My (Our) Experiments with (the) Truth (about cooking)

Well, I thought I should touch on a lighter subject for my next post, and cooking was a good one that came to mind.

My grandfather has always teased me about the fact that the best thing I knew how to cook was Maggi, and he would always sigh and say, “When do you plan to learn some Brahmin cooking?” My reply always was that I would learn when the time came, but I never thought that time would be this.

Well, as soon as I got my admit, I promised my mother and myself that as soon as I came back from Bangalore, we would commence the cooking classes. Alas, all the plans went right down the drain because:

1. As soon as I got back, my mom had me running to finish the visa paperwork.
2.    After getting the visa, everyone was tired, and decided to laze around a bit.   
3.  I started shopping, and notorious for my long hours to decide about one pair of pants, we often came back home way past any time considered decent to cook.  
4.  My grandma moved to Mayapur, or else she would have kept me busy with cooking class.
   

Well, nonetheless, the days flew past till we reached an arrangement. Amma would make one dish in the morning, and I would make another in the evening so that I eventually learned something. This turned out to be a bit of a comedy show, because I would half listen to what Ma said in the morning before leaving to work, so that by the evening I would forget her directions. An emergency call would be made to her office, and instructions taken down on a post-it note. The cooking would finally start, and somewhere in the middle I would have to rush to make another call to clarify something, or my mother would forget I’m cooking and call (She’d get worried if I did not pick up, and keep calling). Luckily, I did not char the food all that much (this was true considering my father never had any comments about the food).

I finally got to Philly, and then began our cooking (mis)adventures. I will only post the ones that really stuck with us. And those of you who follow Archana’s blog might have read some of them. These are listed in random order.

I’ll start with the funniest so far. We got tired of eating pasta and got wheat flour to make chapatti. Archana enthusiastically mixed the dough, and we got busy rolling out the chapattis. Of course, I inherited my mother’s ability to make chapattis in the shapes of all the continents (No offence, Amma!), and Arch was equally inept, so Sug took over the rolling. We were in charge of roasting them. I guess in all our excitement, we forgot that we were in America, and you have things called smoke detectors. So it came as a rude shock when in the middle of our third or fourth chapatti, a shrill ki-ki-ki-ki noise went off, and refused to stop.

At first, we could not understand what the noise was. Then it struck us as being the smoke detector. Arch and I ran to the living room and dragged a chair under the thing and tried to shut it off. We managed to do something and make it stop. Much to our chagrin, we had charred the chapatti that had been roasting. The noise stopped for a bit, but in another five minutes it went off again. It being too cold to open any windows to let the smoke out, we pulled a Phoebe (from F.R.I.E.N.D.S for those who don’t watch it), and yanked the entire contraption from the ceiling and left it on my shelf (where it lies to this day :D ).

One of the other masterpieces (read fiasco) that we cooked was dondakai curry. Archana took over responsibility for the entire thing, since Sug and I were busy with Biosim assignment. We went to the kitchen when she asked us to check the salt. The vegetable had to cook so we decided to cover it with a lid and let it cook for a while. Now, we did not know that Arch could not be separated from her room for too long, and so we never realized that she assumed that we would check the curry. It turned out that all three of us had retreated to our respective rooms, and it was only past a half hour when we saw no dinner being announced that a light went on in our heads and we all rushed to the kitchen to see the pan smoking on all sides.

Inspection revealed a layer of charcoal, nay, charred vegetable having formed a layer at the bottom of the pan. Since we had nothing else to eat, we scooped out the un-charred veggies and ate them. It took a lot of scraping to get the burnt ones out, though.

We also had this phase where we ended up melting several plastic items. A spoon by accident, a plate not quite by accident, and a certain roommate of mine is of the idea that plastic things do not melt when kept on a burner that had been in use (on high flame) for nearly an hour. :D One plate melted because the dish tray was piled with dishes, and we did not see it fall off right next to the burner.

