What can be the most frustrating thing if you're not a cook and you're trying to cook something to satisfy your craving?

The thing you're cooking turning out a big flop or not working out at all!!

I've been craving kadhi for quite a few days. Not the Punjabi kadhi with gram flour pakoras but the Gujrati one...lighter yellow in colour, thinner consistency (like soup) and flavoured with curry leaves and green chillies!

Guess what happened once I started cooking it...the curd curdled!!! Grrrrrrrrr.....

I ran out of yogurt and curry leaves so couldn't give it another go. Then I went online and figured out my mistake. 1) I was using low fat yogurt which does not have the emulsifiers of full-fat/regular yogurt and tends to curdle when cooked, 2) I took yogurt straight out of the fridge and started cooking it whereas I should've used yogurt at room temperature.

The recipe I was referring to used low fat yogurt and didn't mention anything about the possibility it could curdle, but I'm asuming the woman is a domestic Goddess that can make the impossible possible, I'm totally not. So I will be wiser tomorrow (hopefully) and give it another shot because I really really want to have goddamn kadhi. Oh, how I miss my cook from back home :((

Life sucks. Thank God there's chocolate.

And Happy Father's Day, Daddy.

Warning: This is a major crib post so if you're feeling annoyingly happy (annoying for others, not for yourself) or are pissed off with people in general, you may be better off not reading beyind this.

The past couple of weeks have been so hectic! I've been running around since I moved to Sydney. For one, I need to be at work latest by 9 every morning, so I'm getting an hour & a half less of sleep every night. Less sleep makes me cranky and perpetually exhausted. And just when I had started feeling settled into my service apartment, it was time to move house.

I moved in on Saturday and since then I've spent all my evenings buying things for the house, so I can set it up and make it feel like home. To be fair, it's a reasonably nice house - fairly big for one person, fully furnished with stuff from IKEA, and very conveniently situated right in the heart of the City so that it's a 30 second walk from the bus stop, 2 mins from the train station and a couple of minutes from 2 of the biggest supermarkets in Australia. So why am I complaining? Well, it doesn't FEEL like home. And it's obviously not as luxurious as the service apartment I was staying at, neither does it have a harbour view :(

Australia is so far away from the rest of the world that traveling anywhere is a hassle. A round trip to India costs approx. $1500 (Rs 65-75k) if you book 3 months ahead of your travel date, and the connectivity is so poor that unless you're supremely lucky you will end up with a 10 hour stop over in South East Asia! You can forget about traveling to Europe unless you have $2000-2500 lying spare to blow up on flight tickets and you get a kick out of flying (24 hours flying time to London). You would think that with the technology that we have access to today, life in Australia would be simple. It is a developed country after all. But the truth is that this is one strange country.

In many ways, Australia is ages behind other developed countries. Internet is shit expensive. So are fruits & vegetables because Australians won't open their economy to imports. They have a number of protectionist policies for their farmers & retailers, which is a good thing, but it also means that consumers pays ridiculously high prices for the basic necessities. If there's a flash flood in Queensland, which happens only every month, bananas will cost you $13 for a dozen. Which is beyond ridiculous, it's insane. It's cheaper to drive to work than take public transport. A 500ml bottle of Coke costs $3.50 and pizzas don't have enough sauce. Subway makes horrible sandwiches. Their coffee is too bitter and luke warm and they look at you like you've just escaped from an institution if you ask for milk & sugar (I have baristas offer to put chocolate in my coffee instead of sugar since sugar is high in calories. Really, since when did chocolate become health food?). And no one in this country seems to have heard of plastic bottles! (They still make glass bottles that you have to uncork & pop the lid of, to store water).

You know I'm thinking maybe Australia should increase its minimum education requirement from high school to college. They could certainly use a couple of Eureka! moments.

