‘Coz plane food is plain food

Every now and then, I realize how much I do stuff just the way the elders in my family did, without consciously thinking about it. While taking the train and traveling overnight, I always saw Ma or grandma cook and pack dinner- luchi, porota, dry potato curry, dimer jhaal. While the men in the family packed and cleaned the home before leaving, the women cooked and took charge of the kitchen. I am both the man and the woman in my home, on a 27 hour long commute. Since they will serve food in only one of the three legs, and airport food is not up to my liking, I decided to bring my own food. I'm also on a "x number of days" mission of not eating outside. It started as "will eat one meal a week outside home", but it's been 4 weeks now, and I haven't been to a single restaurant. Like the cell phone thingy, it's one of those things of pushing myself to do something differently. 

It goes without saying that I am a foodie, and take great pride in cooking. Sure, I cannot cook fancy stuff like murir ghonto and rui maacher kalia, but I can cook all the basic stuff. So I ended up making egg fried rice. It was originally supposed to be chicken-prawn fried rice, but I ran out of chicken, and didn't want the immigration guys to smell something fishy (pun unintended). 

Now I had a full day at work, and if that is not enough, I even had to shift offices in the morning. Where was the time to cook and clean? So the night before, I painstakingly chopped all the veggies, the onions, bell peppers, spring onions, carrots, garlic until 1 am and refrigerated it. Came back from work, fried the eggs, added everything, added the chili-garlic sauce dad got me from Kolkata, and what turned out was an amazing fried rice. I started eating stuff right from the wok, and had to control myself from not finishing up something that was meant to be my food for a 27-hour long commute. 

Both my Ma and grandma, who have never eaten anything I have cooked, would have wept out of happiness. 

sunshine