MI

Insipid looking Onion Sambhar rice. I was not very enthusiastic about the way it looked all though it smelled good. But tastes great!

Tip of the day: Try cooking to the 'mission impossible' theme song. The taste seems to improve greatly.

Just waiting to get to the end of this week. Life will be so much better!

'Save'ai me

I wanted to have something nice to eat tonight, but no! 'Sevai' packet said 'delicious' meal of my choice can be prepared, but no! I have something like 1 kilogram of gooey sevai which I cannot make anything out of.

Mixed some puliyogare into it and it is edible currently. But will not be for long. I shudder to think of the immovable glue that will be left in the vessel after it cools down. I also shudder to think of how many hours I will be spending scrubbing that vessel.

It is time I ventured out into the wild and inhabitable outdoors to buy some real vegetables. Sometime in the future I guess I will.

This too shall pass.

Some Pongal

Without pepper or cumin or ghee. Just rice and dal cooked together with pickle.

That's all. Bad mood. See you tomorrow.

Quick and swift

This dish is usually my mother's answer to "what are we going to do with all that left over rice" or to " what are we going to cook without any vegetables at all in the fridge" and to many other similar questions that plague today's troubled world.

Onion bhath.

Chopped onions, fried with peanuts and mixed with chili powder and rice. Not left over rice actually, this was freshly cooked.

Best eaten with curds.

Chow:

Bread upma.

This is not the same one that I ate a few days ago. It couldn't have survived for so long. This is a different and much yummier one. Maybe because I am hungrier than usual and in a greater hurry than usual.

Ciao!

Serendipity

I have always thought that most dishes that we love so well were created by accident, and the person who had the accident was clever enough to remember what exactly caused it and could repeat it.

Our accident of the day:

Yellow bell pepper, carrot and onion in tomato ketchupy gravy, with chili powder. Eaten with rice.

I had wanted to make something different and ended up with. I did not like it at first- it was too sour, but it turned out pretty ok when I mixed it with rice.

I think this encourages me to be wild and experimental with cooking so that I end up discovering those various dishes that people invented but were not clever enough to remember how.

Experiment! (as a verb not a noun. I am asking you to actually. Not only with pepper but with life also. )

Bring those colour shakers

Yes, I colour my photos before I put them up. Like here:

How else do you think you could get so many colours into one meal!

Carrots, capsicum and onion fried with red chillies. Boiled dal and rice.

Nothing more welcoming on a cold evening than a hot meal. But not necessarily one that you cooked yourself. Cold days are the ones that get you to be the most lazy.

This afternoon I had a ready-made meal - just heated a foil bag and some chapatis.. and I had great Palak Panneer and chapatis to eat!

One of things that I bought at the supermarket said that it should be stored in a cool and dry place. I found that a bit ironic. Cool? Hmmmm.. maybe will keep it next to the stove.

Keyboard trouble

Chapati with beet root - onion fry.

Disadvantage of solo-cooking: You have to decide what to cook. Sometimes laziness makes it easy to decide. Like yesterday, when the only thing I could motivate myself to do was to make instant noodles. Just boiled and gobbled it.

My space bar on my key board had a problem and please don't blame me if my posts are incomprehensible here on!

:(

Quickly running out of title ideas

Cauliflower and capsicum in tomato ketchup with ginger, cumin seeds and just a small sprinkle of chili powder. Eaten with chapatis. Tasted very sour, because of the tomato ketchup. It needed a little more chili I guess.

I fried the veggies first till there were signs of them getting spots of brown and then immediately added water and ketchup. Because of this the veggies got only a little cooked and remained crisp to eat. I like that very much. The Indian version of Chinese food usually is served like that.

Cauliflower has featured here so many times! I finally ate the last of it today! I do like it very much though and will not complain about eating it very often.

I had some ginger tea earlier this evening and sent out a word of thanks to the person who first discovered this drink. My literature studies suggest that I must thank Getafix and Asterix for tea. I wish I could tie up the bard and have a cozy banquet with a fire under today's full moon.

Beet rice

Chef's special:

One beet root , one onion and rice, first fried in oil with cumin seeds and red chillies and then pressure cooked. Tasty. But I guess I made a bad choice of using red chillies here, because it looks exactly like the beet root and I have already munched on a couple of chillies.

And yes, that is the actual colour.

I pay so much attention to my food and stand by it lovingly as it cooks and tend it so gently, while my house mate rushes in, 'fixes' a meal in a jiffy and is off. My cooking time must be equal to her cooking and eating and cleaning time. Maybe more.

Have I mentioned before that the worst job is cleaning up after cooking? Especially with beet root. Everything around me is maroon now. Wonder why they called it beet. Sounds so sad.

Ginger!

