“Ek to karela, upar se neem-chadha”

This is a famous notion in Uttar Pradesh where the bitterness of bitter gourd is compared to the taste of neem. 

And when my dear mother started feeding me bitter gourd, I absolutely hated it!

Hate is not a very strong word for the bitterness on my tongue, detest is better.

This was when I was a child..

I used to gobble the stir-fried bitter gourd in one go because my father used to scare me that if I do not eat it, then I’ll get huge injections having bitter gourd juice in them. Those imaginary injections were apparently very painful and my father made the “apparent” mistake of not listening to my grandparents and then getting those painful injections. And then he showed me those Boomer era syringe marks, that looked huge and obviously painful to an innocent child such as me. 

Of course, I didn’t know that the vaccines boomers got had a different make than what we did.

So this gobbling continued for years and then one fine day, I discovered that if I combined stir-fried bitter gourd with roti and then dal tadka, the latter one more important in this context, then the taste is bearable.

And then began my unconditional love for bitter-gourd. 

Unconditional because I eventually started having bitter-gourd with paratha. No dal tadka, no third party.

So when I shifted to my new place, I thought why not prepare bitter-gourd? I just have to add salt in the stir-fry and cook it till it is palatable. 

And I called my mother.

But when have the good things in life come easily?

Or cooked easily?

And my mother literally laughed at me that how could I think of cooking bitter-gourd in only an hour’s time of lunch in a work-from-home setting?

Of-course I did not understand. 

And the dread started.

You have to first slice the bitter-gourd, add salt to it and keep the mixture aside for at least 45 minutes. This is to lessen the bitterness in the bitter-gourd. 

You can of course chose to not do this step if you like a bitter version of karela. Or bitter things in life! 😉

Anyway, back to my kitchen disaster. The draining part has to be done with hands, no squeezer please! You have to remove the extra water by squeezing the salted butter gourd slices. And you have to do that at least twice. 

Because when did water ever got drained in one squeeze? Remember your clothes? 🥲

And then you have to cut half ringlets of onion. So after getting tortured by the draining part, you have to cut onions. It is not an issue for those who do not get watery eyes while cutting onions.

And as expected, I do get watery eyes!

And then you have cook this all in mustard oil at high heat. More waterworks! 

And bitter-gourd does not get cooked easily, so you have to ensure that it takes another 40 minutes or so to turn from green to brown. 

Ohhh, I actually forgot about the seed part!

Those huge seeds that produce an annoying “cut” sound when you accidentally eat them while consuming bitter-gourd. Small seeds are adorable to eat though. Many a times, you have to separate those seeds while cooking.

So all this hard work while cooking lentils, kneading dough and making chappatis. 

In the middle of the day, on a work-from-home day in a highly hectic job.

But good lessons are learnt the hard way and through toil. And sweat, blood and tears. I never ever cooked bitter gourd on a weekday after this incident. 😇

This is how it looked. It was very unlike what my mom cooked but the colour and the texture got better as I cooked this more.