Rasam

When i was a kid, lunch was mostly served by my grandmother and usually it was accompanied by a story - either one of the azhvars /nayanmars or something personal - like how my great grandmother survived those days, the description of the house they grew up in tirunelveli etc. One of my favorite stories- actually not favorite but something i used to vigorously nod my head was about this chieftain of a princely state (kurunila mannnan?) who was willing to give his head for another serving of rasam. So the story goes like this - apparently there was a feast in the kingdom and the head chef made such good rasam that people could not resist asking for more. The king apparently thought the rasam to be a 'devamirtham' and kept drinking bowls of rasam till dusk. The rasam supply started vanishing in no time and when the final ladle was left the king ordered that anybody else who asked for another bowl would get it only if he gave his head. This chieftain came forward to give his head after drinking the final bowl because he thought it was totally worth dying for good rasam. And i think I would do that too!.

You get the drift? At times when I am hungry and hence angry, i think my existence on earth is probably for rasam. Thankfully, i was brought up and later on married to a rasam loving household where sambar is given a secondary preference. We even have mean nicknames for sambar loving households. Even on days when there is absolutely nothing at home we can be assured of rasam and its existence in the eeya sombu next to the stove.Rasam - I would say has the simplest of ingredients, no hard labor or elaborate cutting of vegetables but requires a certain skill to get it right. A bowl of good rasam to drink or when simply mixed with rice does not require any other additional item for thottufying .How convenient!.

Here are my points on whether you are a rasam lover or not!.

1) For the record, sambar is not a glorified rasam just because it has more dal or vegetables. Also, this doesn't mean rasam is the poor man's version of diluted sambar. They are DIFFERENT.

2) This brings me to the second point, there IS a fine difference between the rasam podi and sambar podi. They are not the same and if you use the same podi for both it is criminal.

3) Rasam has different sub strata like soil and each has a different taste and consistency. Mixing them all with your ladle every now and then while serving is also bad practice.

4) Its OK if you call rasam the 'south indian soup' because i think it IS comfort food and rasam forms the base for most indianized soups.

5) I think the best rasams are from the tambrahm households. We do not accept store bought podis however if the source of podi is from say ambika,777 or maybe grand snacks it is acceptable but not on a regular basis.

6) I've always thought the unique taste of rasam is a combination of different things . Its not like sambar where it cannot go wrong. Rasam can go wrong - the time you let it boil, the correct quantity of podi, the consistency of your dal and how well you dilute it repeatedly to get the "chaaru". Old people may call it 'kaimanam' (literally taste of your hand?) and i tend to agree.

If you don't like rasam,maybe you have not had the perfect bowl yet. If you still think you don't like it , i only feel sorry for you!.

#blog

Around 8 years back, i was trying to meddle with html and css code during my semester vacation. Thanks to an animation course I was enrolled in, my tutor introduced me to modifying code on blogger. around the same time, sriram introduced me to blogspot and I started writing. Like it usually does, I excitedly wrote something every day, waited for somebody to comment and then realized i needed popularity. During the same time, sriram introduced me to Orkut and i proudly typed my blog url on my profile where it used to say 'website'. And slowly, as the no. of posts increased I also realized i was writing because i wanted to write and not because i wanted others to read. The posts were silly, childish and mostly a rant - about college,work,friends and life in general. Those silly moments when we used to tag each other with sillier questions, get awards and jumping around claiming to own the blogosphere. Thinking about it now,what really attracted me was the amazing circle of friends and acquaintances I made along the way. There was always Rad's comforting posts on family,friendship and work, Nandini's cheerful profile pic and cheerful comments, schmetterling and silveranklet's girly talks, nivi and dd's book reviews, corgitos's(mahathi) school and college recounts, Adi's posts on everything from bombay to svce, nirmal's on linux and minnale.., dandilas carnatic tribute..the list just grew. then there was this exclusive class of people who I thought wrote really well and sometimes a rare comment from them on my post would make my day..the exclusive ones were suze's iima life, coconut chutney, AC and jalsa-jilpa. Slowly, we had blogger meets(i skipped quite a few) and added each other online. Our discussions on posts continued offline. Life moved on.

Today we have all moved on to twitter. The whole bunch of us ! AND many of us have stopped writing. There is this weird connection - we know a lot about each other at the same time we have no qualms showing #outrage on one another. If something sucked, we made sure they knew it. I can think of numerous instances where I stood corrected .In the blogging world, our judgments are very fair indeed.

