Life without Maggi

Maggi is an inherent part of our diet right now! The Nestle made noodles are a favorite evening snack for kids at least once a week and also a dinner option for daddy and the kids at least once a week! 

Daddy is the Maggi expert and can make it in many different ways with any combination of vegetables, as a soup, just with enough water or cook it so that the "noodles don't stick to each other", depending on what the kids feel like on any given day.

When we come home after any all day outings, dinner is always Maggi, as it can be done by the time kids go take a shower. 

So it is a rude shock to see headline news that Maggi has lead and a lot more MSG in it than it is supposed to. Given Nestle is an international brand, the expectation was always that there will be "some" quality control. 

One good thing I do is to not use the Masala packet that comes with the noodles. Instead I use a combination of :

Salt + Sambar powder (made in India with my Grandma or mom's recipe) + turmeric powder + a small pinch of asafoedita (kids like it, I skip it)

and we save the masala packets. Think I have posted on this earlier as well. 

Given all the Maggi consumption, we have a drawer in the kitchen just dedicated to noodles and masala. Today I decided to go clean out the Maggi drawer and this is what I saw..

poured it on the ground and counted the packets to clear it out..

That was 670 packets of Maggi Tastemaker masala! This is just from Jan of this year. 

Going by some crude math, we would have possibly injested enough lead to make us brain dead for the next seven generations if the reports are true!

Then again, we do not know how much of the stuff is in the noodles. Will watch the reports. Maybe the New Jersey Nestle that imports it from India will do some spot checks?

It is also true that noodles (be it Maggi or Ramen) have a lot of wax in it.. so I do boil the noodles to remove the wax on occasion or dry roast it to get rid of the wax before using the noodles. 

Given the data, we are not an occasional noodle family! So we should take this seriously. In the meantime, we are going back to adai, dosai, kunukku for "tiffin" where possible.

The vegetarian VP

Over the last year or so, there are friends that make jokes like "How is Mr. Vice doing?" , "What's up with the Veep?" etc. which are all references to my VP title at work. 

The irony of the vice thing is not lost on me. As a person who is vegetarian by choice, a non smoker, non drinker of coffee, anything carbonated and anything alcoholic, there is a severe restriction when I eat outside.

Folks who have worked with me over the last decade know that I always bring my own lunch box and eat my rice with Rasam, Sambar or plain yogurt with a curry or two. A perfectly okay meal that seems to meet my dietary needs and food allergy restrictions. 

The demands on socializing outside of work definitely increase as one moves up the management chain. At some point, it becomes a necessity to go beyond meeting at Starbucks or the local bars to some high end dining locations. 

To the amusement of the others at the dinner table, yours truly always toasts with plain water or a glass of orange juice. The 400$ bottles of wine that are sniffed and then passed around make for amusement from my perspective. Still a value shopper, I can never understand why a bottle of wine should cost 400 bucks and if the folks at the table can really differentiate betwen a 400$ bottle vs. a 40$ bottle on a blind test. Then again, I am probably not qualified to appreciate wine as I lack the experience. 

Recently at a friends place we had a discussion on "If you have a VP title, your job is to do more business and less technical stuff.. even if you are the VP of Technology... so how can you be efficient as a VP if you don't drink or eat meat or go to places where people smoke?"

That question threw me back! It was never part of the job description as a director, senior director or VP! Was it one of things like the "code red" in "A few good men", an unwritten rule of sorts? I started to wonder if my job would be better done if I drank a lot instead of being the designated driver at these dinners! 

Where the meat figures in this is still beyond me. Most of the restaurants I have visited have at least one vegetarian option if in the US. However, I did see disappointment written large on the face of a head Chef at a restaurant outside the US, when our host was translating. He pointed at me to the chef and said "do you have anything vegetarian?" and the response was "we have mussels, clams. does that work?" and I nodded saying "No. those are not vegetarian" and the Chef said "Oh, No!" in their language. They discussed for a few more minutes and finally got a large salad specially made for me. To compensate they gave me a double portion of chocolate dessert! They were extremely happy that I loved chocolate.

It is true that becoming a dedicated Yogi and practicing Hatha Yoga and simultaneously doing meditation on a daily basis makes folks around me think I am going to become a monk any day and walk into a forest. Given that there is a darling wife who cooks for me to remind me of the finer things in life and two daughters who hold the key to my breathing, there are no plans to become a monk at anytime. It is always easy for folks who claim enlightenment to walk away from social obligations, but it is a challenge to have a clarity of mind and still do what matters on a day to day basis.  

The side effect of doing Yoga and meditation is that I now have the resolve to say "No" to things I do not have to do or want to do and still strive on being the best at what is required. The first contradiction to that was the question raised "you cannot be the best you can be if you don't drink!"

Time will tell if success on the job was ever compromised by being a Yogi! So far, I think not. Every person I have interacted with at these dinners seems to appreciate my abiilty to say "no" to expensive food and wine and stick to my salad, bread and chocolate cakes. My colleagues who know of my allergy history have no complaints. 

Someday, when I retire from being the busy technologist, will write a book with this title. There are simply too many funny stories to share. Given the blogs separation of work and blog policy, those stories have to wait post retirement.

Cashew Burfi (sweet) - A do it yourself Video

Made Cashew burfi for Deepavali sweet this year and it came out great!

Have been refining this recipe over the years with different results but we are locked into this final recipe.

Turns out the 4:3:2:1 ratio for select burfi's that my Lalli chitti taught me 20 years ago works for Cashew burfi as well!

We got a 100 pieces or so. 

Some notes before the video:

1. What you don't see in the video is that I doubled all quantities. (you see 200 grams of cashew or 2 cups of broken cashew being ground.. there was another identical batch added to the mix before heating)

2. This process is very very labor intensive. There is a lot of stirring almost 40 minutes of stirring on low heat and the last 10 minutes is extremely challenging. The thing is so thick that stirring it is difficult, but stir you must or it will start browning. 

3. It is more art than science when it comes to realizing "pour time". If you pour too early, it will be like a Halwa and will be a little gummy to eat. If you pour too late, the whole thing is hard and tastes like brittle candy or it has pieces of brittle hard stuff embedded in a matrix of the gummy stuff. That will taste good but kind of like having the almond noughats in chocholate texture.. The minute you start seeing the entire thing stick to your ladle and come off the pan as one blob, pour it! That is the secret.

The thing has to be just the right mix of crystallite stuff in an amorphous matrix..if you are a fab guy like me, think 550 C amorphous silicon! 

Here is a video explaining how to make this delicious treat! 

The ratios are 4 cups broken cashew : 3 cups sugar : ~2 cups milk (do 1 1/2 or even 1 and it will work) : ~ 1 cup Ghee which is added while heating and mixing

Think 4-3-2-1 and go easy on the milk and ghee.

Also made some thenkuzhal (did it with the right flour mix this time!) and San made some delicious Gulab Jamuns. 

The litlte one doesn't like "nuts" except when converted to burfi's or Halwa's. 

Next year we will do a Badam Halwa. 

Hope you have fun making this sweet.