The world without us

The world without us by Alan Weisman

This is a reasonably interesting book where AW looks into the question of what would happen to the world if humans were to disappear overnight, which leads him to all sorts of fascinating topics about what can happen in the future, what has happened in the past, what is irreversible and what isn't. All the info is interesting, but nothing earthshaking, but overall, it does manage to create a grim atmosphere of the future facing this planet much more than isolated reports of arctic melting and retreating glaciers ever can.
In the end, he suggests a solution - reduce human populations gradually by limiting all females to a single child - but doesn't go into it in any detail at all. This is not a bad idea at all, compared to population reduction from wars/starvation, but I really would have expected some more discussion of this. China is already doing this, so expanding this to a global scale is not as unthinkable as one might imagine at first.

Film Editing

When the shooting stops, the cutting begins by Ralph Rosenblum
This is a fascinating book about film editing. Ralph Rosenblum explains very nicely what goes into editing a modern feature film with in-depth discussions of some of the movies he has worked on. He also goes into a lot of the history of the craft, as well as a lot of snippets of explanation of which kind of editing creates which kind of effect, which is very neat, because the editing is something that is very hard to notice while watching a movie. One of the most interesting tidbits was that after shooting a movie has 30-40 hrs of footage, which needs to be cut down to a 2 hour movie, which really makes clear how much of an impact the editor has.

Feast Yoo-hoo!

Last Sunday (Thanksgiving weekend) we invited Su-Georgie, Dua, and Dos over for dinner. We were feeling like making a "good" spread, so we came up with a menu of veg biryani (not pulao, no sirree, real biryani with baking and all :D), kadhai paneer, raita and mango sheera for dessert.
It was quite neat! The veg biryani recipe is straight out of Tarla Dalal's cookbook, so I won't record it here: Sam showed great accuracy in the rice cooking, and also great enthu in rushing out to Ross to buy a baking tray of the requisite size at 6:30 instead of cancelling the biryani and replacing it with a more modest pulao :D.
The kadhai paneer turned out really well too- the main key was to marinate the paneer in yogurt with haldi, chilli powder, salt and sugar. I marinated the paneer for nearly an hour and a half, and it made so much of a difference to the taste! Next time, I should marinate the capsicums as well (I used both red and green). The main other things were onions and chaat masala.
Mango sheera (halwa) is a killer dish. Fry sooji (semolina) and add milk when it has roasted enough. Add about 3/4 as much sugar as the sooji, and the mango pulp. It is just too deadly :).
Oh and BTW, everyone pigged a lot :D

Pasta Salad

Today we made Preeti's pasta salad for lunch, and it was pretty yummy. Note for next time : use plenty of masala's, since the pasta and yogurt are both pretty bland.

• Boil, drain and cool pasta - keep the pasta firm.
• Dice cucumber. Squeeze it dry before adding to the mixture.
• Plain yogurt
• salt + pepper
• roasted peanuts
• mix all of the above well
• Add tadka of rye, hing, kadipatta, mirchi

garba / raas lesson

So, today after much hemming and hawing, we went to the Vibha raas/garba lesson, which was conducted in our very own supreme court. We were so busy hemming and hawing that we clean forgot to carry sticks, but they had smartly anticipated our foolishness, and were selling sticks. The instructor was a guy from nvidia called Sahil Shah.
Anyway, I wanted to record the details, as I am sure they'll be required in years to come.

Garba

• Each step is actually 3 movements. If you are really clumsy or tired, for each step, you can just move one leg and transfer weight to that leg, but the right way to do it is to move the right foot, transfer weight back to the left foot, and then back to right foot again leaving the left foot free for the next move. Or vice versa, of course. Garba is always done in a circle, so the directions are relative to that frame of reference.
  
• There are just a few basic steps :
• Forward : Move one foot forward at a angle to the line of dance (along which you are facing) (and do the back forth rocking motion as well).
• Back : Move the foot back. One option is to actually face part of the way backwards, or another option to just stay facing forwards, and only move the foot backwards.
• Quarter circle : Move forward and turn as well, so that at the end of the step you are facing 90 degrees from the direction you were facing earlier.
• Half Circle : Turn 180 degrees in one move.
• So, there are a few styles that Sahil taught us :
• Do-Tali : A 4 step move : Forward (R), Forward (L), Quarter Circle (to face inward : ccw), Quarter Circle (to face backwards : ccw). The transition from step 4 to step 1 is a bit tricky, but it works out because you naturally turn less than 180 degrees and it allows you to change orientation as you move around the circle.
• Daudhyu : 1.5 circles : An 8 step move : Forward(R), Forward(L), Back(R), Back(L), Forward(R), Forward(L), Half-Circle (turning from the inside : ccw), Half-Circle(turning from the outside : ccw) .
• Popatyu : 6 steps : Back(R), Back(L), Forward(R), Forward(L), Half-Circle(inside : ccw), Half-Circle(outside : ccw)
  

Raas
5 beats for hitting the sticks : Right (with your partner), Left (with your partner) , Down (by yourself), Right (with partner) , Down (by yourself). In a line formation, the 5th step in when you move over and change partners. The down moves are really free-format, you can do them wherever you want, and turn and do other such style-giri. The other 3 moves, at least make sure you face your partner.

