Adiós

I am going into hibernation...just for a while...
Is it cos of the autumn and the shortening days that i dont get enough time now a days?
There is so much to concentrate now, on my life... so much so that... some days i even forget to wash my face... :-) [Blame it on shorter days!]

If this is the case then I may forget to wake up in winter!

So, till I get used to the decreased daylight and the sun going off at 3pm...[which hasnt happened,yet!]... i am going into hibernation from y360..

Now, I know why they wanted Halloween on autumn!

..till then....

Adiós

London Photoblog- 2

London Bridge and Tower Bridge
---------------------------------------------
I thought that these two bridges are same. In fact I had never heard of Tower Bridge. Only when I saw them, I found that they were different. Both are across River Thames and are parallel to each other. The Tower Bridge seems to be the old London Bridge , which is the one in the nursery rhyme "London Bridge is falling down". (Please correct me, if I am wrong!)


This is the London Bridge, which looks very ordinary to me....




Some views of London from the London Eye(Millenium Wheel)..
Here,on the right hand side, you can see Westminster Abbey and Big Ben.






This is the Tower Bridge , may be named after the London Tower..



With HMS Belfast , in the back ground..

...and if you are not convinced that it is called Tower Bridge....


Windsor Castle near the London Tower, across R.Thames.


Waterloo Station

Note: Sony DSC SR-32 resolution is 640 x 480 . Hence the grains...
We have given back the camera, anyway.

More next time.....

A belated entry for our Irish Onam '07

Onam is over and I just had a very heavy sigh of relief. Till then it was like Ayyo! Onam is coming, I should do this... I should do that..- a number of planning, schedules and what not. Though honestly I don’t like cooking, I like feeding people with whatever I make. No it’s not that kind of ‘sadistic feeling’ some people may already be thinking. I really don’t want to poison them or make their stomach upset for ever, by making them the dump yard of my experiments. I truly, love the ‘idea’ of cooking on my own and giving dinners to friends. Anyone can dream, right?


So, this year, as Onam fell on a weekend, I was happy. I could cook and I could take one day leave after that to give my body the well-earned rest. On Friday I gave a crash course to both my Irish colleagues here on Onam. I could see their imagination go wild (and their pupils getting dilated) on the idea of ‘eating on a plantain leaf’. One of them even asked me about the size of the leaf. God, did he really think that we were originally some tribesmen from the darkest forests in Kerala! Anyway I told my female colleague that I am going to cook, yes cook, and that I am taking a precautionary leave on Monday in case anything goes wrong with my back or stomach! She was more supportive, may be because she compared it with the huge turkey roast they did for Christmas. But my male friend was still apprehensive. And I think that’s because he is a bachelor!


I shopped alone for the feast because my hubby and shopping never ever go together. If we wanted peace in the house, I have to do shopping on my own. Though he just did ‘pushing-the-trolley’ maneuver, he complained as though he did the whole task of making list, finding the items, comparing prices and checking them. So, I was better off without him in that task. That meant pushing the full packed trolley for some 2.5 km on my own (which was terrible, in an uneven pathway!) and then driving alone after that. Anyway I went to some African store and even bought plantain, which was not available in Pakistani store. I decided to do everything the hard way using coconut oil (which will be as hard as frozen butter in Irish climate) and using boiled rice, which took ages in getting cooked!


Anyway I woke up Saturday with a migraine which made me go panic. But after taking painkillers it went down and I started preparing for Sundays lunch menu. I usually work in kitchen with Malayalam CDs blasting in high volume - to boost my mood. It lessens the actual burden of cooking, for me. So with that, I started. My menu was:
Parippu curry, sambar, rasam, beans mezhukku puratty, carrot thoran, tuna vattichathu(non-veg), pavakkai fry. Pappadam and rice was meant for next day. Payasam (dessert), aviyal, pachadi was planned to be brought by our guests. I knew how to make aviyal. But ‘pachadi’ and ‘paayasam’ looked like “Mt.Everest” to me!



