A love story by my kitchen window

Sun-birds are cute, sun-birds are small. But what sun-birds are not are photography friendly. I keep seeing two sun-birds on my pomegranate tree every day. This tree is just next to the garden door, so the moment I open the door they fly away. So I took to watching them through my window. But after sometime the photographer in me starts getting itchy hands, brings the camera, opens the door and the birds again fly away.

I was cooking in my kitchen one day when I saw two sun-birds on the bougainvillea tree at my kitchen window. That was the starting of the love story. I stopped whatever I was doing, ran in, got my camera and clicked.

I got this snap through my kitchen grill. I was so thrilled. From the further developments I am guessing that this was the time when the sun-birds decided to build a nest or it was the guy proposing to the girl or may be both.

After a few days the birds built a nest at the same place where I caught them romancing. When I saw the nest, I didn't expect that to be occupied. I thought it was already abandoned before it was completed, may be due to the increased traffic in my kitchen (a lot of baking happening). 

Then I saw that the nest is indeed occupied. I expected the nest to be a little bit more finished if it was to be occupied; this looks pretty crude. May be the sun-bird couple is a pretty lazy one. I keep checking the nest to see whether the bird is still there, of course from a little far away. If there is any movement nearby the bird flies away and then comes back.

I am really tempted to check whether there are eggs inside, but may be if I go too close the bird might not return. I was wondering whether I should wait for sometime and see whether there are going to be sun-bird chicks, click them and then post this. But then love stories end when the girl and boy end up together and then they lived happily ever after. It is never, they had kids/chicks and then they lived happily ever after ;)

100 Things You Must Eat Before You Die

I saw this list on some one's blog. The original comes from Very Good Taste. When I do not have students who give me interesting stories to post and am too lazy to cook and post and still want to do something out here in the blogosphere, this has come really handy. This also made me go and check out all these food items in Wikipedia, which gave me a few hours of interesting reading. This list is for an omnivore.
The directions:
1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating. *
4) Optional extra: Post a comment at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

* - My philosophy is never say never. Though a few of the items make my stomach churn, I still might try them out when I have a stronger stomach and the opportunity.

Here are the hundred foods.
1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue - On top of Alps in Grindelwald.
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush - The Indian version is called Bhaingan ka Bhartha
11. Calamari
12. Pho 
13. PB&J sandwich - I made one for the sake of writing Yes here and now I am hooked.
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart 
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes - Many - strawberry, pineapple, apricot, plum and may be more.
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes - In Italy. Carried some seeds too, but didn't manage to grow them!
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras (Updated 6-Sep-12, ate it in Brugge, even though I had a dilemma)
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche - I started making this recently and can't stop eating it.
28. Oysters
29. Baklava (Updated on 18-Dec-12, ate in Fava at UB City)
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects - swallowed mosquitoes :)
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala 
48. Eel (Updated 6-Sep-12, ate it in Brugge in a recent trip)
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs - Thanks to living in Taiwan for 2 years.
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill - how do I know whether any of the restaurents have not fed me this!!!
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare - Rabbit will do?
87. Goulash
88. Flowers - Hibiscus, drumstick, roses, pumpkin and may be more
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee

100. Snake - I had all the chances at Huaxi market in Taipei, but.....

In case you attempt this list, please post a comment with the link :)

Experiments with a bar of chocolate

The chocolate bar in question here is not a regular bar, but a 1Kg semi sweetened one, the kind used for chocolate fountains. My friend gave it to me, which was leftover from her son's birthday party. She also told me to make something for her kids with that before they relocate to UK. I was in the process of perfecting my Caramel Custard at that time and didn't end up making anything with that for a while. 2 days before they were leaving to UK I tried making Chocolate Fudge with that chocolate bar. I didn't find a proper recipe for the same and sort of tried a free hand recipe of my own. The outcome was a very tasty but gooey, difficult to handle chocolate paste. It got stuck to the aluminum foil and every time I ate it I had to pull pieces of it out from my mouth and also lick all my fingers. Then I remembered a recipe my sister used to make when we were kids. She got it from a friend of hers - Chocolate delight. So I mixed my gooey chocolate fudge with a little milk, layered it with Parle-G biscuits (in my sister's recipe it is arrowroot biscuits though) dipped in milk. This cut the sweetness a little and turned out handleable and delicious.

Late in the night just the day before they left to UK I managed to feed my friends' 12 year old daughter who was luckily still awake. The one who freaked out on it was another friend's toddler. Since she liked it so much, her mom made similar stuff using biscuits and Nutella, with very good results, though I am yet to taste the same.

Then I landed in Divya's blog and found a chocolate almond biscotti recipe.. I need to finish the kgs of almonds Shyam has brought from Kashmir (what was he thinking!!). So there we went, that is Aparna and I, blanching almonds, cutting chocolate, mixing flour. 

Aparna setting the mix in tray

The biscotti getting baked

 The gooey mix went inside the oven pretty fast. After the initial baking, I needed to cool it before I could cut and bake the sides. I was not patient enough to let the chocolate cool properly before cutting it into smaller pieces for baking the sides. So the biscottis don't look as good as the ones in Divya's blog, but tastes pretty good.

Chocolate Almond Biscotti

There is 700gms of chocolate still left. I will make the biscotti again to get it also to look as good as Divya's ones. Then I will go searching again for more chocolate recipes :)

Gosau

If there is a paradise on earth, this is it, this is it, this is it.