Maa Exchange

A shitty weekend followed by a super Manic Monday. There are a million things crying out for my attention at work, a zillion proofs of investment I need to gather so I can claim a good part of the money that I have slogged to earn through the year from the taxman's claws (and that would otherwise go into some fatass politician's pocket, not into improving my country's infrastructure) and a gazillion people who're pissing me off with their sheer idiocy. So while I fret and fume, and figure out how to survive the madness, read this post on a new reality show that I wrote last week.

What...don't you know we love talking crap here?

*****

Reality shows on singing and dancing. Shows where people answer questions to become millionnaires. Shows where a bunch of 'has-beens' and starlets who are complete strangers to each other are thrown into a house together for 90 days. Shows where celebrities are left to camp in scary jungles. Shows where celebrities participate in death-defying stunts to ostensibly conquer their fears. Shows on cooking skills of wannabe "masterchefs". Shows where a bunch of women squabble, bitch, plot, plan and disgrace themselves in public to win the affection of the sole guy. Shows where a celebrity couple without kids is made to care for someone else's child for a month. Shows where people are willing to reveal their deepest, darkest secrets on television even though it may ruin their lives forever. Shows where people are more than willing to lie down on the couch and let the shrink regress them to their past lives. Just when you thought Indian television had exhausted all possible reality show formats comes another reality show. Of course, most of these formats are borrowed from the West but there has to be some saturation point, innit?

The new reality show on the block is 'Maa Exchange' - the Indian version of 'Wipe Swap'. The original format would apparently have been too risque for the Indian audience given our concept of "family bonding" through television.

In this new reality show they take women from two disparate backgrounds and put them in each other's homes. These women have to run each other's houses for a week. The focus is on motherly and home-maker duties. For instance, a cleanliness freak woman will be put in the home of someone who thinks hygiene kills.

Week 1 saw Pooja Bedi "who runs her house very efficiently with the help of 3 maids" (their words, not mine) swap places with a woman who feeds her husband chapatis straight off the griddle, serves him hot tea whenever he wants and generally waits on him 24x7. I don't know if the show is stage managed but this woman was really bizarre - she believes dining tables belong at hotels, not at homes. That a house that's clean looks like a hotel. That it's OK to have breakfast at 3pm, lunch at 7pm and dinner at 3am. That kids who express their opinions infront of their parents/elders have had a bad upbringing. That people who thanks their drivers or house helps are being fake.

Next week will see a woman who's a cleanliness freak go into a home where the toilets have never seen a toilet cleaner.

It's a scary show, this one. And something I wouldn't do for even a lot of money (I don't know what my breaking point would be though. I'd like to say there won't be one but...it's money, honey). Rationally though I can't imagine being part of such a thing. It's not about stepping out of my comfort zone - just the thought of going to live in some stranger's house for a week and letting her live in mine and manage my house is kind of revolting to me. Kind of.

What about you? Can you see yourself participating in such a show?

Who Stole My Christmas?

Crib post ahead. You have been warned.

It's two days till Christmas and I'm not feeling Christmassy yet :(


I'm a Christmas person. I decorate my house every year. I put up a tree, ornaments, wreaths, streamers...the works! I used to decorate my desk at work as well. My friends & I play Secret Santa. So it's very uspetting to not be feeling the spirit of Christmas because I know I'll have to wait an entire year for the next one to come around :(

Honestly, I'm done with 2010. It's been a year of constant change. The changes have been for the better, career advancement and all that, but they've been way too frequent for my liking. I'm also staring a few more undesired changes, personal and professional, in the face. Sigh.

Then there are the bitchy people. They abound in my life. People who pretend to be really fond of you to your face but bitch about you once out of earshot. People who spread all sorts of false malicious gossip about your personal & professional life. I'm amazed at how bitchy some people I know can get!

I understand that people bitch about someone when they're insecure or feel themselves to be inferior, and you'd think that after 6 years of working in the corporate world I would've learnt how to treat these people, i.e. ignore them. But I really can't ignore negative talk. I've learnt how to deal with it and not get angry over it, I've got to the point where I don't let it get to me. But I can't completely ignore it. Negativity affects me.

