My first party with homemade snacks

We don't get many visitors at my home. When they do come, they don't stay long. When they do stay its usually unplanned and with no time to cook a meal at home. We'd suddenly realise it was dinner time and order some biryanis. And this was never for more than four people. You can now safely assume that i don't have much experience in entertaining people at my home. You can also probably imagine how tensed i was when i had to host a pre-planned snacks party for eight and it was expected that whatever was served would be made by me.

Because there was cake

The animals were the first to disappear - into the mouths of waiting kids

Yes, birthday cake! My son's first birthday cake! No i didn't bake. I just ate. Lots of it. More than i should if i were sane. But it was a birthday cake, and i am supposed to eat my little one's share too, right? Right?

I know i have been completely absent from the blog this year and mostly absent last year too. I wanted at least one post to show in the archives against 2013, so hurriedly typing this up before i am too late and the year whizzes past me before i can take notice. And i am now truly amazed by new moms who have been doing fabulous work to keep their blogs active.

Back from a trip to nostalgia

Gauva tree near Grandma's place, close to this tree, and a butterfly fluttering by.

When you have made lots of friends and you plan on making a disappearing act, you should leave a word lest they worry about you. And while i have done the disappearing act a few times now since starting the blog less than a year ago, i seem to have still not learnt the 'leaving a word' part. I had gone off to my parents place again last week and spent nearly a whole week eating, shopping, and visiting relatives; and despite my best intentions, i simply had no time to come back here and say hello.And i have other excuses too, like my camera battery charger going kaput and such other lame ones. So anyway when i saw a mail from a blogger friend today enquiring if all was OK, i was guilty and ready to post something even if it was nothing interesting and no recipe.

And while my only intention was to do a quick post, as soon as i logged into blogger, i started opening links of recent blog posts that i missed and that seemed too good to ignore. I was sufficiently distracted and started to feel guilty again that this post has nothing to offer, that i am talking without having anything to say. So i won't mind if you too have nothing to say about it. Hope you have been well.

This is the tree that bore these fruits

Fund Drive for Vaidehi Ashram of Destitute Girls, Hyderabad

Siri of Cooking with Siri is organising a fund drive for Vaidehi Ashram which is a home for destitute girls based in Hyderabad, India. The fund drive is from 26 January 2012 to 25 February 2012.To encourage people to donate to this wonderful cause, she has rallied together more food bloggers to sponsor raffle prizes. You can donate any amount with a minimum of $10 or Rupees 500. Each $10 donation will give you one raffle ticket towards a raffle prize of your choice. For Example, a donation of $20 will fetch you 2 raffle tickets which can be used to choose on any of the raffle prizes. You can use all your raffle tickets on one prize (in turn increasing the chances in the lucky draw) or on different prizes. Some prizes will only be shipped within India or US or UK and a few of them can be shipped worldwide. So choose a prize based on whether it can be delivered to you. You can see the list of prizes and the codes here.

Once the donation process is completed, please forward your payment confirmation message to info(dot)siri(at)gmail.com, clearly specifying which raffle prize(s) you are interested in. Within 24 hours, your name and contributed amount will be added to the 'Fund Drive Supporters List' at the very end of Siri's blog post here. If you want to stay anonymous, please let Siri know in advance. For any correspondence/questions/queries, please send an email to info.siri@gmail.com.

When i heard about the fund drive, I wanted to contribute a raffle prize so much, but i was too late as the fund drive had already begun. Now all i can do is urge you to support in this good cause and help Siri collect as much as possible for those dear girls. $1764 have been contributed till now. All photos are by Siri.

Indian Gooseberries (Usirikaya) - Revisiting Childhood

The fruit in the above picture is called a gooseberry (not to be confused with this gooseberry which is mainly used for pickles) and has a unique sour tang to it. The sourness, if i have to describe it to someone who has never eaten it, is somewhat close to that of a raw mango. These were sold in heaps on mobile carts outside my school and were eaten raw with a sprinkle of salt and red chili powder. And i have had my share as a kid. During school days, there was also a tree right next to the building where we lived and there were at least 10 kids around my age (plus or minus two years) living in that area. The whole gang of kids could always be found playing in the vicinity of the gooseberry tree. A vigorous shake of the tree would result in a rain of these green berries and the kids would rush to pick as many as we could hold in out tiny hands. The branches of the tree are quite fragile, i know now because i had a fractured right hand while playing around/ climbing the tree when i was five. It wasn't all bad, all i remember about that accident now is that i got to skip a whole set of exams in my first grade class because my writing hand was hurt and got to munch a whole lot of gooseberries too ;-)

All this revisiting the childhood is now happening because when my parents visited me a couple of weeks ago, they brought these gooseberries along. I hadn't eaten one in almost fifteen years. Turns out a tree miraculously appeared in their backyard and it bore first fruits this year. And how i could i not get a share of these childhood favourites. The black and white photo goes to Susan's Black and White Wednesday event at The Well Seasoned Cook.
So did you have a taste of these gooseberries?

