Get your eyes off my ....

There are a few studies and reports which say, staring at breasts increase the longevity of men. Anyway there is no secret about men and their obsession with breasts. But this doesn't give any man a right to openly stare. I don't know how many women face this problem, but I am 100% sure that I am not the only one. So when my friend was telling me about a common friend asking her boss whether there is any problem out there when he started talking to her boobs, I said I need to get it out here too.

You will always see some eyes gliding there, but the glance is averted instantaneously. If the averting is done with a slightly guilty look then 'Thank you very much'. But here I am not talking about the did-he-look-there glance.

Once I went to a colleague to discuss something. Since it was a Saturday, I was not in my usual  formals, but a t-shirt slightly tighter than the stuff I usually wear. For 3 minutes he talked to my boobs. After that I went and checked myself in the washroom and also checked with a female colleague. She confirmed, nothing wrong. I am a B, means barely there. So I thought, may be this is the first time he
is realising that I have something there. Though I thought 3 minutes is a pretty long time to check and confirm.

Recently again when I had to discuss something with a colleague, I went ".. and the boards will have to be..... (oh, where is he looking).. ready by then ... (oh shit, are his eyes stuck)... or else we will ... (I want to scream).. not have enough time to .... (What is he thinking? "Oh my god, my eyes  are glued. But you please continue talking to me, I can multitask") ... test everything before the ... (run, run, just run)..." And I walked away from there.

Next time if it ever happens again, I will ask the same question 'is there anything wrong there?'. May be, may be, I will feel bold enough to do that.

Let it rain

Rain, oh please let it rain
The earth might be cracking
The trees might be dry
But my heart is so thirsty
I can almost cry
Rain, oh please let it rain
I wait for the scent of earth
I wait for the sound on my roof
I wait for the lightning
Then the thunder
And once all the downpour is over
The drops that are hanging
On edge of the leaves
Rain, oh please let it rain

Things I learnt today - 3

Have you ever waited for rain just because you wanted the scent that follows? I have done that. I am currently doing it as the rain clouds are playing hide and seek for the last 2-3 days. But did you know that the scent of the earth after the first shower is called petrichor? This smell derives from an oil exuded by certain plants during dry periods, whereupon it is absorbed by clay-based soils and rocks. During rain, the oil is released into the air along with another compound, geosmin, producing the distinctive scent. This oil retards seed germination and early plant growth. Information courtesy, as always, Wikipedia.

Have you ever seen a person with irises of two different colours, one green, one blue? Or an animal? Heterochromia iridum is the name of the phenomenon. Read more about it in Wikipedia.

One last snippet for the cook in me:
Basil is originally from India, though it is more used in Italian cuisine.

Castillian Hot Chocolate

In my last post about Sorrento, I mentioned about my hot chocolate which is even better than the Caffe Positano hot chocolate we had. It is extremely easy and tastes like heaven. 

There was a time when my daily news came from Times of India and that carried a weekly foodline column. When ever I found any interesting recipe in that, I cut and kept them. My Chocolate pudding cake recipe came from there, so did this Castillian Hot Chocolate. Times of India stopped foodline quite some time back and I stopped reading Times of India around 6 months back. But these recipes are gonna stay with me forever.

Castillian Hot Chocolate 

Milk                 - one litre

Cocoa powder - 55gms

Sugar               - 180gms (reduce it by 20-25gms if you like it less sweet)

Corn flour        - 25gms
water                - 120ml

Take the corn flour in a heavy bottomed pan. Add the water little by little and mix it without lumps. Add the sugar and cocoa powder and mix it. Pour in the milk stirring continuously. Heat it till it boils and simmer it for 10 minutes till the mixture has thickened and looks glossy.

I usually half the recipe and make and it yields 3 cups, but serves only 2 as I can't really stop at one cup. Try it, if you are a chocoholic, you would love it. 

Sorrento: Giant tomatoes, sunsets and oranges

After the picture tour of Rome and eating the best pizza in Naples, Sorrento was our next destination. Running behind a small truck, filled with vegetables, was the first thing I did after I landed in Meta di Sorrento. I had seen a vegetable in the truck which I had not seen earlier, or so I thought. So I landed up in the vegetable shop, puffing and panting, following the truck after running for a kilometer. The lady at the counter told me it is pomodoro, and showed me a smaller tomato, when she realised that I dint understand what a pomodoro is. There I bought the tomato and brought it to our home stay, to my friends' amazement.

My mobile posing with the heirloom tomato

The home stay where we stayed had the best sunset view of all the places during this trip. We took our evening tea, stood, clicked and contemplated at the balcony in silence.

Sunset at Meta

For the visit to the Amalfi Coast we hired a car and drove from Sorrento. I was the designated driver and ended up driving looking straight ahead while others enjoyed the view. The roads were pretty winding and I needed to keep the car on the road without rolling down the hills. Once in a while I ended up looking at the view while driving, to the absolute horror of my friends. They all wanted to drive the car, but after seeing the winding roads and the beautiful view, none of them drove.

