Author: anuchenji

I know, i know… I have a well-deserved reputation for putting my foot in it – so much so that my husband says I take one foot out only to put the other foot in! My only defence is that he’s got a lot more fun out of life thanks to me than he would have otherwise!

Yesterday, I was reading one of those lists on facebook (the very best way to waste time!) which add nothing to your knowledge but oh, so much fun to your afternoon! A list of “oops” moments and sympathising exclusively with the “oops-ers” (the doers of oops moments) as opposed to the “oops-ees” on whom the oops moments are perpetrated!

Some of my own bloopers came crowding back… like this one time, when we were waiting at the kids’ school to pick up my daughter after an excursion. We are chatting with a bunch of other parents. Guy rides up on a scooter and parks under a tree. Familiar face (see where this is going?). I smile at him vaguely, not quite sure of his name but recognising him as a dad. Puzzled smile back. Ah… now I get who this guy is! I have met him on work!

I announce grandly to my husband and the rest of my audience, “You know who that guy is? He’s Mr AK. Owns one of the largest software companies in India.”

Hubby laughs – “And he’s riding a scooter??!”

Me: “You don’t know – he’s a very simple man. Comes from a very ordinary middle-class background and look at the company he’s built! How amazing he’s still stays so humble!”

Hubby knows it is useless to argue and lets me meet my Armageddon!

I saunter across and say hello. The gentleman gets off his scooter and says hello back but with a slightly puzzled look on his face – the have we met before look.

So then I ask, “Mr AK, isn’t it? We met at your office last month? I am… ” and then start blabbering as his bewilderment increases and I figure I’ve put my foot in it – yet again!

But never mind, I apologise and we chat for a bit before I trail back to the other tree under which the rest of the gang is waiting – with barely suppressed merriment! But I do have a repartee – “So what if he is not Mr AK? I have  a NEW friend!”

On another occasion, I am interviewing someone at my office and he keeps giving me puzzled smiles. I am equally puzzled – just who is this? Then he introduces himself… “I am X, your daughter’s tennis coach.”

Ah, now I get it! Also why he looks familiar but am not able to place him… the thought is no sooner thunk than it is said! “Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr X, I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on!!“

Having only seen him in his coach attire of tennis shorts and T-shirt, the gentleman in a suit bore no resemblence (in my eyes at least!) to the athletic guy I was used to seeing!

FIM syndrome (foot-in-mouth) is now a well-documented chronic illness with no known cure… sadly…

I, of course, prefer food-in-mouth, like this…

BEAN AND VEGETABLE SOUP

• Fresh kidney beans or red soya beans( these are now available in most veggie shops through the year) – 2 cups
• Carrots – 4 -chunked
• French or cluster beans – snapped into 1″ pieces – 1 cup
• Potatoes – scrubbed and cubed – 2 medium
• Ash gourd (white pumpkin) – chunked – 1 cup (optional)
• Tomatoes – 3 medium – chunked
• Capsicum / bell pepper – 1 – chunked
• Green chilies – 2 – minced
• Garlic – minced – 1 tsp
• Onions – chopped – 1 medium
• Mixed herbs – 1 tbsp
• Butter or ghee – 1 tsp
• Salt and pepper
• Milk to serve – about a cup (optional)

Heat the butter or ghee in a pressure cooker (easiest way to do it). Add the onions, cover and sweat for ten minutes. Sweat the onions, I mean, though if you live in Madras, both you and the onions will sweat!

Add garlic and green chilies and saute. Add everything else except capsicum, 3 cups water, salt and pepper.

Pressure cook for two whistles and reduce heat and cook for 5-7 minutes more. Turn off, let cool till pressure is reduced. Add capsicum and cook for two minutes more.

Add 1 or 2 tbsp of milk to every cup you serve out. Great hot or cold. Plus this is an all-in-one meal – with all the food groups. If you want to reduce the carb content, just omit the potatoes or substitute with yellow pumpkin or sweet potatoes.

Put food in your mouth, not the other thing!

“What, what, why are you calling her a cheapskate? She is a bit funny (as in weird funny, not haha funny!) at times but she’s not a bad person really,” insists my mother as we all stare at her in puzzlement. We haven’t been calling anyone anything. In point of fact, we’ve not been discussing people… only food! And then it strikes me – we’ve been discussing cheesecake recipes and my mother, whose gradual loss of hearing has led rise to some hilarious misunderstandings, has heard it as cheesecake and is protesting that the lady in question – a distant relation – is not a cheesecake… I mean cheapskate… I mean I’m getting confused now!

Her son-in-law, my husband has derived a good deal of enjoyment from these situations and constantly tries to get a rise out of her! She is a good sport however and gives as good as she gets!

