Brownie time ..

Tea cake, Chocolate cake, Raisin cake, Nuts and raisins cake, Cashew nut cake, Pineapple cake, Chocolate chip muffins and cookies, Black forest cake, Rum and Raisin cake … Hmmm, just about enough items in my arsenal to open a bakery !! Maybe one of these days I should do so .

I had been contemplating baking a brownie for some time. I have not eaten a brownie, or if I have, I have forgotten what it tastes like. I like undertaking these kind of experiments, because one can be very liberal in the interpretation of success :-).

I required a square cake tin for the same ( don’t ask me why, almost everyone says brownie should be made in one ), a brief trip to MK retail fixed that part.

When wifey was over here couple of weeks back, she was complaining about the lack of general purpose vessels in our kitchen. However I can proudly say that there is no way she could raise the same complaint about baking vessels. Muffin trays, muffin cups, rectangular baking trays, bread box, circular baking tray, hexagonal tray, I have them all !! I have no idea why, maybe I have a bit of blind-spot when it comes to baking ….

For the recipe, my US consultant stepped up to the plate yet again with this recipe on Hershey’s site. Only alteration was to use half cup cocoa instead of one-third mentioned. I did not bother with the frosting, in the past I have failed pretty spectacularly whenever I have attempted it.

All in all the brownie came out looking decent. Maybe more of a blackie than a brownie. It crumbled somewhat towards the center and it was not very easy to extract it out of my cake tin.

Nothing extra-ordinary about the taste, I don’t think it will be one of my favorite cakes. May be the walnuts spoiled the taste some what for me, I should have used cashews instead :(

Rain, Power and me

Not only is it raining here, but it is windy like crazy. And the strange part is the rain and wind exist only for a one hour stretch in the evening. After that it is perfectly calm and bone dry. But boy, the one hour more than makes up for the remaining 23 hours of calm. It has been total mayhem for past 2 days. Trees falling, windows getting shattered, roads getting flooded and what not

Plus the small issue of lack of power of course. The merest sight of a breeze and power goes off. I am supposedly a fully qualified electrical engineer and I can offer no explanation on why this maybe the case.
Is the power switched off to prevent trees from falling and shorting the wires ? Maybe , but underground cable is not exactly rocket science technology to implement, is it ?

More sadly the lack of power brings back two painful problems
1. Since the ceiling fan does not turn, mosquitoes have a field day in attacking me. Hence I cannot sleep very well
2. I light up a mosquito coil to shoo them away, but the smoke invariably triggers an asthma attack. Which in turn again means that I cannot sleep

Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.

Among these raging insomniacal days, I have somehow finished Coming back to me by Marcus Trescothick. In one word- brilliant. 

Truly eye opening account on how devastating depression can be, and also on how under-diagnosed the condition is. It is very rare for a professional sportsman (who is still an active cricketer in the county circuit) to be so open about his problems. The story of his cricket life is very well written with a touch of humor present all the time. The book won William hill sports book of the year award in 2008 and I am not surprised at all.

Muffins and me

It is high time I launch my own bakery.

I was wandering in Forum Value mall the other day when I felt like eating a muffin( or a cup cake) . Strode into Cookie Man and ordered one, only to realize on piece is  Rs.60.  Imagine that !!! And it was not all that great either,pieces of it were under-cooked.

Later on I was in Hyper City when again I saw a pack of chocolate chip muffins, 2 of them being sold for Rs.50.

And to think I am giving away mine for free to the ungrateful lot in office !! Next time I am charging heavily for my creations …..

Learn from nature

A recent visit to the Mysore Zoo triggered some thoughts in my mind. There are indeed a lot of things that we can learn from animals.

For example take the Lion. The male lion does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. All it does is sleep the whole day, the female does all the hard work. The male is not even a wage earning member of the family for God’s sake !! Yet, you could say he enjoys his life. No responsibilities, 24x 7 x 365 food and comfort guaranteed.

Male Lion’s life is not too bad eh ? yeah , yeah, i know they look royal and all that stuff. I could grow a mane too, you know :-)

Or the Hornbill, which is the state bird of Kerala. Legend says that it drinks its water directly from the rain drops. Now why do we spend so much time washing our cars ? Leave them out of the covered garages whenever it rains, let nature do the washing for you !!

Extending the same concept to human beings can result in rather objectionable odors, especially if you are in a place like Bangalore where it rarely rains. So let us leave that one alone please …

I am convinced that this is a “natural” path to follow :)

Jnanappana

No, that was not some jumble that my daughter typed, it is the name of a famous poetry book in Malayalam. More specifically, the obtuse sounding reference to this old book is in the context of the following two verses

Randu nalu dinam kodangoruthane thandilethi nadathunnathum bhavan
Malika mugalileriya mannante tholil marappu kethunnathum bhavan

The translation, again obtained from the above link, reads :

In a matter of day or two You are He, who makes them ride on the royal chair.
On the shoulder of the king who climbs to the top of palace. You are He, who places the tattered heap.

