3 posts tagged “cooking”

Boy 2008 is going by quickly - it's already getting to the middle of February. Today of course is Chinese New Year, and one of my Chinese colleagues brought a treat to the office for the occasion - Water Chestnut Cake. It was amazing. I need to get the recipe from her, but here is one I found online. All this time I've been putting water chestnut into curries and stir fries when I could have been putting it into cakes :)

I have to admit I am a sucker for Asian desserts - almond jelly, custard balls, egg tarts, chiffon cake... - just to name a few. Oh and there is a great Chinese bakery, Regent, down the road from Microsoft which does a mean mango mousse cake and fruit tarts. What I love about Asian desserts versus Western-style ones is that they are not as sweet and not as heavy. Ok I shouldn't be thinking about dessert this early in the day.

In other news, I moved into my new place in Capitol Hill a couple of weeks ago. It's closer to my friends, much quieter and greener than living smack bang in the middle of downtown, and I have my own place again. It's been great so far. I can see the sun rise over the mountains in the mornings (admittedly it's rare that the sun actually gets a look-in in winter, but summer's going to be fab). And the kitchen is huge and wonderful and I've been cooking up a storm. Ach there I go, inevitably back to the topic of food again. Let me end this before I start eating my keyboard.

I am going to make a big call and say that this is one of the greatest things I have ever seen on the internet: Manjula's Kitchen. Young desis the world over can now see how to cook like their Amma, even if said Amma lives on the other side of the world.

I truly enjoy watching Manjupacchi (as I have Konkanarilly renamed her). It's not just the fact that she is teaching me to cook something yummy. There is just something so Indo-maternal about her, and her mixer, and the years of experience during which she has presumably developed superpowers in telling dhana and jeera powder apart from a distance of 30 metres.

For those seven or eight wonderful minutes, I am transported. I feel like I am at home watching my mum or grandma make dinner. It is so soothingly familiar, it makes me want to go home and put on a salwar kameez and make daali toy and gazra kosambari with Shruti Sadolikar singing in the background.

Admittedly, when I lived at home, the situation was more like this: Amma and/or Mummy working their magic in the kitchen, while I lay in some utterly uncharming pose on the couch, wearing scruffy clothes my mother had begged me to throw out about three years ago, chatting on MSN, blocking out the Indian classical music with headphones full of whatever my latest musical obsession was, spoiling my dinner by snacking on pita and hummus, complaining about some uni assignment, and occasionally glancing up at the cricket score and complaining about Saurav Ganguly too, for good measure. Ah, good times. Or, good times, ay. Eh.

Anyway. Back to 2007. Here is a sample cooking lesson, you can click on the link above for the full listing. God bless you Manjupacchi, and all the ammas, annammas, ammammas, pacchis, akkas, kakis, mamis, and phaggar-mais of this world. You warm our hearts and our tummies and make the world a better place to be.

I haven't been updating this blog much since I made the move downtown - I blame the fact that I now have a roommate, which makes it much easier to spill what's on my mind over a cup of tea, rather than trying to get it into a coherent written form here. On the upside, the fact that people have been calling me out for not posting anything proves that somebody apart from my mum actually reads this thing (not that I don't appreciate your readership, Amma :]).

So, updates.

A couple of weeks ago I organised a dinner party for my friends who helped me move. It was Prasad, Ricmoo, Radhika, Shivani and Astha - Sean was still in China so couldn't attend. It was my first time cooking for guests in my new place, and I decided to go for a Malaysian/Indonesian theme - I made laksa (from the amazing laksa paste my mum sent back with me last time I went home), nasi goreng, a crunchy Asian salad, and almond jelly. It was fun to make and I was very happy with how it all turned out. I don't find myself cooking as often these days - the commute gives me less time to do all the organisational stuff around cooking, it just gets easier to pull something out of the freezer or make some quick pasta or stir fry. I need to make more time for it though.

Prashant and Pooja got back from their wedding (in Delhi) and honeymoon (in New Zealand) last weekend, and incidentally the day they arrived was the day after Pooja's birthday. We decided, in true Quirkmeister style, to break into their home (okay... we had a key), decorate it, and jump out at the bewildered weary travellers as they walked through the front door. I haven't been seeing much of my east side friends since I moved downtown, so that was fun. We looked through all the wedding photos - they'd done a mixture of north and south Indian ceremonies (Pooja is Punjabi and Prashant is Tamilian), so it was interesting to see all the costume and mood changes through the albums. And I have to say, Pooja looked absolutely stunning.

Went to a couple of shows this week - Bright Eyes on Tuesday and the Decemberists on Friday. Bright Eyes was pretty good - I'd only heard his most recent album, Cassadaga, which I quite liked, and the songs he did from that one were great. I didn't like his older stuff that much - it seemed very emo and in parts sounded like the missing link between noise and sound (apologies to Danny Bhoy for ripping off that phrase). And the frontman was a little too  much of a primadonna for my liking. I guess that's what happens when people start calling you a "young Dylan" when you're sixteen. The show was definitely entertaining though. He had three percussionists, a full string section, and great backdrops.

The Decemberists gig was simply stupendous. I have no words to describe how good this concert was. Just try to imagine a totally packed Paramount Theatre with every single person in the room laughing, jumping, singing, and dancing, completely rapt in the experience of seeing and hearing an amazingly talented band who are at their peak and having just as much fun as the audience. Incredible. I am still buzzing. And I want to know when they are coming back to Seattle.

Apart from that, work has been really busy, and I have been getting into a really good exercise routine, running about 4 miles three times a week. I am training for a 8 mile run which is happening in two weeks, and that's been a motivating goal for me. I've also gotten back into piano - Punit now has one at his place (minding it for a colleague who is overseas for a few years, I believe), and we've been trying to put a few songs together, him on guitar and me on piano. It's good to be playing again - I am a little rusty but it's coming back slowly but surely.

This week will be busy again with preparations for a bachelorette party and mehndhi for Aparna, who is getting married in a fever hotter than a pepper sprout. Also some big deadlines at work this week, I just hope I manage to fit everything in!