💬 I started selling homemade masala with ₹5,000 in 2022. It's my full time work now

Married 12 years, and for 10 of them I didn't earn a single rupee. Graduation done, job dream gone, usual story. School drop, cooking, husband's lunch box, cleaning, the same thing every day till evening. His salary lasted about a week. Then in 2022 my daughter had a school project on Hyderabadi food and I made khatti dal and mirchi ka salan for it. One of the other mothers tasted it and said why don't you sell this. I laughed. Couldn't sleep that night though. I kept ₹5,000 aside and told myself that's it, if it goes, it goes. Made masalas and samosas that weekend. Put photos on my WhatsApp status and felt so embarrassed doing it, like I was showing off or something. 2 orders came that week. After costs I made ₹350. Not joking, I nearly cried looking at that money. My husband teased me for days after that, kept calling me madam CEO at dinner in front of the kids. Then a customer took my snacks to her office and they asked me to do a Saturday lunch for 50 people. I said yes before thinking. Big mistake. My kitchen is tiny, I had no proper boxes, one delivery went late. Another one went to the wrong address completely and the man was shouting at me on the phone. That night I told my husband I'm done, this isn't for me. He said do it again, you'll get it right next time. So I wrote down every recipe with exact measurements, because before that I was doing it all by eye. Bought proper containers from Begum Bazaar. Started asking people what they didn't like, which hurt sometimes. Masala sold better than snacks, so I dropped most snacks and added biryani masala, salan paste and haleem mix. By end of 2023 some months were touching ₹1 lakh in sales. Some months were nowhere near that. A kirana shop owner near our house tried the biryani masala and said pack it properly and I'll keep it. Licence and packaging ate most of my savings. Called it Reshma's Hyderabad Kitchen because I couldn't think of anything better. Now it's in around 10 shops and I rent a small kitchen 2 lanes away. 3 women from our area work with me. One of them is my neighbour Farzana. Her husband never let her work outside before. He's fine with this somehow. After Ramzan sales drop badly every year because everybody has already stocked up, so it's not all good months. But I leave the house for work every morning now. At 34. Still feels strange to say that out loud. I still mix the first batch myself every morning and the women laugh at me for it. Anyway, that's my story. My sister kept telling me to write it somewhere, so here it is.

Writing every recipe down with exact measurements is the part I'd copy. My mother cooks by eye, and nobody can match her. I tried to write her biryani down once and she kept saying a little of this, a little of that. The first batch came out so different that we all laughed and ate it anyway. Did measuring change how the masala tasted from one batch to the next?

You nearly quit after that office lunch? I would have quit right there.