Kishore Singh: My cook, my life

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The statutory order binding on all residents of the apartment went out earlier this week: "Accept all invitations, no matter how abysmal," said my wife. The reason? The cook's annual vacation to the south meant we were left with a part-time chef to do some rudimentary work in the kitchen, abandoning us to our own resources.

My wife and daughter kicked off the programme even while the cook was in residence. Off they went to a friend in Gurgaon who'd invited them to lunch, but stayed on for dinner as well, and would probably have slept over to include breakfast on the itinerary if I hadn't insisted on their returning.

One problem was the dog who insisted on freshly boiled eggs mixed into his bowl of pellet food, and required to be hand-fed each time. It was a labour-consuming exercise, and for a family short on patience it required a Herculean effort merely to keep him from going on hunger strike because the egg was either stale, or too hot, or had gone cold.

The next was breakfast. I burned the toast, the sausages weren't properly thawed, we couldn't find the box of cereals, and my wife insisted on making coffee "in a moment" that stretched to well over an hour until I had to leave for work "" without the coffee. I wasn't much bothered about lunch, but dinner was proving to be a nightmare. The part-time chef didn't know how to cater to the family's culinary requirements, so we reconciled ourselves to Maggi or egg-and-toast because my wife had decreed the house a "no junk food zone", meaning no takeaway. It was going to be a long and lean summer.

My wife insisted we visit friends we hadn't met in a long while, and when a former colleague called us over for a mid-summer celebration, she said: "Even though the food will be vegetarian, we should still accept for it is the thought and not the food that counts."

When my son complained that he was hungry, my wife told him to eat a banana and to fetch her one, too. When he said he was still hungry, she pointed out that he was old enough to make himself "" and the rest of us "" sandwiches, and to be sure to use mayonnaise and not butter to keep the bread soft. When he said he was sick of eating bread all the time, she said he must learn to like it for what else did he think he was going to eat once he left to join college!

If the empty packets in the dustbin were any indication, we seemed to have rapidly transformed into chips eating junkies. We also swallowed up biscuits, opened tins of baked beans (to eat with rice) and developed a craving for chocolates that was appeased via multiple orders to the local kirana store that delivered everything at your doorstep as long as you paid in cash.

When my daughter said she wanted to eat a regular, Indian meal, my wife sent her off to stay with a friend for a few days (but they seemed to exist almost solely on pizzas, so she came back complaining she still wanted dal, sabzi and roti). My son informed us he'd cook himself (and us) a meal, but because he didn't know potatoes need to be boiled and meat cooked, he ended up making such a mess in the kitchen, no one entered it for a few days after.

We've now reached a family compromise "" my daughter feeds the dog, I burn the toast, my wife buys fruit as a food substitute, and my son summons his friends over so he has an excuse to order takeaway ""for all of us.