Etiquette
Always join and leave lines in pairs to avoid messing up the rest of the people. It's not about hitting sticks. Just touching sticks at the beat. So, move the sticks gently, and don't be too worried if you miss a touch. And definitely, make sure you don't hit anyone's fingers.

Mixed bean soup

We bought this bag of mixed beans from Safeway a few months back and finally boiled them (in the pressure cooker) this week, and finally finally I cooked them today. I decided to make an experimental bean soup, which turned out surprisingly well. I pureed three tomatoes, and ground a handful of peanuts. In a pot, heat olive oil and add some dill, then quickly add in the peanuts, fresh tomato puree, and about 1/2-1 spoon of garlic paste. Let it cook for a little bit, and then add the boiled beans and let it all simmer for as long as it takes to become tasty :). I added some dhaniya powder, chilli powder, and garam masala (not the sweetish one) too, and I guess it must have helped the taste :D

I also made Pongal; boil yellow moong dal and rice (1:1) in a pot till everything is soft and nicely done. Then fry jeera and coarsely crushed peppercorns (black) in hot ghee (the ghee should be really hot so that the jeera immediately darkens a lot). Then add the rice-dal mixture and stir for a while. It's really comfort food :)

Little baingan

Today I cooked the little brinjals that we had got last weekend from the Indian store, after postponing it for lack of inspiration all week. The inspiration came from here, although what I ended up doing was pretty different from all the curries there :)

First I fried the brinjals (quartered) and long onions for a while. In the meanwhile, I made a powder of peanuts, dried red chilies, cloves, cinnamon, whole dhaniya seeds in the grinder.
Then I chopped two tomatoes and made a puree, which I inserted into the brinjal-onion fry along with haldi. Then I put in this powder after a little bit, and added salt and let it cook for a while, and then added sugar and let it cook some more.
It turned out really nice, so much so that Sameer liked it better than the aloo which also I had made- that is saying a lot for him!

Borscht

Today Sameer found this recipe for Borscht from a very reliable blog:
http://www.nandyala.org/mahanandi/archives/category/vegetables/cabbage/
Incidentally, this is the blog he gets his (quite excellent) chole recipe from.

It's a very interesting Borscht, Indianized with spices and all :) (dhaniya powder for instance!)
As we suspected, it's turned out very well indeed!

Trip to the Pacific Northwest

So, finally we went off last week on our biggest trip ever - a 8 day road-trip to the pacific northwest (aka oregon + washington state) - a zone we had been meaning to visit forever.

So, jumping right into the details

Day 1 - September 8th, Saturday.
We got up reasonably early, and Arpi made 7 sandwiches using Elena's super-sandwich recipe (avocado, tomato, ketchup, cheese ... ) and even with that we managed to get out by 7:15, just 15 mins behind schedule. Drove all day. The weather was pretty nice, and Arpi's sandwiches were eaten at regular intervals at a wide variety of rest areas. No need to discover lunch joints along the way! In the evening, we were making good time, and going to reach Salem around 5:30, so we preponed our plans and went off to Silver Falls State Park. The drive to Silver falls was pretty cool going through very pretty farmland. And the park too was really nice, even though we only had time to do the first waterfall, not the whole trail. The trail that went behind the falls was really nice. Also, at this point, we realised that the new tripod that we had acquired for this trip was too short and too unstable to be really useful. After this we drove off back to Salem, where after some effort to find the downtown, we managed to locate the greek restaurant we were searching for ... and it had shut down. So, we ended up eating at India Palace - where the food was really nice - esp after a day full of eating sandwiches and boiled eggs. Then back to the hotel (Crossland Salem North) and crash out.

Day 2 - September 9th, Sunday.
Being fairly tired, we got up quite aaram-se - at 9 or so. Finally left around 10, after a breakfast of oatmeal and sandwiches (gobble-gums has done it again). Then we drove off to Columbia Gorge, passing through the famed woodburn. The columbia Gorge drive was a bit confusing, with the new and old highways. We finally ended up going out and back on the old highway. Most of the action was at the end of the drive, though it is a nice drive throughout. We turned around at Multnomah Falls. Multnomah is easily the nicest waterfall ever, with its structure and the high bridge across the span halfway up.

