This is a post for April Cools, encouraging people to break out of their standard fare and write something new.

For the longest time I’ve not had a particularly great inclination for cooking. I had lived at or very close to my home for practically all my life, I was pampered (spoiled) and was never really encouraged to pick it up. That had to change when I moved to Bengaluru as part of being acqui-hired by Cloudflare in early 2025.

I moved into a 2 bedroom apartment with old friend and current colleague Yash, and we decided to get a home cook. Having been in a hotel for a month or so while house-hunting we had landed pretty squarely on not wanting to be dependent on food delivery. Through some neighbourly drama that is not worth unpacking, we had to fire our home cook pretty quickly and we found ourselves in the kitchen with a strong desire to not starve. We started with the basics: simple curries with chapattis. Chickpeas, black beans, paneer (cottage cheese), and potatoes were pretty common.

The progress was honestly pretty slow. We started with using precooked chapattis sold in the supermarket for a few weeks before shame really set in. We bought a food processor (neither of us had the temperament for kneading dough by hand), and started making our own chapattis at home. We made a very early experimental foray into a Taro root (called “Arbi” in Hindi) based curry, a favorite of Yash’, which was an absolute nightmare to prepare and really killed the vibe on gastronomical experimentation for a while. Eventually we started doing pastas, fried rice, pulao, even a chicken curry where we learned the hard way why you’re supposed to thaw chicken 6 hours in advance (it was edible).

My mother, who had kept me out of the kitchen all this time, found herself quite concerned for the well being of her pampered buffoon. For maybe 6 months I had to send a picture of my dinner every night so she could rest assured that I had a home cooked meal and wasn’t pounding McChickens three times a day. My photo gallery in the past year is probably 40% dinner plates by count. I’m not gonna pretend I took all of those to satisfy her and not to gloat to myself, but she definitely is the reason it started :)

I was already part of the air fryer cult back at home, so when my friend Subhrajyoti was moving out to the Netherlands I happily snapped up his air fryer. This unlocked a whole new dimension in the kitchen, and since then we haven’t gone a week without some type of frozen food in our freezer. The convenience is simply unbeatable, though Yash has not been a very big user of it so far. Some day he’ll see the light.

Yash and I had been big fans of a hummus bowl sold by a food delivery service that was our staple breakfast at office for a while, and when they discontinued it I decided to finally look into how much effort it was to just make hummus myself. Turns out, not much! Hummus is just cooked chickpeas blended into a paste with maybe 5 ingredients added to it. I used the Christmas <> New Year’s week to try it out and ended up with a genuinely delicious batch.

A food processor with blended chickpeas inside it, and a spatula sitting a little to the left that has clearly been inside the food processor. You can still see a bunch of solid chickpeas that are yet to be grounded down, floating in a slightly off white paste of ground chickpeas.
This was a bit of an arm workout not gonna lie
A small metal plate with some hummus that I've done a poor job of garnishing with some olive oil, red chilli powder and cumin powder.
4/10 plating but 8/10 flavour, I'll take it.

The success of this experiment made me try this 3 more times to increasing levels of success, and also make my own falafels a couple of times. Still haven’t nailed that one, but got very close the last time!

Yash also got us into making burritos ourselves, a repeat of the story with hummus but more driven by California Burrito being expensive rather than it disappearing altogether. It makes for something we can prep easily, lasts a couple of days, is quite healthy and very filling. Some highlights from the first burrito misadventures, before I resigned to just doing burrito bowls and skipping the embarrassment of not being able to wrap a tortilla very well.

Two tortillas on a metal plate, overlapping around 30% with a big pile of fillings on top. The internet told me this is the right way to make a burrito with two wraps.
The internet told me this is how you make a burrito with two wraps.
A burrito being lightly grilled on a pan. Shocking it has not split open its guts all over the place.
One of the rare few burritos that stayed in one piece when we grilled them.

I bought a veggie chopper that lets me just make big piles of nutritious salads, topped with some air fried chicken sausages or whatever and just have an exceptionally filling dinner in under 20 minutes. Completely game changer for the days when I’m feeling lazy, has helped immensely with my struggle to lose weight.

When I started going to the IndieWebClub events late last year, I picked up the habit of publishing weeknotes. These have gradually started featuring food more prominently as I’ve gotten comfortable with simply trying things in the kitchen. Being able to navigate the kitchen with confidence has given me so much freedom that I previously thought to be out of my reach. Excited to see what other cuisines I’ll pick up this year!