Anwesha's law of food making and its subsequent consumption states that the time taken to consume a meal is inversely proportional to the time taken to prepare it and quality of the meal itself, if the quantity of food remains constant.

For instance, I could spend 3 minutes to fry an egg and find it consumed in another 5 minutes, while it would take me 2 hours to make 'mishti-doi' and have it disappear in less than a minute.

So, assuming you want your meal to last as long as possible, cook it badly, put all sorts of unwanted ingredients like 'potol', green beans and cook it really fast. However, note that since quality is an extremely sensitive factor in this equation, do not extend its range so much that your meal finds no takers.

For instance, first time when I cooked one packet Maggi in one litre of water, it took a little more than 3 minutes but nobody wanted to eat it. When I cooked 5 packets of Maggi with the same amount of water, it took almost the same amount of time but was better received.

Lastly, never cook in large quantities. You might find that after a point, people get bored of eating the same meal day-after-day even though it might be well cooked. Results may be obtained by experimenting with a one kilo packet of puffed rice to make bhel-puri on the same evening and expecting your parents to consume all of it.