These events have taken the festive feeling out of this time of the year. Looks like someone has stolen my Christmas :(

Some Cribbing and a Cupful of Desire

I don't like kids. Particularly in restaurants, movie theaters, airplanes & my house.

Gaaah, who am I kidding? I don't like kids anywhere, period. They are generally crying, wailing, throwing tantrums, misbehaving, destroying/messing up things around them, or acting like monsters. Not to mention they are major attention seekers. But more than kids, I can't stand parents who don't know how to/won't control their kids in public places.

Last weekend, we went for dinner to this nice restaurant where I had the most decadent dessert, but more on that after I'm done cribbing about kids.

There was a kid running around the restaurant while his parents were chatting away with friends at a table next to ours. He would often come and start running around our table. We tried scaring him away with angry looks but he just wouldn't leave us alone. And then he started poking his finger into our food!

So imagine you've gone to a really nice restaurant with your partner/friend/family/whoever and all you want is a quiet, sumptuous meal with lots of nice conversation and there's this random kid who comes over and starts poking his finger into your food! What would you do?

We turned around and asked the mother to get a hold on him, and this takes the cake - her reply was "shayad woh khana chahta hai, thoda khila dijiye na (maybe he wants to have some of your food, feed him some"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I just stared at her open-mouthed. When I finally managed to pick my jaw up off the floor, I told her that I wasn't there to feed her kid. Neither were the other people in the restaurant. And if she couldn't control him at a public place, she had no business bringing him to one.

At this point, the manager intervened and thankfully, he had the sense to point out to the harebrained woman that there were perfectly behaved little kids at other tables as well, so could she please look after hers as he wanted everyone at the restaurant to have an enjoyable meal, and moreover, the kid might hurt himself by falling/running into furniture?

I was impressed by this man.

While we are on the topic of kids, I got a little shock this morning.

I ran into two of my neighbors who have 1 year old kids. They were going to drop their kids off at school!!!

I asked them what kind of school exists for 1 year olds and apparently, it's a play school that starts at 9 and ends at 12. But isn't 12 months too young for a child to be going to ANY kind of school? And both of these women are stay-at-home moms, so why do they need to be sending their child to school anyway?

I tactfully enquired whether they thought the child was old enough to be sent to school and they blatantly replied that they do it so they can get some peace in the morning and get household chores out of the way, pack their husbands off to work and get their pujas & what not done.

I mean, this really pisses me off. Everyone has the right to "peace" but if peace is so important to you, DON'T.FUCKING.HAVE.KIDS.

When you decide to have a kid, you undoubtedly & unequivocally give up your right to "peace" at least for a few years. It's like people have this pressure to procreate and then the kid can go to hell.

Why do people have kids when they can't take care of them? Gets my goat every single time.

Phew! So now that we're done cribbing about pesky, annoying kids, let me tell you about the mindblowing dessert that I had at the restaurant. Chocolate fondant with crushed peanuts and butterscotch ice-cream with peanut and salted caramel. Oh man, it was orgasmic.

For non-food connoisseurs, the fondant was essentially a cupful of molten chocolate, baked so it was slightly crusted on top. It had crushed peanuts in it and I love peanut butter, Reeses peanut butter cups and peanut Snickers, so I really enjoyed it. The crushed peanuts gave the molten chocolate a slight crunch as well as a slightly salty, nutty taste. The butterscotch ice cream was equally good. It too contained crushed peanuts and was drizzled with a salted caramel sauce. You couldn't help but moan with every bite.

I'm not much of a picture taker (basically I'm just a lazy person!) so I don't have pictures of this mouth-watering dessert. But here's an idea of what it looked like. All that the picture below is missing are tiny bits of peanuts and a drizzle of salted caramel sauce :)

Picture courtesy: http://blog.5min.com/

We're Expanding!!!!

