Gulab Jamuns

I woke up today morning realizing I can look up the actual recipe for gulab jamuns -online or something. I can make gulab jamuns exactly as I want them by looking up youtube videos and figure out exactly how they make it the way they do at bakeries and restaurants. How come I can never do that with the mix or the way we do it at home? Or no one in my extensive family can at least? Not mom, not my aunts and certainly not my cousins, who are all just amateurs compared to the mom-generation of cooks.

It is possible for me to make better gulab jamuns than my mom. There is no question about it and yet its absolutely ridiculous. Outdo my mom, who cooks awesome food, who dedicated a good part of her learning mind to figuring out ways of cooking new and newer things, which would please me, my sis, my dad and all the friends and relatives that we brought home, so that they would have a good time. Not because mom liked cooking, uh uh, I found out that she doesn't like cooking when I was 26? Like all that food and variety that we enjoyed and took for granted as part of the mom service, was provided to us for our sheer pleasure and not due to any joy, in fact it was made despite the lack of joy it personally brought her.

The gulab jamuns that this mom of mine made, which could never quite attain a gold standard, despite the fact that in all my family, she and women like her have tried over and over to make awesome gulab jamuns, well, now I am going to outdo those, I can make better ones. Not because I have half the love in me that my mom has. But because I use the internet.