a God given book ? For all you know, some bored jap peasant might have hit upon the idea of mixing two flours when he did not have enough quantity of one.

This book is about breaking away from the cookbook tyranny. To let you cook dishes the way YOU want. To refuse to kow tow some fancy chef's idea of what a dish should be like.

To prove my point, I'll teach you enough cooking to survive in the first 10 minutes you invest. And by the time you are through with this book, you'll be able to whip up enough international cuisine , even if some of them remain edible only to you.

Lets discover the REAL joy of cooking, not the tyranny of recipebooks which masquerade as cookbooks.

Come let us rip cooking apart and see what makes it tick,a nd learn a few zillion recipes along the way.