Anyway, I am not self-praising anymore… I finally did it and my back is still intact after that, along with my guests’ stomachs. Also none of us didn’t contract diarrhea. And in fact I got compliments, too! So, I think, apart from pookkalam, we irish-mallus celebrated Onam with ishtyle, in Ireland too!


Fiction: My guests (and may be the readers) thought my husband helped me.
Fact: He did, grate 5 carrots, in the whole process!

Photo blog- London - part 1

the metro-which scared me...


60th Royal Wedding annvrsy Special ad, inside Green Park metro.



the famous red telephone box - so London-ish



the famous black London cab



confused inside metro..



change of guards in Buckingham Palace...



Royal Police screaming at me...he..he..not me....




Buckingham Palace (just a portion of it... its spread on 3 photos..)



A 'live' Royal guard - poor man , he is not even allowed to sneeze or even bat an eyelid !!.



Madame Tussads- entrance




In Madame Tussads, with Amitabh!!



A chit-chat with Einstein...




Darwin and myself, together....



..with future Prince of Wales!!



..with King of Bollywood!



..almost hugging Lincoln!




..so, why should i leave Timberlake???? He loves Ireland,too....



...and back to my OWN husband... and to reality-land!! **winks***

Visiting London and a Londoner!

Finally, finally I am back after having a crash-holiday in London for 5 days, from 12^th till 16 August. When I reached my home in Ireland at 9 pm on 16^th, I thought my limbs have stopped working. It ached and ached and finally it cut off my circulation giving way to numbness. I had so much planned to see in so few days time that in order to squeeze at least half of what I wanted to see into the travel plan, we had to run from one tube station to another, like most of the working Londoners. Fortunately the (in) famous London weather didn’t ditch me. Thank God for that!

It’s almost impossible to post all the photos, because I have nearly 1000 photos spread across three digital cameras. Still, I have to say that the most wanted photos didn’t turn up good. That includes the one I badly wanted to post here… my meeting with my blogfriend from London – Mina.

I messaged her as soon as I reached London and gave her my hotel number and room no, so that she could call me. She called and we talked and talked and talked. She had such soft and polite voice that suddenly I thought that may be all Londoners were as soft and polite as she was, whereas I sounded like the good old loud Irish/Indian! LOL…I think I talked with her thru phone for nearly one hr, the first day. Honestly it was non-stop talking from my side. We planned to meet up on Tuesday, Aug 14^th.

The things that happened on Aug 13, Monday includes, me getting lost in Victoria tube station in the mad rush. Next thing was I slipped and almost fell on the never ending 60 mph speeding escalator. The weird thing was that in that escalator you have to stand always on the right side. Else others who are running thru that over-speeding escalator will push you in the rush and before you know you will be lost in the stampede, fighting for your dear life. I thought this desperate rush was the most ridiculous thing I ever saw. There were trains every single minute to all stations in central London and people were running as if they were chasing their lives!!

First day I really couldn’t accept the mad rush of the people all around me. When I almost wanted to go back, my husband and later Mina sworn on their lives that London is not as bad as Mumbai, in terms of rush. That made me a little calmer! LOL…

As this blog is only about my meeting with Mina, I am skipping all my other (mis)adventures. Anyway we planned to meet up in Russel Square underground station, as it was only 5 mts walk from Mina’s office. One of the best things in London is that with a single travel card for 24 hrs(6 pounds) we can travel anywhere in Central London thru metro, national rail and bus, without any additional charge. After meeting Shail aunty, my husband had started trusting my blogfriends. So, it was easier this time to convince him, about meeting a stranger-friend.

Mina was the first one to identify me. She came running and hugged me and only then I found that it was Mina. (Some times with my eyesight I can’t even say whether my husband is laughing or scowling at me!). We chatted and chatted like long lost friends. She wanted to have tea with us. But with just 2 more hrs for the London Aquarium to close, we didn’t have much time with the tickets already taken. I told her that I came there “just to see her”. I promised that I will be visiting London soon, most probably in December when we have almost 10 days holidays. (Mina, yes, I mean it).

My husband took our photo. I don’t know what he did with the camera, despite the sunny sky, warm weather and high resolution cameras, my husband somehow managed to turn night vision ON, and that too in 3 pm broad light…and that explains the quality of pictures.. Also he made us pose for a life time, that finally I got fed up, and managed a frown when he snapped!


