Spicy Capsicum Biriyani

From my grandmother’s diary:

Ingredients:

Onion – 1

Capsicum – 2-3

Beans – 5-6

Carrot – ½

Potato - 1

Garam masala – 1 tea spoon

Salt – ½ - 1 tea spoon

Garlic- ginger paste – 1 tea spoon

Chili powder – 2 ½ tea-spoons

The most important ingredient – One good-for-nothing grandson

Procedure (Never ever follow this):

Before you wash your vessels and get them ready to cook, wake up your good-for-nothing grandson who is busy watching Alia Bhat’s Offo number for the nth time and ask him to help you. He might first try to give extremely silly reasons to avoid coming to the kitchen to help you and when he does so, please do let him be and never ever call him again. Because, if you do, you might regret it for the rest of the preparation.

But unfortunately if your grandson agrees to help you, never ever start by giving him a carrot. If you tell him that half a carrot is required, there is a very high possibility that your grandson might bite and eat away half the carrot and try to hand you the other. If this occurs, be clever enough to drive your grandson out of the kitchen. If you allow him to stay further, be prepared for the worse.

As you give your grandson the cut pieces of the red, green and yellow capsicums and ask him to cut further, please take care that he is really indeed cutting them. Because there is a very good chance that he might be trying to cut and arrange them in such a way as to bring out a ‘vegetable face’. And amidst all this, as you sincerely try to peel the onion and as a few tears drop, please don’t lose patience if your grandson tries to crack one of the worst jokes you have ever heard about the onion-tears.

You finally realize that your grandson is no good with vegetables and decide to just give him the simple task of adding tea-spoons of salt and chili powder. But before giving him the task, do make sure that the fellow is not messaging someone on his mobile. If you fail to do that, you will notice after a few minutes that instead of the 1 tea-spoon salt and 2 ½ tea-spoons chili powder intended, 2 ½ tea-spoons salt and 1 tea-spoon chili powder would have been added by your distracted dear grandson.

Even after all this, if you somehow manage to stop yourself from driving your grandson out, kudos to you! But if you are one of the very patient ones still managing to seek your grandson’s help, you might probably decide that the only thing your grandson could probably help you with might be in the decoration process and might hand him over the cashew nuts so that he might carefully break them in halves for the decoration. But while handing him the cashews, please be sure to mention to him that they are for the decoration and needed to be broken into halves carefully. If instead, you hand him the cashews thinking he might understand the purpose and get busy in preparing the dish, your grandson might leave the kitchen with the cashews only to return a few minutes later to say that it had been a long time since he had eaten cashews fully.

At that point, you lose your patience and finally apologize to him for having called him to the kitchen. He might say that he could help further but if you don’t want to throw the entire dish you are preparing into the trash can, please do drive him out. For the next half an hour, it is up to you to lessen the effect of the extra-added ingredients and increase the effect of the missing ones. Eventually, as you finish cooking the dish despite your grandson’s ‘very helpful’ efforts and go to his room and serve him the dish on a plate and ask him to taste it, you might get such a comment:

“It’s really good but it could have been a bit more spicy.”

Don’t lose your patience. Just smile politely and ask back the plate and add about 3-4 tea spoons of chili powder and hand it again to him. Few moments later, you might find your grandson rushing to the refrigerator and pouring water in his mouth like he has crossed the entire stretch of the Sahara desert.

‘Revenge is best served cold’, they say. But sometimes, when occasions present themselves, revenge is also best served hot!