cake or bake?

I always thought baking a cake at home was very difficult task because of the effort that goes in while making the batter. You have to whisk the batter thoroughly if you want a fluffy bread cake. When I was a kid I loved the plain cake which mom would make it at home in a pressure cooker. We did not own a microwave nor did we have a blender. So mom would knead and mix the batter briskly with her fingers. She never liked cakes because she was a vegetarian and she hated the smell of egg cooking. However MOMs are MOMs. If you tell her that you want a pinafore dress just like what Kajol wears in Dilwale Dulhaniya le Jaayenge then no matter what you do to pursue her she will just not buy you one. If you tell her that you want a piece of cake just like they pile up in the gass counters of a bakery then she will not buy you that either instead she will make it at home for you. And hence she made cake just for me. Soft fluffy plain yellow cake with a thin light brownish crust at the bottom, hidden inside the air vents were mixed nuts and raisins.
When I started working one of the first things I bought for myself was a microwave oven with grill convection all in one oven. The day I got the microwave installation done I went through the entire manual and the recipe booklet and headed right to the stores to get ingredients for baking a cake. I mixed the batter and whipped it and put it in the big flat plate like microwave safe dish and all i got was a flat tasty crispy cookie. The batter had not risen either because the baking powder did not react well or because the microwave was not right. I’m generally categorized by people as ‘Typical Arien’ and I do live up to the attitude they expect me to wear all the time ‘I never do mistakes’. :) Well after that microwave was used just for reheating for almost a year and later I actually messed with the batter several times and made better cakes.
When I landed in Brussels a month back with all the hours of the day just for myself and a builtin oven at my disposal, the craving to bake had gotten back. Every day I have a project to finish ..errrrr or let’s rephrase it. every day i have a project to START. Projects like going for long walks without any particular direction in mind and then heading back home OR like going to the park and sketching whatever appeals me OR Cleaning the house OR baking projects. But baking projects was a double challenge because in Belgium, French and dutch are dominant languages and all hoardings, address, ingredients, usage everything is in those two languages and in some cases German too. Only on some imported goods you can see some rumblings in English. Even at the stores if you ask someone to translate they give blank stares. So I have to do my homework before going to the super market to buy anything. Inspite of the homework I end up getting lost in those counters full of ‘options’ I get for one single item. I wasn't sure of what I would end up with if at all I followed a recipe from a US/UK blog for baking cake using the products available here which are described only in french... a French SHO(r)T Bread ? (considering my earlier experiences of cake turned cookie, here a cake can turn into a short bread too), and probably a must visit to either a dentist or a pathologist after trying to devour it. So I decided not to bake cake bake pastas instead.
I made baked pasta one day with spirellis and vegetable lasagne the next day. my first attempt at baked pasta and it was appreciated very well by V. When there is cheese at home I cannot think of anything else but recipes with cheese. I had fresh mushrooms and I wanted cheese. So made this mushroom cheese fry Indian style.
Ingredients:
Mushroom : 100 gms
Rice flour : 3 tbl spoons
Fine semolina(Bombay Rava): 2 tbl spoons
Chilli powder: 1 tbl spoon
Salt to taste.
Grated Cheese – ( I used the mix pasta cheese)
Slit mushrooms into half apply salt and leave it aside for a while. It leaves out water. Mix all the other ingredients and a pinch of salt and roll the mushrooms on this dry batter. Heat a pan and drizzle oil and place the mushrooms . We are going to toast mushrooms only once on each side. Once it is slightly brownish on one side, turn it around and now i make clusters of mushrooms i.e just place 4-5 mushrooms close to each other and then top it up with the grated cheese. Once the cheese melts pan out each cluster. Serve hot. It is just DELICIOUS.
Notes: Make sure that the while frying the heat should medium for both the sides. If you keep it very low then it will take longer to cook mushrooms and meanwhile they become soggy. If you keep it at high flame then it will get charred.
I loved my experiences with pasta, baking and cheese. Here is a pic of the same. presentation is baaaaaad and rough but all is maaaf for the taste.



