In the most intimidating and frightening of moments when I am worried and right out of my mind due to tension or anxiety, I turn to my kitchen for solace, for comfort, for love, for joy and for the happiness of living.

What does the kitchen do? It helps. It comforts.It heals.

Yes it does. When I relish crispy, immensly delicious parathas that I cook and watch my daugther bite in to them with joy, my stress levels reduce drastically.

The way to cook comfort is simple and easy. All I need to do is decide what to cook. Until a few years back, it was baking that I loved. The aroma of my kind of healthy cookies and cakes filled my home and drove away huge mounds of anger, unhappiness,disgust, jealousy and whatever else I might have had in my mind at that time.

But I also cook for the love of cooking and feeding those that I love. I do sometimes go beserk in my enthusiasm when I have a beloved guest at home.Once though, I cooked up extemely handsome looking delicious cakes and watched in horror as my guests gulped more and more water. I found out much to my emabrassment that I had used rice flour instead of ‘maida’ or all purpose flour to make those beauties. Well, no one can complain that what I cook is unhealthy after all. It rarely is.

Tomorrow is Onam and I am going to cook some delicious palada payasam for home!