My lack of culinary skills is only exceeded by my pointed unwillingness to learn them. This, regrettably, sometimes gets me in a bit of a spot. There is that age old story which Sharmila regales in telling anybody who cares to listen about how I had once spectacularly stumbled while trying to do something, that to the even untrained eye should appear as something one ought to be able to do with those aforementioned eyes wide shut.

I lay the blame squarely at my engineering background’s feet. When I see instructions urging something to be heated at 400 degrees for 10 minutes, my math leaning brain computes it (with some sense of smugness, I might add) thusly: 800 degrees and 5 minutes should pretty much do the job. Something about product of two quantities and all that drivel.

If memory serves me right, I was tasked with the seemingly innocuous job of boiling a few eggs. Where memory did not serve me right is that while it recognized the eggs themselves being an integral part of the process, it certainly missed the step that calls for putting water first.

What can I say? Results were unequivocal. Fairly black and white, if you get the drift. There were some unwelcome explosions, some fumes involved immediately. And a whole lot more of fuming for the rest of the day.

So, every time Sharmila tells that story now, I sheepishly grin. The agreement all around is generally that of me being incapable of simple stuff.

You can only imagine my glee when I spotted something in a coffee shop this week that destroyed the myth of simplicity in boiling an egg. There is a whole book written on it!! Even got my friend to take a picture of me with it.

P.S. While writing this, it dawned on me that I never opened the book to leaf thru the pages. So, please, do not expect any better egg boiling from me in the near future!!