Sundar Narayanan : Desi Engineer in California married to a Desi Engineer. This is a log of my travel experience, food reviews and life's "little" quirks. . .
Disclaimer : My thoughts on this site are not intended to cause physical emotional or financial harm to any person or thing mentioned in this site or to the reader and I take no responsibiilty for the same.. So read at your own risk!! I also hope this font is large enough to be considered legal and small enough not to make my blog ugly !
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Happy Deepavali
Wishing one and all a very happy Deepavali!!
It has been a busy few weeks with a lot of travel thrown in. The good news is that between all the hectic work, went back to the Yoga room. The hand has healed nicely.
Deepavali was made fun thanks to some last minute Target shopping for clothes, some yummy treats made by MIL yesterday and today (including some Deepavali Marundhu) and a short 30 minute celebration today with family in backyard with fireworks.
We also had two nice parties over the weekend where the kids had fun with fireworks and rangoli!
That is not some worm stuff.. it is really delicious "Omapudi" that just "melts in your mouth".. magnified to see detail that you don't normally care about.. but there is something to that texture that makes Omapudi what is really is..
anyways, digressing as usual..
Wishing everyone a Happy and prosperous Deepavali, Diwali, Deeparaya.
May knowledge light up your life!
While the rest of you go back to your firecrackers, new clothes, sweets and savories, I have a few close encounters of the third kind to do with the boondhis, ribbon pakodas and mysorepak..
Microwave for 2 minutes, then drain the hot turmeric/Salt water out.
Bake at 350C for 20 minutes.
Make sure you use a paper towel and soak up the extra oil before serving.
Now something to do with the carved out pieces of potato. Make them into a quick Bhajji that can go along with the roti's.
Unfortunately, the bhajji was all gone before it could be served with the roti's.
Now, this would not be possible except for a commitment to San that the kitchen will be handed over to her in the same condition as before the cooking started!
Gents, please wash all dishes and wipe off stove, countertop etc. if you plan to do this experiment!
A Warning: While the Roses looked pretty inviting and were tasty, the core of the rose was way too hot, while the outside surface had cooled. So do NOT bite into the rose or you will burn your tongue! You may have to wait a little for it to cool down.
Julie and Julia was a good movie. It has inspired me to go back and do something in the kitchen.
On our recent trip to Seattle we did more than go to
Snoqualmie Falls Boeing Future of Flight Olympic National Park and watch "The curious case of Brads Buttocks".. sorry for the slip, "Benjamin Button"
We also managed to go spend a few hours at a place called Northbend inspite of bad roads and snow, eat at Mayuri Chat, Mayuri Restaurant, InChin's Indian Chinese fusion restaurant, breakfast at Eggcetera, visit the local Indian temple on Jan 1st and and and and and...
Yeah, we were busy!
Just to close out the Seattle trip posts
1. Mayuri Chat served me a spoilt samosa which was refried (probably a previous batch?) Thoroughly disappointed!
2. Mayuri restaurant served us really great food. Food that compares to some of the local desi restaurants in the Bay area.
3. Inchin's was amazing. I knew there was a good chance of an allergy attack that too on New Year's eve but took my chances and went there anyways with the rest of the gang. Their Seczchuan fried rice was amazing. (Did get an attack later that night and paid the price for tasting something that either had peanuts or sesame seeds on it and was a spoilsport at the card games that night..) Truly amazing food and fantastic service!
4. BIL decided to take us to Egg's cetera in Seattle instead of a long drive to Mother's Bistro in Portland (yes, on the last two Seattle trips we have driven to Mother's Bistro in Portland to have brunch. It is that good!) But this time we decided to try Egg's cetera, a place with a look and feel that is similar to Mother's and the Brunch was great. The Pecan waffle was mouth watering, and we conclude
Mithun: Amitabh :: Egg's Cetera: Mothers
Leaving you with two pictures that defined the rest of the trip...
