football loser

I'm a loser by my friends' standards. Why? Simply because I've left this 2010 World Cup Football slip me by like a lazy summer day. Except I would have made more of an effort to enjoy the summer day. So, I'm a loser because though I know that Germany trashed England 4-1, I didn't stay glued to the idiot box chewing through my wrist in an effort to keep from throwing up.

Now, don't mistake me I love football... and I followed it religiously up until the last World Cup when monsieur Zidane retired from the scene in 2006. But somehow... with all that's going on in the news... I almost feel like a hypocrite for watching a game on which millions of dollars are wasted. I know sports/art/culture cannot be on the same scale of comparison when talking about Genocide, child abuse, slaughter... sigh... you're right, I am a loser.

facing a writer's block or a black out!

so ideas keep dropping into my head like coins in a fountain. plink... oh that's a nice idea. plink plink... oohh that's a great idea. now i used to write quite profusely when i was in school... short stories, poetry, full length attempts at a novel.... but somehow somewhere that's all taken a backseat.
now by the time i put my pen to paper to sketch out an idea, i'm weary. yes, the very act of uncapping my pen, smoothing down a sheet of paper and thinking of writing tires me out.
i wonder how many writers have faced this moment. and i know the blame lies squarely with me... just the thought of writing scares me now. i suddenly think of a chore that has to be completed, trash that has to be taken out, a friend who has to be called...
i'm hoping to change that... but i know the change will happen when i really put my heart and mind to it.

blog block

I'm back to blogging after eons! And I realize having a blog is like having a baby, you've got to grow with it, you've to feed it your words, nurture it in your thoughts, and clean it up every now and then. Here's hoping I manage to do all that and retain my sanity.

Ayurveda at your finger tips!

Disclaimer: I'm not a certified physician or doctor, just someone who prefers a natural and wholistic approach to small ailments. While I might drink honey and lemon with hot water every morning to detoxify, I would also check myself into a hospital ASAP if i'm suffering from acute stomach pain. Listed below are small remedies that my mother passed on to me, and ones I found to be very useful. On the plus side, there are no side-effects!

1. Drink two tall glasses of warm water first thing in the morning. It revs up your system and cleans out your bowels in less than half an hour. Adding a tbsp of lemon juice and honey is an excellent way to detoxify.
2. A spoonful of roasted ajjwain with a small glass of warm water is a quick cure for a bloated stomach, and or gas.
3. Tulsi tea helps ease a bad cough. Simply stew a handful of tulsi leaves in water, stir in some honey and sip.
4. Boiling cumin seeds and drinking the water helps speed up recovery from a cold.
5. A glass of milk with some pepper and honey in it helps chest congestion.
6. Boil a piece of ginger in water, strain, add lemon and honey to it to make a soothing tea for a bad throat.
7. This might sound really weird but it has worked for me every time! If suffering from constipation, in the morning on an empty stomach, swallow two tbsp of castor oil and follow it up with a little warm water. It works like magic.

... more to come later... so surf in again!

Classics Revisited!

Following is a list of some literature-shattering classics that every bookworm worth his or her salt must read! I've added an (x) next to the ones i've read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (x)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (x)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (X)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (X)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (X)
6 The Bible - (X)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (X)
8 1984 - George Orwell ()
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (X)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens(x)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (x)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (X)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare ()
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier(X)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (X)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot(X)
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (X)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (x)
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (x)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (X)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Graham()
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (X)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (X)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (X)
34 Emma - Jane Austen(X)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen(X)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (X)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (X)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (x)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (X)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (X)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins(x)
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery(X)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (X)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (X)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (x)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen(X)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth (X)
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (X)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (x)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (x)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (x)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (x)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold(X)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas(X)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (x)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (X)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (X)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker(X)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett(X)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce(X)
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray(X)
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens(X)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker(X)
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert(X)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry (X)
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (x)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (X)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad(X)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (X)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (X)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (X)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo ()

Rasam-licious (the Tirunelveli style)

Food: a basic need, a creative expression, an aphrodisiac.