To the whole lot!- Cheers. i know you guys are lurking around and I am in touch with all of you (mentioned above), if you still have your blogger account active ,drop in a line. It's been ages! AND PLEASE WRITE.

PS: I think i had some some 500 odd posts in 2009 and talk about messing with code- i lost them all when i tried migrating to wordpress. It doesn't matter cos I didn't lose that wonderful circle of friends all over the world! #senti

Spain and ...

all the sickness!. In the month of June it was decided that we have my in-laws's 60th celebrations aka sashtiyapthapoorthi in September and not in 2012. Any trip to india is almost always combined with numerous other social/ religious functions and a trip to the consulate. Having decided the 'activities' we started scrambling for the available 'leaves' and came up with close to 3 weeks of vacation. We also decided that this time we are taking a stop-over vacation on our way. The place of course was entirely dependent on the route , flying time & cost. So if it were eithad flying to istanbul or iberia to valencia, if the other two factors worked- that was our destination!. and so we landed in Madrid. oh we also managed to watch ZNMD a few weeks before we left and we were quite happy with our choice rather priceline's choice. The plan was to spend a week in Spain & Portugal get ourselves soaked in everything Gothic and eat tapas.

But...lady luck had a different plan. We had an early morning departure to NY from Austin and the previous night i was literally on the floor clutching my stomach and howling. Till today it remains a mystery - i was fine till the evening & then something happened. I threw up a few times and went to sleep. basically i was giving my husband the fright of his life and we still hadn't packed. He managed to throw a bunch of stuff after my weak instructions and we left to the airport. I knew all the clothes & stuff i intended to carry were definitely not there in those suitcases. Starting from barely making it to the gate to the earthquake in NY everything then on was a hassle. I was still sick and by the time we managed to reach Madrid ,take the train to barcelona (must add :with my level 1 Spanish skills) and check in to our hotel we were in a mess. Enough of misery - now to Barcelona.

Lovely lovely city. There is so much you can do even if you have a few hrs to spare. The first thing that attracted me was you don't *really* need to know espanol. Most of the signboards, trains,buses,menus are in English. if you carry a pocket book it is more than sufficient to converse with shopkeepers and cab drivers. Secondly, I personally love cities that have a good public transportation system. I enjoy reading the subway maps and taking the metro rail everywhere.In Barcelona,all the tourist spots have a metro station outside. Plus, you have the Bus turistica -which is your hop on - hop off ducky tour. You can get upto a week's pass and I would say that is the best way to see the city.

The above pic is the La Sagrada Familia - (kind of the Taj for us).it's one of Antonio Gaudi's famous church still under construction. So Antonio Gaudi is this famous architect guy Spaniards worship.Most of his works are what Barcelona boasts of. One such treat to the eye is Park Guell. If you have go to Barcelona you have to see this massive church.its checklist no 1. very Gothic and again - massive.

The next highlight is Camp Nou aka the Barcelona football stadium. The most amazing 3hrs of my life. I have no words to describe the museum, the jerseys and cups, the history and finally the field itself. what a turf!So they have these audios recorded on a typical match day and when you sit in the stadium they play the audio to give you a feel of the atmosphere . Goosebumps!!

In the meanwhile, i was still sick trying to gather all my strength by eating biscuits and drinking juice. Had to drag myself everywhere and as things got worse my husband decided to cancel Portugal and haul our asses back to Chennai. We decided to spend the rest of the trip in Spain and covered Montjuic and Madrid.

Barcelona has some pretty beaches and a very scenic coastal side. (Costa Brava). Costa Brava is like a day trip and you might need to rent a car although there are trains and buses with minimal service. Montjuic is this mini Ooty kind of hill and there is a cable car that gives you a panaromic view of the city.

Honestly, i don't remember much of Madrid. I was on this bus tour the whole day - saw palaces and royal buildings and oh for the european feel we stayed in a cosy hostel!.

Anyhow, things were back to normal once I was home and now I really wish we had made it to Portugal also :-)

Tips:

1) Carry plenty of change for the metro rail and buses.

2) Have a pocket english-espanol book.

3) Barcelona is the pick pocketing capital of Europe. Yep, be very very wary of your phones,wallets,camera etc. Thankfully we didn't lose much but a cab driver snatched money from my hands and ran away while i was figuring out sienta y seis and counting with my fingers.

