I believe that in all cultures, the kitchen, or the cooking pit or wherever people cook and eat together is the heartbeat of the home. Everything starts in the kitchen. Announcements, good and bad, discussions, good and bad, celebrations, binge eating, stress cooking, the list is extensive. Kitchens are for nurturing and are often the place where you “clarify” many of life’s issues.

In traditional Indian cooking, ghee is a form of “clarified” butter, which is butter that has been liquified by melting. The process makes the smoke point higher, and that is desirable for many recipes. I have been making it with my Mom since childhood, however, ghee-watching has become obsolete as she has now refined the process. My 12-year-old self-standing watch over melting butter so it did not burn has been replaced with a programmable crock pot that does not complain about the heat.

But my blog is not about butter. The idea for the blog occurred in the throes of Covid craziness because a couple of things happened.

First, I assisted my sister with a garage cleanse, and we unearthed what appeared to be kitchen utensils, but neither of us knew their purpose. I pride myself on knowing about weird kitchen gadgets – this irked me. Secondly, we sorted Mom’s cookbooks, which number about 300, but could not find anything where she had written down her own recipes.

A week prior, my other sister had posted a video of Mom (79) teaching her youngest grandchild (6), how to make roti (traditional Indian flatbread). It was poignant. Mom is a former teacher and a natural at instruction, and my niece was very entertaining because she already considered herself an expert.

I thought if Mom would consider doing videos of cooking traditional Indian dishes, I could have her recipes recorded and maybe do a blog/vlog about them. It would also be an opportunity to share her knowledge with our non-Desi friends who continually hound her for cooking lessons. Perhaps she could demonstrate the kitchen gadgets. Enquiring minds, or at least I wanted to know what the thing that looks like a metal fishnet with a wooden stick handle is really used for.

The blog/vlog is called the Ghee Spot because a “spot of ghee” can be the start of a good pot of anything.

Last weekend, I approached Mom with the idea of featuring her instructing 2-minute cooking videos of her recipes, etc., on a series for my blog. She has become a YouTube devotee since she discovered she could watch her “shows” on the iPad, so she liked the concept and has agreed to star in my productions.

I told her I was calling the vlog “The Ghee Spot”, and she replied, “Isn’t that hard to find?” Mom is a little hard of hearing, but she did have a point.

“No, Mom, it isn’t, not if you know where to look.”