It is a tough job to cook, but even tougher is to decide what to cook everyday. Whenever I pay a visit to parents, I don’t have to think about issues like food, because mom is always there to take care of that. But whenever I am not in home, eating becomes an issue with me specially because I hate to eat out alone, or even cook for myself alone.
Just for the records, I am not a bad cook – just that it may take a few tries before I make some dish exactly as intended 
I like cutting vegetables and washing utensils just as well.
Once out of India, people who are used to having Indian food, and especially “ghar ka khaana”, find it difficult. Specially those strict-vegetarians have to live with a limited variety of dishes. But this is not always the case, because if you are courageous enough to cook, then you can try various combinations just because you want to stay away from that burger or pizza.
I still remember the first time I cooked pure khaana (not noodles or some fast food), it remained raw, but i somehow boiled it again and again so I could eat it . Well here, I don’t have to resort to such desperate measures because many of my colleagues are good cooks, and together we manage to cook Indian food well, or at least eatable. In fact we have also tried a number of combinations – even had daal (pulse) and pasta together once, and believe me it tasted great.
Times have changed. Some years back, there were not many Indian stores in western countries, and you could rarely get something Indian to eat – unless you yourself cooked it. But now there are many such shops available. In fact today we bought a number of such stuff from one of the shops here – “Patel Brothers”. Even if things are a tad costlier, at least you get the satisfaction of cooking Indian food.
The general trend here is that people buy food stuff to last a week or two. So you have a number of canned or well-packed food stuff. Even milk is available in huge cans. Every food item has an expiry date mentioned, by which you must consume it. Also compulsorily mentioned is the calorific value.
I do not advocate eating Indian food in US. I am not against it either. I keep hearing thought-processes according to which we must be bold enough to try the local dishes and not just crave for Indian food. After all, when Americans go to India, they try the local dishes there – so why can’t we try their local dishes while we are in their country. As far as I am concerned, I try to strike a healthy balance between American food and Indian food. I have veg organic salad primarily, and have also tried some local things such as fish sticks, chicken tuna (or something similar). I even had “lazania” once – and still do not know what it was
Well, the idea of trying local dishes is certainly food for thought