Sankranti Subhakankshalu/ Happy Pongal

Wishing everyone a very happy and prosperous Sankranti. Here's a visual treat with a collection of festival pictures. Have a great time, everyone.

 My mother-in-law and i took a little more than an hour yesterday evening to make this  Sankranti muggu (design made with rice flour) in front of our house. The muggu is then decorated with turmeric, vermilion, some regi pallu, tomatoes or dosakaya (lemon cucumber?) and coins. The right side design was done entirely by me. I used to do these designs with mom when i was much younger, but have lost touch when i left my home town and state and country for higher education and then job. It was great to find out i could still do this. Though i have to admit that i practised thrice on paper before starting with the rice flour on the floor. It starts with 25 dots, continuing with 23, 21 so on up to 1 by reducing one dot on each side. The dots are then joined to make the design. The muggu made with lines as seen on the left is the more traditional one for Sankranti.

Pressure cooker in action

This was a picture i clicked in my mom's kitchen, a couple of months ago. The colour photo has very little difference from its black and white counterpart. Its just the wall that has colour, a reddish brown granite. The pressure cooker and the frying pan themselves are made of white aluminium and black plastic. (This was cooking in that frying pan on that day). As far as i know, mom has been using these utensils for everyday cooking for more than two decades. They don't make them like that anymore is what i hear these days with both mom and mother-in-law still using kitchen utensils and appliances from when they got married and first started cooking. Now-a-days, the husband and i expect our kitchen utensils to last about two years and appliances to last some five years. Half of my frying pans have already lost their handles, and its just about two years since purchase.

I have missed Black and White Wednesdays the last few weeks and i am happy to be back.

Carrots prepped for juicer - Black and White Wednesday

I liked this picture from the minute i first downloaded it from my camera. It was clicked in natural light in the morning close to my kitchen door. The light and dark sides are clearly visible and i loved the delicious shade of orange on the carrots, which you will now have to imagine as i chose this for Black and White Wednesday. It looked artistic, even if that thought was only mine. 

I had washed the carrots, scraped the skin, sliced off the heads and tails, and sliced them in half vertically so they could pass through the juicer without too much coaxing. They were all prepped and ready to go into the juicer when the food blogger in me woke up and said, don't you want to photograph this? That's how this photo got its place here.

Pomegranates on Tree - Black and White Wednesday

I am back for another black and white Wednesday. This is another photo from grandma's village. I realized recently that it is an old habit of mine to carry my 'point and shoot' digital camera around ever since i bought my first digital camera about seven years ago. And the village folks are generally amused when they see a young woman walking around the village with a camera in her hand, clicking at everything she sees. It so happened that six years ago when i visited this village i clicked some photos of a mother hen with about a dozen new-born chicks. They were really cute to look at. Apparently the lady who owned them still asks grandma about me and every single time they talk about how i went around those chicken for good photos. Don't know where i lost those old photos now. At least this time around, i have this blog to preserve these memories and to share with you.

The above picture has two little pomegranates on the tree. There is also a guava tree growing right next to the pomegranate tree and there is one little 'not yet ripe' guava amidst the large guava leaves. Can you spot it?

Happy Dussehra friends :-)

Cooking in an Indian village two generations ago

I have told you that i recently went to visit my parents in Vijayawada. My grandma lives in a small village nearby, so i usually also go visit her whenever i go to Vijayawada. Also because she loves me to bits and asks me when i am coming to visit her again only a week after my latest visit. My aunt's family also live in that village and my aunt usually does the cooking part now that grandma has become quite old. Coming to the picture of discussion today, this was how the rice was cooked that day, that was eaten with fish and chicken curries.

This is similar to the basic three stone cook stove mentioned here (My friends tell me i have an addiction for wikipedia, possibly caused by an obsession for perfection). Bricks are set up on three sides to balance a cooking pot and firewood or dried cow-dung cakes are used as fuel and pushed in from the open side. Food is cooked on the open flame and controlled by the amount of firewood placed under the pot. This was how my grandma always cooked, she had two such cook stoves side by side and managed to cook delicious meals on them during our childhood summers spent in that village. I guess this type of cooking is almost non-existent today, even in villages, because everyone now cooks with LPG or natural gas or electricity.

This Flower is a Chocolate Cake - Black and White Wednesday

I can't believe its Wednesday again, already! Time for another black and white Wednesday and i have not done a single recipe post since the last one. What can i say, i have been busy and time flew. To give you some context - My dad retired from his job last month after having completed almost thirty five years of service. He had a single employer all his life, the state government. Those were the days when private employers weren't big in India and a young man was deemed eligible for marriage only if he had a government job. And so he kept at it for the better part of his life, where colleagues became family friends.

