Summers of Art

Art and I have a love hate relationship - the love is all from my side and the hate all from the other. I have always loved to draw and paint since I was a child. I didn't so much like going to art contests unless it was the on the spot kind, where you could make up your own worlds from your imagination. I like drawing in detail. Where somebody might choose to draw a single dominating entity in a painting, I would rather draw a million tiny pictures complete with the latch on a house's front door. My technique however has always been flawed, despite or because of multiple art classes I have had.

When summer holidays came up, we always headed to my grandparents' house for a relaxing month or so. Since I was prone to be a couch potato, more often than not and did my holiday homework, we had plenty of that, at the absolute last minute, I was kicked out of the house for art classes to a nearby school. Best part of it was that it was right across the road and I could go there all by myself. What surprises me from the classes I remember and the assignments she gave me was how I didn't end up hating art. What does a seven year old understand of shadows and light? She had a class of much older years and I was the odd man out. Half of my book pages were filled with eraser smudges and clueless shading in lieu of appropriate shadows.

The story was repeated when I attempted to take after school art classes. I wanted to be in this boisterous gang of my classmates and friends who were in the lower art class, fooling around more often than drawing. Little did I know what I was getting into. I was put again in the advanced class. We had a super old curmudgeon of a teacher, she was an excellent artist to say the least, but a very bad teacher. We were a bunch of about 10 unfortunate students. It was difficult to sweat over a cheetah when you knew on the other side of the wall, people were drawing flower bouquets and stick men figures. Our topics were always unusual and challenging. But it gave me a lifelong trauma of joints and movement. I definitely did not learn in all the time I spent in that class about proportion. My paintings are still filled with disproportionate limbs. My characters move with the elegance of an actor in his first movie. 

I moved to the other class, but needless to say, I didn't learn anything. The most I learnt were in my school art classes and the one oil painting class that I took thankfully at an appropriate age, when I actually understood what the teacher was saying. Apart from these scheduled learning periods, a lot of my spare time in my summer holidays were spent in painting and drawing. I would stock up on paints and other material from the R.S. Shoppe on L.B. Road in Chennai and spend many pleasant afternoons over some glass painting or canvas. I also used my pictures to cheer up my hostel rooms. So reminiscing over all my old artwork,  I decided today was a great day to immortalize some of them on the world wide web.

Birthdays- Reine de Saba/Queen of Sheba cake

Predictably, as the title goes, this post is about birthdays. Birthdays were the most special days when you were a kid. Diwali and Fancy Dress competitions aside, it was the day you could wear color dress to school and hopefully given probability was on your side and there were no other birthdays in your class, you would be the only one. Everyone at school outdid themselves trying to think of what chocolate they would bring that year and all those with birthdays outside the school year bemoaned their loss. As we grew older, chocolates were replaced by small gifts like pencils and erasers. I remember myself giving away a glittery eraser ball which I bought in Bhutan, which did less of its job and did more of looking pretty.  There were also those times when you could celebrate your birthday in school, get your parents to bring your cake and cut it in class with all your friends, it was always awesome to get a free period in addition to cake.

At home, I had a birthday party every year all the way from year one until I think I was 12 years old. I had a bunch of friends over and games and cake and snacks. The highlight of my evening was always the bread balls that my mom made. I made them myself twice- once when I was in France and once when I was in Delhi, they are in my head very close to soul food, because it is comfort food closely associated with happy memories for me. I always tried to grab a few before the guests came in.

Anyway, all snacks aside, coming to the most important part of birthdays- cakes, I don't remember too many of my childhood cakes. I remember one Bugs Bunny Cake, the resemblance was too obvious to ignore. I had cake less frequently for my birthday and more frequently for fun. So, this birthday, I decided to put my new found interest in baking to test and make myself a birthday cake. 

That is the story of how I came to make Julia Child's Reine de Saba  or "Queen of Sheba cake". It was apparently the first French cake that she tasted and fell in love with. I was feeling particularly brave when I embarked on this bake. It helped that a lot of home cooks all over the world had tried this recipe and had a lot of advice and warnings. It was a bit of a longish process to make this cake. There was a lot of mise en place involved. But the final product is so totally worth it. It of course followed the original Julia Child recipe, which was helpfully posted at http://theculinarytravelguide.com/2012/06/13/the-jc100-reine-de-saba/

On my kitchen counter:

113 g baking chocolate- I used dark

2 Tbsp of fresh brewed coffee decoction

113g butter (softened at room temperature)

2/3 cup + 1 tbsp granulated sugar 

3 eggs- yolk and white separated

Pinch of salt

1/3 cup ground almonds

1/2 tsp almond extract- I replaced with vanilla as I didn't read the recipe properly

1/2 cup cake flour- involves substituting a Tbsp of all purpose flour with corn starch (sift it)

How you go about making it:

1. Grease 8 inch cake pan and line with parchment paper.

2. Place chocolate and 2 tbsp of coffee in a small pan and cover it. Place over a larger pan with simmering water until the chocolate just starts to melt. If you leave it too long, it will burn, so take it off and allow it to melt gradually.