I hope you guys had a very happy Diwali!

I just realized that this is my 499th post on this blog. Which means that my next post will be my 500th!!!!

Phew!!!!

It's a little hard to believe that I've sustained at blogging for so long (3 years). I guess that's because blogging acts as a big release for me. Whenever I feel the need to take a break from work or generally switch-off for a bit, I blog! Which is why my posts are almost always random and sometimes funny. I try to stay away from writing about serious issues unless it's something I strongly feel about. So let's see what I come up with for my 500th post. I don't have any ideas...all I know is that I've got to make it special, haven't I? :)

You know what I also realized? I've gained 4 kgs over the past 3 months!!!!!! Someone KILL.ME.NOW.

Honestly, I've no one to blame for this except myself. I haven't been to the gym in a month & a half and I've been eating out 2-3 times in a week. That's not all, I've been gobbling up all forms of desserts like the world's about to face a sugar crisis. Gobble gobble gobble...someone stop me!!

Unfortunately, I also realize that THAT someone will have to be me. Poor me :(

So I've decided that I'm going to apply emergency breaks on my eating habits and haul my ass to the gym, starting this weekend. Here's what I plan to do:

1. I'm going to stick to my rule of 5-6 small meals a day rather than 3 big meals, but I'm going to put more thought into what I snack on in between my main meals. Though I'm generally healthy about this - I snack on carrots and fruits rather than fried stuff or junk food - there are times when I give in to temptation. THAT IS GOING TO STOP. I'm going to include more protein in my snacks such as nuts and yogurt.


2. Contrary to what my physical trainer suggests, I can't call the chef out and talk to him everytime I visit a restaurant. I don't want to be "that" freak-show and I'd also rather not have all sorts of pots & pans hurled at me in a public situation. So I'm going to do the next best thing - I'm going to cut down on eating out. I get bored of home food very easily and end up eating out 2-3 times a week. This is one of my major major weaknesses and I really need to get a handle on it. I'm going to eat out only once a week.


3. I'm going to cut down on desserts. I'll have them only when I'm having a real craving. There's always some - okay, alright, a lot - of chocolate sitting in my fridge. The idea was to get reverse psychology kicking in. If you have chocolate handy at all times, you know it's there when you want to have some, so you don't get cravings and you hardly end up eating any. This was my 'smartypants' logic. The problem was that this reverse psychology worked for a couple of months only. Now I pop in a mini-Bounty or mini-Snickers almost everyday!


4. I'm going to eat my breakfast within an hour of waking up. I think I have a reasonably balanced breakfast consisting of toast, a boiled egg (without the yolk) and fruit juice, or a bowl of muesli with milk and fruit juice. The problem is I generally eat it 2 hours after waking up. I really need to get my metabolism kicking sooner than that.


5. I'm going to stop my carb intake after 6pm. That means no rotis for dinner, only protein and produce.


6. I'm going to try and keep a food diary and enter everything I eat into it religiously. That way I can keep track of how good I've been through the week and feel mortified whenever the fattening/junk food intake starts to spiral. Now I just need to whip up the discipline to do this!
7. I will go to the gym regularly. I will go to the gym regularly. Repeat. If I don't, I'll become a butterball that can roll all the way from Ludhiana to Cochin with a single push, my clothes won't fit me anymore, I would need to be lifted with a crane, I won't get through doors without bringing the wall down and I'll need to ask the airhostess for an extra seat belt while flying! Oh, the horror!

Right, so 7 simple steps and hopefully the pounds will melt away, my jeans will clasp without me having to wrestle with them, my button-downs won't gape, and I won't have to take refuge in salwar-kameezes at work. And maybe, if I'm lucky, I'll also end up with a body like Bipasha Basu's!!

Now, that's something I'm willing to grovel for.

PS: I also just realized that I missed the 3rd birthday of my blog! I started blogging on October 31st three years ago. Happy Belated Birthday to 'Just Can't Get Enough' :)