And when he was throwing these friends a farewell party at the end of last month, i couldn't be with him on his big day because i was going to spend it with my in-laws celebrating the festival of Ganesh Chaturthi. I can't even type this without feeling extremely guilty about it. My way of making amends (to myself, mostly) was to visit my parents a week later, and bake my dad some sweet goodies. My dad has a sweet tooth (a huge one) and loves everything sweet. So, i baked him this chocolate cake, another orange chocolate chunk cake, a bunch of peanut butter cookies (that were promptly shared with some of his now ex-colleagues) and a larger bunch of wholewheat oats cookies (the recipe will come soon).

The recipe for this chocolate cake is the same as the one i have posted in June and have referred to in many posts since then, it has become a family favourite. What's new about today's post is that i got myself a new silicone cake pan recently that is the shape of a flower and i have baked all my cakes in it since then, i had to share with you. Today i am traveling back to Hyderabad and once i settle down, hopefully the recipe posts will start coming soon. Oh yes, i have been clicking photos of mom's dishes in the kitchen the last few days - you will have to wait a little more to see them.

This photo goes to Susan's Black and White Wednesday event. An event i now look forward to.

My burger takes many sides - Black and White Wednesday

We had this chicken burger for dinner one night before i started blogging. This was one of the first photos i clicked after having taken a fancy to photographing foods. I was also previously not too keen on presenting foods well, i would just throw whatever i cooked on a plate and hand it over to my husband. Then during one of our usual chit-chat sessions, my mother-in-law told me how much her son liked well presented food. This was news to me, and i was appalled at the way i was serving him lunches and dinners with zero thought to presentation for a whole year. So this photo was from that time when i started giving presentation a little thought and wanted to click a photo to remember my humble beginnings.

 

The burger is made of grilled chicken breast fillet (cooked similar to this) and the sides are grilled pink onion slices, fresh tomato slices, small scoops of avocado, fried fresh green chilies, pickled jalapeno slices, and grilled green bell peppers.

Since i don't have the process pictures for this dish, this never made it to the blog till today. And today this gets to see light because of Susan's Black and White Wednesday event.

Starfruits and Pink Guavas and South Indian Temples

On Janmashtami (also called Krishna Jayanthi or Krishnashtami) which was last Monday this year according to the lunar calendar, me, the husband and his parents went to a visit the temples at a nearby place called Chilkur. One is a temple of multiple Hindu Gods and is called the Swami Narayan Temple. This Hindu temple is present in many countries abroad too and the largest Swami Narayan temple abroad is in London. I went to the London temple and it is exquisite with beautifully carved interiors and statues of Gods and Goddesses, and so peaceful. You should definitely visit if you have the chance.

Swami Narayan Temple at Chilkur

The Vedic school (Gurukul) adjoining Swami Narayan Temple

Unripe almonds on tree

Does that sound like an exotic recipe name? Well, I am actually talking about an almond tree i spotted the other day and couldn't stop clicking at. Now having downloaded the pics onto my computer only hours ago, i wanted to post them here right away. 

Little kids were pelting stones at the tree to get the occasional ripe fruit to fall down. While i was looking at them, one of them came forward and offered to climb the tree and pluck the fruits right out with a higher percentage of success, and the other kids gladly agreed. That kid is on the tree in this below pic and already climbed quite high. Can you spot the kid on the tree in this pic? One foot is clearly visible and the rest of the person is camouflaged behind the large leaves of the tree. You can zoom in on the picture for a better view.

And can you count how many green and purple almonds there are on this tree - within the below picture that is. 

I spent a few minutes counting. My count was 29. Just for fun, let me know your count too - do you match me or beat me? Waiting to hear your comments.
Happy Weekend! :-)

Mortar and Pestle and Measuring Cups

The last two days i have been busy cooking, shopping, eating out and talking, just couldn't make time for writing. And it almost made me crazy. Last night going to sleep i could only dream of what recipes to write about next. And i even woke up in the middle of the night wondering what 'layered' cake i should bake next and how i should go about the process. I am getting a little hyperactive, i think. Can i pretend to be sane and blame it on the century's largest lunar eclipse of last night? (changes in the moon can make people loony they say!) Now I have a trip to the farmers market planned in the next few hours and have lunch to serve and i really am freaking out here, am i not? You are right, i just need to calm down and prioritise. You make it sound easy but i really am the 'freaking out at the slightest opportunity' type who needs everything planned to perfection.

OK now that i got all that ranting out of the way, i wanted to tell you about my new mortar and pestle that i got since my last post. One made of white marble stone and looks so cute sitting on my black kitchen countertop. We went to Shilparamam (take a look at the arts, crafts and cultural village of Hyderabad here) on this cool monsoon evening to have some piping hot traditional oil-fried snacks. Yum! Oh yes and got this mortar and pestle set at a small price of Rs 130.