Over the years I have gone through changes in my likes and dislikes. My parents had to deal with these fluctuations in the time scale of days. My mother reminded me today of my immense love for radish the day I first ate it. I had made my father promise that he would buy it everyday for me. The very next day I refused to eat it. I disliked it strongly for quite many years after. Now I do not particularly hate it.

I have seen my partiality for garlic grow pale. I have seen my hatred for ginger and pepper become pure love.

Here is our ginger flavoured dish of the day:

That is a curry made of one part of a cauliflower, one carrot, two onions and one yellow bell pepper. The curry was made of some ketchup, chopped ginger, chilli powder, and some ready to eat 'bhuna masala', which I had no clue how to use. Have no clue what it is either. It was just one of those random things that I picked up before coming here believing that I would have some use for it.

And of course, some ready to eat chapatis. Yes that kind of stuff is available in markets.

I love ginger in tea. Try crushed ginger boiled in water with some jaggery. It is the perfect drink for a cold day.

Trivia of the day: The more dry and old ginger is, the more concentrated its flavour becomes and the costlier it gets. Like wine?

Hurry!

A must-know for all solo-cooks ( new term that I hereby coin) Bread upma!

Perfect for a hurried dinner - it tastes good and doesn't take much doing or time.

There was a hailstorm here today.. and unlike at home, the hailstones look a really long time to melt. So now you know why I am in a hurry .. spent almost all afternoon staring outside the window!!!

Random dish

Often, while cooking I change my mind about what it is I want to make. I start off with the idea to make upma and then go on to make an elaborate something. The vice-verse also happens often.
Today's case was similar. Here is our nameless dish of the day:


Rice, beans, tomatoes and onions cooked together with chilli powder and salt in a pressure cooker. Tastes good.

I was wondering, why when there are so many recipe books available and there are videos on youtube that tell you how to cook some dish or the other etc., do people find it difficult to learn how to cook?
The answer:
Cooking is like learning to ride a bicycle. You inevitably fall the first few times, no matter how many manuals you read on how it is done. And then you grow in confidence as you keep practicing.
That's today's gyan for the day folks!
That said, I know someone who learnt how to swim with just an online guide. Don't try this at home folks!

With love from Mom

This morning I received a delightful mail from my mother with the recipe for this dish:

The famous Pongal. I never really liked this dish for some unknown reason. It tastes delicious here and now.

Some time back I used to buy Pongal when I was down with a fever or a cold. It is the perfect dish for such a time, because it is the only dish that is easily available with black pepper, which I think is a good cure for these problems.

Rice and moong dal cooked really soft, it is semi-solid and garnished with cumin seeds and pepper corns in oil . Ideally, these should be fried in clarified butter (ghee) which allows the pongal to be blessed with an indescribable aroma. Should be eaten with fragrant coconut chutney, which I cannot make here of course. So I make do with a pickle. Another alternative would be raitha - some fresh vegetables, sev mixture in curds.

I always suspected that my mom made this dish really often because it is really easy to make. My suspicions were confirmed. Time taken : around 20 minutes, actual effort around 5 minutes (to wash the ingredients and then for garnishing).

I enjoyed the sun set today. It was beautiful and because I live at a height, I can see it well for a long time. The sky was left a deep purple for about 10 minutes. A real treat.

First disaster

Presenting the chapati, that is not.

It is actually a dosa made of wheat. The trick to making it look and almost taste like a chapati while not having to spend a lot of time kneading the dough and rolling it out etc.

Mix wheat flour with water into a thin consistency and pour on to a non-stick pan.

Don't put any salt into it. Make sure your pan is non-stick and not overly heated.

This could work for an emergency or under extreme-laziness conditions.

As though in response for my wish to see a disaster in my cooking here:

The second dosa that I tried making was on an overly heated pan and i managed to pour out too much dough, making the dosa too thick and difficult to turn over. When I tried doing this, it got cut into these pieces that might have looked like animal crackers with chicken pox if they were not so out of shape. The dosa went through another phase which I have not posted here for the gentle and weak-stomached readers.

Side dish was made of a potato, an onion and some ginger garlic paste. I decided not to use chilli/ powder as an experiment to see if I can make interesting things without it . And this really was interesting

There it is folks! Our partial disaster of the week.

Maggi with excellently, brilliantly chopped vegetables.

Today is celebration of a wonderful person! So the maggi was made extra well. It was delicious.

Life moves on as usual. It gets colder and colder. Days get shorter. I get chattier and less bloggy.

More tomorrow!

The joy of sharing

This afternoon I had an amazing time cooking with friends. We found some free time.

I won't go into the details of the meal, but I learnt a few more tricks from my fellow experimentalists. It was a nice time and I will remember it. But I realized that the joy of cooking together and eating together is always shared, like the meal.