4) Do NOT miss the tapas!.

5) Spain is the land of perfumes and saffron. You get perfumes ,the original ones which ar eusually priced 20%lesser than it costs in the US. Saffron - a box of 50- 75gms is 1Euro!. Compare it to 10$ in the US or roughly 200- 250INR. Stock up on your fav scents and spice!.

Summer '11

I wanted to write something about how hot this summer '11 has been and dang! NRI Maamihad to say it all in her post and now it would definitely look like I copy-pasted it. But here it goes..

It has been 4 years since I moved to Texas and I only see the summers getting intolerable each year. Agreed, I am from chennai and that's where i lived for most parts.. but i have never sulked so much about the heat. And i sat down to write this post as to why I think I didn't crib back then.

A) Chennai perennially had just one climate and maybe i thought that was the only weather that existed until maybe i was 10years old.

B) We had ice creams, kulfi, mangoes and coconut water. Do you need anything else to beat the heat? I mean when your entire day involved in planning how to get to the beach with your cousins, steal an extra mango slice from paati(she had the skin peeled-ready-to eat and straight out of the fridge) and beg amma to make icecream ( hear you food bloggers - back then ammas and perimas made the best "paal-ice"- aavin milk, sugar.that's it. no fancy-schmancy ingredients and no 200$ Cuisinart equipments) why would you care about the "heat"?

C) May was supposedly the hottest month and we had annual vacation. we were all packed and sent out to some cousins house and we stayed indoors playing.

So when did I start cribbing about the summer?

As a teenager I used to crib that my school uniform was pathetic ( Terri-wool yea right) and the three piece torture made it very uncomfortable esp during PT periods. But come 11th and 12th those coveted PT periods were anyway in automatic-maths/phy/chemistry conversion mode so I was spared from getting an already brown skin look like tar.

High school and college also meant extra classes, tuitions, semester exams which were always during May and I didn't have the guts to say 'i don't want to study'. I just said ' Veyyil adikardhu irritate pannadha'. (boy, did i have logic or what?)

Now, coming back to reality this texas heat is killing. The sun wakes you up at 6AM which is an ungodly hour and it sets at 9:30PM by which time most restaurants close. And psychologically, I somehow don't feel hungry till it is quite dark outside.

Ants. Who would have thought of these? yes, expect ants to visit you every hour. i'm talking in hundreds.Spray ant repellents overnight and by next afternoon they are there. If it were an apartment i would call the leasing office and not bother about it cos it's their business .Not anymore.I have to study about ants, talk to people at home depot, go home and check what kind of ants they are (there are 26 apparently) and get the right product. Or don't have a fancy lawn or garden.

Which brings me back to the next topic- grass. I am now a sucker for all things home. i shop,read,plan,dream and spend my free time on home decor. My backyard grass is now brown and crunchy.I hate to walk on it and my friend's two year old came to me and said "your grass hurts my feet". People say there is nothing you can do about it but i don't want to lose hope. Maybe next summer ain't this bad but if all this global warming is true i really wish we can do something about it. (like not have a huge lawn and watering them daily thereby saving your county from a drought :( )

So all i have been doing this summer is setting up the house, cribbing about how hot it is and having truckload of friends drop in every weekend. It has been fun paying high utility bills and trying to recreate summer recipes. (like buttermilk and mango shake).

I hope the summer everywhere else is tolerable.

Feliz verano!

The trip

May 1970

My grandparents made their maiden trip to the US of A. My uncle drove my grandparents, his 2yr old son and wife from Houston to Niagara.The journey has been narrated multiple times over the last 25 years.Apparently,It took them 6 days by car. Hand written maps , home made food to last the journey and just one photo - a prim faced family with the view of the falls

July 2007

My maiden trip with family to US of A( & of course Niagara). This time it was my bil who drove my parents,his parents, his wife and a jetlagged- me. Probably a 3hr journey from Pitssburgh and I was too sleepy to look around.

My first reaction after seeing her(the falls) was plain :o. (I'm obviously talking about the Canadian side!:P). The only difference from the trip my g'parents made 30years ago was we had a garmin gps. Which meant, we erm didn't get lost (mostly!) but hey! we didnt have reviews, online tickets and wait a minute Apps.

