A Peek into my Life

For this post, I am going way back to my cinco de mayo post where I mentioned about the nacho and brownie bars at the party. I never got around to posting about the brownie bar. I love the idea of a toppings bar at a party. There is something about creating your own special version of the dessert with all the toppings. That might be why I love "Souper Salad". As the name suggests, it is a soup and salad bar; but it also has a dessert bar. For the brownie bar, I made spiced brownies, salted caramel chocolate sauce, lemon whipped cream and laid out store bought vanilla ice cream and crushed some oreo cookies. The next day, we ate the leftover brownies, parfait style with layers of brownie, icecream, whipped cream, caramel chocolate sauce and strawberries, topped with the crushed oreos. Yes, it was as awesome as it looks. Spiced Brownie Everyone should take the journey of finding the perfect brownie texture that works for you. I have seen brownies ranging from c...

My almost 3 year old does not eat her vegetables. I try to offer her some vegetable everyday with the hope that she would eat it today. On some blessed days, she eats raw baby carrots or some lightly sauteed broccoli. She almost always eats methi in a dal or kadhi. It is no wonder that the biggest question on most mom's minds is how to get their kids to eat more vegetables. The recipe was a result of this ongoing question that I face. Since she loves dosas and pancakes, I thought a hybrid with vegetables might work. She ate two of them which is a big success. And I have noticed that grating vegetables makes them more palatable even for adults. Veggie Pancakes Grated vegetables, flours, egg cover all nutrition groups to make this a complete meal. Ingredients: 4 carrots 1/2 beet 1/2 onion 3 tbsp chopped spinach 1 egg 1 green chilli 1/4 tsp baking soda 1 tsp salt 1/2 tsp black pepper 1/4 tsp turmeric 4 tbsp besan 1 tbsp flax s...

Spring is usually the time when wind-chimes come out to hang. I could see them hanging in many a houses but instead of buying one, I decided to challenge myself into making one. In the spirit of recycling, I began to look around for things that could be used to make windchimes. I narrowed down on metal as the material of choice because it had to make a sound when it clanked together. I also did a google search and saw a few ideas. I decided, metal cans it will be. I spent most of spring collecting metal cans of various sizes. Finally I made two different kind of wind chimes. Cascading Can Chime When I looked at my collection of metal cans, I saw four of them fit inside each other just perfectly. That led me to this cascading wind chime design. I used tiny jingle bells to anchor the cans on the metal wire and also for the sound they make. Materials: metal cans of different sizes metal beading wire small bells acrylic colors Remove any labels from your metal...

When Nupur posted the fridge cleaning challenge on her blog , I knew I couldn't ignore my fridge anymore. I had been ignoring it for almost a year now and it was extremely dirty. Yes, I am lazy like that when it comes to cleaning. A couple of days after the challenge was posted, I decided today is the day. I could have done it in parts over a few days but that never works out for me. I clean a part of the fridge one day and then forget about the rest on other days. My fridge was pretty empty because these days I am trying to reduce the number of grocery shopping trips. This forces me to find ways to use the stuff lying around in the fridge and pantry. This way, we get to eat different from the usual roti-sabzi routine and of course, save money and reduce waste. This was one of the days when grocery shopping was inevitable. That is a good time to clean the fridge as there is less stuff to remove and replace in the fridge. I started with the dirtiest parts first : the bottom-m...