3. Cream butter and sugar together until fluffy and beat with egg yolks.

4. Beat egg whites and salt to a soft peak and add sugar and beat to stiff peaks ( culinary trivia- this is a french method of baking, which leavens the cake without use of baking powder or baking soda)

5. Add chocolate which is now melted to a smooth consistency to mixture in step 3. Add the ground almonds and extract and mix well. Fold in egg white and cake flour alternately one fourth by one fourth.

6. Preheat oven to 180 degree celsius. Place batter in cake pan and push up along the circumference. Bake for 25 minutes until circumference hardens and cake is still a little oily when tested in the middle with a needle.

This is the best part of the recipe- Glacage au Chocolat ( Chocolate butter Icing)

- 57 g baking chocolate- again dark

- 2 tbsp fresh brewed coffee

- 5 tbsp unsalted butter

- Bowl filled with ice cubes and water covering them

Use same procedure mentioned in step 2 to melt chocolate to a smooth mixture. Add butter tbsp by tbsp and beat to mix well. Beat over ice and water until it cools to spreading consistency. Spread over the cake with a spatula. 

Now your cake is all shiny and ready to eat. Makes for a perfect birthday cake.

Dum Aloo- Saturday Special

Over the weekend, we had guests at home. So of course, in anticipation of this, my dormant cooking cells decided to get enthusiastic about cooking. My mother made a safe bet with mutter paneer, so I opted to get a little experimental and make a recipe that I have been reading about often- Dum Aloo Punjabi. There are so many variations of this dish, so I went through a million recipes before I hybridized the following one and then anyway veered away from what I decided. I had help too from an expert cook who was one of the guests, so she tasted my in progress dish and gave me some ideas about what I should do to make it taste better. So finally, I was happy to make a tasty dish out of it. It tasted better with dosas according to most of us than with rotis for some reason.

Start with the masala powder. Powder together 2 tbsp of coriander seeds, 1 tsp of jeera, one clove, a little cardamom and cinammon until it is a fine powder.

Soak and slightly cook about 10 cashew nuts in hot water. Grind to a fine paste. Chop up two onions finely. Puree 3 tomatoes which have been boiled in hot water and peeled. Cook the potatoes in a pressure cooker for about 2 whistles of the cooker or until boiled firmly. Then saute potatoes in oil until light brown all over the surface.

In a flat bottomed pan, add about 3 tbsp of oil and saute bay leaf+onion+ginger garlic paste, until  the onion turns completely brown. Add tomatoes and saute until the soften. Add cashew paste, above ground masala powder. Add turmeric and chilly powder depending on how spicy you want it. Also add salt and a pinch of kitchen king masala if you have some. Add two spoons of curd (Some dum aloo recipes are based completely on curd and have no tomatoes at all. But I didn't like the idea so much considering I don't like curd so much. But this curd was added as a fix to make the dish a little sour and bring balance to the additional spice it needed. and some water to combine. Allow it to boil until the raw smell goes away and the masala combines well. Add potatoes to the mixture and allow to soak on low flame for sometime. Take it off the heat and serve hot.

In other food related news, I finished reading the book, As Always Julia. It's a tome of a book, that I happily bought for a buck in the discount shelves outside the Strand Book Store in New York. It is a compilation of letters between Avis De Voto and Julia Child. It feels like when you are reading this book, that you are going through the whole experience of publishing Mastering the Art of French Cooking with them. It's a great book also to understand the then political and social environment albeit from a Democratic point of view. Also both of them were excellent at French and tended to lapse into it in the written form quite often. So it was good practice to read and understand French as well.

# BookChallenge- The Top 10 books that have stayed with you

This was my list for the so called Book Bucket Challenge on Facebook.  I don't know if the challenge will get people to think if they have been reading or not and bring them back to the fold. All I know is that it makes for a very good starting point when you are stuck thinking what you should read next, you can go look at all your friends' lists . My list did tend to be a very female oriented list, either female protagonists who are very strong or written by women.