So, we still had to find our way for decent indian food for most parts , had to cringe looking at stale food/dirty restrooms/shut restaurants (cos there were no reviews to read) ,had no clue when our flights were delayed AND (we didnt get points for the numerous check-ins .sigh).

June 2011.

i decided to surprise my inlaws for their wedding anniv and took them to Niagara. It was the first niagara visit for them & my hubby and i had to pick this one - It was Grand Canyon,Niagra or Mt Rushmore. Tickets to Rushmore were insane, Grand canyon was ruled out because of obvious reasons( u club it with Sedona and las vegas dont ya)

and so it was Option1. So basically the trip was to cross one more destination in the patel check-list.(if you know what i mean!).

My good friend DD gave me 1 awesome tip - Get the Discovery pass . Seriously, if you book the discovery pass online you save 20bucks per ticket plus you get the special darshan queue respect every time. highly recommend.

So this is how our trip started - Southewst App alert on Sun morning indicating flight schedule. Flight on time.

Reach buffalo. Scan app for frequent flier.

Figure out restaurants and reviews on our way to the restaurant itself.

Proceed to the hotel which was a stone's throw from the falls. Check-in. Scan app for membership rewards.

Walk to the Falls. Use the discovery pass. Spend the rest of your vacation (using apps& becoming a Mayor) and find time to relax.

Although much fun was had with the family, we spent a considerable amount of time using all kind of apps and check-in points. The trip was perfect in everysense - no delays anywhere, no problems with food or stay but I think I would have loved to be on a car for 5 days without a GPS just like in the 70's.

I think this will be the last time at niagra falls unless of course we move to Buffalo or Detroit or Toronto (in which case it becomes unavoidobale).And honestly,i was not spell bound this time. What attracted me this time were the food trucks, hard rock cafe (they opened last year i hear) and the wonderfully shot movie about the falls in imax.

PS: the probability of bumping into your school friend /neighbor/ neighbor's kids/ grad school friends(with wife)/ grad school friends (with wife & kids) are HIGH. The blue /yellow raincoat

with hood is pretty useless if you want to dunk your face.

The new home buyers

We closed on a house today. Having said that, this happens to be one of the biggest days in my life post wedding.It is a big thing & although it is exciting to be a new home buyer our emotions are pretty much "yeah..thank god" and not just "yahoo!". lol,i think it is understandable when you have your income tied up to a mortgage company

for the next 30yrs!.

We have searched around austin for the last 1yr and during this process i can pretty much say we have scored an A in housebuying 101. Here is probably the top 10 things that I learned / observed over the last 10months.

- Don't try to fit in 'everybody's lifestyle into yours while searching - accept it- you dont have friends/relatives who visit you every week unlike in India. it doesn't really matter if you have just 1 guest bedroom and you think of what if uncle a & uncle b visit at the same time. the chances are slim. Things like having a basement, fireplace is common in the east coast while a large backyard in common in tx. Basically it depends on what you want and not how you would fit somebody else. (exceptions of course)

- re-sale,re-sale,re-sale. in India, you buy one house and you live there all your life.your kids,grandkids everybody will continue to live there. People move out in 5yrs in the US. desi/non-desi. You grow out of it pretty soon.If you are buying a previously owned home, do not add value to aesthetic stuff(like they show in model homes). Adding square footage makes sense. If you buy a house which has a main road passing right behind you,chances that you can sell the house are very less.

- model homes are like a model. dont get carried away. they attract buyers with aesthetic details that you can't help but admire the hand carved front door.In reality, nobody sees your front door.You enter through the garage :D

- sales consultants at new home builders/new sub-divisions can fleece you.beware of all the fine print.(this applies to most common things)

- You cannot like a house,talk to their owners and come to an agreement. People dont show you houses if you dont have a realtor. Same for selling.In fact you never meet your sellers. its all mediated.

- Apart from important facts like property tax,mortagages and numbers when you begin home search make a list of things that you absolutely want- for ex- we wanted a self contained community(gym,pool,hall blah blah)all inside, exemplary rated school districts etc. Also for the last 2 yrs we were the only indians living in our apt community (although it had its own perks) often we felt the need for a good desi gang.you know what i mean.

-getting a good realtor is very very crucial.u dont want to move around with an used car salesman who is trying to push you something. get somebody who knows the city well and is patient & straightforward. it usually works thru referrals. although our realtor is 75 and has a poor memory(cant blame her) she has told us on face how she disliked a particular house (when we thought we liked it).you want someone who can point the negatives.

