Pumped

Pumpkin poriyal and rice. Just boiled pumpkin and garnished with red chili.

Salt as a preservative

Salty okra - store bought but great chapatis - home made.

Not so Souperb

Cucumber soup! One chopped cucumber, fried lightly with crushed garlic in olive oil. Then pressure cooked. Mixed with some corn flour. Then cooled. Then ground in the blender. Garnished with dried spices.
As tasty as it sounds, it wasn't very. I think I added a little too much corn flour.

Which colour do you choose

Pasta with tomato, red bell pepper, parsley, garlic and cream.

Treats from Leftovers

Wheat flour-corn flour dosa with cabbage-spring onion- tomato (with basil leaves and garlic)  fry. The cabbage fry was supposed to be the main dish, the dosa was an after-thought. A record number of ingredients today. And as always, the reason was simply that all these ingredients were getting old and needed to be used up fast. But by  no means was this a bad meal!

I Ate This

Katrika poriyal (Aubergine fry) and rice, with tomato-onion-cucumber-curds salad.

I wonder why I provide translations. You know katrika poriyal. (Nutty face. You have a question mark face I can see. With you know what.)

The easy way out

Salad: chopped cucumber, chopped mozzarella, pickled olives. Seasoning: oregano, pepper and olive oil. Yes, that was dinner followed by a large glass of milk and some fruit.

Purslane, aubergine, capsicum

Lunch  = keera sambhar and rice. This is supposed to be something called "purslane". It was slightly bitter but bitter good.

Peas rice with one aubergine fry and one capsicum fry.

Pasta Properness

So. I followed a recipe that I read online. Almost to the dot. That is I replaced an ingredient with another and I didn't really pay attention to the time for which stuff was to be heated, boiled, fried etc. And no attention whatsoever to the quantities.
Here is the (modified) recipe: Boil pasta of your choice according to the pack instructions and keep aside. Heat some oil (recipe said to use olive and I did, but I am not sure it is absolutely necessary to stick to this) and add crushed garlic into this till it is cooked. You can check if it is cooked by gently pushing a spoon into it; it must feel soft. To this, add one chopped tomato and keep the heat on medium till it is cooked. Check with the same spoon test. Add the boiled pasta to this with some chopped fresh basil leaves(<-link). Finally, add in some "cooking cream" and turn off the heat. The recipe said to add cheese, which I had run out of. Add salt. I am glad I made the switch, because I think cheese wouldn't give this dish the creamy texture that it had.

I was really delighted with the taste and flavour that was mainly from the garlic and the leaves of course. Basil leaves are of the family of tulsi. The leaves that I have here smell like tulsi but do not have as strong a flavour, much larger in size and have a different shape.

The recipe is so very simple, does not need any skill at all. It does need some special ingredients, but they are not too hard to get. The total preparation + cooking + eating time was a little under 35 minutes! Well it might take you a little longer because I think I gulped the whole bowl down in less than a minute !!