Driver has a horrible tan

Driver had her moments too

I had the best hot chocolate at Caffe Positano, the only hot chocolate which can beat that, is my own hot chocolate, for which I will post the recipe later.

Waiting for the hot chocolate

Reflective mood after the hot chocolate

Beautiful view from Positano

Amalfi Coast

I just realised that I do not have a picture capturing the beauty of Amalfi Coast and Wikipedia has a beautiful panoramic picture.

Sunset at Sorrento beach

We had been seeing these oranges hanging on the road side trees for a long time. We had not managed to pluck any oranges as they were always at unreachable heights. After watching the sunset at the Sorrento beach when we were walking back, we again stood around the trees staring at the oranges.

Preets can't reach the orange

After seeing my Iowa State Cyclones sweat shirt, 2 Amercians struck up a conversation with us, telling they were from Iowa. After some time, we asked them to help us get the orange. After jumping up for sometime they shrugged their shoulders and told us that it was not possible. Preeti retorted, "May be you dint try hard enough". After looking around for a minute, one of them lifted up his daughter to the tree and she reached and plucked the orange for us.

This time I try hard enough!

 We left from Sorrento the next day morning with hearts contend with giant tomatoes, delicious hot chocolate, beautiful drive, radiant sunsets and helpful Americans who would try hard enough when pushed.

Stop! I will give you the password!

A friend of mine, who has been following my blog for some time now, complained recently that my blogs have become too girly now a days. Here comes one more girly one. The ones on which he has complained were on cooking, which were not really that girly, considering there are as many male cooks around as there are female ones, or more. But this one is going to a beauty parlour, can it get any more girly? Dedicated to you, Mr.

I go to the beauty parlour once in 6 months. I have established here already earlier that I am an extremely lazy person. Remember, my friends told me not getting my hairy arms waxed is sacrilegious to the very idea of being a woman? But I haven't started doing that yet. But on every fourth visit I decide to do a facial. That is every once in 2 years, see I have done the math for you.

I like the shoulder and upper back massage she gives me. May be next time I will just ask her to continue doing that for the whole one hour. But then she turns me over, starts chanting the name of all the concoctions and starts applying those on my face.

Torture weapon

Then comes the comedo extractor (I figured out the name of that recently). That is when I become the protector of the worst nuclear device. I am the only one with the password which can launch the device. The lady starts torturing me by trying to loop the extractor through my nose walls and lower lips. I grind my teeth and refuse to give the password. Arggghhhhh... She gives me a nasty look and continues. After the ordeal is over, I come out of the room huffing and puffing, when she looks at my upperlip and asks me, "Shall I thread?". Oh no! One more time I need to hold the password in. I am really surprised that that night I don't wake up shouting, "Stop! I will give you the password".

I get out of there swearing and promising myself that I am never ever going to put myself through this torture again, only to come back after 2 years trying to get the password out to those people who want to destroy the world!!

And the award goes to.....

It is a funny feeling to get an award for blogging. I have seen a lot of the blogs I follow, having awards they have got posted on their blogs. I always thought of them as professional bloggers. I am just an amateur. I blog for the fun of it, nothing more, nothing less. But then I still got the Versatile Blogger from Malini Rajesh. Thank You so much Malini.

But then, this is kind of a chain award. Bloggers pass on this award to other bloggers. Now the disbeliever and the digger I am, I wanted to figure out who has started this award and how long it has been going on. I went searching in google and the earliest I could reach was May 16th 2010. The blog from which she has got the award had gone defunct and there the trail went cold. So, I decided to just play along.

There are rules too, to be followed for this chain to stay alive.

1. Nominate 15 Fellow Bloggers
2. Inform the Bloggers of their nomination
3. Share 7 random things about yourself
4. Thank the Blogger who nominated you
5. Add the Versatile Blog Award picture to your blog post

So here is my list of 10 versatile bloggers, either I consider them versatile or their blog versatile or both.

1. Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen
2. Gayatri of Life. Unordinary
3. Anupama of Easel and Bytes
4. Divya of Easy Cooking
5. Janaki of Sincro Station
6. Priyanka of Slice of Life
7. Shaheen of The Purple Foodie
8. Nehal of Bibliophile
9. Nags of Edible Garden
10. Ria of Ria's collection
too lazy..

I found 10 versatile blogs and 5 of them are exclusive food blogs (versatile in their cooking, though). That must be telling something about me, burppp.

Now comes the hard stuff. 7 random things about me. Huh!
I asked Shyam to tell me 7 random facts about me and the first one went "You are weird" and then "You are straight forward". So I would rather make my own list, he is of no much help here.

1.When I start talking to some one new, sometimes I can go on talking for about 4 minutes before he or she cries, "you are a mallu".
2. When I go to a buffet meal, I first go check out the dessert counter to see how much starters or main course I should eat.
3. I have watched the movie "My cousin Winnie" 58 times.
4. The senior girls in my school used to call me 'half nut' and I still don't know why.
5. My favourite colour is lilac and so is half my wardrobe.
6. I love tattoos and getting tattooed, but... :(
7. I am the laziest person I have ever seen.