DISASTROUS DAAL

I know you must be wondering…how can daal turn out to be disastrous…but you forgot one thing…where there is ME, nothing’s impossible!

Well, so here it goes, after a lot of experiments with the other veggies, I was confident that daal will be a baayein-haath-ka-khel…coz everyone had told me that daal is very easy to make. So I decided to do the ShriGanesh of my newly bought cooker by this supposedly "one of the easiest dish"

So as per my mom’s instructions, I took half a cup of moong ki daal, washed it and put it in the cooker. Then added around 1 cup of water, a bit of salt, turmeric powder and then closed the lid of the cooker. Now here's the catch...I am really scared of cookers. Why?? well, once I had seen the cooker lid blow up and the contents all stuck on the ceiling of the kitchen. Since that day, I am dead scared of cookers.

Anyways, now the time had come for me to fight my fears. My mom had instructed me to put the flame on high and after one whistle, to put it on low flame and then let it cook for 5 minutes …so bhagwaan ka naam lekar, I tried to follow her instructions. After around 1 minute, the cooker started making strange sounds. Petrified, I switched off the flame. Then told myself, that I HAD to be brave. I restarted the gas, waited for a couple of minutes and when the pressure started building in the cooker, I decided to turn it to low flame and cook for another couple of minutes. Then I switched off the gas and after the pressure was out, I opened the lid to find out that the daal was not yet done…huh, so for the third time, I re-started the gas! This time I let it cook for 10 whole minutes. When I opened the lid, I found that almost all the water was evaporated, and the daal was more like khichdi! Since it was cooked and since it was already 9pm I had no more patience left, so I prepared the tadka and took the daal in my katori.

What was my first reaction after tasting this “easiest dish”?? namak kam hai….so I added some more salt, then realized, even mirchi was less, but now I had no more patience and so ate it as it is. Hey hey…its not yet over…the best part is yet to come. Now while I was preparing the daal, I was so over confident, that I thought that I will make some extra daal for the next day too. So there was around one extra bowl of daal left. I took the remaining daal in a bowl and left it on my table in my room (so that I don’t forget to keep in the fridge) to let it cool. I started watching a movie and fell asleep and got up only in the morning to realize that…that…that…. the bowl was full of ants…boo hoo hoo!!!!! So all my hopes of rectifying my mistake the next day went down the drain!!!!