On one occasion, when I have a particularly annoying visitor who invariably manages to get under my skin with her very retrograde views, my mother seems to be quite calm about the whole thing and doesn’t react to anything the lady says – even when they are most irritating! The lady leaves and I ask my mother how she manages to tolerate her so well. “Oh, I just take off my hearing aid when people like her are about, you know.Then I don’t have to listen to them. It’s a very useful thing to be deaf sometimes,” she announces blithely! Trust her to make the best of any situation that life throws at her. When life throws lemons at her, my mom’s policy would be to why stop with making just lemonade, let’s go the whole hog and make lemon meringue pie and cheesecake and lemon rice and a lemon pickle to go with it and extract every possible ounce of juice out of the lemon!

This selective deafness seems to run in the family. Another elderly relation, married for many years, rarely hears what his wife says to him. When he has to, however, like when she speaks very loudly right next to him and he cannot ignore the message, he turns to her with an expression of the utmost surprise, “Huh? Oh, were you speaking to me?” – by which time she’s given up in frustration. But sit right across a large room  from him and ask him in soft tones if he’d like a drink, the “yes” comes without him missing a beat!

I have some problems with my ears a few months ago and check out my hearing. The audiologist certifies it as one hundred percent perfect hearing. I tell him I am very glad because deafness runs in my family and I had been a bit worried. “Oh, don’t worry. You might get there yet,” he assures me – even he seems to think deafness is no bad thing! I am now engaged in studying these various relations of mine to see in what ways deafness works for them – pointers to my own future course of action, maybe!

In the meantime, here’s the lemon cheesecake that my mom loves and comes from some of the lemons life has thrown at her!

One of the easiest dessert recipes, it’s a throw it all together and whizz creation…

EASY LEMON CHEESECAKE

• Ginger or digestive biscuits – 5-6 – crush with just 1 tsp butter and press into the bottom of 4 cups
• Paneer/cottage cheese – 100 gms – cold
• 100 gm cream cheese – from the frig
• Sprite or Fanta – 100 ml – cold
• Juice of one lime
• Sugar – 1/4 cup or Splenda – 4-5 sachets.

Whizz the paneer in the blender along with the sweetener.

Add the fizzy drink, continuing to blend.

Add the cream cheese and the lime juice and blend till well mixed. Pour into the cups and refrigerate overnight till set.

Decorate with lemon zest or mango puree as a topping.

This one aint no cheapskate, I’m tellin’ ya!

(Pic: Courtesy internet)

Ok, yes, I missed a deadline last night… excuse – I was drugged out on the Dramamine I took for seasickness (being the possessor of one of those sad stomachs which rears up angrily if I so much as stray a couple of metres into the water at the beach!) but am going to make up for it – it’s 365 posts in 365 days – remember – my loophole is I can write two posts or even more on some days so I get there – trust the Indian to find the loophole in the rule that I made for myself – oh, lord! We are all politicians in the making and I had fooled myself into thinking that i had embraced no ‘isms’ whatsoever – one lives and one learns things about oneself!

The whalewatching trip out of Boston harbour was incredibly exciting – we sighted no fewer than twenty one whales and a seal which followed us for over a mile (see just how American I’m becoming – actually going non-metric!) and kept popping its head out of the water every few seconds to eye us curiously – maybe it was wondering whether we were very large prey? I was careful to not go too near the prow of the boat – after all – fat is the most difficult substance to procure in nature and we do not want to tempt any predators with our extra kilos – pounds rather!  And those waters do harbour sharks – the tour guide said so!

The whales seemed to be putting on  a special show for us as they cavorted in the water – showing tails and undulating silhouettes – they are unimaginably graceful for such large creatures. And no wonder they get to be that size – did you know that they can feed continuously for six months – like I mean – a mealtime lasts that long – with no breaks and then for six months they can go without any food whatsoever! It’s called a slimming diet – no food – and boy do they need it by then!

From a day that starts out warm and all you need is a shirt, the boat zips into the ocean and then suddenly I am feeling like ice-cream – semi-freddo – soon to be fully freddo! I mean – it is bone-chillingly cold. And I begin to think of hot soups and hot parathas and generally hot anything will do! The glorious dance of the whales drives everything else out of my mind till it is time to head back.

Thinking of what whales eat – krill and plankton and small fish – (all stony cold, I bet – I wouldn’t want their diet even if I could eat for six months continuously!) and Moby Dick and by some strange association – the hunting of the Snark… brings to mind quorn! We’d been talking about it with one of our hosts on this trip – the incredibly hospitable, warm couple – Neena and Anupam – who are veritable encyclopaedias (encyclopaediae?) of knowledge on almost anything under the sun and I learnt for the first time that quorn – unlike my imagination which had characterised it as being made of veggies and Marmite and mushrooms and eggs – compressed into little pellets (I swear!), it was actually a microfungus!

