One Fleeting Moment

I have been feeling slightly under the weather off late and craving the hot, brothy soup that was once a childhood comfort food. One phone call and a few minutes at the stove later, I now have a vat of my mom's tomato soup to chug my way through.

So if you are feeling the chill, take half a dozen medium sized tomatoes, a small onion, a knob of fresh ginger, a large clove of garlic (optional) and give the veggies a few nice hacks with your trusty knife. Add four to five cloves, a bay leaf or two and two cups of water to the veggies and pressure cook the heck out of them. Run the resulting pulpy mess through a sieve, season with salt and pepper, add a dollop of butter and enjoy. For a thicker consistency, gently reheat the soup with some cornstarch slurry.

Labels: Food

There are somethings in life that just elude me. I have come to accept the fact that large water bodies and I do not get along. If I accidentally find myself in one, I will sink. Never mind what the laws of phsyics and the swimming instructor have to say on the matter. I will not float, I do not float. I will sunk to the bottom of the pool like a sack of potatoes and horrible, salty, hyper chlorinated water will enter my orifices and make me rather unhappy. I do understand that this inability to prosper and propel forward in all masses aquatic might become a question of life or death someday, but for now its just means that I am not too enthusiastic about heading to the beach. I can live with that.

Then there is the matter of card games. I don't get it. I simply cannot remember how a deck of cards is organised. I was the kid who could never figure out the solution to all those pesky probability problems involving cards. Luckily, Probability 101 is long gone and the way I look at it...what are the chances that my survival might depend on my ability to know a queen of something from a jack of something else? Not much, right. Unless I suddenly head off to Reno for a life of reckless gambling. And the probability of that happening is infinitesimal compared to the probability of me unexpectedly taking off for Ocean City. So there...peace.

But my absolute lack of understanding of timesheets does bung a spanner into my life every other week. I am the bane of all office managers and HR people. I am the person who has at least one mistake in her timecard, everytime-without fail. And if I am really, really good then it will be months before the bean counters in a distant office figure out that I have used the wrong billing codes for months!! Audits will be done and long letters will have to be written and signed before every wrongfully assigned penny is sent to its proper electronic ledger. However, unlike the previous can't dos which I have made peace with, I still have hope for my timecards.

A nagging cough and persistent showers has meant that I have had to stay indoors, consume steaming cups of cha and catch up with my reading. Three down and one more to go before the vacation officially ends.

Indian television sucks - there is no other way of putting it. Every news channel seems like an Indian language reincarnation of Fox News.

No more pictures to post, the camera has taken a vacation too.

And I now have an accent- none of the customer service reps seem to get what I am blathering about. Five excuse mes, three repetitions and some garbled Hindi has usually done the trick so far. Apparently, my Hindi proficiency has also gone down the drain.

where smoke belching chimneys are nestled within green hills and roads names are strangely musical. Where childhood games revolved around matching industrial products with the local factory names...Timken, Tayo, Agrico.
the "aloo chaap from bangaal" at Ambagan and the fair at Sabuj Sangha.

Labels: Nostalgia, Travel

A bowl of dosa dough (with instructions) happened to come by our way...thanks to N's mom. The batter like dough was transferred to a bigger bowl, covered with cling wrap and placed inside the draft less confines of the oven. We hovered around the oven impatiently, waiting for the dough to grow all nice and puffy. In our mother hen of a state, we might have even cooed at it. While the domestic diva within was delighted at the prospect of turning out crispy-on-the-oustide-but-soft-on-the-inside dosai's, we were even more delighted when the dough made us proud by puffing up to fill the bowl. We were ecstatic and in that fit of euphoria we...

Labels: Food

A warm and muggy August morning is probably not the best time to visit the 700 acres of marshland that constitute the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. We reached the park at around 9:30 am and walked around the ponds by ourselves before joining an interpretive tour at around 11:00 am. The blooming season for nuphars was over, but the lotus was going bonkers

Labels: Cinema