We all need The Seam Ripper!

The other day I was sewing something (yes I sew and if you would like a peek into my sewing adventures then check them out here) and I accidentally made a wrong stitch. Well it often happens, this wasn’t the first time; but it sure was the first philosophical seam ripping time! You see when I was ripping the seam, I thought to myself that it took me just a few seconds to make a wrong seam but almost 15 minutes to rip it off and I realized that draw an analogy to so many situations in life. It’s so easy to gain weight but so hard to lose it. It’s easy to adopt bad habits but so hard to let them go. And so many more. Don’t you think so?

So we all need The Seam Ripper Of Life that makes it all easy!

Vegetable garden

Alert – this is a photo heavy post!

Two weeks back we had a weekend which seemed to herald that summer is here! Post that I think the clouds scared away the sun so much so that it’s only been a courteous visitor since! Not that I’m complaining – I like this perfect blend of cool temperature and light sun. I like it even more when I read about heat waves across the country! Anyways, coming back to what I was saying was the hot weekend inspired us to build our vegetable garden. So off we went to garden and nursery stores to get our stock. The good thing is we already had the pots and soil from our previous endeavors. So we just had to get the plants/starters. Here’s what we ended up with:

White Petunia and pink geranium – ok wrong start those are not veggies!

Basil (on the left) and mint (on the right). Those are big yogurt containers. My always-ready-to-help husband drilled some holes into them . They now sit on my kitchen window sill. 

Zucchini

See that label – it says its an eggplant plant. Where’s the plant? – you ask me. Well the rabbit ate it away when the plant was only 3-4 days old!

Tomatoes. Heirloom tomato on the left and hybrid on the right. Can you see the difference in their size? The hybrid is twice the size of heirloom plant.

The strawberry plant. I actually planted this last fall with little hope that it’s going to bloom. Then towards the beginning of spring I saw fresh new leaves coming up and it made me so happy! Here are close-ups of the newborn fruits

Given that we’re not getting much sun these days I’m not sure whether these plants will be able to flourish, whether we’ll be able to eat red ripe juicy strawberries off of our garden. Even if they did get enough sun, there’s always the peril of rabbits and squirrels. If these poor little things are able to survive all these hurdles and make it to my kitchen – that would be the day!

Pecan Coffee cake

This is the first time I made a coffee cake. Over here a coffee cake is a cake that you eat with your coffee and not one that has coffee in it! It was amazingly delicious! Not only did my DH loved it but I gave it to my neighbors and they loved it too! It was soft, slightly moist and just perfectly sweet! The pecan and sugar topping added the right crunch. The original recipe is from allrecipes.com.

Ingredients

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 cup butter, softened
• 1 cup sour cream
• 1 1/2 cups white sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup brown sugar (I used light brown sugar since that’s what I had on hand)
• 1 cup chopped pecans
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 2 tablespoons butter, melted

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Line a 9x13 inch pan with aluminum foil, and lightly grease with vegetable oil or cooking spray. Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt; set aside.
2. In a large bowl, cream the butter until light and fluffy. Gradually beat in sour cream, then beat in sugar. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then stir in the vanilla. By hand, fold in the flour mixture, mixing just until incorporated. Spread batter into prepared pan.
3. To make the Pecan Topping: In a medium bowl, mix together brown sugar, pecans and cinnamon. Stir in melted butter until crumbly. Sprinkle over cake batter in pan.
4. Bake in the preheated oven for 30 to 35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean. Let cool in pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack, and remove foil.

New beginnings

Spring is here and gone (not by the temperatures but by the almanac!) and I finally got a chance to post some beautiful photos of how nature works. It surprises me to see that trees that were skeletons of branch and trunk are now covered with lush green leaves! If you looked at the leaves themselves, they were so tiny and initially the tree looked bare; but now it looks so full. So rich. Ground that had nothing, had tulips and daffodils sprouting from it. The daffodils are gone now and their stems/leaves would also disappear soon. Yet they would appear again from nowhere next year. The magic of nature mesmerizes me!

