Making Rotis

I haven’t known what to write lately because the last couple of weeks I've been busy just keeping to myself and trying to change my lifestyle. Firstly, I’ve been decluttering. I realized that it bothers me how much stuff I have and I’ve been trying to just reduce that burden of things that we hold onto. I think most of us hold onto stuff way too long, and maybe that's not even physical space but just in our minds and bodies we hold onto moments that we don't need to. I've actually just had boxes and boxes of stuff I needed to get rid of from school. 

I spend a large part of my day cooking new recipes because I am trying to change what I eat. As we’ve talked about before food is the foundation of our health and wellbeing. I have thousands of recipes that I had saved to try and I am finally getting the chance to go through them. I never considered myself a good cook in the past- I knew a couple of good recipes that I would eat over and over when I lived alone, and that passed the time. I thought that I genuinely would never be able to become better at it because my new recipes weren’t ever really successful. In reality I think it came down to “guesstimating” when making measurements and skipping certain ingredients if I didn’t have them, because now that I’ve invested the time into cooking its going pretty well. I am think that it was a matter of just feeling so discouraged from before, and just a complete lack of energy to learn another new thing on top of everything else that was new to me during my schooling. If I'm honest maybe there was a part of me that just rebelled that I don't want to do this because every Punjabi girl is judged on their cooking and I feel like I'm so much more than just what dishes I can make. Yet I do believe its important to be able to make food for yourself, and for your family and it has been really enjoyable spending the 1:1 time learning with my mom. Its been interesting learning stuff that I never thought of before like the fact that there’s a “wrong side” of the roti to put the butter on, and accidentally dumping way too much haldi into my sabji. It has also been really neat trying different types of rotis and just realizing the diversity in various flours and their nutrient benefits. Maybe cooking wasn't as bad as I thought it was this whole time. 

I’ve been also trying to just focus on overall health- exercise, simran, and spending time on my rabab. I found out recently from my rabab teacher that its actually rare for females to do kirtan on the rabab, and it’s also rare to be the lead singer doing kirtan with a rabab regardless of gender. It made me that much more determined to continue to keep up with my rabab practice. If I had looked back years ago and told myself I would be spending my summer doing all of this I wouldn’t have believed it, but it really just goes to show how much we can grow. It is nice to be able to focus on newer skills and other areas of life now that my studies are completed. I hope people are getting a chance to do something new this summer as it is a very different summer due to covid.