Culinary Tales: The bhel puri that wasn't

Though I call myself a foodie, cooking always looked an audacious task to me. I prefer eating to cooking. Let’s go for a flashback. It was on March 20, 2009, my first college cultural event was happening and I took part in a duet singing competition and bagged the first place. That was totally an unexpected win. So, with all that excitement, I wanted to participate in other events too. That’s when I thought I’ll give a shot in cookery. 

Though the theme of the event was ‘Fireless cooking,’ my cooking turned out to be disastrous. Bhel puri was the aim of my cooking experiment, but the result was something terrible. I chose to make Bhel puri, thinking its just easy to simply mix all the ingredients and present in a simple way... Oops! I soon realised I had made a mistake once I started make the dish..Now lets go to the making of the special bhel puri . 

After adding the basic ingredients, I poured in the khatta sauce. As I was mixing it, my cookery partner came. Not knowing what ingredients I had added, he asked me if I had already put in the meetha sauce. I confused the term ‘khatta’ for ‘meetha’ and said that the meetha sauce was already in. 

So, he assumed I hadn’t added the khatta sauce and poured in one more cup full. By now the Bhel puri had turned green. The meetha sauce was totally missing. We somehow completed the dish, decorated it and presented it. I asked him to taste and tell me how it was, but he refused and asked me to taste. 

Finally, neither of us tasted it before presenting it for the judge’s evaluation.. None of them believed it was bhel puri, because it didn’t even look the part. 

After tasting it, the judge gave a horrified reaction. Poor man! He couldn’t even spit it out in front of everyone. His only question was ‘Are you sure this is bhel puri?’ After the event was over, I decided to taste it and only then did I realise that there was no sweetness in the bhel puri. Later, I found the unopened meetha sauce under the cooking table!

The writer is a city-based research scholar