Panfusine

The New Year's here and that of course means that the festive finale of the previous year comes to a grinding halt. The Christmas tree is cleared of its ornaments, the ornaments are wrapped up, and stashed back into the big storage boxes, and said storage boxes are then dragged back down to the basement to hibernate until next December. In most households this definitely means a lull in the happy mood that prevails, the sinking feeling of nothing to celebrate until the weather warms up, and of course, the snowstorms and  bitter cold weather that inevitably marks February. And no, a corporate invented festival like Valentine's day does not count. In Indian homes, we just get ready to celebrate the next celestial event that makes its turn, In this case, the return of the sun to the northern Hemisphere, known as 'Uttarayan' in Sanskrit. every state and community has its own way of celebrating the impending arrival of spring / hot weather (for all practical purpo...

I hate negativity, I'd much rather spend my time in the Lab doing what I love best, running my experiments, taking measurements,  analyzing & visually recording  the results. Or, in blogger-speak, create a recipe, clear my kitchen counters,  prepare the dish, take photographs & then tuck into my creation. I'd rather not have written up my last post, my response to Martha Stewart , but there was something so smug about her tone in the interview, non verbal, that my pre-frontal cortex just had to sit back and support my lower brain in lashing out. It was not easy, for every 2 sentences I put down, I had to erase one. It was a learning experience, one that made me determined to never let my self imposed guard down when it came to to the quality of the recipes I post and never be stingy on listing references & inspiration, however insignificant or indirect.  Today's recipe was both an example of something hurriedly cobbled together into a one pot dish th...

Depending upon cultures, its interesting to see how people react to the advent of summer. In India, It was to confine yourself indoors for the fear of getting a dark tan, stepping out with an umbrella to shield oneself from the intense sun and a host of 'cooling' foods such as Yogurt rice, and chilled fruits. The very idea of grilling anything out in the blazing sun would send a shudder down the spine. Grilling over coals was confined to cooler months and the rainy season when vendors would stroll the streets with carts full of corn to be roasted in a 'Sigri' (a Coal oven made of sheet metal). In sharp contrast, With the advent of Memorial Day in the US of A, there's a scramble to get the  grills and  barbecues readied for cooking foods the way our   cave men ancestors used to. Meat, Meat & more Meat, with a tiny footnote for grilling veggie burgers and marinaded vegetables.  Well, if you can't beat 'em, Join 'em! While that rallying ...

You know you're passionate about something like blogging when missing out on one post for  a week sends you into a spiral of guilt & blanked out grey matter. The confusion, nagging feeling of  the high that invariably kicks in once you click on the orange 'Publish' button.

Hysteresis - is the dependence of a system not only on its current environment but also on its past environment.  Turns out that the term does apply outside of physics. I like to define it as the intense craving that exists as long as two weeks after sampling a dish. You crave it so much that you simply must have more. Deep inside the  gyri that run though the cerebral cortex, are taste notes perfectly embedded and making connections to other memory cells to recreate the flavors & textures.