Cooking is one of the few activities I truly enjoy. Every successful outcome of a new recipe feels like a happy little greeting from a new dog - it makes me immensely happy. This may be the lockdown me talking, but cooking is gratifying. All those cakes and cookies and dosas and pastas that have had our hearts poured into making them form memories for days that are otherwise hard to tell apart. 

My food blog has amazing, drool worthy pictures of food we’ve made over the past one year. Rich desserts, complex curries, colourful smoothies, healthy snacks - you name it, we’ve got it. The grid looks beautiful, Insta connoisseurs would approve.

That’s because only the good stuff goes up there. The tasty, picturesque, beautifully styled, appetising stuff.

The many recipes that don’t turn out as expected end up in my ‘food disasters’ album that only I have access to.

Dosas that look like scary ghosts. Burnt cookies. Cakes that looked wayyy better in my head. (And on YouTube). Some of them are absolute nightmares.

And then there are times when looks are supremely deceptive, too. You may eat with your eyes to your heart’s content, but your mouth will go though trauma so intense you may have to feed it ice cream for four days straight to reverse it.

So in today’s edition of ‘this blog could’ve been a Twitter thread’, allow me to elaborate one of those nightmares. 

I made my first ever batch of hummus today. People say it doesn’t turn out great at home, stick to the store brought one, why go through all the hassle, etc etc. But YouTube assured me that all those are myths and it had recipes good enough to shatter them. I mean, hummus is one of the easiest dips to make, theoretically. All you have to do is blend छोले and some supporting ingredients together and you’re done! How hard could it be? 

What I failed to anticipate though, was that the supporting ingredients - garlic, dahi (didn’t have lemon juice), olive oil, sesame seeds and cumin - all belong to a group of pungent foods called ‘stay away if you’re hungover or pregnant or both’ and all of them blended together will form a concoction pungent enough to make vampires stay in their dreary castles forever. 

But like I said, I failed to anticipate it. So I went on with my happy experiment. I guess I should’ve foreseen disaster and stopped when my glass bowl broke in the microwave while roasting sesame seeds. 

But breaking glass - good omen, et all. I went on. Started blending the ingredients together. Except when I did, the blender emanated an odour akin to an overflowing sewer on a hot day that sent the family going to check the bathrooms for leaks. 

But confidence was also overflowing like the aforementioned sewer, so I assured them that the odour was brought in by the wind coming in from outside, and continued with my chore.

Blending done, time to taste the fruits of the blender’s labour - aaaaand my expectations came crashing down instead of the myth I was hoping to shatter with my hummus making skills.

It was horrible. Like Salman-Khan-in-every-movie horrible.

I belatedly realised, putting in five overpowering ingredients together may not have been a great idea. Also, proportions matter. You can’t just throw in stuff andaaze se. 

It still looked good though. So I went ahead and baked Pita chips. In those nice triangular shapes too. And then made a fancy looking plate and clicked forty-five pictures. One of those is posted in this blog.

The hummus was predictably inedible of course. I braved my way into gulping down two chips with it anyway. It has been two days since. Still makes me shudder.

 What did we do with the Pita chips, you ask? 

My ever resourceful, zero-waste-in-the-kitchen-champion mother-in-law suggested we add them to Dal Tadka and make Dal Dhokli. And we did.

Those Pita Chips ruled. In the Dal Dhokli, obviously. Amazing taste. Clicked forty-five pictures of that, too. But they are not going up on the food blog, not insta-worthy, you see?

The hummus is still in the fridge, awaiting its fate. I’m creating a new album for its pictures. ‘Beautiful disasters’.