Far from it. I don't have stories of growing up clinging onto the apron strings of an ample-bosomed grandmother, who would hoist me up onto a wooden stool and lovingly guide me into kneading dough to make my first loaf of bread. No, my forays into the kitchen came much, much later.
Though I have to say at this point, perhaps it was in my blood all along. You see, though technically not raised in and around a kitchen, we were raised to be adventurous and experimental with what eventually found its way onto our plate. Eat everything, my father would stress - try everything once. A plate of innocuous onion rings one holiday in Cyprus turned out to be my first taste of calamari. Which I loved. He was a sneaky one, my Dad. Oh, did I mention he was in the food business? His company is the largest frozen food company in the Gulf. So my childhood photo albums from Dubai are filled with images such as a 6-year-old me holding up a big, bright orange and red lobster just a wee bit smaller in size than I was at the time, outside a cold storage unit. Hmmm... typical childhood images, wouldn't you say?
So maybe food is in my blood, but I didn't know it.
My earliest attempts to cook took place during an awkward pre-teen phase when my best friend Vaishali and I fashioned ourselves wizards of anything and everything BAKED and overall confectionery in nature. Puddings, pies, cakes, cookies, muffins... we tried them all, both in her kitchen and in mine. I know this sounds pretty impressive for an 11-year-old, and most times I just about struggled to keep up as her sous-chef, but I have some iconic classics from that time. Such as my delicious "salt cake". Imagine the scene: I add the requisite quantity of "sugar" into my chocolate cake batter, pause to taste. Ew. That's weird. Must need a lot more sugar. Proceed to add copious amounts of "sugar", stir, taste. EWW! What is wrong with this cake batter?? Try to add more chocolate. Decide to bake it anyway, thinking then it would taste OK. Fresh out of the oven, it is the worst chocolate cake I've ever tasted in my life. Only then does the realisation dawn upon me that the family cook's penchant for nondescript glass jars for all kitchen spices was the culprit. Today, I don't think there's a single jar in my kitchen that is not labelled.
The next time I found myself actually using a kitchen was in college. I had a date with a cute boy and thought it would be super romantic to cook together a nice Indian dinner. That was the time I learnt the words cook, Indian dinner, and romantic result in scenarios that are conducive to anything but romance. Let's go through this quickly, because it is painful:
Grocery shopping with a LONG list of ingredients and masalas 1 hour
Preparation of chicken dish from a Madhur Jaffrey cookbook 1 hour
Actual cooking 45 minutes
Drat. Attempts to salvage dinner 30 minutes
Cough. Attempts to air out apartment 20 minutes
Almost 4 hours later, hungry and perspiring, we had a lovely dinner consisting of overcooked, dry, stringy chicken in a thick, heavily masala-d brown gravy reeking of onions, on a bed of soggy rice the edges from which water is slowly seeping and flooding the dinner plate.
Cue lighting of candle for romance.
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And now I'm writing a cooking blog!
Just kidding.
So what happened in between? A little something I like to call.... marriage and divorce. And therein lay the beginnings of my culinary education.
When I was getting married, I sat my family's beguiling Bangladeshi cook Mehfooza down and drilled all her vegetarian recipes out of her. Yes, I married a vegetarian. My concept of vegetables was the decorative elements around a steak. But I was determined to put my mind and heart into it and learn more. So I made a nice little handwritten file of recipes like aloo gobi, aloo beans, aloo methi, balti aloo...basically every conceivable Indian preparation of potato and off I went to Mumbai, India, into holy matrimony ready to take to the kitchen with flair.
That's what I thought newly wedded brides did, at least.
Back from the honeymoon, I had no clue what I was supposed to do with myself besides shadow my mother-in-law around the place with a dumb smile. Think, Natasha. If you ever hope to be a Domestic Goddess, what would one of those do?
Throw a dinner party.
Yes, that's what I would do. To make it even more exciting, I decided to invite 30 friends buffet style, and whip up three different cuisines which I decided would be Thai, Italian and Chinese.
I had a fleet of staff at my disposal and an Internet full of recipes, how difficult could it be?
Except I didn't speak a word of Hindi and had no way of communicate with said staff beyond sign language and the words thanda paani which means "cold water."
It took me three days of intense preparation during which time everybody in the household probably thought I was possessed, and I didn't make many friends in the kitchen let me tell you, but I was determined to make a success of my first dinner party as a married woman cooked entirely by yours truly. I also had the number of a highly recommended caterer as an SOS backup, you know, just in case.
A decade later, I am proud to look back at that night and say it was a resounding success, and that was when my love affair with cooking really began.
My ex-husband's family placed great emphasis on healthy eating, so under the guidance of my mother-in-law I slowly learnt about vegetables - how to select them, where to find them, how to prepare them. I discovered vegetables I'd never seen before, heard of before. Different colours, sizes, textures... it was an adventure and an experiment, just as my Dad would have said, and as a newly-converted vegetarian, I was doing just that. Luckily for me, the chef was responsible for the family's daily meals, leaving me to build and flex my new culinary muscles and whip up imaginative treats from time to time and play around with different cuisines. "Natasha's recipe file" slowly grew fatter and Mehfooza's cherished Indian recipes that I had grown up on, gained company.
Many family dinners and vegetarian parties later, I found myself single again.
Chef-less and single in the city. What is a girl to do?
Like everyone else on the planet living on their own, I soon collected another fat food file - of take-out menus. Initially it was a lot of fun, ordering in a different cuisine for dinner when I was home. But mostly I'd be out partying with my other single girlfriends and just, well, enjoying being single. At work, (I was an Editor at a fashion magazine at the time) my colleagues were massive foodies just like me, and lunch was always a flurry of excited activity - what to order and from where? Chinese, Thai, Indian, Grill, Italian...and not to forget the most important element of those meals: Dessert. Fun days.
A while went by like this. I'd be eating out everyday, and dinners were always out with friends. Better than staying in and having a microwave dinner in front of the TV, right?
Damn, I can be too black and white for my own good.
I started putting on weight. My skin looked dull. I felt sluggish and tired all the time. Pretty soon, it all felt like one big blah and those menus bored me.
So back to the kitchen I eventually ventured, albeit with trepidation.
I'd never cooked for one before.
