the art of bad cooking

Well as the title of this post suggests, I'm gonna describe a very weird incident that happened when my room-mate one day rolled out of bed and decided to make a traditional south indian dish called upma. For the uninitiated, it's a dish that's made using semolina, a few spices and cooked in hot water . It's a pretty simple dish to make and I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to make it. But it does require a little bit of uncertainty to mess it all up.

So my room mate rolled out of bed one day thinking he could make some Upma (aka Upit in some parts of India). He couldn't find any clean vessels in the debris that we apparently call a kitchen. So he took out his pressure cooker, thinking he could cook his way to a nice,delicious dish of upma. He filled half the cooker with nearly a tonne of rava aka semolina. Little did he know that you actually have to roast the rava till it's golden brown before plunking in a few mugs of water. He started cooking the beast in this pressure cooker, and before the water even heated evenly , he plunked in another bunch of vegetables - a couple of onions, a couple of tomatoes here n there, a few leaves which he presumed were basil and a generous sprinkling of mustard seeds. It flashed back memories of me watching Tom n Jerry as a kid,where Tom chops his vegetables as haphazardly as possible while cooking jerry in a huge cauldron in an episode where they get lost on an island inhabited by cannibals.

I went outside for sometime waiting for the upma beast to be unleashed. As I entered the kitchen on my way back , I was greeted with this layer of sandy stuff strewn all over the floor. I asked my room mates if anyone of them went to the beach.Turned out they didn't, so i guess it could clearly suggest that I was walking over a layer of mashed rava. I then saw this rice cooker bellowing away like there's no tomorrow. I opened it up and to my amazement, I saw this throbbing cylindrical mass of slimy rava just waiting to explode. My room mate entered the kitchen thinking it was ready to be eaten. He then tried to serve himself only to find out that he couldn't remove anything off the spoon. So he just dumped the serving spoon in that bellowing mass and after the entire thing cooled down, nobody could remove it. It was as though the worst ever meal was just set in stone. I felt it could become part of history and be seen as a desi grad version of King Arthur's sword...stuck in a big mass of upshit aka apparent upit!