First time when I landed in Gosau, I swear, I didn't tell this.
We had traveled by train from Vienna to Salzburg, Salzburg to Attnang-Puchheim, Attnang-Puchheim to Bad Iscl and then from Bad Iscl to Gosau by bus. Not to mention the German who couldn't understand our English and made us get down from the train one stop earlier to Attnang-Puchheim there by making us wait there for half an hour. Argh! how difficult is it to say "No" or "Nien" when someone asks whether the next stop is Attnang-Puchheim! How do you pronounce this name anyway!!
Actually we almost didn't make it to Gosau. When we found out at the car rental that the medium sized car which can stuff four of us (medium sized) with our luggage (over sized) is not available, we got the 3 hop route from the train station. In our over sized luggage we still had a few packets of pongal and methi mutter left with us, not to mention all the warm clothes meant for Switzerland. After seeing the 3 hop route we almost decided to skip Gosau and stay back in Salzburg. But then wisdom prevailed and we said, lets try it out.
The route was scenic, beautiful, but the journey tiring. So we finally got down from the bus at Gosau-Mittertal and started walking the 400 metres which our host has mentioned. But then the 400 metres actually turned out to be 1km. Pulling the over sized bags over uneven road at the end of a 9-hour journey (oh all that luggage pulling from platform to platform, up and down stairs at stations) is not very pleasant even for 400 metres. By next day we were well rested and also fed by our ever-giggling host. Looking around I said, if there is a paradise on earth, this is it, this is it, this is it.

First Picture of Paradise on earth

Paradise in panorama

Our home stay - Pension Elfi

When in Paradise do as the Paradisians do :)

I love manual focus!

Lake at Löckernmoos

Our mood when leaving Gosau!

I loved my worries

I am a worrier. For being worried, I don't need impossible deadlines glaring at me or a bunch of 10 year olds who are 4 grade levels behind where they should be. I can worry my head off just by sitting at home cooking, gardening and generally whiling my time away.

But in these last few moments of being joyful in my joblessness I wonder about my worries from the last 2 months.

• My house is still as disorganised as I had it 2 months back. My carefully prepared list of things to do to get it in order has gone missing inside the piles of papers which have been carefully collected by me and my husband over the last 11 years.
• After scalding my wrist with molten caramel, almost cutting off a toe, burning and bruising myself at umpteen number of places on my hands and wrists, I might burn my house down while cooking.
• How to get my caramel custard taste like heaven every time I make it and get everyone to say that it is gourmet dessert.
• None of my flower seeds, including the ones which are preserved over 5-6 years, are germinating and my garden is still rather flowerless.

The best of all my worries:

• My cardamom plants are flowering, but the fruits are not setting. May be I do not have enough bees in my garden for doing pollination.

But then tomorrow is altogether a different story. Who knows about tomorrow? Who knows what my worries are going to be from tomorrow!

Chocolate pudding cake

After a long time, I am discovering the joys of baking again (don't ask when I baked earlier, I did bake earlier). I tried again one very easy, but delicious pudding cake I have baked long time back, once for friends and once for family and received appreciations galore. I am sharing the recipe here.

Chocolate pudding cake

Ingredients:

Part 1

1 cup flour

3/4 cup sugar

1/4 cup cocoa

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

a pinch of salt

Part 2

3/4 cup milk

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

Part 3

2/3 cup brown sugar (reduce this to half if you want the pudding to be a little less sweet)

1/4 cup cocoa

1/4 cup chocolate chips (optional)

Part 4

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

1 3/4 cups boiling water

Thoroughly mix all ingredients in Part 1 with a fork in a 9-inch baking pan. Now add Part 2 and continue mixing. Preheat the oven to 180°C. Keep the water in Part 4 for boiling. Sprinkle all of Part 3 over the mixture. Don't mix. Add the vanilla essence into the boiled water and pour over the mixture. Bake at 180°C for 30 minutes. The cake will come up in the middle and the pudding will be bubbling around.

Serve warm with vanilla ice cream and then wait for the compliments.

The good thing is, all the mixing is done in the same pan, no beating. It is as simple as that.

If you think this itself is difficult, what the heck, call me up and come over. I will bake it for you.

Don't forget to pick up the vanilla ice cream on your way :)

Roma - a picture tour

After the 2 year stint with teaching was over, I together with 3 of my friends, decided to see the world. We ended up in Rome last Tuesday. Though the intention was not to do any off beaten track, we found ourselves staying at a camping site a little outside the Rome city. The first things which caught my eye was the cotton which was flying around all over the place. But this cotton didn't come from long pods as I have seen back in India, but very small pepper sized pods. One day morning I ventured out while my friends were getting ready to go out. I found myself in the middle of a dream sequence in which light snow kept falling. I closed my eyes, extended my hands on my sides and rotated around a few times.

These are some pictures from my camera during my visit to Rome.

Trevi Fountain

The Spanish Steps

 

Fresco in the Vatican Museum

 

 

The beautifully frescoed ceiling in Vatican

 

Last Supper in Tapestry in Vatican Museum

Creation of man in Sistine Chapel

Colosseum at night

Inside Colosseum

Madonna and the Child

(don't miss the blush saving tapestry which was added much later in the painting)