- credit score- this is the fun and tricky part. when you like a particular house, the process is multi tiered. one of the things that are often scrutinized are credit scores. u might think everything is perfect but remember even little things can make or break a deal.let me give u an ex:so the bank determines whether ur worthy of a loan.they pull your credit score and depending on how good or bad it is you get the loan. you can land up getting a smaller loan because your CS was marginally below the expected score.when we i moved from CA to TX time warner accounts had to be settled.

two yrs later they had actually mailed us saying we were due 85$ for a modem. We settled it but this "due" gets carried on your credit report for 1yr and you are screwed. So when you start the home search, check your score.

-Paper work paper work paper work. Pages and pages of documents to read, understand and sign.Its a nightmare really.understanding the mortgage math by itself is a big deal. after that you have your insurance,property taxes,escrow,hoa -the list is endless.

So,in short, the last1 yr we pretty much scored an A in housebuying 101.

Looking fwd to the settling down and setting up part over the next few months.

Oh, don't you just love my kitchen? :-)

Tinkle tells me why....

Last week, Uncle pai's death was the talk of the town -(Twitter and Facebook I mean). One fine morning we all woke up and realized that he was actually 80+ and he died. It was not a shock - I have never tried to read about uncle pai or his health ever. I have to admit that i was a little guilty, cos i was trying to find every bit of news about Steve Job's health all these years but not about this great man who accounts for almost 60% of my childhood. I mean I know all of us have to die one day but for some weird reason i never "expected" uncle pai to die. Probably he was also a "character" engraved in mind along with shikari shambu, suppandi and Ajay. C'mon shambu cannot die right? Its like Mickey mouse- they are always there deep inside your mind.

Tinkle was probably the first book I ever read. 1st std maybe. My sister got a copy home from the school library and at that age all I wanted to do was get my hands on whatever she had. I initially followed only raghu and suppandi. I found shikari shambu boring, though I always drew his wife in my drawing notebook (i found her very cute). I skipped ajay and his adventures with his dog (Raja?) cos I actually got scared mid-way. Yeah. As years progressed, i read all except shikari shambu. This was when the obsession with Tinkle grew so much that my mom decided to get the annual subscription (after much pleading - 60rs a year was a LOT i guess).

I clearly remember our newspaper vendor throw in the tinkle on the 5th of every month. Sister and me had this rule that whoever gets to "touch" it first reads it first. 5th of every month we woke up very early. For almost 3 years. Years passed and Tinkle got bigger- the digests came out and then the much awaited "Holiday edition". For some reason holiday editions were never available at easwari lending library (always out on rounds and i have a good guess as to where it might have gone - dandilsa? :D). The scrawny man in the library insisted i read "Gokulam" and I used to make a face at him. Gokulam was way down in the ladder compared to Tinkle. Starting with in- attractive covers and too many "do it yourself" stuff than stories I had to fight with mom for buying tinkle and not Gokulam. (It was way cheaper than Tinkle though).Our only choice was to search the higginbothams at central railway station. From then on, train rides just got better with Tinkle. I don't think there has been a single train journey -even an hr's trip like Chennai-Vellore without buying ourselves a copy of Tinkle. I would have written to Uncle Pai atleast 5 times asking him to publish my "It happened to me" ( most of it would have been a lie) and "Tinkle tells you why". In return, we used to get Uncle pai's handwritten letters saying he was sorry and a box of the most amazing erasers.(Very cute and colorful ones). what joy!. Looking back, he really is an awesome guy-imagine writing letters to children every single time.I wish i had those letters now. As years went by and five find outers, malory towers, nancy drew started getting more attention, i started lending Tinkle to younger cousins. But there was this special bond with Tinkle - i HAD to get it back from cousins.Losing it meant a big quarrel and parents had to pacify us. I actually read a couple of Tinkle digests last year - have to admit, the stories were very childish and I finished the comic in 5minutes but there is SOMETHING about those familiar faces- the illustration- the onomatopoeic words, kapish uncoiling his tail that makes it really really hard to resist a smile. It is truly a blast into the past - a familiar world that you wish you could jump right into.

There are about two huge boxes of Tinkle ( late 80's, early 90's and mid 90's) at home back in Chennai. Suddenly, they seem more valuable than they were earlier.

Uncle Pai, you are sorely missed.