The 2015 Book Challenge- My Year with Eleanor

The Good-reads beginning of the year book challenge is my perpetually broken new year resolution. Every year I start with an ambitious number of books that I want to read. Inevitably I start and never finish on time. My book reading habit falls along the side when I watch random series and don't take up any books. Months go by before I read a book. This year hopefully, Scribd will keep me on the straight and narrow with a book on my phone, anywhere anytime. But I decided just like many others taking up this challenge this year, that I would not challenge myself to read a large number of books, but just 75 books from which I am able to at least take away one thing, which makes me laugh, cry or inspires me. I am not going to aim to read a large number of pages like some have chosen to do- say with War and Peace or Crime and Punishment. One of the most intriguing books of all times is Antoine De Expury's Little Prince which is not longer than fifty odd pages if I am right.

So I guess, if I have 75 "Aha" moments in some way, those 75 books will make the list and I will meet my goal. I found my first 'interesting idea' book . It's a book called 'My Year with Eleanor '. The author embarks on a journey of fighting her fears inspired by a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt. She goes on to read about Eleanor Roosevelt and agree and disagree with her, be inspired by her. Most of what she does is confront her anxieties and worries and discovers ways to combat them. She chooses to do this on her year transitioning from 29-30. The reading does get a bit whiny at bits, but she draws you in, makes you relate to her and you almost wish you were skydiving with her or climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. It was a good beginning to the year, helped me resolve to breathe and relax when I find myself worrying about anything. It reminded me to challenge myself to do something I have never done before, each and every day of my life.

Pav Bhaji Reloaded

So this is pretty much old wine in a new bottle. A recycled post on Pav Bhaji, since I already waxed eloquent about this dish in an older post about couple of months ago. I had all the vegetables to make Pav Bhaji yesterday, thanks to my mother and I picked up some minuscule pav buns when I was out shopping for other stuff. I had one of my closest friends over yesterday for dinner on a very very hurried visit. So it is a funny story why her visit was as short as it was. She was heading down from her hotel on Richmond Road and had booked a cab with Ola. About 10 minutes past the time of arrival, she was frantically calling the cab driver to find out why he wasn't still there. Imagine her surprise when she discovered that he had already left with another passenger who had also booked an Ola. To put it in her words, the girl who took the cab also shamelessly spoke to her and said she had taken the cab and was half way to her destination. The only saving grace was that she hadn't recharged her Ola account and didn't end up paying for a trip they did not take.

So anyway, getting back to Pav Bhaji, I had a recipe which I tried the last time I blogged about it. But I wanted to do more research to oomph up the recipe. A few articles were read and a few videos were watched. The recipe I tried yesterday had a smack of authenticity because it was a video of a beach-side stall in Juhu, Mumbai. So here goes another yummy version of Pav Bhaji.

On my kitchen counter:

5 Tomatoes

3 medium sized potatoes 

Quarter of a cabbage- Finely chopped

Beans- 3/4 chopped

Carrot-1 chopped ( Too much will make it sweet)

Peas- A handful and a half

Pav Bhaji Masala

Hing

Salt

Chilli Powder

Turmeric Powder
Green Chillies-3
Ginger Garlic Paste
Oil
Butter
1 chopped onion

What you need to do:

1. Puree the tomatoes and keep aside.

2. Boil all vegetables except potatoes with some water and run through a blender to get a coarse paste.
3. Boil potatoes and mash well.
4. Chop up 3/4 green chillies. Add a mix of oil and butter in a tava and add the chillies and fry well. If you have capsicum you can add at this point and roast it until light brown.
5. Add 1 tsp of ginger garlic paste and saute well. Add the tomato puree and some more butter if needed. Allow the tomato puree to cook until it starts releasing oil. Add salt and turmeric powder at this point. Add chilli powder according to taste as well.
6. Now combine the vegetable paste and add about 2 Tbsp of Pav Bhaji Powder. Mix well and add some water. Allow to boil and cook well. Taste and add more chilli powder or salt at this point.
7. Once the vegetables are well combined and the mixture is bubbling, add the mashed potatoes and some more Pav Bhaji powder if needed and mash further to combine.
8. On another tava, heat up a Tbsp of butter. Add a tsp of ginger garlic paste, some chilli powder, salt and the chopped onions. Saute until light brown and combine with the mixture in step 7.
9. Your bowl emptyingly yummy Bhaji is ready to be enjoyed with buttered pavs.

Of Letters and Novels

How long has it been since you wrote a letter or received one? Very long is what I think.  When I was young, I used to look forward to my grandfather's letters. They inevitably contained a cheat sheet for an upcoming essay or elocution contest. He also sent me pictures for my favourite academic activity, making the fattest prettiest geography record book. I know, I am such a nerd. I was also fascinated by Nehru's book, Letters from a father to a daughter. It goes through prehistory, the industrial revolution all the way until colonial India. That book makes you wish that somebody would write to you like that. This is not an essay in defense of handwritten letters, I like them as much as the next person, but I type faster than I write. All I am defending is a good long email. We all instant message, WhatsApp, we share information in small units and expect instant reactions. It is convenient and wonderful that we can share our lives with people we care about. But we tend tp lose sight of some special quirks that communication should have. 

A letter contains a lot of its writer, consciously or unconsciously. That' s the best part of a letter. It conveys a feeling, a tone, sometimes things that you never meant to convey at all. I have often had this argument that writing is a projection and not the truth of the author. It might be true. But sometimes reading between the lines tells you much of things left unwritten. I find it difficult to understand even this, because most of the time my writing sounds exactly like me- pedantic, opinionated and with more asides than topics of conversation. While I don't write rude emails, I often have been told that I sound angry. Lots of times I do mean it, rest of the time even when I am writing a forced polite reply, the anger seeps into what I am trying to say. See what I mean about conveying things the author doesn't mean.