Wiki says :

“Quorn is a major meat substitute product within the UK and Ireland.^[1] The brand was launched in 1985 by Marlow Foods (a joint venture between Rank Hovis McDougall and ICI). Quorn is intended to replicate the taste and texture of meat.^{[citation needed]} All Quorn foods contain mycoprotein as an ingredient, which is derived from the Fusarium venenatum fungus and is grown by fermentation using a process that has been called similar to the production of beer or yoghurt.^[2] The fungus culture is dried and mixed with egg albumen, which acts as a binder, and then is adjusted in texture and pressed into various forms. Additionally, the carbon footprint of Quorn Frozen Mince in the UK is claimed to be 70% less than that of beef.^[3]“

I am shocked – but like I said – we live and we learn.

All that is fine but quorn still doesn’t sound very appetising to me – am going to try it and tell you what it’s like. In the meantime, I get hungrier and hungrier – a packet of chips does little to allay hunger. An ENORMONGOUS (I promise there is no non-messy way to eat it) sandwich – I have to keep picking bits of cabbage and mayo and ketchup and mustard and various unidentifiable objects off my clothes through the day! – and a yummy red velvet cookie (they are called whoopie pies – such a cute name!) are what I get – here’s the latter…

RED VELVET WHOOPIE PIES

Don’t be fooled – it’s not hard like our biscuits, it’s soft! – more like a cake. Adapted from a recipe from Oven Love

• 1 cup flour/maida
• 1 tbsp. cocoa powder
• 4 tsp. baking powder
• 3 tbsp. salted butter, softened
• Scant 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1 small egg
• 1/2 tsp. vanilla essence
• ½ cup whipped yogurt
• 1 tsp red food coloring
• 1 batch cream cheese frosting – (whip together 4 tbsp cream cheese, 2 tbsp butter, 1/2 tsp vanilla essence and 1/2 cup of icing sugar (more if you lie ‘em sweet)

1. Preheat the oven to 375˚ F
2. Using something round, trace evenly spaced circles onto pieces of parchment paper sized to fit two cookie sheets. Place the parchment on the cookie sheets so that the side you have drawn on is facing down; set aside
3. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt. In a separate bowl,cream together the butter and brown sugar on medium-high speed until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Beat in the egg until incorporated, scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary. Blend in the vanilla. With the mixer on low speed, beat in about a third of the dry ingredients, followed by half of the yogurt, beating each addition just until incorporated. Repeat so that all the yogurt has been added and then mix in the final third of dry ingredients. Do not overmix. Blend in the food coloring
4. Transfer the batter to a pastry bag fitted with a large plain round tip. Pipe the batter onto the parchment paper using the tracings as a guide. Bake 7-9 minutes or until the tops are set, rotating the baking sheets halfway through. Allow the cookies to cool on the baking sheets at least 10 minutes, until they can be easily transferred to a cooling rack. Repeat with any remaining batter. Allow cookies to cool completely before proceeding
5. Fill the frosting in a clean pastry bag fitted with a plain, round tip. Pair the cookies up by shape and size. Flip one cookie of each pair over so that the flat side is facing up
6. Pipe frosting onto the flat-sided cookie of each pair, leaving the edges clear. Sandwich the cookies together so the flat sides are facing each other and press gently to help the filling reach the edges. To store, refrigerate in an airtight container

No this is not the whale’s slimming diet – it’s the one in the other six months – the fattening one!

The country where Louisa May Alcott lived, wrote and espoused staunchly feminist principles.

The land where crayons come in unbelievable colours.

George Washington and the cherry tree story.

Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Rich country where everyone has a car and some even have two!

They play a very funny and completely incomprehensible game called baseball and seem to actually prefer it to cricket – how strange!

Where people speak with an accent that begs for subtitles (not that we had even heard of subtitles back then!)

Scary country. It has big grizzlies and even saber-toothed tigers! (We learnt only later they had become extinct several hundred thousand years ago!

Where Elizabeth Taylor married Richard Burton some ten times or so! Why????!

Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning conductor and why it didn’t strike him dead was one of those mysteries of science!

Where schools were full of Archies and Jugheads and all-American middle class Betty was always more popular than that catty Veronica – why did Archie even bother with Ronnie?!

You made it there if you were very, very good at studies!

Perry Mason and Della Street. James Hadley Chase – the thrill of feeling very grown up as you read them!

MacKenna’s Gold and the Wild West and everyone had a horse and a gun and boots with spurs which jangled when they walked (many of us would have cheerfully sold our souls – if we knew we had such things in our possession! – many tomes over to the devil to possess these!)

