“Put on your pants before you come out of your room!” I yell at my 7-year old daughter who has a habit of wandering out forgetting various articles of clothing! It is a source of constant tension to check to see if she’s properly attired before we leave for school and office in the morning. Now, everyone knows how that works – the pre-eight o’clock period of the morning – you barely have time to check if you’re still breathing before you have to hustle self and everyone else out of the door!
Then you cross the halfway mark, just negotiated horrendous Madras traffic and that horrible stretch of road still under construction (they do know how to choose their time, don’t they??!) before a small voice piped up from the backseat, Amma… I think I forgot my pants/shirt/pencil with an exam on today/lunchbox/that assignment which is overdue by a week and the teacher has given her an ultimatum – today!… any of a number of things!
K, being K, would have been perfectly happy to go to school with any or all of these missing, except the all-important lunch box! That was something for which she would want to turn back for! The rest of it I considered important and would turn back for – just a matter of differing priorities!
Back to our missing pants tale. There is a shocked silence for a minute at the other end of the line. “But… but… how did you know I wasn’t wearing any?” whispers a friend’s voice! I had dialled a friend just before K came out of her room half-dressed and without realising that the line had been picked up at the other end, yelled out the pants-on-fire bit! Shocked friend, embarrassed self, both with a funny bone equal loads of laughter and a tale that I haven’t lived down even twenty years after!
There is something about our one-track minds which is rather unmindful of anything in the environment except the thing we are focusing on at the moment – which invariably leads us into trouble!
I’d have yelled out an instruction, “Be sure to flush after you’re done” at a cinema or a restaurant or something without realising that the kid being given said instruction was behind a closed toilet door but there was a large-as-life co-theatre-goer/diner standing right in front of me till I got a funny look and the other lady scuttled off as fast as her legs would carry her, to get away from this keeper-of-public-morality!
Oh well, one lives but one doesn’t always learn!
One then consoles oneself and the embarrassed kid and maybe even the co-diner with food items! Like this…
BANANA CHOCOLATE MUFFINS
- 3 very ripe bananas – mash well
- 100 ml vegetable oil (sunflower or any odourless oil)
- 3 tbsp yogurt
- 2 large eggs
- 100 grams demerara sugar
- 200 grams plain flour/maida OR a mixture of half and half whole wheat flour and maida
- 4 tbsp cocoa powder (sifted)
- 1 tsp baking powder
To the mashed bananas, add oil, eggs, yogurt and sugar. Mix well.
Mix all the dry ingredients together and working really fast, mix the wet and dry ingredients together.
Spoon into muffin cases (about 15) and bakle in a preheated oven at 200C for 15-30 minutes till done. These muffins are dark brown and simply delicious!
You really will enjoy taking your foot out of your mouth for one of these! 😉