Au Revoir...

R.A.D.I.O

Radio was only in kannada, I presumed, when I was a small kid. My dad is a radio fan. He has a portable radio which he took everywhere and played it all the time . On the bathroom window sill while he is shaving.below a chair in the balcony while he is scanning the newspaper in minute prints . on an uncovered pillar on the terrace with the antenna of the radio closer to the rod . while there is a power cut and the family would trek the terrace for a moonlight dinner. Night at bedtime hindustani vocals or classical or instruments would be played until all of us are snoring and mom would get angry and turn it off to put a stop to her tossing and turning to get sleep. Early morning the day would start with sanskrit news and then while I throw my tantrums for brushing my teeth kannada news would be on to mellow down my mom's voice . I would stomp my feet and run around the house avoiding a boring upma being stuffed in my mouth while kannada- chitrageetegalu would be on the background giving the rhythm to my mom's chase.
In a smaller town life is so simple. You don’t have to pack lunch and have cold stale food instead you can run back home sit on your mom's lap and get fed . The only hitch is that you will have to eat faster than you can ever do and if you cannot you will have to gulp it down else it will keep piling in your mouth. Trust me mom's hand never stops when on something , until the task is finished. It keeps the pace and rhythm and keeps coming at you periodically and no breaks are ever entertained. The quantity is not reduced if you say you are not hungry but if you are hungry you will get double more than what you have asked for and in the end again the quantity doesn’t reduce. the feeling is same. So the best policy is to get stuffed according to their estimation and either munch a snack after that or the body itself would throw up the excess food. I preferred the latter because if you ask for snack chances are that either you might not get it at all or that
My dad's office and my school were pretty close by and the lunch break timings were same. Hence my dad would pick me up from school and we would have lunch together while the radio was giving out the last bits of the noon-news. Kannada chitrageetegalu would follow till 2 PM during which a family siesta was scheduled. I would squeeze in between the wall and dad near to the radio , lean my legs on the wall , watch the country flags poster, listen to Dr.Rajkumar or SP Balasubramaniam and doze off. That’s how I know most of the kannada songs only and not a single movie for which these songs were pictured.
When I was in Pre university classes watching television was not encouraged and moreover cable TV was disconnected only DD was available. I could not sneak in the foyer to watch TV as both of them would be there. And the sound from the tv was too tempting to concentrate on studies. I have heard through most of the television serials and imagined it and I m updated. Radio for some reason was not used much by my dad in the evenings. That was the trigger point for me to start listening to the radio on my own. I would tune into VivdhBharati to listen to Hello farmaish, pitaara , Jaimala , Bhule Bisre Geet, Hawa Mahal , Bioscope ki Baatein. I would listen to the RJs talking to their pyare Shrota- mitr throughout the evening . Only first few days I kept tuning and re-tuning to get the right signal and with a hope to listen to songs of new movies. However that interest died down as the backlog of things to do at school increased and I started enjoying whatever came on radio. Later on I was so used to the radio that I could study only if there was radio even though I did not listen to what was playing, it had to be there. It would help me keep my concentration on the subject and also cut me out from the rest of the world. This is again my dad's thought and it worked very well for me.
Travel is a part of work life and very few are lucky for whom it isn't. the routine grind of setting the alarm and snoozing it several times before the dawn breaks on you is so very usual. The only thing I would look forward to was to sit in the bus and listen to the radio and take the much needed nap before I reached the work place. I remember on 91.1. they had this amazing RJs called Chaitanya with an amazingly mature, calm, authoritative voice and it was a treat to listen to him. And listening to RJ Vasanthi was like listening to your grandmom stories the stories that take you to a different world just like how the movie Avatar did with those 3D glasses.
Somehow the radio channel wars had begun and just like how "Mumbai-kars"got the Amchi-Mumbai fever, kannada fever was spreading and all channels we tuned into played only kannada songs. Not that I don’t like them but I knew only those songs which I had listened to in my parents room. And I had sleepless travel to work place.

