Chef de Cuisine

This is my first attempt at Italian Cuisine. Please don’t say that it doesn’t look like an Italian dish. (Can anyone of you hear me shouting at the top of my voice “wooo hoooo !!!!”). I have always wanted to try cooking different cuisines (other than Indian) at home from a long time; and finally I did it today!

I have been reading my colleague’s blog (she blogs about food and cooking) and I was all the more inclined to trying one of her recipes. And another inspiring factor is a friend of mine who also tries cooking different kinds of cuisines (Imagine she and her husband go on cooking marathons!). I knew one of these weekends I would definitely try something different, but didn’t actually think that I would try today!

My hubby enjoys having a traditional Indian meal at the end of the day, and never really relished having a different cuisine. But I guess he has got bored too and was ok with trying something new. And the moment he said “Let’s try pasta today”, I was on my way to the grocery store to get everything I needed. Well, not exactly; I started searching for easy/simple Italian recipes on the internet. Thanks to my colleague’s blog, I could get a basic idea of what I needed and a base recipe. And off I went to the grocery store with a shopping list. I made parmesan crusted chicken and penne pasta with vegetables. I was very apprehensive of what it will turn out to be finally, but it was ok, not bad for a first try. (Can you see me patting my back?) Let me know if you need the recipe ;o). I did forget a couple of things, but the final dish turned out yummy !!! I finished it with a sprinkle of grated parmesan cheese. What should I name it though ? Penne Pasta with veggies and Crispy crusted chicken....

Seasons so beautiful!

Spring is just around the corner! This is my 4th spring here in the United States, but yet again it surprises me the way trees just spring back to life with a little sunshine…..trees that have become dead because of the freezing winters, trees that have lost all signs of life and shades of green because of the bone chilling temperatures. The fresh and translucent color of green that starts budding all around you is so pleasant to look at, the way brown just vanishes and different shades of green just take all the place is so amazing.

Actually, we get the first look of any arriving season at the departmental stores and especially the arts and crafts stores (Michaels is my favourite). The stores change their colors and displays in just a day and spread the mood of the oncoming seasons. Come spring, you will find a lot of tulips and bright daisies beautifully decorated in bouquets and come fall, you will see the same bouquets transform into warm and cozy colors like the oranges and the maroons of the maple leaves. And just another month from the fall, everything is decorated in deep red and silvery snowflakes welcoming the winter and the holiday season.


Every season gets a different mood along with it. While spring feels so peppy and vibrant, autumn marks the beginning of the festive season and the lovely feeling of spending your time with family and friends and winter is kind of a mix of gloomy and dreamy feeling. Sometime it looks so beautiful like a winter wonderland in a fairy tale that we have heard of as kids and only feel fortunate to be experiencing one, and sometimes it feels so gloomy and makes us long for bright mornings of the spring.


Being raised in a tropical weather, I was fortunate enough to have pleasant spring weather for most of the year. Well, a duh! that I was, I never really appreciated having such beautiful weather until I started experiencing it only for some time of the year. There is one thing for sure that I like about the widely varied seasons here (USA), we get a chance to shop quite often (give season as a reason you see!).


From where I come, winter is like mid fall here. And now after experiencing winters with 10 inches of snow, that doesn’t even measure up to winter for me! I did get my first taste of cold winter during my stay in Gurgaon, part of North India. Well, it dint snow there, but there was lot of fog and mist. I really enjoyed that. But on the down side, Gurgaon also had very and dry summers. Thanks to the climatic changes, summers in India are getting hotter, and it feels like there are only 2 seasons – summer and severe summer!!! It wasn’t this bad when I was younger. I do remember having moderate summers and chilly winters, but it’s no longer the same. Monsoons are no longer the same; they show up for only a short period of time. What’s happening to the climate?

Decreasing level of water in River Colorado

I know I started this post on a very happy note, but as I went on, I started feeling bad for what we are doing to these wonderful creations of Mother Nature. Are we doing enough to save the climate from even more damage? Actually all these thoughts crept into my mind when I was reading about how longer a particular material takes to decompose. When I read that thermo coal takes a million years to decompose, I was shocked! I was shocked not at the “million”, but at the number of thermo coal cups that we dispose everyday. I am no saint, I dispose at least 2. That really struck me hard. Hard enough that I decided to bring my own pet bottle (for water) and my own spoon and fork (for lunch). Well, it’s not much, but at least I will do whatever I can. It’s not just thermo coal, there are so many other things that we dispose and don’t even think twice before doing that – plastic bags, rubber, aluminum cans, diapers, woolen materials, Styrofoam and a whole lot of other things !

Landfills

(http://www.discoveret.org/ksb/Facts.htm). I agree that some of them are recyclable, but still what proportion of are we able to recycle? Like for example, we keep shouting slogans that trees should not be cut, that will lead to soil erosion etc, but we still do cut them and make a lot of things out of the tree barks. One major product is paper, but what percentage of the paper products that we are disposing are being recycled? Are we still not going after trees and cutting them down? Yes, a lot of these questions are circling my brain right now, and I am sorry I am injecting everyone else’s mind who is reading my blog too! One particular question that keeps lingering in my mind is “Do we want our children to have an Earth with no nature and no beautiful seasons to enjoy?”

Writing Letters......

I have long been thinking about writing a letter, and I mean actually writing one and not “typing” as in “e-mailing”. Well, to whom? I haven’t thought about it yet. Thanks to all the technology we have, though its making easier and faster to communicate, haven’t we forgotten the good old way of writing letters? I spent my childhood with my maternal grand parents and my grand father taught me how to write letters to my mom and dad. I very sincerely used to write “Hope this letter finds you in the pink of health, good spirits etc”. Now, when I think about it, I feel where has all the art of letter writing gone? Do people use such phrases anymore? It feels a little vintage to write or to speak like that these days, but yet it’s so beautiful.

I am reading this book called “Indira” by Katherine Frank, which has letters written by Nehru to his daughter. In fact, to tell you the truth waiting to read those letters is what’s keeping me read through the book. Though Nehru used those letters desperately as a way of keeping in touch with his daughter and as a means of discussing everything he wanted to with her, they are not just pieces of information he was passing on to his daughter, but also a lot of love and affection. Reading that book and also memories from good old letter writing days have inspired me to write this post.

It always amazes me how letters can communicate such wonderful feelings. Well, emails also do, but I don’t think they do it well enough! Just a simple example would be – have you ever searched for an email and read it again and again? But you do that with letters, don’t you? At least I do. There are numerous occasions on which I scoured through my letters and searched for that one letter which was so special or which reminded me of some nice things, and read it again and again.

I loved waiting for letters, and I loved spending time writing letters. With emails, it’s like dropping a telegram; we don’t write much in emails, and thanks to the shortcuts, we end up dissecting the language trying to type a quickie! I used to pack my letters with everything I wanted to say, probably because I dint get to write another one till another 10 days (but with emails, you can write another one the next minute!). I am not trying to draw a comparison between letters and emails, but I am just trying to see how much time we used to spend doing something that was so wonderful! I feel the same even with e-cards. There was a time when I used to make personalized greeting cards and give them; which slowly transformed into e-cards; which has now deteriorated into one liner emails! Isn’t that sad? Things which used to give us so much happiness and satisfaction, we no longer have time to spend on them.

I don’t know about everyone else, but all these thoughts have definitely rekindled me enough to go back to writing letters, making cards and all those lovely things. Well, you never know I might end up writing a letter one of these days!