What is it about food that drives the world? In my favorite stories, the orphan always got into trouble because he wanted an extra piece of bread or just that tiny morsel of bread. In a recent book I read, Suite Francaise (I strongly recommend it, btw), entire families don’t fear the invasion of the Germans as much as they fear biting into that last piece of foie gras. Food is that much of a motivator; a powerful element in its own right.

We play with it, we ponder it, we gulp it, we dismiss it, we hate it, we love it, it brings us to the brink of ecstasy…you can never be indifferent to it.

When God created this world, one of the first things he said to Adam was “Go on buddy, and eat of everything in this garden because it is all for you.” Interestingly enough, it was food — that ripe and devastatingly tempting piece of fruit — that brought about his fall too!

So, here in this blog, I’ve decided to explore food and post recipes of my favorite dishes and my not so favorite ones (but ones I eat simply because my mom told me as a child that it would make my hair grow longer or aid in the functioning of that pesky little thing called brains!)


So, starting with my all time favorite dish: the beguilingly simple Rasam. But first a brief history!!

Wikipedia kindly informs me that Rasam is known as Chaaru in Telugu, and in the 7th century, the Iyengars in Tamil Nadu called it Chaathamudhu. Soon, by the time the 20th century rolled around, it was being consumed as Rasam by all true blue South Indians.

All that aside, have you ever deeply inhaled the smells that emanate when Rasam is being made? First is the heady scent of the ghee, then the delicate fragrance of the curry leaves, followed by the pungency of hing (or LG asafoetida). Then comes the absolutely mesmerizing aroma of garlic (if like me you crush it and sautee it in the oil) and afterwards is the intense odor of the red chilies and pepper from the rasam powder. When the tamarind and tomato juice is bubbling, how can anyone resist the call of this siren? A handful of aromatic coriander does the trick right before you ladle the whole lot on to a plateful of steaming rice and settle down for a good ol’ south Indian meal! Hungry yet?


Now for my recipe! (note: I’m bad with measurements cuz I learnt the whole thing by trial and error, so feel free to experiment according to what you like and don’t. Oh, and, I’ve also learnt that if you don’t let yourself be afraid of cooking, it actually gives you a chance to come up with brand spanking new creations!)


RASAM:


The individual elements:

Tamarind: the size of a small lime (the green one).

Tomato: 1 ripe. (I once substituted cherry tomatoes cuz I had run out of the regular ones and it worked just fine…in fact the rasam was a lil juicier.)

Curry leaves: as much as you like

Garlic: as many cloves as you can stand. I stick to 3 cloves, maybe 4 if I want it a little garlicky.

Rasam powder: I like the MTR brand.

Hing (LG): a pinch or two.

A spoon of ghee or any oil. Ghee gives the rasam a delicious flavor. And come on, how much harm is a spoon of ghee going to do to your diet!

Some mustard (half a teaspoon?)

Black Pepper powder (optional)

Coriander leaves


The whole:

Warm some water and soak the tamarind and tomato in it for 15 minutes. Crush the tamarind and once you’ve extracted all you can from it, throw out the remains. Then crush the tomato in the water too and depending on how much you like that particular fruit (or is it a vegetable…oh well, the debate continues) you can choose the amount of pulp you want to leave in the water.

Heat the ghee and throw in the mustard and curry leaves. Once it starts to sputter and go crazy all over the place, put in the garlic and hing and sauté for a minute or till the garlic gives off its aroma. Don’t let the garlic burn. Put in three teaspoons of rasam powder and sauté. You can add more powder later if you want the rasam to be a little more intense. I add pepper powder here for added spiciness cuz I like my tongue to be burning and my eyes to be streaming when I’m eating it! Give it a few minutes and pour in the tamarind/tomato water. On medium flame bring to boil (give it 10-15 mins) and add salt to taste. Then right before you take it off the flame, throw in some coriander leaves.

Enjoy!