I have never cried over a book. But this book had me thinking otherwise. It is a story of many layers. There are many gray areas too in this book. It is a coming of age story of a young girl, the survival instincts of a mother, the protective older brother and the man they are all fear and respect- the head of the household. At first glance, it is the story of suffering and the triumph of spirit. It tugs at your heart strings. It scares you with the monsters that lurk behind the seemingly innocent facades and respectable personalities of everyday men. But it also tells the story of support and love from unlikely sources and that you are capable of surviving much more than you expect.

Anne of Green Gables is an inspiration and a companion to many girls growing up. I liked Anne because she was not too much of a goody two shoes like Pollyanna. She was an adaptable child who made the best of situations she was thrown into using her imagination. Her practical streak however does come through as she grows older. It is a journey typically taken by all of us moving from childhood to adolescence. Anne's story is bittersweet- rejoicing over tiny triumphs, fussing over tiny schoolroom disagreements and coming to terms with the greater losses in life. She learns important life lessons and grows up to be a fine young woman. So there's hope for all of us. No matter how falliable we are.

Room was a book that either people loved or hated. I read more Emma Donaghue after this, but nothing affected me the way this book did. It was a scary, scary book. A less likely scenario than Purple Hibiscus but very relevant to the ever present dangers of abduction and harassment that women face everyday. I think it was a beautifully written book, just because it handled this issue very sensitively and treaded the fine line between turning away readers in fear and disgust and instead evoking their empathy and sympathy. It is the story of a boy and his mother trapped in a nightmare of a stranger's perversion all through the eyes of the five year old.

Daddy Long Legs is a delightful episolatory novel. I am a big big fan of this style. I am a nut for letters. I can never write those perfect balanced letters- with news and funny tid bits and holding the  reader's interest until the very last P.P.S. But I do love the fact that people can write such letters. Daddy Long Legs doesn't have too much drama, just some misunderstandings and a whole lot of long newsy letters from an orphan to her benefactor. It is a great feel good book. I like the sequel to this book as well- Dear Enemy has a lot more verve to it because of the main character, but I will stay true to my first love.

Jane Austen's very last novel, but my absolute favorite. Every time I read it, I grow to like it more. Pride and Prejudice, I love as my very first Jane Austen. But Persuasion is a book that really stayed with me. Most of Jane's heroines had failings. They were immature, dramatic, prejudiced and so on. What would you think of a heroine whose failing was maturity and understanding? I thought it was an interesting proposition- a heroine who lost her chance at happiness because she considered too much, analyzed too much and tried to do what would benefit everyone the most. It is a very mature work from Austen and strikes closer to reality than any of her other books. There is doubt and there is love and it all depends on how Anne Elliot makes it work.

 Story of runaways who accidentally or not so accidentally stumble onto  a secret history. Unlikely pair of white child and the slave who helps her, aside from a story of the search for identity and happiness, there is a huge political background and all the attendant consequences in this story. It is a very situational story and difficult to relate to, but it is also a story which is difficult to forget. Most importantly, it reminds us that sometimes the truth is best left untold.

Rebecca- Most chilling thrilling novel ever. Daphne Du Maurier had me hooked and on the edge of my seat with this book. Even though I know the story and the ending, I have my heart in my mouth every single time I read this book. I didn't like the heroine at all- she's one dimensional. But I realize that it is sort of the point to make Rebecca all the more a contrast. Mrs. Danvers is so totally the character for Halloween dress up. She's creepy and concerned and nursing secret plans of revenge all at the same time. Manderley Estate is pretty much a character in this book as well, leading to many turning points in the story.

Julie & Julia gave me the kickstart into reading about food. It is one of the first books of the genre I read. I do realize that a lot of is fiction posing as non fiction and people were offended that Julie had misrepresented her life.But really which of us doesn't exaggerate when we tell a story or make our life look prettier than it is. This book led to a fascination with Julia Child. I went on to read - "My Life in France" by Julia Child and "As always Julia"- the letters between Julia and Avis de Voto. It was fun to go look at Julia's kitchen at the FOOD exhibition in the Smithsonian American History Museum after reading all about it in her books.

Finally, a book, that is actually funny and a light read in my book list. Not a mindless book, with limited drama and cutting humour, it is an interesting contemporary series. Written in a very tongue in cheek fashion, it can chase all your blues away. Right from the little boy who lives down the hall, the neighbourhood dog, eccentric middle aged people and the clueless heroine, all of these are people who we would meet everday and that makes these books all the more enduring.

