That One Thing

Julie Powell in her famous blog "The Julie/Julia Project" (which was later made into a movie by the name Julie & Julia) quotes, "If a large meteor was heading towards earth and I had 30 days to live, I'd spend it eating butter!".

There is something about butter which makes it so irresistible. If you think carefully, every delicious and extra-yumm dish doled out of any kitchen must have a lot of butter in it (as Julie puts it!). I love butter; to be honest I come from a family of butter-lovers. My grandpa used to have clotted cream (malai in Hindi) with sugar like a snack almost everyday, and my mum is often found eyeing the tiniest iota of cream left on the sides of a milk bowl even now! To top it all, I think the fun in eating cream is a million times more when no one's watching you eat or lick it. Reminds me of Lord Krishna as I write this, and perhaps His stories are not all a figment of our imagination! 

But I digress. 

For this post, I thought I'd pick that one ingredient/object which helps add an extra zing to any chosen aspect of my life. Like butter for food. Chocolates for my mood. An orange chinos for my wardrobe. Claire's Daisy clips for my accessories. And in general, laughter of my loved ones on any given day!

What is that one thing that adds a zing to your daily routine, in any aspect of your life? Do share, I'd love to know!

Happyness!

So I love going to the Whitecross street market to get my lunch during work. It's a long distance from my office, but I enjoy the walk; it's probably one reason why I go - to take a nice 20min walk just before lunch. The market kicks off at noon and there are various stalls carrying all types of food, possibly from all the parts of the world. Click here to see the place!

The parts of the world that interest me, however, are only that of Italy and India. Dishes served in these two stalls are rich in variety even when it comes to vegetarians, are rich in flavour, and in my opinion, offer good value for money too. The reason for my inclination towards the Indian stalls is quite obvious but the Italian stall attracts me more for the fact that I believe I'd never learn to cook these dishes at home and so I gorge as much as I can when I have the chance.

So this weekend, when I went to do my grocery shopping at Morrisons, I decided to get some of the bottled sauces to try my amateur hand at these Italian pastas. I bought the tomato & Mediterranean vegetables sauce, and tomato & chilli sauce; picked up two packets of Penne Rigate and Spirali each from the neatly stacked large shelves and was feeling quite Italian already! I prepared Spicy Arrabbiata for lunch on Sunday and complimented it with some toast and butter as sides, and without sounding too boastful of my cooking skills, I think it tasted quite like the box of arrabbiata I get from the Italian stall at Whitecross. I couldn't believe it until a few spoonfuls and then I had sort of a eureka moment sitting in my kitchen - I could cook Italian food! And then it occurred to me, how suddenly had the Italian food come within my reach! In a fleeting moment though, the Italian stall lost its charm. I felt like a master who had just tamed a ferocious tiger...

Cutting sharply through my thoughts was my washing machine making loud noises of rinsing and spinning my clothes. I darted out of the kitchen and into my bedroom, to quickly get dressed for my evening ahead. Idly sitting in the tube later on, my thoughts sprang back into my mind as if trying to finish some unfinished business! I thought about how the dishes at the Italian stall suddenly seemed captured within realm of my own kitchen. And my mind was quickly drawing up an analogy with Life itself.

Wouldn't you agree with me when I say a task, or a material object, or even a personality attracts more interest and curiosity when we think it/they are unattainable? Money, fame, all big fat luxury items, our favorite celebrities and their lifestyles, etc. - just all of them carry a certain aura, charm and a mystery that makes them seem so special and unreachable. We all desire for each of these - to earn money, to be successful (which is only a relative term anyway), to own some hi-tech or fashionable luxury item, to meet our favorite personality - but once we get these things, what really happens? The luxury item becomes a showpiece that you overtime forget to even brag about; money stays in your bank and you enjoy spending it but are no longer under the aura it carried in your mind until you earned it all, and you look at the picture you got taken with your favorite star and bask in it, if only momentarily! None of this is against the human psyche. This is how we are. This is how I am. Only that this time, the Italian stall was at the losing end of the game.