Inchin's on New Years eve
The Northbend mall a day after we landed in Seattle. The backdrop was so unique for an outlet mall.
We have already begun the process of leaving the trip behind in our memories and are back to the work, school routine!
The posts on life's "little" quirks will begin soon enough...
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!
When I was a small boy, every year it would be a festival or a function, be it a marriage, baby shower, birth announcement, or some such thing, where the old ladies would gather in the kitchen and make some sweets and savories that make your mouth water, just thinking about it!
A couple of bricks would be placed, clay plastered around and before you knew it, the stove was ready! They would have charcoal and "varaati's" (dried flats made of cowdung and straw) as the fuel. The extra large vessels reserved for the special occasions would be gathered from the "paran" (attic) and the ladies would go about the preparation process.
The chilies were sundried, the rice soaked and dried off on large towels, the trips to the mill to powder chillis, rice, lentils and even sugar(yeah, these were days before electric dry and wet grinders were there in every household!), the impatient waiting to see the goodies take shape!
Usually kids were not allowed into the kitchen area during these times. My grandmother always made an exception for me, simply because I would watch and ask her a million questions! Somehow between my grandmother and my grand aunt, who was referred to by every kid in every generation as "Ambulu Mami" , they would actually take time and explain things to me, probably because they were bored, or amused at my curiosity. Incidentally, Ambulu mami, was my grandma's aunt, but just a few years older than my grandma, so they were more like sisters!
They would take turns stirring the jaggery paste to make "vella paagu" aka caramel and then put peanuts, cashewnuts or split roast peas (pottu kadalai) and pour it into a large tray which had clarified butter spread on the surface.
At this point, the two ladies who had spent almost an hour stirring the syrup with the giant ladles with bored looks, would act like they just got an overdose of adrenaline. There would be a frenzy of activity, where they tested the temperature of the rapidly cooling mix with their fingers. In a motion that reminds you of gymnasts powdering their hands before going on the rings in the Olympics, the two of them would powder their hands with a mix of rice flour and powdered sugar and rip out small globs of this hot mix and roll it into little balls.
They had a small time window before the whole thing would solidify into a hard mass. "Reheating the mix would deteriorate the taste!", they would tell me. Sometimes they would put the plate (taambaalam) over a vessel with hot water to keep it from solidifying so fast. I am sure there is a lot of science behind the various phases of sugar syrup and the temperature vs. hardness response to rapidly cooling sugars, but this was definitely more art than science!
There is something to be said about making stuff and eating it, as opposed to just buying it and eating it. My grandmother is too old. My mom is going through surgery after surgery. Making all this stuff at home is definitely lost with the new generation, be it with San, my sister or Sister-in-law. They are all good cooks, but they would not venture past the usual rasam and sambar, to make laddus, or Jaangiris or even the therati paal.
"That is too labor intensive. Why spend all that time when I can go to Grand Sweets or Sri Krishna sweets and just buy it?" would be the question. In all fairness to the fair ones, they just don't have the motivation! They can all make the pongals, payasams and vadai's for the special occasion, but that is where it stops. My mother-in-law is still old school and she can do non-standard stuff and sometimes we talk about somehow capturing these things for posterity! She is probably the last of the dinosaurs, if you exclude me from the list.
Call me old school, but eating is just part of it. I would always long for the semisolid "Mysore pak" that is still bubbling on the stove than eat the cold solid pieces a day later. Same goes for Kaju Kathlis or Badam Halwa. Taking in the smell, the texture of what is cooking is a whole different deal. Somehow I feel Jr. and the little one are missing out on this.
It has been raining heavily here for the last two days. Wanted to get back in the kitchen and make something out of the normal. So went about making pottukadalai urundai's. Brought back lot of memories! San was definitely amused. She even videotaped the stuff. However, Jr. was just more interested in the eating than in the making. Who knows, even having a kitchen stove might become an alien concept two decades from now and the microwave will replace the stove!