Sug’s disaster included reheating a SPOONful of cauliflower curry for an ENTIRE minute in the microwave, which came back burnt, and left a charcoal-y taste in your mouth. Mine was the underestimating of the strength of tamarind, which resulted in super-tangy rasam.  Minor experiments gone wrong were miscalculations of rice-water proportions, and leaving curd out in the open till it was spoilt.

Besides these small incidents, we have pretty much smoothed out all the rough spots. You could say that we are decent cooks now, and you can certainly come over to enjoy a meal of pasta, if not traditional cooking. We are yet to master that art. But we are surely all much better than we were when we first came here. I guess that would apply for Arch and me, if not for Sug. She has been cooking longer than the two of us. Anyway, try us! J

 

2008: The Year That Was

Well, 2008 was actually a good year now that I look back on it. To keep a record for myself, a recap of the significant events:

January to March:

The first three months of Practice School II in NAL, Bangalore. This was a lot of fun. It was the first time I was sharing a room with someone. I made some new friends, the more important ones being Hari, Aparna, Naveen, Meenu ( My supervisor!) and Grips Sir. It was the first time I did anything close to research (and enjoyed it thoroughly). I think it was also the time that Dr. Jha screwed with my midterm grades.

The other important thing was waiting for the MS admit. I don’t think I heard from anyone till March anyway. The other thing that was significant was the Chennai trip I took in February to see Charanya. Boy, that was a LOT of fun!

Oh, February was the month that my grandparents moved to Mayapur for good. So that was a sad thing. I still miss them so much!

April to June:

Well, PS was getting a lot boring, especially because Meenu went out of town to get married, and I was bored to death for two weeks, since I could not do any experiment without her. I guess they thought I would blow up the lab. But thankfully, she was an angel to give me her room keys, so I spent most of my time chatting and surfing the net from her room.

April was another trip to Chennai to see Charan.

I got my admit to Drexel, and was jumping around in Garuda Mall when my parents called to tell me about it. I promptly treated Hari then and there and treated myself to a HUGE pastry. :D                                                   

May included the best time in PS: Charanya’s Bangalore visit! Man, that was 5 days of pure indulgence and undiluted FUN! And Kavitha just moved to Bangalore because she started work in GMR, so met her a few times and cooked egg dosa and omelette… :D

The first weekend in May included my big trip to Coimbatore, and I saw my cousins after a really long time. I was out nearly the entire weekend, eating, sleeping and eating some more.

May and June were a scramble to finish the PS report and get out of Bangalore. But I had a really wonderful time while I was there, and still miss it.

The middle and end of June went in The Kauby and Vrish Poonal - Family event of 2008 (for me) and the DREADED visa interview!!!! That was an awesome week of partying, fun, tension and happiness. Oh, and of course another visit to Charanya (which ended with me sulking and contributing to it being not so nice).

July to September:

Well, this was a lot of fun for me and a lot less fun for Amma: SHOPPING! I emptied my parents’ accounts with the amount of shopping I did to come to the US.

It also included Rohan going off to Manipal. I was so sad to see my lil brother going off to college and growing up so soon! But I was also happy that he had to suffer the misery of washing his own clothes… :D The Manipal trip included a stop at Coimbatore, which was just AWESOME! Lakshmi and co just rock! We went to Palakkad and visited old relatives and temples, and had a great time there, too.

Back in Hyderabad, it was a whole lot of lazy days, missing Rohan and trying to convince Charan to come home. The high was her getting a job, and I was so happy for her! I on the other hand, spent a lot of time in front of the television, eating and sleeping more than anything.

The months were also spent looking for roommates and housing in Philly, and I met Suganya and Archana.

After a lot of shopping, I shipped off to Chennai on September 5^th, for my last round of family visits before I flew to the USA. My 22^nd birthday was a quiet affair, with the rain putting a damper on my dinner plans, and ending up with a candle-light dinner prepared by Appa (power cut!).

