A Peek into my Life

Last weekend was a long weekend. 4th of July. And we are in the middle of a travel or more specifically, a driving spree. As usual, we made last minute decisions about where to go. We went to Miami to a friend's place. We decided to start on Wednesday afternoon around 2 o clock and again as usual, we were delayed by more than an hour. We finally left after 3:30. It was a 730 miles journey by road. We took our first stop around 6 in the evening, just before hitting I-95 S which makes up for 450 miles of the total journey. After a cup of tea from our excellent new thermos, a plate of triple layer nachos for our stomachs and fuel for the car, we were back on the road. I was asked to sleep in the back seat. I tried but within an hour, I was hungry again. Glad we brought the bananas with us! We wanted to cross Jacksonville before our dinner stop but we stopped a few miles before. One of the reasons was a weird noise. We were worried the tires might have a problem. But it turned out tha...

Now that Anurag got his drivers license and we made the small trip a couple of weeks ago, we felt ready for a longer trip. We decided on Atlanta and quickly booked a hotel and bought the CityPass online. CityPass is a good way to get tickets to all the attractions in a city in a single booklet at an affordable price, at least for Atlanta. We had decided to leave by 4 in the afternoon on Friday but we were finally able to get going at nearly 6. Being, summer, the day lasts till at least 8:30 which was good for us. As we neared Atlanta, we moved into severe weather of thunder, lightning and heavy rain. But it was the last part of the journey and we finally made it by 10:30 to the hotel. Somehow, I was not able to sleep that night. At 6 in the morning, it was a great surprise to be awake. At home, I never feel awake before 8:30. We were out and about by 8 and headed to the Georgia Aquarium . There we exchanged our Citypass e-ticket for the booklet. On summer Saturdays, the aquarium wo...

Last week Anurag finally got his driver's license here. So we decided to rent a car for the weekend. I should write about the fun and food before it gets too late. On Saturday evening, we went to the temple at Charlotte. It was only recently we found out that there is a temple here. It might just have been the first centrally air-conditioned temple I have been to :) Next to the temple was another small building. We saw many people going there. So we thought of checking out what it was. It turned out to be a dining hall and people were having dinner. We were not sure if it was for everyone so we started to go back. But a person called us and asked us to have dinner and go. And dinner we had!! I still remember the vaghareli khichadi and bateka nu shaak and the cooling chaas (that is khichadi, potato curry and buttermilk). Yummy! And also got to eat sukhadi as prasad. It was pretty nice to go to a temple after a long time and meet some friendly desi folks. Because otherwise, the de...

That's baked karanji/gujiya. I took the crust recipe from here . I took 2 cups of all-purpose flour, salt, 3 tbsp ghee, 3 tbsp yogurt, a pinch of baking soda and water to get a tight dough as mentioned in the recipe. For the sweet filling, I melted jaggery and added dried grated coconut, cardamom powder, and some sugar too. It would be great if you can find the soft kind of jaggery. I baked it at 375 F as mentioned in the linked recipe. It turned out delicious for a low fat sweet. Anurag said the crust was like a biscuit. Maybe because it was crispy hard, which means, I had to cut up the karanji with a knife instead of being able to break it by hand. We got a lot of karanjis from the dough but we were still sad when they got over after a few days :) I had tried this easy rasmalai recipe on Diwali. Yes, that's a long time ago. I also made a lot of other stuff which is in the background. This baked ricotta cheese rasmalai is so tasty, that it's hard to believe you did...

There isn't a huge variety of "known" vegetables in the supermarkets here. The staples on our weekly shopping are cabbage, cauliflower, french beans, spinach. Sometimes, I buy the vegetables I am not too familiar with, just to break the monotony. So, this post is about those vegetables which I tried to cook for the first time. The first one is Brussels sprouts . The picture shows them raw and then cooked with potatoes. I just quartered each Brussels sprout and cooked it like the usual cabbage aloo. Made a tadka of jeera, hing, turmeric, chilli and then added the cut up Brussels sprouts and potatoes, some salt and dhaniya powder. Then instead of cooking it up in the pan like usual. I thought this needed to be crispier than that. So I put the almost cooked vegetables in an oven tray and broiled them for a while. I didn't warm up to this vegetable a lot though Anurag thought it was good. I thought it had a strong odour and taste. I never had this problem with c...

What does one do when one washes a pillow in the washing machine and it kind of gets torn? One can do some kind of patch work on it. That someone is me. The pillow threads got loose and it was sure to get torn if we didn't do anything about it. Anurag said we need to do a patch on it. After thinking for many days, we finally went into a craft store. And instead of a real cloth, we bought a felt cloth. And some stick-on snowflakes and flowers and leaves. That made the task so much easier. Anurag gave the idea that one side of the pillow represents winter and other side represents spring. So we stuck snow flakes and flowers in seemingly random way, but I assure you I spent a few days (pretending to be) thinking the design. I tried to sew on the felt on the pillow but the stitches didn't look neat. I should have expected that, since my sewing experience is in negative. So I took a ruler and marked dots on the felt so that I know exactly where the needle goes in and where ...

Here's some of the fun stuff I baked in the past few months. The first row of pictures is paav. I made them a few months ago. I think I used this recipe. We had them as pav bhaji. They didn't turn out as soft as I would have liked them to be. Must be because I used some whole wheat flour instead of all-purpose flour. Also looks like I baked them a bit more than needed. I hope to give it a try once again. Let's see when I muster up enough courage to do it again :) The yeast I used to buy in Bangalore was such a bummer. It didn't froth so much. The yeast here does froth very well. So I can't blame anything on yeast anymore. The second row is vegetable puffs or some people call them patties. They don't look so good in the pictures but they tasted amazingly good. I used ready made puff pastry sheets like these . I had them in the freezer for months. A few times I had taken out the box but well, it seemed quite time-consuming to make when someone is over...