Maybe there is no point to passing on these tricks to the next generation?
Here are the finished "yummies"...
I have been thinking a lot of my Sachi Patti (Saraswathi!) and Ambulu mami since yesterday. Do not know why. Went through my old photos and actually dug out this one from the early nineties. The one on the left is Ambulu mami and the one on the right is my grandma.
Like I told San, you can learn to do anything as long as you have great teachers! I was gifted with two great teachers when it comes to making caramel and kadalai urundais!
For the first time in my life, tasted a cheese quasedilla, at a Taco Bell during our Santa Barbara trip and I really liked it. At that time, I also relized that it was the Mexican equivalent of the aloo paratha, except the cheese takes the place of the Aloo.
For the last two weeks, have been wanting to try making a Rotidilla(A word I am copyrighting right now.. Google search shows zero results).
Today that dream has come true. San had some mini roti's leftover after the kids had their tiffin and ...
Behold, the Rotidilla!!!
Had to hold the video camera like a phone to take the video (San was busy minding the kids who were hell bent on peeking into the garbage container.. apparently a garbage container is more fun than toys, books, etc.)
Next week, will add some spice to the Rotidilla and try to use less cheese (we have to listen to the critics!). It is high time some one started mixing Cheddar Cheese and Sambar powder!
I have two kids who will volunteer to taste and give me feedback ...
A restaurant review, after a long time. This restaurant made me get back to writing reviews!
After a strong recommendation from Mitr and K, we decided to check out Dosa Place this weekend.
When San told me that it is between Kiely and San Tomas Expressway on El Camino Real in Santa Clara, I immediately reeled off possible locations.
"Either it has to be in the complex which has DiCiccos or the complex that has the Officemax and Java Coffee.. there are no other places there.. unless the Uno Pizza which became a Chinese restaurant is now an Indian restaurant?". For those women out there who are intersted in knowing San's response, it was "Just shut up and drive!"
There are two new Indian restaurants. One called Peacock in the Officemax complex and the Dosa Place, which has actually replaced Dicicco's Italian Restaurant! I have fond memories of the Italian place. When San was pregnant with Jr., she would order me to go get breadsticks from Diciccos.
Location : 2665 El Camino Real, Santa Clara, CA Wait time : 5 minutes (reasonable crowd but the place is big and we were seated instantly). Food wait time from order : 10 minutes for all items including Dosa Check time : 2 minutes (Visa, Mastercard, and they take AMEX) Average price per person : $8 Rating "I miss my mother in law!". Service : Excellent.. Really Excellent!
The old Italian restaurant used to be long and the walls were painted a dark color. Now the whole place is brightly lit, and looks spacious.
The food was excellent. All the items were amazing. But there is more to this review than the food. I remember my mom telling my sister once during a function at home "You should always smile when you serve the guests food. That is when they feel like eating". If you read that and said "hey, that is just common sense", well it is not the norm in most Indian restaurants in the bay area where someone serves you because they are paid by the hour and you can pretty much tell that they don't care about your culianary experience!
Dosa Place has a lot of things going for it.
1. It is brightly lit. The place looks festive! 2. The waiters, waitresses, manager, cleaners all seem to be in the 20-30 age group. They remind you of the singapore airlines air-hostesses. Always smiling and energtic and very polite they made us feel welcome. 3. They play nice fast paced Indian instrumental music in the background.
When we asked the manager she said "this is a kind-of family owned restaurant. We started two months ago and have a branch in Fremont".
We really hope that their service doesn't decline as the crowds go up!
For a second I was sad to see Dicicco's go, but now I am happy that it has found a worthy replacement.
During our long weekend visit to the east coast, we stayed in a hotel near the BWI Airport. After a long days sightseeing in DC, we wanted to go get some Indian food.
Called the lobby and they suggested a small Indian Restaurant nearby. It was the only Indian restaurant in that small town on the phone book. We had nothing to lose and so off we went.