Today's meal:

What do I call it? It is boiled channa, with potatoes, tomatoes and onions, a sprinkling of chilli powder and salt, garnished with sliced cucumber.

Salad? sundal? Something.

I wonder, how it is that I manage to like everything that I cook. Is it that I cook so well or that I manage to convince myself that the food that I have cooked will be good because of the effort that went into it.

Lisa asked me this question today - does your food always turn out ok. I said, maybe my taste buds are actually dead and my brain is actually just convincing me that I am eating delicious food. We will never know folks.

The weather is getting a bit cold and I think I will need more than a sweater at night. I wonder if I will be able to continue eating the same stuff as I do now even in winter. If nothing else, the exhaust system (that consists of leaving the door open when I am cooking) is going to stop working. I may have to give up frying chillies and things like that.

Today's tip of the day: try my tips.

Today's other tip of the day: The more colourful your food is, the more its nutrition value will be. This applies only to freshly cooked food which does not consist of artificial colouring of course.

India's most hated

The dish that all Indian's unitedly hate : upma, also called uphittu or khichdi(?).

Of course that doesn't apply to me. I like it! Here it is:

Chop one onion, one part of a cauliflower, some beans. Any other vegetables that cook easily will do. Fry along with red chillies in a little oil. Sprinkle enough salt. When this looks a bit cooked, add rava (also known as suji or semolina) , pour in some water, cover and then cross your fingers that the end product is not either lumpy or over cooked. In both cases, you are left with uneatable gooey stuff, which can double as a punishment to kids who don't do their homework. I think it will get better results than the methods that teachers use today in school. I would recommend it if it weren't this inhuman. But if it turns out fine.. like it did for me today , you have a healthy and wholesome, tasty meal.

Last night was an exercise in tolerance as I sat eating a vegetable burger, while people around me were digging into 'spare-ribs'. These are supposed to be the ribs of a pig. No one who was eating it knew why they are 'spare'. Anyway, it was not an exercise in tolerance for me. I have grown up (if only a little) enough to understand and respect the eating habits of others. The others were the ones who couldn't understand why I wouldn't eat meat and hence were a little cold about it. But they survived last night, without getting converted or feeling guilty as I imagine they could.

Food is just something that we eat to get nutrition and go about living our (meaningless) lives. It cannot define who we are as people. I wish we could move on to an "eat and let eat" philosophy rather than be concerned about the habits of others.

Ok. That was today's preaching session for you.

Tata!

Ketchup makes an entry!

Hello world. Today's dinner was fit for the Queen.

Quite a few of you are going to go green just looking at it:

This took me just 10 minutes to make and it tastes great!!!

It is a dosa made of wheat flour topped with fried onions and tomato ketchup. And here is dessert:

Apple, strawberries and a few bits of nutty chocolate. This was actually an effort to clear my fridge of all the various things that had been there for too long. I think strawberries are over-rated. I am not going to have them again. The only thing is that the fruit looks good!

One of the good things about cooking for yourself alone - you don't have to share !!!! Heh Heh Heh

Blah

Do you see the guy peeping from behind in this picture? I thought it was bad one though.

My taste buds wanted some thing new! But me was too lazy to really innovate. So the inevitable happened. We got another boring dish: noodles with capsicums in tomato and onion sauce.

These are the chinese kind not the instant kind.

It didn't taste too bad. Spicy and fragrant.

Washing dishes is the worst part of the whole cooking-for-yourself thing. It is amazing how many vessels you can manage to use to make a simple dish.

Have you noticed that most natural food is either brown, red or green or shades of these colours only. Except for brinjals (aubergines) I cannot think of any different coloured food.

I can cook!

I remember a TV program called 'Yan can cook' that used to play around 15 years ago. I don't remember many details but I recall being fascinated by the huge knives the chef used for cutting lots of vegetables and meat extremely fast while chattering away. Interesting chap. May look for those videos on youtube later tonight.

Today's menu: Carrot sambhar and rice with pickle (not in picture). Cook rice in a pressure cooker and set aside. Boil toor dal. Chop one carrot, onion and tomato and fry in some oil. Add some chilli powder and salt. Some of that miraculous turmeric powder to this would be good. Maybe I should go in search of this someday. Once this is cooked, mix the dal in. Mix with rice. Ready to eat!



Vegetarians depend entirely on dal (lentils) as a source of protein. I don't take dal everyday because I find it too tiresome to watch the dal boil. It takes forever. Ideally, dal should be put into a pressure cooker to save on time and energy, but I have only a small one which means that I cannot put rice and dal together in it. Moreover, they have different cooking times.
To compensate, I snack on nuts.

