Tuesday 5 June 2012

Cook Issues!!!

Remember I had told you that I am hiring a cook to come and cook for me and on most days I do consider this a huge help because she arrives at around 6 am on most days and she spends an hour and a half in my kitchen to produce breakfast and lunch for DH and I. I still consider this a frugal option because even before DH and I can make up our mind to not eat at home or to go out and binge etc. food is prepared with fresh home cooked ingredients and while it does get a little monotonous to eat at home all the time - still good, healthy food is available each morning. Also knowing I pay for the cook as well as the ingredients with which she cooks each day reduces DH's and my impulse to go out and eat as we both hate to waste food.

But then, cooks have a mind of their own. There was one instance when the cook refused to acknowledge the way my pressure cooker behaves insisting she knows her stuff better than me ( she speaks of years of experience versus my 3 year experience in cooking, hence I get snubbed by her when I try to contradict her statements...) and she ended up making rice 3 times because she screwed up the first two times. There are instances when she adds too much green chilli into the chutney , and to make the flavours even - she has to add more coconut / bengal dram dal resulting in far more quantity of coconut chutney than is required for 2 people.
These are weekly occurrences with her still getting used to the utensils at my place and I choose to ignore her mistakes because most of the time things are going fine!

So most often with the cook being in the picture, we are spending more on groceries, fruit and veggies than we would otherwise but I would like to think that I am balancing it out with the lesser "Eating Out" bill. And the main reason for spending more on groceries/fruit/veggies which should ideally be because  we are having all our meals at home, is mainly because the cook cannot grasp the option of cooking for two people :-( she has to cook enough quantity for 4 people even when I give her specific instructions such as to cook 1 cup of rice/ 1.5 cups of dal. The quantity is usually way more than that - and she reasons it with we can keep leftovers and eat them later (why would I want to eat leftovers when I have arranged for the cook to come in each day to cook fresh stuff for me?) She also uses way too much oil on everything claiming oil makes everything "tastier" - Eg: Pulao has to have not only veggies but even the basumati rice dripping in oil as only then the flavor of Pulao masala would be enhanced according to her. Ghee and oil flow through her hands to the point that she uses 1litre of sunflower oil each week to cook for 2 people :-( and no amount of trying to train her seems to work as she doesn't believe in my cooking skills.

So all of this has been happening for a while now, and because I can afford to have a cook and it does help to have a cook to make meals when you invite friends/ family over : I have decided to let go of these minor issues!!

So with all this background, it comes down to what happened today morning. I needed to leave home at 7 am for work. Which meant that I expected the cook to be on time at 6 am. She entered the house at 6.30 claiming that she met someone on her way here resulting in her coming late. I was already irritated with her for that. Then, her work today was to make 4 dosas for DH as I had already assembled my lunch and breakfast before she had come. Her first attempt at making my dosa was a burnt dosa in brown color. I asked her to slightly decrease the flame to make dosas that were not burnt. She decided to make the remaining 3 dosas in sim resulting in yellow colored half baked dosas. And she had already cooked 1 burnt dosa, 3 half baked yellow dosas before I realized that she was screwing things up. So the conversation went like this

Me : What are you doing? This is Rawa Dosa , it gives a nice golden red color - make it crisp !
Cook: This is the color you get in sim.
Me: I never said keep flame in sim, I said do not burn the dosas
Cook : your dosa batter does not give red color
Me: Then how come the first dosa became red, then brown before you removed it from tawa?
Cook: That was because the flame was more.
Me: Don't act smart!
Cook : smiles at me for using the word smart to describe her
And because I felt humiliated for her smiling at me when I was angry and upset and heavily pregnant (read 27 weeks!) , I ended up crying... Weeping bucket load of tears. Not the best way to show who is "boss" to the cook I am afraid. In between my tears, I told her - she has done enough for today and asked her to come tomorrow and she left smiling looking at my state !


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