Phew! Just in time when the topics to discuss in the carpool had died down RadioCity comes up with 'one song only once per day' which became an instant hit with my fellow carpoolers. Every old song they played it would take us back in time and we would discuss about the movie and its whole cast. All our memories are so off that nothing strikes and we do google it to find out and share the information. lets see how well you remember :the song goes like this "Chori chori jab nazarein mili..." Bobby Deol and a flop heroine -Neha starred in this movie. whats the name of the movie? ... Guess... ? it is NOT Barsat. what is it? I'm yet to google it..! :)
3Rs : nothing beats listening to Radio , Reading a book While raking a hot cup of tea. Yeah you can make it the 4Rs as well... add a bit of thrill and romance to the set up - Add Rain. :) .
even today whenever I tune into Vividh Bharati it brings back those memories of my school-friends, studies, Udupi,the then-famous songs - like songs from movie-Ishq, sweat-you know the humidity in Coastal areas, mosquitoes - Again humidity and rains, the time when I weighed lesser and could easily manage to squeeze in with my parents in a twin-bed, and it is precious.

Whopppa...!!

Cannot seem to believe that time has just flown by. It is more than a year and there is not a single entry in my blog for year 2009. well, I have to pledge that I'll make sure that I blog at least one entry per quarter!
And this one is not counted for any quarter!!

Failed to Nail my Nail-Biting Ritual!

No More Bite"- Nail enamel did work brilliantly only for a few days though. I used to find it so bitter in those early days that anything I ate with my fingers would taste bitter. So nothing was Finger-licking good! Now it doesn’t taste as bad and I have started to like the taste which of course is duly defeating the whole purpose of why I apply it.

I started biting nails when I was in high school. My dad would bite nails whenever he sat in front of his PC and back then best imitation always was a talent well appraised . So whenever mom asked me to show ‘how dad does at his desk’, I would promptly-proudly show off my skills by actually biting my nails off.


Ever since then I have been biting nails and have been successful in reducing its size to half. Sometimes I bit it so hard that blood would ooze out of the edges and I couldn't eat anything hot or spicy with my hands. People say that you bite nails when you are scared. But I bit it for no reason. while watching television, listening to lectures, talking to friends, before dinner , after dinner. every time. It is more of an involuntary action in a comfortable position, which is usually my desk where i can rest my elbow on the desk and bend the arm in such a way that it is right next to my mouth. So usually one can find me with one hand on the mouse and the other in the mouth. eeeshhh!!!

At times I get so engrossed in biting I don’t realize that my head would have bent in a way cats do while eating fish! How horrible I must have looked and how disgusting it must have been for people to watch an ugly chewy head. Whoever has caught me biting nails might have thought a 100 times before ever shaking hands with me! So many a times mom has hit my hand when biting. Relatives, friends, neighbors everybody asked me not to bite and I never gave heed to what they said. Still after years, the count of which exceeds the count of my abominable nails, I still do bite. I have promised to many people and taken resolutions on the beginning of every new year ! But I have agreed so far with the fact that resolutions and promises are meant to be broken!

Two years back I met with an accident and just before falling out of the vehicle in which I was seated, I hit the handle rod that gave a internal crack to my front tooth. The tooth was quite sensitive for some time and I could not drink too cold or too cold,if I ever did then it would pain excessively. But even then I never refrained myself from chewing nails!

When my engagement date was fixed, I panicked and was overwhelmed with self-disgust! I was scared and ashamed to show my ugly filthy fingers to my would-be hubby. That’s when I decided to grow my nails and let myself out of this self 'infliction of pain'. But I had to do something about the nails for that D-day. I purchased artificial nails and glued it to the base of my nails , pretty confidently that it would stay unperturbed on them during the whole course of the event. It looked like a wig on a bald ugly mannequin. But the world was against me using false nails, I presume. Just before I stepped on the stage my would-be mother-in-law was supposed to take me by my hand to the podium and Bam! there it was ! She held my hand and all those pieces of plastic fell off my fingers and my nails were bald again when I reached the stage. !!

