The 5 Love Languages: Men’s Edition

Author: Gary Chapman

I’d no intention of reading the Men’s Edition of this book. I didn’t even know about it. So when I ordered it in the library I didn’t even realize it was the ME till I read the foreword and that’s when I flipped to the front cover and read the title! :-) However the content is quite generic and is applicable to men as well as women. The suggestions at the end of the chapters are what is specifically for men (husbands).

I loved reading the book. I think primarily because I believed in the proposal the author put forth. According to him every person has a love language – the language that makes him/her feel loved. When his/her spouse speaks that language he/she feels loved. For a happy marriage, you must know your spouse’ love language. If you don’t and are speaking a different language then however much you try it’s not going to make your spouse happy.

The author proposes that there are 5 love languages:

1. Words of Affirmation
2. Quality Time
3. Acts of Service
4. Receiving gifts
5. Physical touch

The names are quite self-explanatory. As an example, if your spouse’ love language is “Acts of service”, which means that “doing“ something for her is what makes her happy then your cooking a meal would mean more to her than bringing her flowers. On the other hand if her love language is “receiving gifts” then your doing all the household chores wouldn’t make her as happy as bringing her flowers. You get the point.

There’s a chapter devoted to each language and then a few on how to infer your love language, your spouse’ love language and so on. Also I think that to some extent this is applicable to most relationships in life. Again, this is also discussed by the author in the FAQs on how this applies to children, etc. The book is simply written. I really enjoyed reading this book and would highly recommend it to every one out there – married or unmarried!

Bottom-line: Must read!

Makhane ki kheer (milk pudding)

Yes two recipes in a row! And no that’s not because of what the Google stats told me. It’s just that I happened to make these two on the same day and figured that I must write them up before I forget – much like so many other delicious, totally original recipes that could never make it to this blog of mine!

I love this dessert! To be fair, there aren’t too many desserts out there that I don’t love…but still this features in probably my top 10 desserts! Again it’s a very simple recipe. Has to be – coming from my mom. She has this knack of simplifying all recipes – big or small. Trust me she does. I can’t tell you how many times I’d tried to make baingan bharta (curried eggplant) but it just wouldn’t come up to my expectations and all these recipes I tried were so tedious. They were from all over the internet. Then I asked my mom what she does. After I got her recipe I told myself that this is the last time I’m ever trying this dish. Lo and behold! I had the tastiest baingan bharta at my table! DH absolutely loved it! And her recipe – it was so simple! You know the last time I made it I got all the ingredients measured so that I could share it over here but it’s just one of those recipes that I was talking about at the beginning – poor things they never got the privilege of being here!

Anyway enough of gabbing let me get down to the recipe!

Ingredients:

• 2 1/2 cups makhane
• 3 cups milk (I’d 2% on hand so I used that. Whole milk would be much better. Don’t use anything less than 2%. If you do don’t call it a dessert )
• 6-7 tbsp sugar.
• Chironji according to taste. It adds a nutty texture. To me this dessert is incomplete without it but you can substitute it with slivered/chopped almonds.

Method:

1. Grind the makhane in the food processor. Most will grind to a powder and some on the top will be in chunks. That’s exactly what we want.
2. Add the milk, sugar and makhane (from step 1) to a sauce pan and bring to a boil.
3. Simmer till the mixture thickens. The kheer will thicken a little after cooling.

The Lonely Plant

This is proof that life exists. In our vegetable bed. That life can survive. In our vegetable bed. Proof that there’s enough food and water there. That life can grow there. Most important of all that we’ve more than a tinge of green thumb!

Can you see those cabbage-like leaves towards the top right? Well that is cabbage. Those greens to the top left? Yes those are some salad greens.

The title of the post should actually be the lonely cauliflower. It did have a lot of its clan for company but looks like they couldn’t survive the heavy snow. I’m totally ignoring the fact that we planted them so close that they hardly had any space to breath. Have you heard about “survival of the fit”? We know it by heart. So much so that when we were planting these we figured that all these cauliflowers would fight each other to grow the best and hence we would get a bumper crop! Ok honestly – yes they were uncomfortably close to each other but it was the snow that killed them.

We have this 8 ft X 8 ft vegetable/flower bed and we wanted to grow vegetables like we’d just bought a farmland! It was quite a learning experience. For example little did I know that the tiny cauliflower head that I buy at the supermarket takes up 6 times the space in our vegetable bed! Jokes apart, as you can see, the leaves of the cauliflower do spread almost 1ft in each direction!

On a more serious note, despite the fact that only 1 out of 12 cauliflowers survived and that too doesn’t look too healthy – we were so happy to see it! Fruit of our labor as they say.

I was reading the Farmer’s Almanac Gardening Guide and it’s foreword struck a chord with me. To quote, it said

“Digging in the dirt, planning a spring garden, weeding, and watching seeds become healthy plants both soothes and lifts our spirit. Gardening is indeed about hope. We believe seeds will sprout or we wouldn’t sow them; we plant a tree so that our grandchildren can enjoy one day.”

So true! I can tell you that every time we plant something we would watch it daily to see if it has grown or not and then admire it.

The cauliflower and the quote above have totally motivated me to start planning for the summer vegetables!! Yippee!

Sweet and sour tamarind (imli) chutney

It’s been such a long long time since I chattered here. I went on a nice long  vacation and then after coming back just couldn’t get my fingers and mind to type something up here. Well in the meantime I was looking at the stats for my blog on Google Analytics, just to see if my long absence had put a dent in my viewership and what do I see! The recipes on my blog seem to be the most popular of all my content – that quite surprised! I never thought of my blog as a cooking.recipes blog so I must say it was indeed a pleasant surprise!