Gone Girl- Best Bestseller I have read in recent times. I tend to veer away from Booker Prize winners and Recommended Best Sellers in general. Booker Winners are not my style, I feel they are too highbrow for me and I really don't understand them. Recommended Best Sellers occur at the other end of the spectrum, they are generally over hyped. But this was a super cool puzzle, a twisted treasure hunt of sorts. Extreme Justice served cold. Must read novel of the previous year.

The Brotherhood in the City of Brotherly Love- Masonic Temple Tour in Philly

The Freemasons are a guild that have surrounded themselves with mystery on purpose than by accident. We have all heard of them, if not in medieval history books, in the books of Dan Brown. Masons have hazy origin stories, historians offering different opinions, from the Knights Templar to the workmen guilds or unions of past days. While they may have been unnaturally fond of symbols and we in the company of Robert Langdon see things that aren't there, a  thank you is due to  the Masons is for the buildings they made. The Capitol building and the Library of Congress are beautiful testimonies to the skill of Masonic architects. The emblem of the masons is the compass and the ruler, they are steeped in science and building techniques and mathematics. Philadelphia boasts of a fairly large Masonic temple on one of the large streets in the city.There used to be an ancient temple of Solomon in Philadelphia which was destroyed and this new temple was built in place.

As you can imagine, if the buildings built by the Masons are so beautiful, how beautiful the building which they meet in would be. Also they are supported in furnishing and making their buildings by a long lineage of very powerful, rich and well traveled Masons. Interesting masons include George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and many other members of the Government and various divisions of military. I walked past this temple and decided to step in on an impulse. I got the tickets for the next guided tour from a very twinkly eyed gentleman who looked a little like Santa Claus. It is generally one of the members of the temple who volunteer to give these tours and we were a group of some 10-15 people from various parts of the country and the world who took the tour. We had a funny, entertaining tour guide who even offered to show the "secret treasure" hidden in the dungeon for a small fee.

The Masonic temple sprawls over two storeys above ground and I do not know how many below. Each room looks like a work of art decorated with interpretations of various cultures- Byzantine, Egyptian, Arabian and colour based rooms as well.The Byzantine Room below is decorated with the traditional murals and colors of the period with Gods and goddesses representing various virtues painted above the doorways.

Every one of the rooms curiously has a clock right opposite the Grand Maester's chair. It's positioned so that the Maester who conducts and adjourns meetings can view the clock and keep track of time without obviously appearing to do so. All others have to make do with sneaking a quick sideways glance.

The biggest challenge with exploring the Masonic temple was half the time I did not know where to look, up/down, around, all this while keeping a ear out for all the interesting stories that the guide had for us. Even the roofs and pathways of this building are so intricately designed and assembled. Most roofs in the pathways are designed to reflect the night sky and morning sky. They look startlingly different with and without lighting apparently, but it being mid day I did not see this. 

Speaking of pathways and doorways, you are never safe from the treasures of the Masonic temple. As you walk along, paintings and frescoes rivet your eyes, as do paintings of famous masons. You might bump into marble busts and statues and encounter brilliant coloured stained glass windows at the end of your stairway. At every turn, you will encounter new and brilliant works of art and architecture. A funny tribute to a famous mason lies above one of the doorways. It is the carving of a turkey. It is a little known fact that Ben Franklin recommended that the turkey be made the national bird of the United States, claiming that the alternative- the bald eagle was a cowardly bird. So the turkey though not the national bird, now presides over Masonic banquets.

The most in-ostentatious of all rooms were the Knight Templar rooms. Considering the crusades, they all rode on and all the treasure they are supposed to have collected, the room resembles a spare meeting room. Its only statement is a deep red carpet and heavy mahogany furniture lending it an air of stability and solidity. This contrasts with the beautiful oriental carvings and gold leaf with dominates the Arabian room. It looks like a room straight out of the Arabian nights. Even the grand Maester's chair, while of a classic shape in most other rooms makes an attempt at grandeur.

 The other gold gilded and ancient room here is the Egyptian room. It was one of the first rooms to be constructed. According to the stories we heard, there are a lot of anachronisms in this room. It was made when Egypt was more in people's imagination than in the reality of explorers and such. The most curious of all is the roof which has zodiac medallions embedded in a rather large sundial, bordered with compasses. The walls are covered with hieroglyphics & the central seat to kneel on is used for induction rituals and other meetings.

 That ends this rather long blog post and the tour. It started and ended with the grand library which I unfortunately do not have a picture of. This is not the half of it. These are selected rooms which are open to tours and all other rooms including subterranean pathways are open to only members and members' families. Also, what I think is a very bad move for such an ahead of times organization, they still are an all boys club and do not recognize women members or women Masonic guilds. But as long as I got to see the tour, it was pretty awesome to say the least.