From a kitchen hater to falling in love with cooking, here's my story!

I read a lot of food blogs and see that people have childhood memories of watching their mothers and grandmothers cook and helping them around, which imbibed the seed of culinary arts in them. As I lost my mother at a very young age, I do not have any such memories. My earliest memories of food or kitchen was my father teaching each of our new maid how to make the one staple we used to have on a daily basis--egg curry.

I have never had any interest in cooking, apart from my occasional experiments in the kitchen, that too because  I wasn't allowed in the kitchen. However, these experiments seldom resulted in something remotely palatable.
My father tried to imbibe in me some cooking skills after I hit teenage but was highly disappointed at my lack of interest in the entire process.
At the age of 14-15, this was hardly a serious matter for me. In fact in hindsight, I guess I believed like others that I will somehow deal with this  problem when I will face it but life doesn't always give us that time.
I'm someone who started cooking as a last ditched effort to keep herself alive... like literally, believe it or not I'm not exaggerating.
I have lived alone for... quite a while and after trying every permutation and combination to keep myself well fed, I finally decided to learn how to cook one day when I just couldn't take it more, in fact my body couldn't. It was after, and I still squirm at the idea of it, I fainted one day  as I had eaten just Maggi and Pepsi Blue for a month...

What happened in between is a long story, to be told some other day...
Well, so I decided to learn cooking that day. It was a couple of months before I moved to Delhi in July, 2005.  My cooking  journey started with me making a conscious effort to first learn to cook all the things that I like to eat. So it started with calling aunts in Calcutta to know the difference between two vegetables or asking friends' mothers for a recipe if and when I ate something at their places and liked it .

It has been nearly 10 years since then and it has been an absolutely wonderful journey to develop my culinary skills. My biggest high as a cook is to feed people. And I have been extremely lucky to have friends and families who have only encouraged me .

It was on Saraswati Pujo (Basant Panchmi) this year when I cooked for 20 people alone, that I felt it's time to share my experiences with all.

I'm an Indian non-vegetarian who doesn't eat chicken, so I will post both veg and non-veg recipes, with a fewer chicken dishes. 
I'm a Bengali by birth and got married in a Bengali family, with both my paternal and in-laws having roots in erstwhile East Bengal. 

I have been brought up in Jabalpur in Central India and have been living in Delhi for a decade now. My husband spent his childhood in Dhanbad, Bihar. 

I have found my new love in baking. So my recipes will have an influence of all these cuisines and more :) 

I don't claim that whatever I cook or recipes I follow are the best or the most authentic one. I might share recipes that you hate or can improvise and make it better. I'm all ears for feedback -- good or bad. I just want to reach out to that girl/boy who might be missing their home-cooked food while eating a bad bowl of noodles and say that you are not alone and cooking can be fun. I'm gonna share my experiences, of which some you might find useful and some of you might say, hey I told her that. Yes, my recipes are a dedication to all who have taught me and all who ate my food, good or bad with a smile...

So let the journey begin! 

NOTE: If any of the pictures used in the blog have copyright issues, please inform and it will be taken off within 24-48 hours.