Mister Muthu's Tea Party

 Muthu loved to try new kinds of food, though he enjoyed his mother's simple and wholesome cooking heartily. He waited for a chance to make something imaginative. A dish that was seasoned with creativity as he liked to say.

 It was not often ( till recently that is) that Muthu had ventured into the kitchen to cook. His sisters had always been there to help their mother. They chipped in daily, not because they were girls and "had to learn to cook" but because they were older. That is what his mother told one of them who had been reluctant to assist and had argued as to why Muthu was not being made to help.

 After his eleventh birthday, Muthu's mother had slowly begun including him is some of the easier chores around the kitchen. When he protested that it clashed with his time for cricket, she explained to him that as he grew up, he may land up in a foreign land and she may not be there to cook for him. If he knew some cooking he could put together a decent meal for himself and not pay huge amounts of money to the local Indian food restaurants. That reasoning convinced Muthu. He started by  first learning to wash rice, eating some of it as he went about the business. When he realised how difficult it was to clean greens, he began to appreciate how tasty they were.

 He enjoyed peeling- potatoes, carrots, beets and loved shelling peas. He looked out for the occasional worms and put them in old washed pickle bottles and watched them move sluggishly* in the jar. His mother could not understand this bit, though she was very pleased with his progress otherwise.

He realised that buying vegetables and fruit was not an easy task and required a good eye and sometimes nose too. Muthu found that the library and the internet had a wealth or recipes that could be studied from across the world.

 Within months his interest in cooking grew by leaps and bounds. He started reading up a lot on cooking. His mother's cooking during her entire life had not gone beyond "Indian" Chinese. But Muthu wanted to make pizza and burgers and pasta. He once printed out a recipe and gave it to her. She saw it and said "But this is nothing but our Maida dosa! Which you dislike when I make it and call it Maida dosa!" After that he stopped taking recipes to her..

He decided he would learn all she could teach him and then experiment on his own whenever he had access to a kitchen. He took heart from the fact that most of the best chefs in the world were men.

 Opportunity knocked when one day his father brought home a long-lost friend with him in the evening. As luck would have it, Muthu's mother had gone to their native place for a temple festival.