As you can see the tree below just started having leaves.

This is a different tree but of the same type as above. However due to it’s advantageous location it started blooming before the other one. So you can see how the above tree would look in a few days. If only I had a picture of how it looks today (note to self – take a picture of the tree tomorrow!)

Masala bun

My DH would often remember khara buns from Bangalore/Mysore. I’m not too familiar with them and when I saw these I thought these are the khara buns. Khara meaning hot, could also mean “masala” according to me . So I set off to make these. Turns out these are not khara buns, nonetheless they were well received in my house. So mission accomplished!

I too liked them and I think they’re especially good as to-go food. They’ve a yummy potato filling!

 

To make the buns:

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups All purpose flour
• 1/4 cup Milk
• 1/4 cup water (add if more needed)
• 3/4 tblsp Active dry yeast
• 1 tblsp sugar
• 3/4 tsp Salt
• 3 tblsp Olive oil
• Chilli powder
• Chopped coriander
  

For the filling:

• 3-4 Boiled potatoes (cubed)
• 1/2 cup chopped onions
• 1/2 tsp turmeric
• 1/2 tsp chilli powder
• 1 tsp amchur (or mango powder)
• 3 tsp oil

Method:

1. Warm the milk,add sugar to it and mix well. Add the yeast to it and mix well. Keep aside.
2. Take flour and make a hole,add water,olive oil,salt in it and the yeast completely dissolved in the milk. Add the chopped coriander and chilli powder.
3. Mix and make a smooth dough,keep in a warm place covered with a cling wrap for an hour.
4. Meanwhile make the filling. For the filling:
1. Heat the oil and saute the onions till golden brown.
2. Add turmeric, chilli powder and fry for a 1 minute.
3. Add potatoes and mix. Add the amchur.
4. Mix well and if required mash the potatoes. That makes it easy to fill the buns.
5. After an hour, the dough must’ve risen. Make 6 equal balls from it.
6. Flatten the balls and take a tablespoon or so of the filling and then wrap it in the dough.
7. Preheat the oven to 375 Fahrenheit and let the stuffed buns rise in the meantime.
8. After the oven has preheated, bake the buns for 17-20 minutes.
9. Delicious buns are ready!

Cutting for stone

Author: Abraham Varghese

The story starts off in the most morbid and dreary manner you can imagine. So much so that at one point I thought of not pursuing it but something kept propelling me. And for the good! It turned out to be very engrossing!

An Indian nun falls in love with a British doctor in Addis Ababa resulting into two twins. The mother dies during delivery and the father of the twins is distraught and flees. So they’re adopted by a doctor colleague and the story is narrated by one of the them. I think the central theme of the story is “love”. Every turn in the novel is because one character loved another – it could be motherly love, fatherly, brotherly or of young hearts. The twins grow together and apart; but both grow up to be doctors. In different parts of the world. The narrator in US and his brother in Egypt. The twists and turns in the story keep you deeply seated. I think the story is very well written – I could almost feel myself with the characters in the novel. Just bear with the first few pages and you won’t regret!

Bottom line: A wonderful novel!

Letter from Sendai, Japan

I came across this letter through another blogger and felt so pleased after reading it. It was such a big coincidence that before reading this letter I was reading another blog that had outlined qualities of the Japanese, exhibited in this massive natural calamity. Both the posts had the same sentiments – there was no chaos, people were helping each other, people were sharing what they had – there was no drama. Both left me in awe of the Japanese! I bow to them, in all honesty!

When Katrina happened, we saw videos and photos of how the gas stations and stores were looted. It shocked me. In this country where we had so many systems working based on “honor”, how could people do that. This is the country I realized that honesty could be common to common people. So the looting videos led to me believe that in the face of disaster, every human behaves the same way. He can only think of one’s survival.

Until I read the above two posts.

They totally changed my view.

Not only are the Japanese technologically most advanced, they’re so behaviorally too. We must all, this whole world minus Japan, study them to learn how they got be so.