Ratatouille really inspired me with the quote that “Anyone can cook!” And I took this quote seriously during Covid work-from-home era. 

Yes, we are still sticking with covid-era culinary adventures. They are not ending soon!

That era was characterised by those dreaded Kadhas (never drank the medically unproven shams), heat-providing dishes, virus-destroying ingredients such as turmeric, red chilli, garam masala etc. If food ingredients could destroy viruses, then we could have cured common cold way back. 

Anyway, back to my disaster. I’m not going to give attention to anyone but my mistakes here. 😅

Millets gradually entered the foray of food blogging and considering my “fear-of-missing-out” shenanigans, I too jumped into this well.

Except that I did not know that this well was something that I had never experienced. And my super-chef mother had not ever cared to drink the waters of this well.

But ignoring all these mountainous facts, I ordered kilos of millet flours. 

I could have ordered 250gm of these flours, tested them out and shot for my blog. But no, if Remy the Rat can cook the elaborate French cuisine just by reading a book, so can I. 

So I got bajra/pearl millet flour and then wondered what to cook with it. Rotis and cheelas/pancakes came to mind first. I went to my mom and asked whether I can cook rotis with bajra in lunch that day.

As usual, she flatly refused with choiciest quotes:

“We do not eat bajra, not our thing.”

“Who eats bajra in summers?”

“Do you even know how to cook bajra roti? There are special techniques required that I’m not well-versed with”

My father jumped in with:

“Bajra is given to pigeons, why should we eat it?”

I did not have much time to research on bajra rotis, so I decided to prepare bajra cheelas. I soaked the flour in curd and water and the mixture was extremely watery. My mother advised to add some binding agent as these flours are very fine and do not bind easily. So I added besan/gram flour.

Even after adding besan flour, the mixture was watery but as usual, I anyway decided to add the mixture on the hot tawa/pan.

Since the mixture was watery, I had to apply a thicker layer. Then my mom commented that if I had added chopped onions, then some sort of binding would have been there.

Parents love to wait to see their stubborn kids (or adult in my case) fail first and then they would give you advice. 😂

Anyway, the cheelas turned out okay but were shapeless like amoeba and paramecium, very similar to the first set of rotis I prepared. They were difficult to flip over the pan because of weak binding. And when I say flip, I mean the normal flip that we desis do with a steel spatula not the acrobatic calisthenics flip that French chefs do to their crepes. 

The taste was okay, a bit weird due to absence of onion, ginger and chillies. I was the only one who ate those 4 cheelas and I was given ultimatum to finish that leftover flour on my own. 

So it is not that “anyone can cook.” Sometimes you can cook, sometimes you get a lesson on “how not to cook.” 🤓