How else can I describe my state ? Till yesterday I was a king. My house was filled with laughter, people, food , action and conversation. Today there is nothing, my family has gone back after their brief vacation

On the positive side, we spent probably the happiest week ever together !!

I will get back to my reading mode again. Among other books, I have the latest collection of short stories from Archer in queue : And Thereby Hangs a Tale.

Long trip

And I am back to Bangalore, after having driven ~ 950 kms over the past 5 days.

It all started with a drive to Calicut with my parents on 1st May. The trip took longer than I planned because we took frequent breaks in between. Plus I no longer drive at the same peak speeds after an accident I had around an year back.

The road is in very good condition, except for a small section between Mysore and Nanjangud which is quite bumpy and uneven. Nanjangud to Bandipur forest is the best stretch of road. Sparse traffic, long straight sections with very good visibility. Do watch out for several unmarked humps. The forest section has its own charm due to the significant drop in temperature, we drove with our windows down at noon in the peak of summer. Still it was so cool !! All the more reason for Bangalore to actively look at increasing its tree cover.

The drive through Kerala is very scenic. Overtaking is a nightmare, owing to twisty nature of the roads. You can rarely see a 50m stretch of straight road, it always snakes around into blind corners :(

Then we went to Kuttiyadi for my cousin’s wedding on Monday. Again a 50 km drive that took me close to 1.5 hours due to the fact mentioned above !!

On the drive back on Tuesday, I had my wife, kid, sister, brother-in-law and niece for company. We took one day break in Mysore and did some sightseeing there.

The Mysore zoo is a must visit for folks with young kids. Be prepared to spend half a day there if you are planning to cover it by walking as we did. You have to walk close to 3 kms !!

My favs were the Hornbill, Sarus crane ( which is the world’s tallest flying bird, a fact that I did not know till now) and the Royal Bengal Tiger. I don’t know who named the Lion as the king of animals, for me it has to be Tiger without a shadow of doubt !!.

Reached back in Bangalore yesterday evening. And I am sick of the sight of my car already :-( Driving in peak summer is not too much fun.

Whipped cream miseries

Definition of Whipped cream : thick cream that has had air incorporated into it by rapid beating

Sounds reasonable, so what is the big deal ???

The big deal is that once you keep whipping the cream, it turns thicker and thicker. There is a certain thickness level, which once when crossed WILL CAUSE RAPID CONVERSION OF CREAM TO BUTTER !!! So instead of having nice whipped cream to decorate my pineapple cake, I had BUTTER .

&^%$#*@

Needless to say, the icing had a slightly odd taste, completely masking the excellent pineapple cake underneath.

Icing and decoration continue to be development needs for me.

Sighhhhh, when will I learn all this ????

Jose again …

Jose Mourinho is back after his Inter Milan won 3-1 against Barcelona in the first leg of their champions league semi-final. When asked by a journalist about some petty complaints that Barcelona had about the loss, he answered

“The way they are, tomorrow we will probably read I am to blame for the volcano. Maybe it is true. Maybe I have a friend in the volcano and I am responsible for that."

Barcelona , of course had to take a long bus journey to Inter to play their match because all flights were canceled due to volcanic ash

I like this guy !!

And its over

Gone are the days when I can come back home , switch on the TV and be entertained by a mindless exhibition of slogging called T20. The end of IPL-3 has left a vacuum in my life, one that I am trying to fill with the new season of Indian Idol :-)

Yesterday’s final was the true demonstration of why Tendulkar (who no doubt of the greatest batsman India has ever produced) is no more than a very average captain. A very average captain, whose stock has been considerably inflated by two of his long time admirers in commentary box – Ravi Shastri and Sunil Gavaskar.

Baffling choices in batting order. MI lost because of those choices and also in no small measure due to fairly pedestrian batting by Tendulkar and Abhishek Nayar. Harbhajan and Nayar are better players than Duminy and Pollard ?? Which book of cricket says that ?

Anyway it is wonderfully easy to be an arm-chair critic , is it not  ? :)

PV the philosopher

I might have mentioned earlier that expectation may indeed be the root cause of many miseries.

Judging others by how you might have responded to something is an equally precarious path. A path that I have tread so often in the past, somehow the lessons from that are never learnt.

Maybe life is like that, a few lessons are repeated, yet you do not learn. If all of us learnt from our mistakes and never repeated them, would the world be a better place ? Or would it be far worse off ?