You could buy trick-y things to be used at school like you read about in the Mallory Towers books like invisible ink and squeaky chalk and other such exciting paraphernalia from the catalogue at the back of comic books!

And finally and above all else, the land which is covered with apple trees Johnny Appleseed randomly through around as he wandered round the country side (image of a barefoot tramp with a sack of apple seeds slung over his back rather like how tea pickers carry their babies in a sack on their backs!) scattering them as he walked (image courtesy Radiant Reader, the series of English textbooks we had up to class 6, i think).

This was what we knew of America when we were growing up in sixites and seventies India! A random set of facts – mostly gleaned from books – ranging from schools texts to Archie comics and little bit of serious literature!

Growing up, unfortunately, de-mystified much of this. Some things stayed – like the Little Women series, Anne, forever glorious at Green Gables – as comforting and as familiar as Thangam maami next door!

Driving through New England these couple of days, seeing such unbelievably pretty towns, I remembered another old favourite – Johnny Appleseed. And then comes random thought, would apple pie even be American if it were not for this one man?!

And so, to celibrate America is the essentially American…

CORNBREAD (recipe adapted from Betty Crocker)

• Salted butter – 1/4 cup
• Milk – 1 cup
• Cornmeal – 1.25 cups
• Maida – plain flour – 1/2 cup
• Whole wheat flour – 1/2 cup
• Brown sugar – 1/4 cup
• Baking pwd – 2 tsp

Melt butter in a saucepan. Switch off.

Whisk in egg and milk, stirring frequently.

Add all the other ingredients and mix till just combined.

Pour into a greased pan and bake till golden brown and the centre is cooked – about 25 minutes – at 200 C.

Serve with any gravy – I like a mushroom gravy with this.

I think even Johhny Appleseed would have liked it – he was a vegetarian in the latter half of his life!

“Sputnik? You’re having me on!!” I protest as I am introduced to a girl from a different school at an inter-school cul-fest. She is introduced with the name of this Russian satellite. “I wasn’t born yesterday,” I think to myself. “Don’t try to pass off an outlandish name like that to me!”

But it turns out to be true – she was born the day the Sputnik was launched and the parents, in their abundant (?) wisdom and satellite-struck state, decide to commemorate the day by naming their first born after the satellite!

I move from shock to curiosity. “So, how does it feel to have a name like that?” I enquire politely if not quite politically correctly! (Political correctness was born much later and I’m sure someone must have named their kid after that too!)

“Oh, it’s quite cool, actually. No one ever forgets my name,” she says quite proudly. Sets me to thinking about all the unusually named people I know and which of those monikers I’d prefer for myself. A childhood playmate called Subhaschandra Bose Raju (we Telugus are seriously star-struck!). Or how about Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi Reddy?! I once did a summer internship in a company where I had to interview an Eisenhower Subramanian!

How about “My name is Singh, Bond Singh, James Bond Singh”. For real, I promise!

How about the girl named Full Stop by parents who’d already had six kids and intended no more! Well, accidents happen and a year later, they had to dig around for a name and decide that this time they mean business – with a little boy named, hold your breath, “Period”!

How about this actual name on a Singapore passport – Batman bin Suparaman?! Wonder whether his son would be named Robin bin Sidekick?!

Or this skinny police officer in America whose nametag read, most inappropriately, I may add, Chris.P.Bacon!

Was thinking of this today when we ordered what in America are euphemistically called “Kid size cups” of ice-cream at this ice-cream farm called Erikson’s Icecreams in Maynard, Massachusetts (one of the prettiest little towns I’ve ever seen, btw!) – it would be a “large” anywhere in India! Wonder what they would call our single scoop cups in India – doll sized servings?

The most delicious ice-cream ever, btw! I had “rum butter” and took spoons out of everyone else’s – all yum.

Here’s a recipe for

SPICED RUM BUTTER ICE-CREAM – adapted from allrecipes.com

• Butter – 2 tbsp
• Cornflour – 1 tbsp
• Brown sugar – 1/4 cup
• Whole milk – 1 cup
• 1/2 cup rum – white or dark
• Cinnamon – 1/2 ” stick
• Vanilla icecream – 400 ml – leave outside the frig for ten minutes till a little softened.

Melt butter with the cinnamon stick in it. Mix the sugar and cornstarch together.

Pour over the butter and mix well, stirring continuously.

Pour in milk in a steady stream and continue to stir till it begins to thicken. Discard cinnamon stick.

When thickened, remove from heat and stir in rum.

When cooled completely, fold into the ice-cream and re-freeze.

And call it Osama bin icecream if you want – rum butter by any other name is as sweet!

(Pic: Courtesy internet)