Mira stood with her shoulders hunched, peering into the webcam on her laptop, as she chatted with her mum, Sneha.

Ordinarily, she’d delight in this but she was in a hurry today.

“Maa, hurry up please! I don’t have all day! How much is it?”

Sneha screwed up her eyes, put her finger tips together and pondered. Mira was losing it.
“Maa!”

“Sorry, beta! I think it’s 1 spoon sugar and 1 spoon cardamom.”

“Now that’s the exact measure, right? I have guests coming. I can’t screw this up.”

“It’s an exact estimate. I don’t use spoons to measure ingredients!”

***

Welcome to The Moving Quill!

For this year’s A to Z Challenge, I’ve taken up the theme of

An Oxymoron rendered in micro-fiction.

Each day’s title will have one half of the oxymoron while the second half will be revealed towards the end of the post.

Follow me as I unravel each tale in exactly 100 words.

Follow me on Facebook or Twitter to keep track of my updates

***

11 thoughts on “X for (E)Xact- #FlashFiction #AtoZChallenge

  1. Ah moms! They never have the exact estimate but they sure do put in excess of love in anything they make. That’s what does the trick I guess 🙂

  2. Oh I can relate to this….when I ask my mom or MIL for measurements and they reply, “roughly estimate the amount by looking at the amount of the dish!!!!!”
    Prasanna from Team Mocktailmommies

  3. Oh goodness! I’ve had this conversation with my mother so many times! She’ll give me these guestimates and the end result will never be close to anything she makes.

  4. Story of every Mum and Daughter, they do not use exact measures and we are deigned the other way. But now I am learning the art too 🙂

  5. Hahaha! That’s just like my mum. She has these exact estimates for her recipes and I need perfect measurements like to the last gram 😀

  6. True. A lot of the old recipes don’t have measurements. I’d like to believe that our grandmothers knew exactly how much of cardamom and cinnamon to put, only because they were masterchefs in their own way. They totally knew the need for each ingredient and the ratio of spices needed to create a delicious and magical dish!

  7. This made me nostalgic about both my grandmothers, sadly for all their recipes there were no specific quantities and both of them being unlettered these were never passed on.

Comments are closed.