I tried to make bhuna khichuri alone and it was a disaster

This is going to be a quick and kinda funny one. My mom went out for a few hours to run errands on Saturday and in her absence I decided to surprise her by attempting to cook bhuna khichuri, which is this lentil and rice dish that’s kind of only cooked when it rains, you know, comfort food. I’ve seen her cook it like, a hundred times so I figured I’d got it.

I was wrong.

Attempting vs knowing how to is a tricky business. Firstly, I managed to burn the onions on the first go and had to start all over. Then I used way more lentils to rice than I should have for what I intended and it turned into a big mushy baby. On top of that, the ghee that I added at the end pooled up on top of the khichuri instead of combining, which my mom told me later is because of adding it to too early.

She got home, saw the khichuri, laughed about it for maybe thirty seconds straight and then managed to polish off two bowls of it telling me that I had “potential”.

It’s the people that love us for the mistakes we make. I don’t think the lesson is as much about not burning stuff as much as it is about the fact that a lot of cooking has to be learned from muscle memory, a certain timing that simply cannot be explained through words or measurements alone. When I asked my mom about the precise measurements beforehand, she told me, “You’ll know when you see it,” and “just kind of adjust it as you go.”

At the time, I thought that was kind of bull and it wasn’t until I was standing over the burning rice that I realized she was totally right there was no really real shortcut to learn how to make the stuff properly aside from probably doing it poorly several times. Attempting it all over again this weekend. Hoping for much lower expectations this time, which may just be a healthy outlook in general.