Continuing that spirit I thought I would bring to you another recipe. Sweet and sour tamarind chutney. Or as we call it in Hindi, Khatti (= sour) Meethi (= swet) Imli (= tamarind)ki chutney.

I don’t make it often but when I do, I make it more-than-required quantities and have it ready in the fridge. Every time I want to make it, I forget the proportion of the ingredients. Of course, I learnt this from my mom – I mean to make this chutney not to forget the ingredients! So this time I made sure that I measured everything that I add. It’s quite simple to make and is so yummy! Yum! Yum! Yum!

Ingredients:

• 3 tbsp Tamarind paste – easily available in Indian stores
• 1/2 cup Sugar
• 2 cups water
• 1/4 tsp chilli powder
• salt to taste

Method:

1. Add all the ingredients to a sauce pan and bring to a boil. Take a big enough sauce pan so that it doesn’t ooze out on boiling.
2. Let it boil till it reaches desired consistency. If it’s oozing out of the pan then simmer. I like mine to be flowing consistency but not watery. Note: The chutney thickens a little after cooling.
3. Quick and simple!

I got approximately 3/4 cup of chutney from the above ingredients.

Be more with less

Sometime back somehow I landed on a post at this blog, Be more with less, The post struck a chord with me and since then I’ve become a huge fan of this blog. Courtney’s writings always make so much sense and they’re always so new! Many a times with popular blogs that you read regularly, you tend to find that the author runs out of things to say and is simply trying to fill. I haven’t found that true with her, at least not till now. Initially I wanted to link a few posts of hers which I simply loved and then I realized that that list was growing and growing. So I figured I would instead mention her blog itself. If you’re a minimalist or want to be one, hop over to her blog and I’m sure you’ll get highly motivated!

Oats Idli

Sounds weird doesn’t it?!?! It doesn’t taste weird, trust me! In fact it’s delicious and it is healthy! How many times have you heard delicious and healthy in the same sentence?!?! I found the recipe here.

Ingredients:

• Instant oats - 1 cup
• Suji - 1/2 cup
• Curd - 1/2 cup
• Water - 3/4 or as required
• Carrot - 1 medium sized grated
• Mustard Seeds - 2tsp
• Green chilli - 1 tsp finely chopped
• Salt - to taste
• Hing - 1/2 tsp
• Coriander leaves - 2 tsp finely chopped (I didn’t have these)
• Baking soda - 1/2 tsp
• Oil - to grease idli plates

Method:

1. Dry roast oats for 3-4 minutes. Let it cool and then grind to a fine powder ( I used my coffee grinder to do the job).
2. Dry roast rava for 3-4 mins.
3. Heat a tsp of oil and add mustard seeds. Let them splutter. Then add green chillies and grated carrot. Saute till carrots are slightly cooked.
4. Mix all the ingredients (except oil for greasing plates). If the batter is too thick, add a more water.
5. Fill cooker about 1” with water. Heat to a rolling boil. Grease the idli plates.
6. Spoon the batter into the plates. The idlis are going to fluff up so leave the idli cups half empty.
7. Put the idli stand in the cooker (do not put a whistle). Steam for 15 minutes.
8. To remove the idlis from the idli plate, use a spoon dipped in cold water. I’ve found that it works the best for me.

Notes:

• If the idlis are hard, it’s quite possible that the batter was thick. The batter should not be running consistency but it shouldn’t be too thick either.

Potato Leek Casserole

Since we subscribed to the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) , we’ve been inundated with new and never-eaten-before vegetables. Well not that the CSA forces that on us, we can pick what we want but we always feel like getting new vegetables to break the ennui resulting from the same-old-veggies! So one time we got leeks. Now let me tell you  there was a time when I wasn’t sure that leeks were vegetables!

Thus began my search for a recipe that uses leeks as the primary vegetable. My favorite source is allrecipes.com but sometimes I like to search foodgawker too – it’s a feast for the eyes! And it’s the last site you should go to if you’re hungry! Anyways, I found this Cheesy Potato Leek Casserole through foodgawker and I must say that we absolutely loved it! Here’s a poor photo of it – unfortunately I couldn’t grab a photo when it came right from the oven. Our tummies beckoned it more than the camera.

Well you must be thinking being half eaten is not the only problem with the photo There’s poor lighting, bad background and so on and so forth. However I though no photo is better than a not-so-good photo!

I modified the ingredients a little bit based on what I had at home and would suggest the same to all. There’s no need to stick to the veggies listed here – feel free to substitute them with what you like and what you have. Having said that I’m not sure how it’ll turn out with veggies that contain a lot of water like tomato, zucchini, etc.

Here’s what I used:

• 4 leeks
• 1 onion
• 1-2 big potato
• 3-4 fresno peppers (or any other mild pepper)
• 2 carrots
• 4 oz cream cheese (= 2 mini tubs of cream cheese)
• some leftover heavy cream (around 1/4 cup)
• 1/2 cup shredded mozarella
• 1/4 cup panko bread crumbs

To cook:

1. Preheat the oven to 400 F.
2. For the veggies:
• Potato – peel and slice thinly about 1/8 inch
• Peppers, Leeks and onion – chop them
• Carrot – grate it.
3. Stir fry all veggies except potato.
4. Soften the cream cheese by microwaving it and then whisk it a little.
5. Add the cream cheese and the heavy cream to the veggies and mix well. No need to heat them together.
6. Grease a 8” X 8” baking dish.
7. Line it with potatoes and then spread the veggie mixture on top of it. Spread the bread crumbs and the mozzarella cheese on top.
8. Bake for 30-40 minutes.