But I have come to believe, with the limited knowledge that I possess, there is one thing we all desire for, and yet never grow tired of after achieving/experiencing it - happiness. There is no one definition to happiness, and each one of us has her/his own for this 9-letter word, but no matter how difficult the path to achieving this feeling might be I am absolutely sure at no point in time do we begin to set it aside as an attained wealth/commodity - like I perhaps did with the Italian stalls. To vouch for my rather homo-sapiens-behaviour, I tried out the 'I-can-possibly-never-get-anything-interesting-veggie-there-thus-unreachable' Japanese place Habibi that my team often visits to get lunch from and after tasting the Vegetable Curry & Rice I wondered why I avoided this place all this while. And voila! I now have another object of desire.

Such is Life, and it is only nice to have these tiny realizations between awesome morsels of food that I put into my mouth, making every bite rich and wholesome.

3am Food

I return from work quite late these days. When I walk into my apartment, I usually find one florescent bulb glowing in the living room, to greet me into the silence. My early mornings and late nights have become a blur now. I spend a little time with my laptop after returning, browse the net, check emails, and lose myself into a deep slumber. 

But not all nights are as easy. And, 3am hunger is the hardest to get by. Last night, I experienced it as strongly as I can imagine for the first time. I walked in and out of the kitchen several times before finally deciding on what (all) I wanted to conjure up for myself at such an unGodly hour. 

My room-mate brought some yum-looking Mumbai's special chocolate doughnuts from Calcutta. Yes, that is possible to do. So, I picked out two from the box and heated them in the oven for the chocolate inside the doughnut to flow out like lava. I sat with them on my bed with a big grin and lost myself in the dripping chocolate that flowed from the doughnut into my mouth. It felt heavenly, for a few moments. But as I neared the end of my chocolate downing, I felt shamelessly hungrier. I went back to my kitchen and spent a great deal of time staring into my fridge. Then, I decided to have a green-and-red sandwich. I have heard it is not good manners to say yumm while having food, but yumm it turned out to be. And, so sumptuous was my 3am meal!

I thought I will share the recipe of green-and-red sandwich with you all. Simple as it is!

Recipe: (for one person)

One medium-sized tomato

One small capsicum

Amul butter

Chat Masala

Two slices of brown bread

Chop the tomato and capsicum into small pieces. Spread Amul butter on the toast; you could alternately use flavoured cheese spreads also. Sprinkle a layer of Chat Masala on one of the slices. Mix the tomato-capsicum pieces together and spread them on the other slice, spinkle some Chat Masala on these chopped vegetables. Put the slice on top and your sandwich is ready. 

This is the first time I am writing a recipe on my blog. Hope to share some more interesting ones in the future. And of course, this is the first time I prepared a full-course 3am meal for myself in the reverse order of desserts first and sandwich later,  and for the first time I felt good about bloating myself with guilty calories!

When was the last time you did something for the first time? 

the Minakshi's - in the making!

It was a sunny afternoon in B’lore; and we were going to Marathali in a noise-making auto with hot winds blowing all over our faces. Sonali and I had already got late for our luncheon invitation. At Minakshi’s place. Thanks to our “lachha” sessions running late into the night, we both were running late now! As per the plan, we had decided to help Minakshi (Minu as lovingly called by some of her friends) with the menu and then the cooking; but that wasn’t to be.

The menu was simple but if one considered the guests invited that day, the menu was nothing short that of a lavish lunch I say! It included: Matar Paneer, JackFruit Curry, Palak Dal, Rice, Pickle, and Curd.

For a 23year old, who has recently started to cook, this was no mean task! Cooking for 8 of us; most of them being in BITSian words “hoggers” – these are the types who don’t eat food; they hog!, Minakshi had indeed taken a tough challenge on herself on an otherwise cool and lazy Saturday afternoon.

And what a delight the lunch was. I have not enjoyed a better meal than that in a long time; It had the flavor of all worlds – be it Bengali, be it Continental, be it South Indian, Minu had done it all! Every dish tasted so perfect to its cuisine that we couldn’t have had a better Milan.

Kudos to you Minakshi! And btw, I see a bright future of a restaurant as a side-business for you; I’m sure you would know quite a number of MBA’s by then to help you open one… And am sure you would remember this post better too! ;) How about simply putting it as “The Minakshi’s”.