Recently my friend who is averse to my nail biting habit got me an Revlon nail enamel that is too bitter to be brought anywhere near the face. But the bitterness did not stand strong against the years of hard work and efforts my tooth enamel has been bearing to keep my nails short and trimmed always!

Well, that’s it. looking back and over the years and bestowing glory upon my feats, I have finally made up my mind to stop biting. It is a conscious effort willingly applied to fulfill the wish-list of my dear ones.! Hope I do succeed in this deed to show that I have a strong will-power and also that I do care for myself as well as for those who care for my nails. My nail’s well-wishers.

Ad-Hawkers

Sometimes what you have in abundance can make you fall prey to failure. Anyways,
One ad which really was very captivating in the recent times is the Happy Dent ad where in they show that chewing the gum makes your teeth so white that they can replace a bulb in the night! The concept, visualization is so very well framed and of course backed by a fabulous sound track. The same goes for the Vodafone ad which features the cute kiddo and the pug.. happy to help. Ad making is not an easy business. When a 10 second of ad can cost lakhs and in that minimal time period the whole concept of the product, usage, value of the product, how it is different from other competitors, punch line everything has to be brought in in a very effective way to capture the audiences’ eyes and mind.
I bet that 65% of the buyers of the product in the market are those who are sold to the product’s advertisement. These people are the total Risk Takers who are so much appealed by the ad that they instantly buy the product because it is new. Sometimes buyers buy the product because of recommendations by their friends, neighbors, colleagues . thay are the safe players. they also go through the product review published in newspapers, internet , user experience etc.. they are Choosy! There is another class of buyers who buy because their kids or other family members are forcing them to do so.

To make a product appeal to the audience, the ad maker has to (I’m not an ad maker but say probably I would ) think of so many varied stuff.
1. User / target audience
a. Teenagers, adults, senior citizens
b. Upper, middle, lower class (though the definition of the class has changed, I still use it to broadly classify between the Ambanis, Bachchans, Tendulakars, Wadias, Premji,Revankars Prabhus etc by their annual earnings)
2. ad jingle
3. The visuals (I can think of Lipton Taza where all green and white in the ad)
a. Shooting location (it has to be the tea mountains of Darjeling)
b. Colors used in the ad(a gal dressed in green and white salwaar) has to match with the product wrapper(green coloured tea plants on)
4. The audio
5. The concept – story line, dialogues, punch line.
6. Comparison with other competitors in the market
7. Product Company’s stand in the buyer’s market and share market
8. Already launched successful product by the same company
9. Brand ambassador for the product. l
10. The cast ..kids or gals or guys or both or all

Sometimes a beautiful face can sell anything and sometimes they don’t.! Jogger’s Park starrer Perizad zorabian advertising for cement ad is one thing which I loathe. How can some pretty faced model can add any value in a cement ad when the competitors use elephant to convey the strength of the cement?
The soft-drink ad makers seem to make their ads with the theme of their competitors. When Coco Cola came up with blue coke, Pepsi never left a moment to mock coke about it, in their next ad.
Also remember Wheel washing detergent powder? Well, another detergent ad made this very clear in their ad- ”wheel se mukti paavo, lo trishul apnaaoo”. However, Surf always seem to come up with original innovative ideas.
Master card ad is so wonderfully made..”There are something money can’t buy for everything else there is master card.” How inspiring that ad was.How can we not think of “Sar Utha ke jeeyo” of HDFC standard life insurance where an old man gets down a train rejecting the offer his son gave him. I remember when my FIL wanted to take an insurance, and when the company people came to tell about the various offers, he asked them tspecifically what was the plan which says ‘sar utha ke jiyo’ and he took that up. See how each mad makes an impact on the viewers mind. The Master card ad had me and the latter had my FIL buy it.
Finally I like to sign off with this Monster ad ! Cheers to all those creative thinkers who bring out a new dimension and value add to the products and services we use daily, making it a matter of pride to consume them.
“Caught in the wrong job, log on to Monster”