Do Not Try This At Home

I’m talking about making Tandoori Chicken on a gas stove. Which moron tries to do that, you ask?

Well, you get three guesses & the first two don’t count!

Why did I do that? Because a) I don’t have a tandoor oven or a gas tandoor at home but I really wanted to make tandoori chicken, and b) A friend of mine made it on the gas stove once & it came out looking just like it looks at restaurants.

You want to know how mine looked? It looked like a chicken dish without the curry!

To be fair to myself though - and to my dearest gas burner - it didn’t taste bad at all. It tasted quite good actually, thanks to my superior marination skills. I beat some yogurt, added generous amounts of ginger-garlic paste, lots of tandoori chicken masala (in the hope that the damn chicken would come out looking red as it does in restaurants, but it came out as pinkish-orange at best) & kept it in the fridge for 24 hrs. It tasted awesome…just that it didn’t look like tandoori chicken at all!

I must get hold of my friend & torture her until she spills the secret as to how she made hers look just like professionally made tandoori chicken.

On an aside, I’ve been going for a jog/walk since Monday. Have made it 3 days in a row! Let’s hope it continues.

There is a huge lake about 100 meters from my house that I’d never seen the face of in the one & a half years I’ve been living here. On Monday I decided to go. It was a momentour occasion in the history of mankind, I tell you, because I’ve been planning to go for a jog around the lake for about a year now. There is a nice jogging track and tons of people walking, jogging & doing yoga & all kinds of weird exercises. There are companies peddling health food/drinks at the entrance, and food stalls. The grossly obese uncles & aunties who come for their “morning walk” – because their arteries are choked with cholesterol & the weighing scale threatens to shatter under their weight – put a nice end to their walk by gulping down kachories deep fried in oil & jalebis that are saturated with sugar syrup. I wonder why they bother to get up in the morning & come for a walk at all, because trust me, it’s a BIG pain to do so!

It takes all the motivation that I can gather to wake up at 7am (I set my alarm for 6.30 & hit snooze at least 3 times before I get up) with the prospect of having to torture myself physically. No one likes to exercise, accept it. The motivation for me is that I need to lose 6 more kgs (yes people, I have lost 6 kgs already!!) , and the bonus is that I get to watch rowers glide through the lake in their boats & lech at their toned, muscular, dark glistening bodies jog by my side after their rowing sessions. You see, the lake is home to the Calcutta Rowing Club.