7^th September, 2008 was one of the best days of the year! It was Charan’s birthday and I got to spend the WHOLE day with her, which was just the best thing that could happen before I left India. It was truly one of the best days ever. We saw a movie, roamed around Spencer’s Plaza (one of my favourite places in the world!) and just had a good time in general. I met Kavi in Spencer’s and exchanged birthday presents with her.  And took some really nice and funny pictures. And oh, I got the best birthday present I could ever hope to get!

10^th September was the BIG day. It came time finally to bid goodbye to my parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins and Charan and fly to the US for my Masters’. I met Sug at the airport, and we flew to Philly together.

The rest of September went in settling down in Philly and the beginning of classes and MS.

October to December:

The last three months of the year were spent in studies, cooking, assignments, losing sleep, midterms and finals, and of course a lot of fun, too.

December was mostly about the Christmas break, which I spent eating and sleeping most of the time because I was short of cash. We spent new year’s eve at Penns Landing, watching the most spectacular fireworks display.

That was a brief look into the 2008 that was for me. 

Amistad, Freundschaft, Amitié or What We Call Friendship...

What is friendship? There are a whole lot of quotes out there that try to give it meaning or a definition, or at least fit it within some definable realm. But at the end of it, what would someone say when asked what they thought friendship is? I think the meaning of friendship to each person is different; what I expect in a friend would be vastly different from what someone else might expect.

For me, the meaning of friendship has changed through the time that I have grown up. When I was little, a friend was no more than a playmate. A friend was the person with whom we did the silly things that little girls do, play hopscotch, hide and seek, arrange tea with our tea sets and dolls, that kind of stuff. I assume my friends changed each week, depending on whom I had a fight with. But I doubt I looked for more in my friends at that point of time.

As I grew older, the meaning of a friend changed a little. Now friends were not just playmates; we began to share something more than that. Feelings came into the picture. I suppose the need for a friend was deeper than when I was in kindergarten. A friend was someone with whom I could share my thoughts and secrets. Of course, even at this age, friendships were fragile and broken quite easily albeit not as often as before.

I suppose I found my first true friend only when I was a teenager. Being Indian; we do not go through the typical teenage angst process that you see in English movies. At least I did not go through it. I was a happy teenager, did not have problems in school (at all), and was the class geek. I was never Miss Popular, and never aimed to be; I was more the person people asked about classwork and homework. This friend I’m talking about happened to me only because we accidentally picked places next to each other at the beginning of the year. We spent the better part of the year giggling in some classes, playing hangman in some, and she’d watch out for me when I dozed in some of the classes.

I never gave her much thought while I was in school. It was only when I finished school and started college that I realized how much I was missing her. I also realized that she was one of the few people in class that I really wanted to hang on to as a friend, and keep in touch with. We spent many an hour grumbling about our respective high schools and the misery we were going through in those two years. What I’m getting at is that she was the ‘always around when you need someone to talk to’ kind of friend. I can always just pick up the phone and dial her, and we can spend two hours talking about something, or even nothing (which happens most of the time).

Now comes my favorite part, my best friend. She will probably groan when she reads this, since I have spouted a few sheets of paper on the subject many times before. I have two of them by the way. Two best friends. You might wonder about that, since the term ‘best’ is normally reserved for a single superlative entity. Well, it just turned out that they both fit the superlative in my case J. Getting back to them, I’ve known one of them for six years now, and the other four. My relationship with both of them is different; the one thing they share in common is that they both bring out the best in me. I know that I would do anything for either of them, and I mean anything. I’m not trying to be dramatic or anything (even though I’ve been told I have a flair for drama), but they really mean that much to me. And I really, really miss them a lot.

Let me tell you about the four year old one. She is the rock I lean on when I’m sinking. She knows just what to say and when to say it. She’ll give you the perfect advice when you need it, and even if she is pointing out a flaw in you, you’ll feel better that she told you when you’re done listening to her. Other than that, she is everything most people look for in a friend. She has ample doses of funniness, wittiness, and the other ingredients you’d need. Other than that, she has a somewhat foul temper which will come like a storm, wipe out the town, and then clean up after itself if you know what I mean. You can’t really stay angry with her for more than 5 minutes. Not that she gives you too many opportunities to be angry with her.