Manju, thanks for asking me to meet Mina. She was one of the nicest women I have ever met! Soft, polite, and soo… soo… nice!!!

Recycling kitchen bloopers...

I think most women will empathize with me in this blog. Be it working women or not, any woman (or man) who runs the kitchen will sure see my plight and offer their sincere sympathy with me in here.

I am not very experienced in cooking. It’s been only 2.5 yrs since I started this adventure, willfully. Still I haven’t gone much further from where I began. But, now at least I can cook ‘edible’ things. Some people have this special knack for cooking. And I totally envy them. I cook because I ‘have to’ cook. And I put a lot... honestly… a lot of hard work in that - especially because it’s a skill that I lack genetically. So, after such an effort, whenever my ‘experiments with masala’, fails, my whole world crumbles before me. I panic, scream and sometimes I often end up at the verge of tears.

To add more depth to my woes, my husband has a heightened sense of taste, that he can identify even the minutest burn/problem in food. Sometimes it’s good for me that when ever I have a ‘fluke’ success, he praises me lavishly. But mostly I won’t be able to repeat that success. Then, he sternly refuses to eat it, no matter how much I beg. The result will always be the dish ending up in waste bin – with a lot of my tears. My heart-break mostly lies in the fact that I put all those hard work, after my office hours, mostly after 8pm.

So, the day after my migraine session, I told my husband that I will cook dinner as I didn’t want him to eat take away continuously for the third day. I decided to make this mushroom-cauliflower-prawn kuruma(dry), which he likes. The original recipe (posted by Sabiha) is only for vegetables, but as my husband likes the prawn-taste, I usually add some cooked prawns into it, to get that taste. I was overconfident because last time it was an incredible ‘fluke’ success and my husband finished the kuruma within a day.

I was to make rice, kuruma, moru-curry(kerala dish with buttermilk) and dry-fish fry for dinner. While making moru-curry, my concentration slipped from kuruma for some seconds and it ended up a little bit burnt - just very little. Also I had put a little more ‘garam masala’ than needed. I swear it was just a pinch more.

We started eating dinner and my husband proclaimed that the dish tastes ‘horrible’. I was eating the same and couldn’t notice any problem (my dishes always taste bland for my tongue!). I was shocked. From 8 pm to 9:30 pm, I was toiling in kitchen, after working in office, and this is what I get? And what about those dish left? He told me “Please don’t ask me to eat this, I really can’t” and pushed the plate away. I heard my heart crashing into a ten thousand pieces!!

The next day, I was determined NOT to put my hard-work into a bin. Five years back, I happened to hear one of my friends telling about turning vegetable kurumas into cutlet for her kid, who hated eating vegetables. But I being a dumbass in the cooking area, had no idea about the process behind that. So, I googled for the cutlet recipe and found it in here, and here - the kerala variety. Then I got a sudden inspiration from nowhere and got all the traditional recipes for Uzhunnu vada, Ethakka Appam etc and decided to challenge myself this long weekend, replacing all the kerala ingredients into similar ones available here.

Yesterday evening after office, I entered kitchen with a new kind of enthusiasm. I took half of the kuruma left and blended it well into a paste in the mixer. Then added boiled, mashed potatoes into it and mixed well. Then shaped the mix into cutlets, covered in egg-batter and then in bread crumbs (I didn’t even know how to make the bread-crumbs, till I found it in the site!) and made 5 cutlets. I didn’t taste it, determined to make my husband the scape-goat.

When my husband came at 10 pm, I served them with sauce. And within 2 minutes, the plate was clean, even without the crumbs. He wasn’t even asking me what it was.

Then I asked him, “Did you know what you ate, just now?”

“Cutlet”

“Did it remind you of anything?”

“No. what was it”.

He was getting panicky- haaaa…revenge is so sweet!

