I was updating my resume recently and after a bit of counting on my fingers, I noted down a total experience of 8.3 years. I felt kind of low the rest of the day, for apparently no reason and then it hit me. My college years were far, far behind me; I was not quite young anymore; I was, gulp, middle
My friend Crl told me recently that November was upon us and it was almost time to soak raisins in rum (for Christmas cake). And that statement plus all the wonderful baking happening on Rachel Allen’s Cake Diaries made me want to bake a cake more than anything else ever did! Determined to make som
When we were children, we always wanted to eat at our favourite restaurant that was called Hassan (in Salalah, Oman). It was not always easy to convince our dad to take us there especially since the food almost always gave him a stomach upset. So he often made stories about the poor hygiene at restaurants, his favourites being that cooks didn’t wash the chicken and they didn’t wash their hands. Not very imaginative, which may be why they always fell on our deaf ears. We slyly roped in our mom to help our case because even then we knew that no man can deny his beautiful Mrs something as simple as a trip to the restaurant.
I can remember the restaurant very well. There were two huge dining rooms and some private booths as well, the doors of which children (the unruly ones, not us) loved to slam shut. We once spied a lone diner lick tomato sauce off the bottle rim and resolved never to use anything from an unsealed bottle. Other diners cooled the soup in large saucers for their kids, but
August has been a very good month, holiday wise. With four holidays and a couple of long weekends, a lot of non vegetarian cooking and eating happened in my house (my parents did the cooking on my request, and I did most of the eating). The Eid weekend had me dreaming of the wonderful Hyderabadi Du
In my younger days, shopping in Kottayam was restricted to a couple of places right in the heart of the overcrowded town. Post shopping, which invariably ended well past lunch time, we would go to Anand, a “pure” vegetarian restaurant which like all Anands, Anand Bhavans and Anand Vihars around the world served fluffy idlis, crispy dosas and vadas, piping hot rice and oodles of ghee along with a selection of South Indian curries (all of which looked and tasted somewhat similar) irrespective of the hour.
Today, the town has many more places to shop at, though this is not necessarily a good thing. When I was there a couple of months back, I had a tough time deciding where to shop because my dad simply refused to take me everywhere (- he looked horrified when I suggested this, as though I had pointed a fully loaded gun at him); second, I had to choose between blues and pinks, reds and yellows, whites and blacks and that took me considerable time, though my mom happily helped me through
Samosa is fried triangular pastry stuffed with mashed potatoes. It makes a perfect tea time snack. I had never known hunger until I started life in my college hostel. The food was so pathetic that we would mostly skip meals or eat just enough to sustain life. Choosing the worst dishes on the menu wo
InduGetsCooking 