Time...the irony

When we see comments like "you have way too much time on your hands" after watching the mysore pak or vadam videos, cannot help but smile.

The whole idea behind doing the videos was to show folks that

a. you do not need a lot of time to make it
b. it is not that difficult to make these things

That is why the time was mentioned in the videos. The mysore pak was done in 1 hour and 4 mins (and if the ghee was premade it could be done in 50 mins.) The time it takes for you to drive around to an Indian Restaurant and find mysore pak(you can find Soan Papdi and Haldiram stuff here in stores but not MysorePak), stay in line, pay, come back home is almost an hour plus.

It will also cost you 1$ per piece + gas for that while it costs you 10 cents to make it at home!

The vadam making started at 12:42 and we were done by 1:08, in under 30 minutes! We got 72 pieces for ~$1.5 total! Your other options are to wait for closest friend or relative to get you some from India or buy 20 pieces for $3.99 from the local Indian store.

It would have taken the same time to make 4 times that quantity of the gel and another 10 minutes to spread it out!

Was telling Sangeetha earlier today "Has cooking ones own specialty items become that unfashionable that only people with time to waste or too much time on their hands can do it?"

Is this a phenomena with the younger generation? Eating fast food or buying your food is somehow supposed to be a "time saver" and therefore a cheaper option?

Just think about it!

We cook every night and we take our lunch with us to work. (San always packs my lunch.. also everyday I do call her at lunchtime to have a chat, if not about the food, at least we have a chat). We cook for the kids anyways, so it is a no brainer to spend the 10 minutes to pack lunch. One can always argue that if you get paid enough, the cost of that 10 minutes is more at an hourly rate and therefore buying food is cheaper.

So many recipes are going to be lost. It has been ages since I even smelled some of those divine smells that would come from the kumuti aduppus (charcoal stoves) when my grandma and her aunt would team up to make sweets for the family on a whim!

Just wish I could replay those smells like we replay youtube videos! It doesn't have to be lost. We don't have to rely on MSG and complicated carbonates and coloring agents to add pep to the food we eat.

On a similar note, when we pulled potatoes grown in our backyard and made a simple curry, the smell and taste were orders of magnitude better. It was like being transported to my 10 year old phase, and I was sitting on the floor and my mom was sliding more curry on to my plate from the "ilupa chatti"!

The potatoes looked ugly and gnarled, but the taste was out of this world. The picture perfect potatoes from the local grocery store are practically bland compared to this. We as a consumer would rather have our food look good than taste good.

A lot of the younger generation prefers to buy food than make food and the convenient excuse becomes "you have way too much time on your hands if you are cooking!"

By the way, bloging and videoblogs are easy, especially if you can type 70+ words a minute and you have been doing this a lot.

We all have 168 hours a week. If you spend 42 hours sleeping, 14 hours driving to and from work and running errands over weekend, that leaves you with 112 hours.

If you work 11 hours a day, 5 days a week and another 10 hours over the weekend that takes out 65 hours and you have 47 hours. You spend ~2.5 hours a weekday with your kids and 12 hours with them over the weekend and that is another 17 hours and you still have 30 hours left for eating breakfast, dinner, watching movies, doing dishes, grocery shopping, making that once a week cooking video,etc. no?

Jr., after watching the "Making of Vadaam" video, decided to make a cooking video earlier today (aka irritating your mother video). I did not know about this till San told me. It was hilarious to hear her commentary and the videography.

She adapts, refines, starts this one at the beginning of the Dosai making cycle..Watching this brings happy tears! My little girl is already an expert videographer and cooking aficionado!

You see how a 7 year old can do this by observation (between watching food network and her dad). Next thing you know she will be collecting advertisement money.

Kids today!

ps. You have to have the audio on high to really hear her comments.

.

Indignation - the rightful kind..

Well, these days there is rightful and wrongful indignation. This is a documented case of the "rightful" type!

Went to this South Indian food place and asked for the usual Rava Dosa. Got it in 3 minutes, which is a surprise, considering it usually takes at least 10 minutes to 15 minutes from order time.

Got a dosa that had a lot of Rava in it. But the batter was definitely the regular dosa batter!

Now, if you are not picky about a dosa and would consider anything round and crispy brought to you with a cup of sambar and chutney as fair game, stop reading this post. You may not be amused.

On the other hand, if you know enough about Dosa's to answer a quiz question "What is the difference betwen a Rava dosa and Plain dosa?" with anything more than "The Rava dosa has rava in it!", read on.

