Monday, December 31, 2012

Bye bye 2012


A year gone and gone with the wind…
Just thinking about the worries of mine at the beginning of the year…no…. those things do not scare me anymore; do not make me awake at night. The worries for future are there, but they have lost the intensity. The vulnerability of life is so pronounced that I do not worry for position, status or power fight any more. Two incidents of 2012 had shaken me from the core. One was Sandy Hook Elementary School incident and the other was the rape and unimaginable torture on a 23rd year old girl. My faith on humanity is hanging on a thread. Yes, I know about war and death of children in war. But this is like the sudden full stop of the beautiful lives of 20 little children, their laughs and their dreams. After my mother’s death, I have not been shaken so much. The second incident was so brutal that I could not even think about that anymore. Even the word “animal behavior” is nothing to describe that crime. At one point of time, I thought,” let it be. Let the Mayans be true. The world is no longer a place to live anymore.”
   I am a mother and I play a very critical role in a person’s life. Now instead of raising a successful man, I want to raise a human being who should be compassionate and caring and who will value humanity more than anything else. That is the only think I hope for and breath to live for.
  Bye bye 2012. 

Saturday, December 8, 2012

Learning With You....to Adi.

I thought I knew everything about ABCDs... and I can teach you in my finger touch. Little did I know that its as tough as solving a scientific problem ?

Friday, December 7, 2012

Ode to food-bloggers

  I like to cook and do not like to be disturbed during cooking. Cooking is a kind of meditation I choose. But when you have a pre-schooler sneaking in your kitchen all the time, its very hard to concentrate. Usually, I get up quite early in most days of week ( I hated that when I was kid). Early morning time is the best time for me to cook aka meditate. I enjoy and relish it. If I had to do the same thing after coming from office, I feel crazy and angry. So mind it, time and moment are crucial things for my tasty food.
    I never thought I would turn out to be a foodie,much to my parents' surprise. My love for food begun when I left home for higher studies. The difficulties to get home-made (aka home-taste) food were my driving point to get tasty food. Then after eight years of hostel-mess food, I really love any kind of home-made food from any part of the world. Still I did not get my hands-on experiments on food and solely dependent upon my cook, my mom and mom-in-law. But the real journey begun after coming to USA.
    When I crossed Atlantic and reached Boston, my culinary expertise was limited within rice(!), daal(lentil soup) and begun bhaja (fried egg-plant). Oh Oh I forgot the boiled egg. I fed plenty of bottled and ready made baby food to my son in his first few months staying in USA. But I was not happy eating the same recipe again and again. I started cooking some things else, long-distanced calls to India gave me the recipe of fish and chicken, but we know our moms. They will never able to tell you size and proportionality of ingredients. And the search for wonderful world of food-blogging left open to me. I really appreciate them. The amazing food-bloggers all over the world keep posted about their cooking and photographs. I learnt almost everything from them. And then something happened to me.
   I fell in love with cooking. The everyday chicken biriyani from Bongmom or coconut-steamed prawn from my friend's blog make me a cook, at least my husband and kid like it. Somewhere, I started believing that cooking is not only about food, recipe or eating. Especially displaying a well cooked food, the appeal of vision is very important. I feel I should give an example here. I never knew about the green, leafy chard in India. On first look, I thought its beet-root leaf, yes, though they belong to beet family but they are not same. And I avoided them for quite sometime. Then this post from ecurry made me to go to store and buy some chard. By now you might be doubting about my sanity. I admit i did not add pine nuts and recreated the same except I added poppy seeds( aka posto) end of that chard recipe, but it tasted awesome and fell in love with the chard.So the whole thing started from a particular blog-post.
   Here are my most favorite food blogs from where I read recipes and cook :
             1. Bongcookbook
             2. Bongcook
             3. ecurry
             4. Cooking and recipes 
             5. Peppermill
             6. Bakerella
             7. TheIndianSimmer
            8. veggiebelly
           
There are many more awesome blogs where I read recipes but these are my regular ones. I respect the time and efforts they put on their blogs. The whole point of creativity is to get mental satisfaction is very true. So I cook and so I think everybody cooks for.
Before I finish just want to quote this single word poem from Bob Raczka,
              "Creative i crave art".
Cooking is indeed a special kind of art.
    So happy blogging and cooking. Chao..