Cheesy Delight!

Getting food on the table is easy for me. I walk into a restaurant, pick up the waiting take-out order and put it on the dining table. Some people prefer a more circuitous method called cooking. I strongly maintain that if all humans are meant to cook, we would have evolved with a spatula for a hand. In any case, I have recently been asked to produce macaroni and cheese by my daughter, not by the normal process of getting it from a restaurant but by the infinitely complex process called cooking.

What happened was, my over-ambitous 8 year old daughter promised mac-n-cheese to her friends over evening snacks one day and I was volunteered to fulfill the said promise! In her words, “Mac and cheese is easy. Boil milk. Pour macaroni. Add cheese and serve.” Simple it is! but for some reason, she insisted on me calling her friend's mother. When I didn't oblige, she called her favourite Reena aunty and got the recipe written. For resons best known to her and her Reena aunty, she actually called me up repeated and the recipe atleast 20 times!

The dish may sound simple but the recipe was not. My theory is that when a process involves heating milk to its boiling point, using hot burners and tongs, it should be classified as a chemical experiment rather than a process to produce something edible. Perhaps I should have started with a simpler dish. But as the old adage goes, all’s well that ends well. My cooking certainly ended well and the kids were well-fed and well-nourished.

When Reena came to my place later in the evening (she is my neighbour, after all), I was ready to accept the profusion of encomiums that were in order for the extraordinary job I performed. But no! No accolades. No words of praise. Not even a small gift of appreciation. (Am sure she was jealous!!!)

All she did was look at the dish in which I produced my magnum opus and raise an eyebrow. I waited for the other eyebrow to follow suit but it didn’t. That was not a good sign.

She: (Suspiciously) Why is there ketchup in mac and cheese?

She was in dire need of enlightenment.
Me: When food has a smoky flavor, you nuke it with ketchup

She: It must have tasted awful!

Me: On the contrary, the kids just loved it. (vigorous head-nodding approval from the kids)

She: (Growing more suspicious) Why did the mac-and-cheese have a smoky flavor?

I continued to enlighten her.
Me: Food assumes a smoky flavor when it is burnt

She: You burned MAC-AND-CHEESE? How could anyone burn Mac and cheese! It’s the simplest thing in the world to make!

I would argue with the choice of the word “simple” but it was not the best time for the dissertation of my chemical experiment theory.
Me: It’s not my fault. It’s my daughter's fault.

She: How so?

Me: See, after I put the macaroni in boiling milk, I needed to wait a few minutes for it to cook. So I told Millie (my daughter) to watch it while I cleaned the broken glass in the kids room (thanks to your wicked son! Ofcourse this I couldnot tell Reena). Apparently in her vocabulary, “cooked” means “general texture of bituminous coal”

She: YOU LEFT A 8 YEAR OLD AT THE STOVE!?

Me: I know, she completely blew it. In retrospect I should have watched the pot while she did the cleaning. But hindsight is 20/20.

She couldn’t speak for a few minutes probably mulling over the cogency of my argument.
She: (Resignedly) So the kids ate that charred glob.

Me: Why would I do that? I extracted all matter of certain color and brittleness and disposed it carefully in the trash. Then I doubled the cheese portion to compensate for the lost macaroni.

She: Let me get this straight, the kids basically ate a ball of cheese with ketchup.

Me: Ah, Reena! You make it sound so unappetizing!!!