The man who convinced me to cook!

No, it is not my hubby Ganesh :) I must admit that he did more than his share to get me interested in cooking, right from cooking himself to making me a food aficionado by restaurant hopping every weekend. To avoid further guessing I’m going to let you into the name straight away. It is this guy called Ramki about whom I read in the ‘The Hindu Metroplus’ a few months ago. Having disclosed this, I am now feeling like I lost an opportunity to do some social networking by creating a poll or nice question which I could have posted on facebook or twitter!

I have to admit that nothing to do with eating or cooking has ever impressed my rational thinking brain more than Ramki’s blog . Ramki is popular for his one page cookbooks and just one look at his blog bowled me completely over. The one thing that has consistently kept me away from the kitchen is the tedious nature of the recipes. This is why at some point when I took a small interest with cooking, I ended up making salads and some tried my hand with stir fry Chinese recipes. As with everything else, my patience is in short supply I guess. Anyway, this exact impatient nature is also what made Ramki’s recipes which are broken down into 3 column A4 page size catch my attention immediately and I wanted to try it out to see if it really works. And guess what? I ended up making Hyderabadi Biriyani and it worked like magic. To me that is the equivalent of reading Microsoft help for a new feature and trying it and it immediately working (reminds me of MS Excel Pivot table help I used once, frankly cooking was much easier!). Having said that, the initial curiosity did not push my laziness enough to become a proper cook but at least this time , I am still working on it.

As for Ramki’s blog itself, apart from the recipes, I was quite intrigued by his background and how he ended up becoming a cook. His story is one of those ‘dot com businessmen going bust and ending up finding a new (and very interesting) way to survive’. Just the novelty of the way he found and how he adapted it to his thinking brain is particularly interesting. Hats off Ramki! You not only convinced me to cook, your thinking is also a shining example of how one can use adversity to one’s advantage if one has the will.