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Entries in taste (2)

Wednesday
May072008

The potpourri that is life

Last wednesday saw a turning point in Daddy's life. He had written posts the previous weekend on how he was determined to change his lifestyle and life, take better care of himself, blah, blah, blah, blah, and more blah.

San even took a secret photo of him meditating in the backyard(which he found out much later while downloading all photos from the camera).



If this trend continues, people will start to think twice before they come visit us. Looks like everyone in the house has started taking secret pictures!

Just when things were going great, the little one came back with a small but stern cough. As is customary in this house, when kids are sick, they sleep on daddy's side with his left hand for a pillow and when they are in extreme distress they call out "Daddy!!!!", preferably after 3:00AM but precisely before 4:00AM and just as he looks at them and says "Ennada kuttyma?" let out a bellowing cough and directly trasfer spittle into his open mouth!

Daddy, who has somehow managed to get a Ph.D., is an evolutional retard. After going through this repeatedly with two kids over five years, he still has not figured out that, this whole sleeping with the sick kid is a bad idea. He just does not learn!

That fateful cough, coincided with Saturn moving to the ninth place in daddy's horoscope and at precisely 3:58AM the flag of the invaders was planted on Summit Daddy and when the sun rose the next morning, it was fluttering for all the world to see. The next few days were a blur. Daddy had been taken siege.

Did I mention the Saturn moving around to wrong places on the planetary belt, as predicted by famous astrologers? Apparently, Mr. Saturn can do a lot of bad things according to Hindu astrology, and as predicted, daddy's future took another nosedive. Almost ten years after marriage, he decided to have an affair!

Yes. We all know San is a stunner and daddy loves her very much. But as fate would have it, he was physically weak and mentally drained and in a moment of total weakness he succumbed to someone he met at the doctors office.

Her name was Codeine Robitussen and she was one sleeping beauty! She took him places he had never been to before and even locations which daddy had seen only with his dear wife appeared in a new light. Dad thought he had found the elixir of life!

The good news was that the affair ended three days later when the mother in law returned from India. She took one look at daddy at the airport, saw his clothes and said "You are a bloodly rag! and I am going to fix this for good." It was just daddy and the MIL driving back from the airport for almost an hour, with the MIL lecturing a quiet daddy on his habits and how her poor daughter deserved better. The MIL, had "Had enough!".

They came back from the airport, MIL's bags were unpacked, and they had enough material to open a small south Indian provision/sweets/savories store in Cupertino. Daddy had already broken up with the exotic Codeine and to celebrate, the MIL offered him and San sweets and savories. Daddy, tried small samples of every little item, only to find that they all tasted like "arisi maavu" aka "rice flour"! Had he been a carnivore he probably would have declared that they all tasted like "chicken"! This was a disaster. Dad had lost his sense of smell, sound, taste, needed windshield wipers for his watering eyes and was pretty much in suspended animation.

Then a miracle happened. He met the right doctor who gave him the right medicine. In the great country of United States, the probability of finding the right doctor is 1 in 10 and the probability of that doctor giving the right medicine is 1 in 10. The nine out of ten times you get that kid out of college looking up your nose and patting down your throat, you can bet your copay that you are going to walk home with stuff that will make you regret the attempt to seek medical help. That said, the chances of getting a screwed up prescription is very high and the calculation of that conditional probability will be left as a homework exercise for the reader.

Sorry, I forgot, this blog is not a math textbook! Let's get back to Daddy and his miracle. The last twenty four hours have seen daddy get back his sight, speech, smell and most importantly his sense of taste! Based on his recent self tests he concludes that :

Seedai tastes like seedai,
Murukku tastes like Murukku,
Karasevai tastes like karasevai, just as he expected!
Mixture tastes like Mixture,
Varuval tastes like varuval and surprisingly,
Sohan papdi tastes like Heaven!

Now that daddy successfully made it to work today, can talk again albeit with a slight cough and a raspy voice, even play with the kids and more importantly devour Sohan papdi like nobody's business...

We are one happy family again!


ps. This has definitly been daddys worse sickness in ten years and he has a newfound appreciation for family, life, love and all that he should appreciate more. He seriously believes he saw Yama driving a Sohan Papdi vandi with the big glass jar all empty, trying to aim his lasso to grab daddy into an empty tasteless world.

pps. We are not talking the Sohan burfis here. We are talking fresh off the bell jar, mouth watering, raw cotton!

pps. He also thinks Codeine Robitussen was one bad @$$ girl and he is better off without her bad influence!

.

Sunday
Mar232008

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!

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