And I said, with a Jhoom Barabar Jhoom Barabar Jhooooom kind-of- move, “It was yesterday’s kuruma, mixed with mashed potatoes. I had vowed that I WILL make you eat them, relishly! I succeeded. I am not bad. I am not bad at all. I am the best recycler in the world”

After 10 minutes of gloating and dancing accompanied by my hubby’s confused face, I went to bed determined to do some more efficient recycling of my future cooking-bloopers, which I knew had more than 99% probability of happening!

A fever and its effects.

When you are so familiar with almost every kind of illness, you wouldn’t panic at all when something new pops up. You will be like “I have seen most of this. Let us see what happens, next”. But imagine a person who hasn’t been attacked even by a common cold for past 3-4 years. And when he is attacked by “viral fever”, all of a sudden, the situation turns out of control mainly because of the sudden ‘panic’ that sets in his mind. As we know most of the illness is related to how we treat them with your mind. If you panic, the illness gets an upper hand and it takes its worse form.

Ok, now coming to the point, the person I was referring to is my husband. Last Friday when he told about a cold coming up, I thought that it would be gone with some anti-cold tablets and paracetamol. But it didn’t. It upgraded itself into severe fever, chesty cough in the night which almost blocked his breathing not to mention the running nose. But the main problem was the panic he faced. He couldn’t simply accept that he was having fever.

As it was Friday evening, I couldn’t take him to the doctor till Monday. Here ‘doctor-on-call’ is only for emergency, and that means you must be nearly dying to qualify for it. First you have to call your GP and they will transfer you to the ‘doctor on call’ and you have to convince them that you are dying. And they will decide whether you are ‘really’ dying or not. And then they will call the doctor at home and tell him/her about your symptoms. And if he is willing to come, they will call you back and give you the permission to come to ‘doctor-on-call’. This is the procedure. I know it sounds crazy to prove that you are dying to get emergency treatment. But that is how the funny medical system here works.

So, we had to wait till Monday to see our GP. Now I had Saturday and Sunday to visit the pharmacist and do some ‘self-treatment’ to my husband. Also he suddenly started asking for the most impossible things like ‘kanji’(rice-porridge), pappadam, chukku-pepper-coffee, vicks etc. It was impossible at the moment because, we didn’t have any of these at home then. Also I had no idea from where to get whole pepper and chukku (dried ginger) and pappadam. He didn’t want ground pepper and fresh ginger.

Now Saturday I began my hunting for these odd objects at 1 pm. To my utter horror, TESCO re-assembled all their products on that day, after 3 years!!! . I was completely lost in that huge super-market. After 3 hrs of patient hunting, I found whole black pepper, cloves and dried-ginger-powder in the thai-spices aisle. After that I went to Boots(pharmacy) and got all the vicks, anti-cold tablets and paracetamol. [Here there is a restriction on paracetamol, that at a time you can buy only one pack].

When I came back at 6 pm, I had to make chukku-coffee, basmati rice kanji, dried coconut (the only kind available here) -chammanthi (chutney). With Lemsip (lemon-paracetamol drink) every 4 hrs, chukku-coffee every hour, fresh kanji-chutney three times- i was running all around, not to tell about the constant coaxing to make him eat tablets/food.

This was my very first experience with a feverish person. At home, when amma had fever, she would take food and tablets without any complaint. We just have to give her-that’s all. No complaints like “This kanji doesn’t have enough water. I wont eat this”. And I never expected husbands/men to be this cranky, when feverish. I was exhausted too much by Sunday evening. Constant running up and down every half an hr for coffee and kanji made my back pain horrible. Monday we went to our GP and my husband was given antibiotics.

Now with all these medicines he turned on his crankiest form.

“I don’t want to eat tablets."

"I don’t want to eat."

"I want kanji with more water and less rice."

"I won’t drink Lemsip, its bitter."

"You put too much ginger and less sugar on coffee”.

Now what will I do when a grown-up man behaves like this??

Some how… I can only say somehow, by Thursday his fever subsided and now only traces of his crankiness are left.

And I learned one big lesson. To be sick is very simple when compared to the effort, patience and stamina needed to look after a sick person when he is cranky!

Does everyone behave like this, when sick?

This play list has some old malayalam film songs which are my favourite! enjoy....

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