Amita Mausi came up with the idea of cooking together every week starting in mid-May 2020. She was already cooking country-wise cuisine with Mark Mausaji’s family, so she wanted us to have a similar experience.

We initially thought of starting the same thing, but Mummy said that she wouldn’t get all the ingredients. So we decided to start with the Indian states. Since India is very diverse in terms of cuisine as well, it worked perfectly.

It was decided that every household will participate in the cooking. So if we are living together it will be considered a single household and if we live far from each other then it will be considered a different household. So, the participants were Amita Mausi living in Missouri (USA), Mummy living in Ranchi (India), Reena Mausi living in Birmingham (UK), Lovely Mausi living in California (USA), Anku Didi who was in college at the time it started and later moved to Indiana (USA) and me who lived in Bangalore at the time this started then moved to Ranchi (India) during the lockdown and finally moved to the Netherlands. In case, any of us visited another, our household would combine and we would not have to cook separately.

Then the next task was picking a day of the week. Reena Mausi didn’t want to cook Indian on the weekends because the kids would complain, and Monday was her busy day. On Wednesday, Amita Mausi was cooking with Mark Mausaji’s family. Mummy was doing fast for Friday and she never cooks non-veg on Friday, so we were left with Tuesday.

Initially, all of us cooked on Tuesday and posted the same day. But as the lockdown slowly opened up, everybody got busier and started cooking on different dates. All of us just posted photos together on Tuesday. We also shared recipe links in case someone wanted to cook other’s recipe.

After cooking every week, we exhausted all the states by the end of March 2021. We then took a break and started again in June 2021. This time, we started by picking Asian countries each week. We took another break in October because my wedding was near. We were not getting the time to cook as we were busy running around the city shopping and planning everything for the wedding.

Now I am in the Netherlands and felt a little settled in my routine, so we resumed the cooking where we left off at the end of June 2022. This time we will be cooking every other week instead of every week so that no one feels burdened by this.

I recently saw a movie called Julie & Julia which is a 2009 American biographical comedy-drama film starring Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci, and Chris Messina. The film contrasts the life of chef Julia Child in the early years of her culinary career with the life of young New Yorker Julie Powell, who aspires to cook all 524 recipes in Child’s cookbook in 365 days, a challenge she described in her popular blog, which made her a published author.

Julie’s journey of cooking and blogging about it gave me the idea to document our journey of cooking. She had 524 recipes. We have 195 country recipes to choose from. I had this idea but got busy and forgot about it. Rishi again reminded me to start a blog about our cooking, and I remembered my idea of blogging.

I will be sharing everyone’s pictures and recipes shared for each theme. Since it has been 2 years since we started doing this, not all of us have all the pictures. So the old ones might not have everyone’s pictures.

This has been a fun ride and I hope we cook and share our food and love till every possible country’s cuisine is done!