I have always loved epistolatory novels. I think they make great serial stories and keep you waiting for the next installment. Some of my top favorites are Daddy Long Legs, Dear Enemy, Anne of Windy Willows. All of these are romances. Daddy Long Legs is a budding college girl romance. It's a one-sided communication. That's what is great about letters right now, they are sort of unconditional. You keep it open so the other person can decide how they want to respond. Dear Enemy is a beautiful documentation of escalating clashes of opinion, wills and theories culminating in a romance.  Anne writes to her fiance while she waits to get married. The book is tilled with newsy prosy letters you wish you could write. I recently re read one of mu other favorites, The Guernsey Potato Peel Pie and Literary Society. Filled with different voices and styles blending to form a single story, it could be a manual for letter writing.

For all my enthusiasm on writing letters, I become rather stilted when I write a letter. I write 3 word sentences. I am funny unless I try to be funny. If I try, it makes bad reading. So if I want to write a great epistolatory novel some day, I need oodles of practice writing letters.

This week in Reading

So this was a good week for my reading. Despite various distractions I have been making headway on and finished a couple of books. So the first book on my bookshelf was Major. Pettigrew's Last Stand. Now this a book I bought purely based on the opinions of a blogger whose blog review I happened to read. Well, at one level this book made me glad that I did not buy a brand new copy. So most readers have their top lists right, books they love, like, endure. My meter goes pretty much like airport or rail book( the kind u read and pretty much don't care abt) they are sort of those short mystery thriller types, unless you read gone girl on an air trip. Then there are your well thumbed childhood favorites, either you know them off by heart so you don't buy them or you keep really old copies and hate yourself when you sell them.  Then there are the books you like to read and preserve, like if you are collecting a series. So you handle those with care. Then there are those which you just might spare cash to but the hard bound edition.  But a little annoying are the books that you wonder why you bought.

This book was definitely one of them. I couldn't quite put my finger on one single thing that troubled me. At the face of it, it claims to be a twilight romance of an unlikelcy couple which is actually an interesting subject. It' s just that I didn't like any particular person in the book at all.  The major is pompous, and a tad bigoted absolutely until the last page. Mrs. Ali is a one dimensional character who tries to break all the rules. It is interesting though that you actually like the characters you are expected to dislike, that is partly intended by the author, but it's also because they are the ones with any sort of variety.

It wasn't a complete waste of time though, some of the observations are wry and the descriptions of the English countryside are great. But for all its attempts,  it seems to me like it is a glorified multicultural catalog.

A Headstart on Weekend Baking

It is Friday morning and the hours in the morning stretch pleasantly when you decide to work from home. So I utilized my hour long commute time better today getting ahead on my weekend baking. I made an eggless cake and a cookie. The eggless cake is a repeat recipe, it is the mawa cake I attempted soon after Diwali. I generally have a strict non repetition policy so that I learn new cake and cookie recipes and so I don't get bored of my new found hobby as well. But the mawa cake had to be made primarily so I could finish up all the yummy things which could go into it, which have been sitting in my fridge for ages now. If anything, it turned out even better than the last time I tried to make it, none the worse for my abuse of the ingredients.

But the real star of my culinary chronicle today is a cookie. After a long time, I got a cookie perfectly right. I guess, I just had to try enough number of times to get it right. So when I started off, I was intimidated by cakes and made only cookies. So I made cookies very well. Then I stopped and made only cakes. When I got back and tried making any sort of exotic cookies which involved egg, like shrewsbury biscuits ( rock hard and had to be broken with excessive force), zebra cookies ( had to miraculously transformed into cupcakes) and my most basic cookie failure, rice cookies (enough said). So baking has me believing in Malcolm Gladwell's tenet that enough practice can make you an expert in anything. 

So I was happy to get into the cookie baking groove again with these awesome melting moments cookies.  They are so pretty to look at and the prettification doesn't really take too much effort. I found this recipe at Bakeclub.com.au. They had a very good video trailer of the recipe and very very detailed instructions. So this is not the only recipe I am going to be trying from this site, I have already book marked a bunch for future reference. Possibly, they have made their instructions so fool proof that even I cannot go wrong.

Now without any further ado, presenting melting moments cookies with orange icing.

On my kitchen counter: ( To make 18 or 36 halves)

250 g butter (softened and cubed)

110 g icing sugar

11/2 tsp vanilla extract

250 g flour

60 g corn flour

For the orange icing:

60 g butter softened

125 g icing sugar sifted

rind of an orange scraped

a drop of food colouring (optional)

How to make them:

1. Cream together sugar, butter and vanilla, until they mix well. The butter goes pale and creamy and sort of streaky as well, this is when you stop.

2. Scrape the mixture from sides of the bowl and mix thoroughly with sifted flour and corn flour.

3. Once you have combined it using a spoon, you can use your hands to bring the dough together.

4. Grease and line a cookie tray. Preheat oven to 160 degrees celsius.

5. Take heap teaspoons of the dough between your hands and form into equal sized balls. Place them on the cookie sheet about 4-5 cm apart.

6. Press down on each ball with a fork, very gently, to create a pattern and sort of flatten the cookie a little bit.

7. Place in the oven and bake for about 18 minutes, the lower side of the cookie turns golden brown while the top half remains sort of beige in colour.

8. Remove from cookie tray and allow to cool before icing.

For the icing:

Combine butter, sugar and rind and also a drop of food colouring ( use orange instead of lemon yellow like stupid ol' me). Cream together and spread evenly on one cookie and sandwich with another.

So thanks to my brilliance, I have executed one of Heston Blumenthal's Masterchef tasks quite unwittingly. When you look at it, you expect to taste lemon cream and what you get is orange cream (looks are deceptive).