The Strangest Dream I Ever Did Dream

It went like this. I was in one of those situations where I couldn't make myself heard. Like I am trying to scream and no sound would come out. I'm waving my arms about and kicking up quite a dust but no one seems to notice. Where do these situations happen? Mostly in dreams I suppose.
So, the reason for all that arm flailing, dust kicking and screaming was to get Sushi's attention (in the dream) as he was about to, get this, put 2 large tablespoons of white flour in his tea, thinking it was sugar. He had his first sip of the tea, and only then seemed to realise I had been frantically trying to get his attention all this while.
The invisibility cloak lifted, I tried to salvage the situation or rather the tea. I remember suggesting that we could add more flour to the tea, to get tea flavoured dough, which probably we could try and make some pancakes with.
Don't know how that would have tasted in after sleep reality, but I am willing enough to try that experiment with coffee liquor in place of tea.
The other thing is, I'm on the look out for a good dream interpreter these days.

Colourful Spirits

Guys, on a Friday night of merry making with buddies, go into a huddle, with a glass each of dubious murky brown substance. They probably have a bowl of peanuts by the side, and they talk "guy stuff".

Girls, when they make merry on a Friday night with buddies, like to dress things up. - Thus-


That's Pinacolada for you. Agreed, it needs pineapple not lemon to look pretty, but we had none on us then. What you do is, you start with some neutral coloured spirit. Then you choose a lot of juices in a wide array of colours and flavours to suit your mood. And then -- you dress things up. Like the pic above, it's Bacardi (or anything else, the neutrality of the colour matters - remember?) coupled with coconut cream and pineapple juice. Add the lemon to achieve a bit of contrast.

Here's another -
The same(or any other) neutral coloured base. To that, we added grape juice. So, I guess, this would be ..wine? What you are supposed to notice in the pic is the salt rimmed glasses(we stuck it on with lemon juice), the contrast the drinks make with the curtains, and the diamond rings on our fings.

The "Bloody Merry" below - that was crafted with a good deal of care out of pureed tomatoes, ground garlic and green chili (spicy was the mood), and, say it with me, a neutral coloured spirit.
Pretty neat huh?

Sushi, he invented an interesting cocktail too, because, I am after all his chief drinking buddy. O'course it's still murky brown coloured, but there's a legitimate reason for that. The cocktail in question is tea-based. We would have called it "Long Island Iced tea" had we not discovered just in time that Long Island Iced tea doesn't have ANY tea in it! Who'd have known.!! However, the neutral coloured spirit with iced tea tastes just fine - so we choose to call our little invention - "Iced tea punch".

Happy merry making and hope your spirits stay colourful.

The Mother of All Misunderstandings and Disaster Averted

So, there I was, googling along, like I usually do.
"Tiramisu" I typed into the search box. Click here, if you are hazy about what Tiramisu is because it is important that we have our basics clear in the first place.

Now, most of the recipes going around google say that if I am to make this the authentic Italian way, I should have at its base - Lady Finger. Lady Finger to me is "Bhindi". In Minnesota, or the whole of US for that matter, they like to call it "Okra", which is fine by me. Confusing, but just fine.

Tiramisu, I happen to have eaten at what I thought was a pretty authentic Italian place and some not so authentic Italian places too. It has always tasted delicious, but never like bhindi. Not that I don't like bhindi. In fact it's one of my favourite veggies.

I'm just getting around to wondering whether I should be using the over ripe bhindis or slightly new ones for my Tiramisu, when the recipe describes that I must dip my "bhindi" in a mixture of chocolate, coffee and brandy! Something felt terribly wrong! Very wrong! I googled again...

Care to know what "Lady Finger" is ? Here
Phew! That was close!

The Traditional Fish Curry

While my 'other half' is more excited about trying her hands at multi-cultural continental cuisine, I stick to honing my skills on the home-grown ones. Not that I don't like 'her kind' of cuisine (I do! what will all that cheese, shrimp, ham and the like), but I enjoy cooking 'my kind' more, since it feels quite empowering being able to handle 'n' types of spices and 'm' kinds of oils patiently and coming up with something finger-lickin' good!

So, the weekend gone by I felt like having the good-ol' fish curry that my mom cooked back home when I was a kid. Now, I am not an avid blogger (as you might have guessed; this is my first post!..even though Sashimi keeps mentioning me here and there in her antics), so I forgot to take pictures while I was cooking. I'll try to be more considerate next time ;).

I'll keep it short (I personally find ramblings very boring unless there are images/pictures/visuals to support the content). The fish of interest is Rohu (no idea what's the common name though scientific taxonomy attributes it to "Labeo Rohita"..thanks there, Wiki!). People in northern and eastern part of my country are quite fond of it.

So, I took a fistful of mustard seeds and garlic bulbs (or pods? or buds?..what's it called, dammit?!) and centrifuged them in my grinder with a little water. I added some red chilli powder, pepper, turmeric and salt in the resulting paste. That takes care of phase one. Oh, I forgot to mention that I had cleaned up the sliced rohu and kept it in refrigerator earlier, so technically this mustard business is in phase two.

A little mustard paste is smeared on the fish slices and shallow-fried (umm..well, you can deep fry it and have it just like that..it tastes yum!! but that deserves a separate blog entry, so we will proceed). Meanwhile I had heated up some oil (ok, this needs mention: "oil" everywhere in this post means "mustard oil", any other will ruin the stuff!) in another pan with a li'l bit o' fenugreek. The mustard paste is deep-fried in it till it turns golden-brown, at which point I diced a tomato in it. Well then, the deal is almost over; you put the fried fish in the mixture, add a little water, salt it up a bit, leave for 5 mins and you are ready to rock! We usually relish it with freshly-cooked steamed rice. Feel free to experiment and add you own touch!