If you consider yourself to be the Sankara Saastri of Dosa's, this post will definitely increase your heart rate, pulse rate, stomach acid secretion rate, etc. etc. You already know that the basic ingredients in the plain dosa batter are rice, urad dal and fenugreek (vendayam) seeds while the Rava dosa is made from rice flour and rava (cream of wheat) with some green chillies, ginger, cashews, black pepper thrown in as added attractions (the additional ingredients vary widely!)

There is also the issue of fermentation. While the plain dosa batter gets its taste from leaving the batter overnight to rise (yeast action), the rava dosa batter is almost whipped up instantly with some buttermilk to help with integration!

So, if you get a rava dosa, you should not expect it to taste like a plain dosa. In other words, you should not detect the urad dal or yeast.

Now you can always tell me "so what? think you ordered a sada dosa and they put rava in it by mistake.. just eat it!". Which brings us to the "rightful" part. The average bay area restaurant charges 5 bucks for a dosa and 7 bucks for a rava dosa. The 1.5x price is usually due to the complexity and time consuming nature of the rava dosa manufacturing process, compared to the plain dosa. In effect, it is a custom order!

Now, if you throw a cup of rava in plain batter and give it to me in 3 minutes and charge me extra for it, I might ask you to put "kalpooram" in your hand and do deepa aaradhanai!!!

ps. I was at one time moderately allergic to urad dal. Which is why the choice was always a rava dosa! Not anymore..

pps. Not naming restaurant yet, because the owner is going to spot check the cook and let me know if this was really happening!

.

Flying with kids..

In a recent post on kids travelling under constraints, a couple of links were pointed out to me by s.b. These links were good, really good!

Here is how we manage the kids during our flights. We do not let them float in the aisle. We did have two other kids walking up and down on their own constantly, during our last flight. One of the kids actually stopped by for almost 20 minutes near our seat and I was holding his hand so that he wont fall down. Eventually his mom came and took him back to the seat! We do let the little one out of her seat, but she is confined to our row, and sometimes I carry her up and down the plane.

We do not let them open the door hatch! Jr. is entertained extremely well by San and her mom, by teaching all kinds of grandma games on the flight!

This one is Dosai amma Dosai! (Dosa is a south Indian Crepe and amma is mommy).

It goes

Dosai amma dosai
arisi maavum ulutha maavum kalandhu potta dosai
ammavukku 4
appavukku 3
baby-kku 2
Jr. ukku 1
suda suda suttu
neiyla thottu
vayaru romba saapidalam!

(translation)

Dosa mommy Dosa
crepe made by mixing rice flour and lentil flour
mommy gets 4
daddy gets 3
baby gets 2
I get 1
hot hot and fresh
clarified butter dipped
lets eat till our stomach is full!

This goes on for 15 minutes before they switch to ice-cream soda!! Or I play "find that word on this page" with the in-flight magazine.

Point is, our kids are equally cranky, but we deal with a lot less negativity.

I have been thinking of starting a kid friendly airlines!!

1. I will have wide aisles for kids to run around
2. the walls will be painted with Disney , Sesame street, Barney, Dora characters.
3. I will hire daycare teacher turned air-hostesses or air-hostesses turned daycare teachers only!
4. Will not have any carbonated or sugary drinks on the flight that would make the kids hyper.
5. There will be little tables in the middle of the plane and little kid chairs where they can draw, paint etc., once the seat belt sign is removed!
6. There will be music and videos for the kids to be distracted.
7. There will be little beds for them to sleep comfortably instead of trying to lie down horizontally between daddy and mommy with those annoying arm rests pulled up halfway!
8. All adults who board will be asked a few extra questions.
a. do you like kids ?
b. did you let your kids put things in your bag without your knowledge ?
c. do you think kids should be allowed to travel on planes ?
a "NO" answer for any question will promptly trigger a cavity search by airport security and they will not be allowed to board the plane.
9. Instead of the pathetic paper barf bags, there will be a button next to the seat marked "V" which automatically drops a bucket from the top compartment. That way you can save yourself an inflight shirt change!
10. there will be a diaper change area and some special diaper trash containers. Have you ever tried pushing a full diaper into the small rectangle which says "trash" on local flights?

I have a lot more ideas for this plan, but don't want to get carried away! Damn, I already thought way too much about this. Now all I need is some nice billionaire to loan me some money to start Babiaire / Littlewings or Kidsfly Airlines!

Hope this inspires some other parents to control their kids during flights!

.