Mister of Spices!

It was the beginning of summer this year and I was learning to manage two kids, a toddler and a baby...learning on the job! It was a tough time for me since I was staying up nights and barely got to rest during the day too with a toddler running around the house. I was coping but small things could make me lose my cool and snap.

With the onset of summer I felt like having some Punjabi kadhi one day. It’s one of my favourite dishes, but it needs to be made well and with the right ingredients to bring out the intoxicating aroma and the flavours especially of Dhania and dried red chillies. With the right consistency and sourness of curd, it can be the best meal ever accompanied with rice. I realized I needed those key ingredients to get the right kadhi, the way I was imagining it to be and just thinking about it made my mouth water.

We were on our way back home from somewhere and I asked my husband to stop at the grocery store to get the ingredients. I just had to have the curry that day. Since our baby was sleeping in my lap I asked him to get sabut dhania and sukhi lal mirch. It had been a few minutes that I was waiting in the car when a private security guard came and asked me to park the car somewhere else. I told him that we would only be a few minutes and I could not move the car right away since the baby was in my lap. He did not seem to like the answer and continued to stare for a few seconds. It really irked me and I ended up arguing with him for staring at me like that.

Another few minutes passed and I was getting a little impatient wondering what was taking my mister so long to purchase two simple things. I finally wrapped our baby into a bundle and walked into the store to find my husband looking clueless as he looked up and down the shelves in the store. In his basket I saw a bunch of fresh coriander leaves and glossy red fresh fat chillies. These items were not what I expected to find in his basket and asked, "Why are you buying these?". He looked at me and confidently said, “Why, as you said, I got Dhania and Lal mirch.”

I was on the verge of having a meltdown at the store itself, cursing myself for not getting it myself and for believing that my husband could pick up these ingredients on his own in a jiffy and come back. I was really mad at him that evening. But, now whenever I think of it I laugh at how even simple things could be misunderstood and how unfamiliar Mr. Dutta is to kitchen ingredients.

I at times wonder how people think of comedy scenes in movies and I guess some do stem from real life instances like these. There was this another time he tried to show off his masculinity in the simple task of disposing off some ice-cream. I will tell you all about it, in another post.

Incase you are wondering...yes, we did have kadhi that day.

Want to read about the ice-cream incident? Here's the link: An Ice-Creamy Story!