We were pleasantly surprised by the ambience and the food!
In about an hour we were seated, we had finished a sumptuous meal and were out!
The prices were reasonable too (12$ a person)
The naan, matter panner and poori's were awesome.
But if you are in the BWI airport area, this place is a good spot for a nice Indian dinner. It is called Indian Delite and is in Catonsville just outside Baltimore. It is on Frederick road (two blocks behind where route 695 intersects route 40 aka National Pike).
(Yes, In My Back Yard. I thought I was being creative and had coined YIMBY based on NIMBY. Went to WIKI and YIMBY is not just there, but there are YIMBY movements across the USA to bring affordable housing to certain areas !!)
The mouth watering goes on..
SSDP : (This one didnt turn up any WIKI hits. SSDD stands for "Same Shit Different Day". SSDP is Same Shit Different Place! (I will take all credit for coining this one). Why SSDP ?
Two different events in two different places.
Chennai:
We are flying from Chennai to Singapore on our way back, and they give us some Malay Straits newspaper in Tamizh. The newspaper was obviously pro Jayalalitha(opposition party) and was pretty much a government bashing propaganda machine. The headlines was about how the Airport Authority of India had spotted a location for a new Chennai airport but they couldnt go through with the plans because a. some people had illegally erected huts in that location and b. a political party called PMK had threatened to protest, move against the local government, etc. etc. they tried to evict those people or even try to relocate them and pay them monetary compensation.
I was planning to write about this, especially after my experience at the Chennai Airport where the place is operating at pretty much maximum efficiency just to keep the existing number of flights moving. If they add more flights in and out of the place, they will have to expand.
San Francisco :
Was listening to KQED (local public radio station) last week and the headlines ? A whole bunch of people protesting outside the Immigration office in San Franciso (Dept. of Homeland Security which encompasses the former INS or Immigration and Naturalization service). They were protesting the raids that have been taking place over the last 9 months where 13000 illegal immigrants have been caught and deported. The DHS says they are specifically targeting repeat offenders who are illegal and are involved in shady activities. The people outside are saying (and I kid you not):
"people are scared to send their kids to school or go to the local doctor because they are worried that they might be picked up by the DHS". If you are living illegally in a country, shouldn't you be worried anyways ? They were claiming the raids are a slap in the face of the immigrant community, especially after all the immigration reforms promised by the newly empowered democrats. But the bottomline is, legal vs. illegal!
Before the illegal immigrant community decides to flame this post, I would like to mention why I even put this in the blog. A couple of years ago, San and me were going towards downtown San Jose. The car in front of me was swearving, speeding and we could make out that it was either a bad driver or someone who was not aware of rules. Just while we were talking about it, the driver sped up to cross a light which had already turned yellow. Problem was that this was a light where the perpendicular road was a highway exit, that too at an angle and the people standing at the exit had already started turning. This driver went and hit the first car that came out, smack in the middle. The car spun a few times and came to a stop. The middle aged lady who was hit had to break open the window and get out. She was bleeding from all the cuts and bruises. San and me went to help her. The cops came and we were held as witnesses.
The car that ran the light was actually being driven by a lady. The minute she realized that she had hit the car, she ran out and the guy who was with her in the passenger seat went and sat in the driver seat. Later while we were helping the lady go to the ambulance, this guy walks up to me and says "please say you saw me driving the car!" and walked away.
There were other witnesses as well. All of us told the cops the same story! That the driver was actually the lady and had given a description of the lady. 10 minutes later the cop told us that she had been picked up and was an illegal immigrant and that is why the guy was trying to cover for her!! My take on it was that if you are illegal, by the very definition of the word, you have no respect for the law and you are going to be a menace to others intentionally or otherwise.
But Chennai or SFO, people who do things that are illegal, still think they have a right to do what they want and actually protest, strike, etc. and get to bully the guys who are actually trying to do their job. SSDP !!