Whatever that maybe, nothing better than an empty house, cloudy weather and indifferent mood to unleash the philosopher in you.

Stay tuned for more PV-isms :-)

A good blog

If you are keen follower of football , especially the English Premier League, be sure to read Chris Charle’s Blog on BBC. Especially look at the Quotes of the week section.

The irrepressible Roy Keane came up with this during the past week :
"Attempts on goal is like going to a nightclub. You could speak to 50 girls but if you're going home on your own, it's no good, is it? You could only speak to one and go home with her!"
Roy Keane's dating tips and Ipswich's scoring issues!

And one of the reason why so many of us love The Special One : Jose Mourinho is captured in the quote below. This was just before the Champions league match between Mourinho’s Inter Milan and Chelsea, the club he formerly managed.
 "Before the game I know everybody and I love them, and after the game I know everybody and I love them - for 90 minutes I know nobody." 
The one and only Jose Mourinho on his return to Chelsea
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/chrischarles/2010/03/quotes_of_the_week_17.html)

Also if you are looking at a humorous round up of the weeks football action, you could do a lot worse than Robbo Robson’s blog.

Non football lovers, please excuse :-)

When everything else fails …

…………… try reading. Always a good remedy to unwind and relax. Especially when a weekend looms where friends are unreachable or unresponsive. Everyone has their own lives to live, which is why books are such a reliable backup.

Well, let me try and recap my last 3 books. First was 2 states : The story of my marriage by Chetan Bhagat. Contains plenty of pot shots at Tamilians, with a few unkind portrayals of Punjabis too thrown in. But overall he is not far from truth. There is very little in common between North and South, however hard you may try to prove otherwise. The book is very light to read and reasonably entertaining.

Another one that I read was Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton ( may his soul R-I-P). Quite a deviation from the usual science thrillers that he writes. Story of a band of pirates around 17th century. For me it is more of a portrayal of super-heroes who are indestructible.  Pretty weak by Crichton’s standards. Not a bad read, but not a recommended one by me for sure

Most recent one was Arvind Adiga’s - Between Assassinations. Quite well written, very simple stories. There is an underlying anger or frustration that comes through in each one of them. I am yet to read the 2008 Man Booker prize winner – The White Tiger, I am  tempted to after this book.

There seems to be quite a lot of very good Indian authors around. I must read more of them.

IPL and entertainment

The IPL has been entertaining me on most days. More than the cricket, I have been impressed with the Adidas ads on cricket. Here are all the three, in descending order of my liking. The music score at the end adds that extra punch

The bowler
He can hit the ball for an eight. He can bat till the pitch grows grass. His coach loves him, my coach loves him. He is strong off the front foot, he is strong off the back foot. He is his team’s best batsman

But right now …. He is in my way

The fielder
I can’t sing. I can’t dance. I can’t climb up mountains. I can’t ride a horse. I can’t swim. I can’t cook.

But sometimes …… I can fly

The batsman
Good advice, bad advice, captain’s advice, coach’s advice, stranger’s advice, dressing room advice, barber shop advice.

But my bat … it is Deaf

Enough of this nonsense

I am tired of hearing “breaking news” about Sania Mirza and Shoaib Malik. I don’t care if they get married or not, it is time for the media circus to end.

Could not care less if Sania went and married an Orangutan instead. Considering the fact that her fiancé has in the past married a woman over phone after seeing her photo, some may argue that in terms of intellectual capacity Orangutan may score slightly better than her present choice.

But that is beside the point. Two adults should have the freedom to do what they want their lives without the disgusting behavior (bordering on Voyeurism) by our media.

Shiv Sena also has made some hay while the sun shined, with Bal Thackeray claiming Sania would no longer be an Indian if she married Shoaib. Possibly he has overlooked that fact that Shoaib had married Ayesha Siddiqui first, who is an Indian. I don’t recall him writing an article saying Ayesha is no longer Indian, maybe someone can refresh my memory.

Happy Birthday and other things

Wifey’s b’day today. As usual I am missing in action. Nothing new there.

My bad time has lingered onto to the current week. Again nothing much new there.

Slept for like 4 hours each of the past 4-5 days, nothing at all new there.

Team dinners and outings resulted in me eating out 4 nights out of 5 this week. Well, there is something new there !!!

Pardon me, I can no longer hold on to a thought, they are escaping from my mind at the rate of knots.

My dreams in the past few days include an attempted murder by me. I distinctly remember pumping several bullets into some unknown person. And 5 minutes later, he was knocking on my door …….. Apparently I was not successful.

How bad is life when you begin to suck in your dreams too ??????

Existence is often pointless, yet we continue to do so. Why that is so is one must be one of the most mysterious facets of life.