My mom has never enjoyed spending too much time in the kitchen. She never really considered it her domain — always nervous before hosting a dinner party. Even when she’d send food to my aunts, who are all excellent cooks, she would worry if they’d like it.
If you ask her to describe herself, “cook” probably wouldn’t be the first word she’d use. But those of us who’ve grown up with the comfort of her meals know that her cooking isn’t just about what’s on the plate, it’s about how she’s always made time for the things she loves while still making sure we were well-fed and taken care of. Whether it is her everyday dal, tempered with a generous sprinkle of kalojeere (nigella seeds) and a couple of fiery kancha lonka (green chillies), or a quick khichuri packed with veggies, every dish is yum.
She was making veggie-and-protein-loaded one-pot meals long before “one-pot meals” became a Pinterest category. It was just her way to get us to eat our veggies and get our nutrition from one easy-to-cook, delicious meal.
Watching my mom in the kitchen has never about learning recipes, it’s about watching someone who just made it work. She never told me I had to cook, and I never felt like being a girl meant I needed to. In her simple, no-fuss way of cooking, my mom taught me about individuality, independence, and quietly rewriting the rules. What I did learn, watching her move through life was that time, when managed wisely, could make space for everything that matters.
She was quite amused when I started cooking and would follow a recipe to the T — every measurement exact, every step replicated the way it was described. This also meant my going back to the file that contained recipes that my dad had carefully photocopied from various sources over the years, and flip the pages midst cooking, trying hard to avoid staining them. She, on the other hand, didn’t find joy in elaborate recipes or hours spent chopping and stirring.
Unlike many others of her generation who pride themselves on carefully curated masalas and handwritten cookbooks, Mamma has always been the queen of quick fixes — throwing things together in a way that looks almost careless, but somehow, the food always ends up delicious. No recipes, no measurements, no rules. If you ask her how she made something, she’ll shrug and say, “I don’t know… I just made it.” Repeating a dish exactly the same way is practically impossible — not for lack of trying, but because she’d never kept track in the first place.
Take, for instance, the now-iconic milky palak sausage. It was a rushed day. We had somewhere to be, and time, as usual, was not on our side. Mamma had decided to make sausage in a spinach gravy, something she’d never done before but seemed confident about. As she tossed together the palak (chopped, never pureed), garlic, and sausages. Something in the gravy tasted off. “It’s too sharp,” she muttered, looking around the kitchen in mild panic.
Without hesitation, she opened the fridge, pulled out a small carton of milk, and poured a generous amount straight into the pan. I watched in horror and fascination. Milk in sausage curry? But it worked. The bitterness mellowed, the gravy took on a soft creaminess, and the sausage became something else entirely — comforting, and just strange enough to be brilliant. That last-minute save ended up becoming one of our family’s most-loved dishes.
That’s how Mamma cooks — by feeling, by need, by mood. Her shortcuts never feel like compromises. They are smart, swift, and creative. Now that I cook more often, I find myself reaching for that same spirit. I try not to be bound by recipes, to allow myself to listen to the dish, to pay attention to what it needs instead of what it’s “supposed” to have. I mess up sometimes. I improvise. And I think of her. Whenever I make that milky palak sausage, I measure the milk. I try to get the ratio right, to make it taste exactly like the first time. But it never does. It’s always slightly different. Because, in the end, maybe it isn’t the ingredients or the method that makes Mamma’s food what it is. Maybe it is the freedom — the unspoken lesson that food is about adapting and also about showing up for people in the best way you know how, even when you’re in a hurry. That’s a recipe worth remembering.
Here’s a recipe from her. I’ve added the quantities as per what I use.