My Week Night Veggie Innovations

We are doing what we can to reduce our calorie intake. (I can't say for sure if it's working, but isn't it the thought that counts, or some such thing) With this noble thought in mind, on most week nights we have fairly simply done vegetables - home cooked, and plain chapatis. Now, the part about "simple" and "plain" gets pretty depressing at times. One night, not very long ago, Sushi rebelled. He wouldn't see another lauki until Armageddon cometh. The hapless lauki in the mean time was pining away in the refrigerator, slowly changing hue from a fresh youthful green to a pale, forlorn yellow. It was very nearly on the brink of going a murky brown, and time had come to take decisive action and reconcile the warring parties.

That's when some forgotten memory started to stir and it turned up "Kofta Curry". Kofta, as I remember, used to be a part of my childhood meals. Grandfather's faithful servant, the forgotten species that actually reside in separate quarters in your house and pretty much do everything that there is to be done around the place, had this item in his repertoire. Incidentally, the "faithfulness" of Shankar dada is a subject that's up for debates and it invariably is, at a lot of family gatherings. He's even suspected of having evil intentions pertaining to the life of my grandfather, which if nothing else, does show a stoutness of the heart.

Well, baba, that's my grandfather, strolled out of this world at his own pace and time and no one does doubt till this date, the culinary abilities of Shankar dada. Which is not to say that I got in touch with him for the recipe of Kofta curry! He was known for other nefarious activities too like being a rickshaw puller to make an extra buck and peddling contraband articles, so I'd rather not run that risk! Nope the kofta curry recipe came from good ole google of course.

The recipe? Oh yes, that. All you need to do is to get the bai to grate the murky brown lauki(if yours is still in the green of its youth, you may not really want to wait for the murky brownish-ness). To the grated lauki you add seasonings as per taste . I used asafoetida, cumin and coriander powder, salt, red chili and gram flour to make it all bindy and sticky.

You then shape the bindy and sticky mixture into spherical kofta shapes..which when fried right gives this -

Onion and tomatoes and ..er...I forget exactly what, but general spices make up a curry. In that you swim your koftas . Thus -

Phew! And thus your home economy is saved from the near loss of good lauki. (Lauki, for those who call it something else is "Bottle Gourd")

Swedish Meat Balls

..Or that's what they were intended to be at any rate. But they were a disaster on so many levels that it's only now that I can bring myself to write about it, precisely a month and a half later.

Let's start with the equipment.

My "meat ballers" are in fact not "meat ballers" at all. I don't even know what they are any more. They sit pretty in my kitchen, looking like a pair of quaint scissors, but they do nothing.
I could use them for ice cream scoop I suppose, but I don't want to jinx my ice cream. Why they aren't meat ballers? Because they don't ball nothing! And it ain’t my fault neither. I had learnt from my

Cajun Patties experience and put in plenty of bread crumbs in the ground meat and cream too, which altogether is a different story. But, the ballers wouldn't do their thing and no use blaming the bread crumbs or lack thereof, 'coz here's proof I could do it by hand just fine!

(I put them in the freezer just in case, to be absolutely sure)

This brings me to the next part of my disaster tale. The moment I put my perfect, rather,” perfect looking” meat balls into the wok they just came apart! Agreed they didn't turn to powder, but they lost all form! To this date I can't say why, but nasty shock that. Nothing I have seen in my 9 and 20 summers had prepared me for it.

Putting a brave face on it and moving on we tried to do what we could about the curry. Can't say, "moving on" really, we were just in a state of denial. So, then, cream forms an essential part of the curry in Sweden and also part of the ground meat for that matter. We were wondering if the Swedish like things over sweet, when we realised, the recipe said "sour cream". We had in fact put in whipping cream! Trying to fire fight the situation, I poured in some curd. Curd is after all sour. So, logically speaking it should have offset the effects of the whip in the cream.
Well -

Sushi put a stoic face on it. But I did catch him stealing bread slices from the fridge late in the night. I ate away valiantly, but had to accept defeat at the hands of leftovers at breakfast next morning.

And now, really, I have to go fortify myself with some strong black coffee and hope to put this behind me!

Popeye Chicken

So, here goes the story.

It was a week night. Monday at that. Beginning of the work week. We are pretty subdued on Mondays. By Wednesday, we start to perk up. By Thursday, we are rubbing our hands in anticipation. And Friday nights?! Those are the best of all. We celebrate, go out, cook, eat, squabble, argue, etc. In short, Friday nights are what we live for.

Anyway, like I was saying, it was still Monday night and subdued we were. In accordance with the mood , a mellow mushroom in spinach was on the menu. I had sorted through the spinach bundle and discarded those leaves that weren't quite up to standard - roughly 49%. I had then painstakingly washed each individual leaf that did come up to scratch - say 51%. About three quarters of an hour's worth of labour and the leaves were all squeaky clean. They were then put in a pressure cooker, to soften them under , u know, pressure.

That's when Sushi marched into the kitchen. He demanded to know what was under pressure.

Me: "Spinach"

Him: Hmm

He then peeks into the freezer and espies chicken.

Him: Out out out
Me: Me?

Alrite, I put the mushrooms back into the fridge and rush to get my camera. Sushi is meanwhile vigorously attacking chicken.

He then seasons it and puts it under pressure too. That's put both of our pressure cookers into the fray. Out comes the liquidizer. The spinach is very soon but a smooth paste.

A biggish blob of butter in the kadahi, and the chicken is all fried. In goes the spinach paste. A pinch of salt, a quick turn of the black pepper mill, woah.. did Friday night come sooner than usual?!