She’s just the most fun to hang out with. We can spend hours describing in detail the things that happened over the day, or some incident that happened to either of us. Her laughter is so contagious; it only takes a giggle to set us off on a laugh ride. Despite being one of the brainiest people that I know, she is just so un-nerdy. She is all about the fun. She doesn’t like travelling much, and would rather sit in her room than go out somewhere. Oh, she is always looking for a reason to be overworked, and once she is in that mode, it’s hard to be able to catch her for more than half an hour in a day. But then again, just a couple of minutes of talking to her can get you through a rough day better than anything else. She just rocks, beyond all words can say.

The six-year-long friend is a whole other deal. She is just one of a kind. I haven’t had the privilege of meeting anyone else quite like her. Our friendship is the kind wherein I do most of the talking (I learned recently that it was because I never gave her a chance to get a word in edge-wise). But when she does talk, it’s a whole lot of fun to listen to her. She doesn’t believe that “I met so and so the other day” or “I went and spent a thousand bucks buying shoes” is any matter of importance requiring telling or discussing. “What you upto?” will be greeted with “Nothing, I just spoke to you two days back; what did you expect would come up?”  A story I tell will last a minimum of twenty minutes, while one she tells will be only about five minutes long (It might also have something to do with me interrupting her, you never know).

 She’s the kind of person who can bring you back to reality in a very sharp manner, like poking a pin into a balloon. :D She never bats an eyelid when she gives me a whole list of things that I’m doing wrong or saying wrong. She’ll never flinch when telling me that my opinion is stupid. We’ve had plenty of arguments just questioning why I feel the way I feel about some silly topic. But it’s these little debates that make our friendship all the more special. She’s always given me a reason to be a better person than I was some time ago.

I’ll skip the details of how we became friends. That is a long story that I can’t type out now. But I’ll tell you that I did argue my way through the first two years of our friendship. Even so, after spending the better part of the day at school picking some meaningless fight or the other, I’d still go back home and apologise over the phone (for no less than an hour!), and I’d still want to ride home with her on the bus, even if it was just to look the other way and not say a word to her. I’ve been unfair to her more than she ever deserved, but it moves me to know that she still wants to be friends with me. She’s always been the person who’s loved me in spite of me.

Right now, we have a really twisted relationship. I can’t quite find the right words for it. She will annoy me by not mailing, not coming online, not speaking on the phone (though hopefully she will now, since it’s an international phone call) and I will try my best to get her riled up by spamming her inbox (both email and phone). Unfortunately, I can’t make long distance calls just yet; I’m waiting for that day to dawn. But even though she is the way she is, I don’t think there is any other person out there I’d want for a best friend, or care about more than her. She may not really say it in many words, but I know there is no other person who will tolerate the bundle of misery that I can be at times other than her. She is just the most wonderful person I could ever have hoped to know.

I don’t quite know what we expect of friends as we get older; I suppose they will be there to share all the milestones that come along in life. They will be there when we are down, to uplift our fallen spirits; they will make us laugh when we are crying. They will be a part of the person we evolve to be, no doubt having some role to play in the process. We will probably meet and make new friends as we go on in life, and add to the list of people who are special to us. Some of them will stay in our memories, some of them not so much, and the ones who are the most special to us will only be etched deeper and deeper in our minds and hearts.

 

 

My Second Post!

Well, you might wonder why there was a gap of two whole years between my first and second posts! 

This should tell you that I'm an occasional rather than a regular blogger. To clue you in, I was busy graduating, joining graduate school, and wasting some time in between...

My friends said that I should keep writing, and I figured this new year was as good as any to keep up that resolution. So here I am, with my first official long post! 

Enjoy!