Well, it’s that time of the year when one finds oneself minus the wife and two hungry mouths to feed (ok, make it three, I forgot to include myself). The better half entitled to a better life, once in a while we let her spend an extra few days at her home town.

Now the time has come to march into the kitchen, to the tune of "you picked a fine time to leave me Lucille, four hungry children and a crop in the field" immortalised by Kenny Rogers. Apparently this song has quite a few misheard lyrics and I like the one in which the four hungry children become 400 and worse still, crap in the field. Oh, what a stink it would have created. We could have had a lot of headlines in the papers like "Mayor calls for inquiry into crap", "Opposition calls the inquiry a lot of crap" and the like.

Sorry for the digression. Now the time has come to make that momentous decision. What to cook? I know that this particular question is quite capable of reducing many a formidable cook into a blob of jelly. Of course, it helps if you know only one particular concoction like the Sambar.

So onward to making of fine sambar. Take one potato and boil it along with "parippu" (lentils) in the pressure cooker. Now comes the delicate art of skinning the potato without getting your fingers burnt. The achieved, we have to look for some cutting edge technology to, what else but cut it into small pieces. Easier said than done. Our entire collection of knives seem to be rather blunt, in keeping with the general pacifist philosophy. The most wicked looking knives had come along free with boxes of mosquito repellents. These had of course turned quite rusty and were of little use. Anyway, a search of the kitchen drawers turned up something better and the battle was resumed.

It was soon realised that the docile looking vegetables in the cooked form tend to be rather formidable in the raw. Take the cabbage, for example. It has got so many layers making it quite a job to shred. The cutting part over, water was set to boil and the various cut vegetables put in along with the lentils and liberal doses of turmeric and red chilly powder and salt to taste. Then came a spoonful of ready-made sambar powder. The end product certainly looked like sambar and tasted much the same.

The children were polite enough not to comment. At one time, I made a simple "parippu thekathu", a preparation with just a dash of turmeric and onion and Chandu said it was quite ok and tasteless. So the next time I put sambar powder and voila, he loved it.

I managed to prepare some authentic "Pinapple Pachadi’ with the recipe downloaded from the "˜net. This of course involved breaking of the coconut. The ancient cutlass that we have is the chosen implement. For a while, I was in a dilemma. To use the blunt edge or the other side. Both were risky and if there is a miss, what will happen. So I tried both ways and managed to break it. The rest, as they say, is history. Moral of the story is that even if I do not make it to Michelin guide in a hurry, I will be able to feed quite a few of my guests.