Recipes for survival

Youngsters on the move are fast learning a new skill 8212; cooking

Ashutosh tewari, 27, left Allahabad after graduating five years ago to take up a BPO job in Mumbai. 8220;For a fresher, things couldn8217;t be better. I planned to work for a few years and then study MBA. I packed my best clothes and was off to a new life,8221; he says. He shacked up with a few other boys, worked overtime and de-stressed by checking out the sights and sounds of Mumbai. 8220;One fine day, I realised I8217;d been living on vada pav ever since I had arrived. I wanted the dal-chawal mom made. I tried the dabbawallahs and it didn8217;t work for me, I queued up at roadside jhunka bhakar eateries with taxi drivers for the spicy, oily thali that came for Rs 18. By the end of three months, I was back home with jaundice and had to take a long leave from work. As I recuperated, the one man I thought about very often was Napoleon Bonaparte. What a guy! He had known an army marches on its stomach,8221; he says.

There8217;s a dream job waiting in a different city, or a college in another country. Every day, hundreds of youngsters pack their bags and move to cities to work, study or break free. Food isn8217;t on their minds. 8220;It is ironic that they ignore the one thing that could give them a competitive edge in their jobs or work. The drive to get anywhere needs fuel,8221; says nutritionist Ishi Khosla.
Tewari learnt to cook and returned to his job. Now, a business analyst with a Mumbai-based firm, he still pops liver pills every day8212;the after-effects of jaundice. Like him, most youngsters are realising that they need to master a new skill 8212; cooking for survival. This group of kitchen rookies are clubbed as Bachelor Cooks by a Delhi-based software engineer Anthony

Tongbram who went on to become a minor celebrity on the Net with his blog anthonyskitchen.blogspot.com. The blog is about 8220;kickass recipes you can never go wrong with8221;. His Bachelor Cooking forum on Orkut has hundreds of members and counting. 8220;I was reaching out to kids who hated cooking. I have simplified the recipes and use a chatty writing style with lots of smileys. There8217;s no gyaan about how many teaspoons of which exotic herb you have to use or how finely you have to slice the onions; just basic boiling and frying,8221; says Tongbram with the wisdom that comes from living in hostels all his life and learning to cook long-distance over phone calls to his mother in Manipur while he was studying engineering in Pune. The blog was shortlisted as the Best Food Indiblog by bloggers in in 2006 and Tongbram plans to launch a dedicated website on Bachelor Cooking this year. 8220;The fact that it has had lakhs of hits shows the kids can8217;t live on Maggi alone and they aren8217;t earning enough to have takeaways and ready-to-cook meals every day,8221; he says.

8220;It always helps when you have grown up watching somebody cook. My mother and sister are good in the kitchen,8221; says Vi-Vi Anne, a 30-something AIR FM radio jockey who moved from Darjeeling to Delhi seven years ago. She recalls the time she bought expensive rajma from a fancy store and set about cooking it as soon as she reached home. 8220;My friend had given me a rajma curry recipe and I followed the instructions to the last letter. But the beans remained hard as ever even after boiling for over an hour. I threw it away and went off to the store to complain. That8217;s when I found out that rajma must be soaked overnight and boiled in a pressure cooker. Enlightenment!8221; she laughs. Now, a good cook, Vi-Vi Anne says that sometimes all it takes to start a new hobby is a packet of rajma.

While things can be nightmarish for the culinary challenged, even expert cooks have to re-learn a thing or two. Rema Bhattacharya, 28, an analytics professional, who shifted from Kolkata to Mumbai and Delhi to work, cooked as a hobby at home. 8220;It8217;s fun in a sparkling, well-equipped kitchen. At the hostel where I stay, the kitchen boasts only a gas oven, a kadhai and little else. No microwave, not even a pressure cooker,8221; she grins. A health freak, her mantra, she says, is 8220;innovation, imagination and experimentation8221;. 8220;While processing for breakfast, I pack my lunch. If it is watermelon for breakfast, it will be watermelon and a poached fish sandwich for lunch and plain poached fish for dinner. I make do with that one kadhai. I create my own recipes and there is no magic ingredient, everything can be substituted or done without. If I don8217;t have lettuce for a sandwich, I use cabbage, if there is no garam masala, I make do with onion and tomato for fish curries, if there8217;s no oil, I let chicken stew in its own juice,8221; she says.
Maria Pastorello, a 27-year-old trainee at the Italian Cultural Centre in Delhi, says if it weren8217;t for innovation she would have starved to death in her six months in India. 8220;Most regular Italian ingredients are either not available in Delhi, are too expensive or unsuitable to be eaten in the sultry weather here,8221; she says. She has stopped eating pasta and lives on rice instead, pocket-friendly Amul cheese is her Parmesan and vegetable from the thelawalas near her flat get an Italian makeover with garlic and basil in her kitchen. 8220;As for extra virgin olive oil, I don8217;t remember when I used that last. On the up side, I have discovered bhindi, which isn8217;t grown in Italy, is the most delightful vegetable ever,8221; she says.

Sabyasachi Upadhyay, 32, vice-president at Wall Street Derivates Financial, left India 10 years ago to study and work in New Zealand. He survives on large glasses of protein shakes when he isn8217;t eating out with clients. He carries jars of protein shakes on business trips around the world, supplementing the foreign fare with his daily glass-full. 8220;The only thing I can make is grilled fish. When my parents started looking for a bride for me, I hoped she would like to cook,8221; he says.
8220;A journey of a thousand miles begins with the right diet,8221; says Tewari. Napoleon Bonaparte would have agreed.