Why am I a vegetarian? I think it is the most efficient kind of food. I see no point in force-feeding some animal, waiting for it to eat and digest that food and get fat and then kill it to eat it, when I could get all my food directly from plants. Just get closer to the source of nutrition rather than wait for it to go through one more wasteful cycle. Just my opinion. I do not intend to preach. But I do not buy the ideas of it being related to my religion or my love/disgust for animals etc either.

I never thought that it is strange to be eating with my hands till I met people who had never even contemplated eating that way. "What do you do when the food is hot?"
Well, what do you do about that!! You get to know before you burn your tongue !

Rice floor

Disaster strikes. The box of rice tipped over my entire kitchen and we had an early ricey snow indoors. Managed to salvage some of the rice and had to throw some away. Disturbing thoughts of people dying with the lack of food enter my mind. Wasting food is one of the greatest crimes one can commit. Think of all the energy that has gone into the growing and tending and transporting etc. Think of the man hours spent on it. etc. etc.

Then I remember, this rice will become manure someday and come back as more food. What a blessing nature is.

It was a handful folks and please let me not have ghosts haunting me about this for the rest of my life.

Today : tomato rice with cucumber salad. I don't feel like relating my recipe today. It feels too tiresome.

I remembered sadly the number of times I sent back salads in restaurants back at my last place of living because they looked old and unclean. That is one of the advantages of cooking for yourself: you know exactly what indignities your food has suffered.

Hurray for Chillies!

Some of the most brilliant inventions have been in cooking. It is a pity that there is no 'award' that goes to the best cooking inventions. If there was any such thing I would vote for our candidate for the day: aval upma (or avalakki uphittu (or aalu poha(or pounded rice ... umm ... dish (!)))).

A rich source of carbohydrate, starch and nothing else, it is a delicacy that Indians unite over.

Simple to make : dice one potato, one onion, a few small chillies. Wash some poha and leave it to soak in a little water. Heat some oil in a pan, add some mustard seeds when it is heated, then add in the chopped chillies and onion. Wait for a short while before adding the potato. This ideally should be followed by a sprinkle of haldi / turmeric to give the dish an out-of-this-world aroma. I don't have any here. Once the potatoes look slightly cooked add some salt and then the pounded rice. Sprinkle some water, cover for a few minutes and done!

Cooking for just yourself also offers other challenges; you must know exactly what vegetables you are going to feel like eating for the rest of the week and buy just enough. If this equation's coefficients are not calculated correctly, you end up with consequences such as having to go to the veggies store too often or store veggies for too long and see them get rotten.

Another thought: what would the world be without chillies! A much sadder place. Let's hear it for chillies!

Life saving Maggi

Essential food!

But did you know that it needs skill?

You need to cut veggies skillfully and apparently you need some special skills to avoid throwing the very essential "tastemaker" packet away. Which is what I seem to have done. There were three noodle 'bars' and only 2 tastemaker packets. So I used 'garam masala' again.

Here it is:

One potato, one capsicum and one half of a really long carrot. I cut the carrot small, the potato a little larger and the capsicum largest. I then fried these veggies a little before putting one noodle bar in, sprinkled masala and salt, poured in some water and covered it for ... guess what? of course! two minutes! Ready! Total time taken must have been around 15 minutes.

And of course, making instant noodles means that I am busy trying to finish an assignment to submit tomorrow. I wish I could also acquire the special skills needed to start working on assignments before the very last day.

What's life without some spice

And I mean some ginger, clove, cinnamon and so on.

I have noticed that cooking is a stress buster but it can also be an irritant when you are cooking for yourself:

Man 1 ( at office canteen after opening his lunch box) : Oh man! Not brinjals again!

Man 2 : Why don't you ask your wife to cook something else?

Man 1 : I am not married.

Man 2 : Then your mother?

Man 1 : I live alone.

Man 2 : Servant maybe?

Man 1: Nope. I cook for myself.

Man 2 : Eh? Then why cook brinjals everyday?

Man 1 : I like brinjals

Man 2 : But I just heard you complaining!

Man 1 : Yeah. I just like some nagging before meals!

My story cooking for myself is similar. Cooking is an art and creating art for no one else to admire is plain pointless!

I have also observed that my cooking reflects my general state. If I am really hungry, then my meal is either uncooked or burnt. The same if I feel lazy. If I am unhappy then my food is extra delicious.

Today I am busy, so here is my overcooked cabbage and lettuce rice soup.

I just put the vegetables and a few grains of rice into a pressure cooker, added salt and 'garam masala' and done. Cooking time around 30 minutes. Actual effort : 15 minutes for cutting the veggies.

Tastes bland. Some ground pepper would have cured that.

Later!