After that, we drove off to Portland downtown for lunch + tripod hunt. It was a real mess, and we got lost repeatedly, but finally we managed to find the place we had decided on for lunch (Justa Pasta, based on the insiders' guide) ... only to find out that it was closed on Sunday lunch. Then we tracked down our choice 2 - Pearl Bakery - and that was also closing as we walked in, and had run out of veg sandwiches. Then we foraged around a bit (including Whole Foods) and finally ate a tomato basil ciabatta sandwich at a gelato place. We almost ordered the horrible soup as well, but had the good sense to taste it first. At this point, we were really tired and disappointed in Portland Downtown. But I guess Sunday lunch is not really a very downtown-y time. Anyway, we decided to show some mettle and look for the camera stores. We found a really big one - Camera World - fairly easily, and spent an hour there looking over the tripods. Finally got a really nice Manfrotto for just $113. The one we were returning to Keeble, for comparison, was $120, and much worse.

After this, I had a starbucks coffee, and then we got out for Cannon Beach. Decided to skip the beach at first, and go straight to the hotel, since we were too early for sunset anyway. The place we stayed at in Manzanita - Spindrift Inn - was really cutely done up. After a nice rest, we got out and went off to Cannon Beach, where we pretty much spent the rest of the evening taking pictures and walking up and down the (huge) beach. Once, it was dark, we spent some time looking for a place to eat, but the town of Cannon Beach was basically dead. Looks like it was active only on Friday and Saturday when there were hordes of tourists. Finally, we had maggi in our room.

Day 3 - September 10, Monday
Got up early, and went to cannon beach slightly after dawn.
Drove up.
Gas scam.
Aberdeen lunch fiasco.
Quinault rainforest.
Forks
Hoh rainforest.
Pizza.

Day 4 - September 11, Tuesday
Hoh rainforest.
lake crescent.
Maggi lunch.
Marymere falls.
Salmon fiasco.
Sol-duc falls / butterflies.
Forks.
India oven dinner.

Day 5 - September 12, Wednesday
Hurricane Ridge.
Bainbridge.
Ferry.
Downtown Seattle.
ESA
Dinner at Bengodi's.

Day 6 - September 13, Thursday
Mount Rainier national park.
Sunrise.
Road mess.
Narada Falls.
Paradise meadows - Alta Peak (?), Myrtle Falls.
Subway in car for dinner.

Day 7 - September 14, Friday
EMP / SFM
Monorail.
Pike Place Market (flowers, fruits, seafood, starbucks)
Munching - sabra - baklava, very french bakery -friand, ?? , other bakery - bread stick, sabra - lunch plate.
Drive to Portland enjoying the traffic jam
Siam Society.
Doubletree.

Day 8 - September 15, Saturday.
Leave at 7:45
Drive, drive, drive.
Arrive at 7:00

Aftermath
Sleep sleep sleep

Gobi Tamatar

Today was a real first for me. I had an urge for a tomatoey dish, and I came up with a recipe for that, made it all, and it even turned out pretty decent. :D
So, here's what I did :
In one pan : put oil, fry kala jeera , add the gobi with some salt and haldi. Then I kept frying this for 20 mins or so, alternately keeping it covered so as to not lose too much moisture, and frying it hot and open, to make it crunchy. It turned out fairly decent in the end, though I would be hard pressed to reproduce it.
In another pan, in parallel : fry a bunch of tomatoes, with kala jeera (again), chole masala, and garam masala. Keep frying this, mostly covered, and mash everything into a paste. It was fairly thick at the end.

Doing these separately allows you to avoid boiling the gobi into a tasteless chunk.
When both are ready, just mix it all.
Enjoy.

Investment fundaes

The Winning Investment Habits of Warren Buffett & George Soros by Mark Tier
This book, which I picked up from Santa Clara library, has a really trashy sound and look. But, in fact, it is a really well-thought-out and easy to read book. The main point of the book is that you can't look at investing as some kind of black magic and rely on random advice from others to decide what investments to buy / sell. Instead, you absolutely need to have a comprehensive theory of how the market is going to work, a clear criteria of why your investments make sense, and have a clear criteria on when to sell (when the criteria are no longer met). And you just need to put in a fair bit of time to get good returns.

This is a must read for all the legions of wannabe stock pickers out there, who are constantly spouting stock prophecies and advice.

Non-dysfunctional rajma

Finally, after many hopeless attempts at rajma, a rajma that worked.
Fry long-chopped onions with kalonji tadka and cloves for a while, then add ginger paste, haldi, dhaniya powder, and large quantities of yogurt on high heat. Add some chili powder after a while, and mix in the pre-boiled rajma. Add salt, sugar, my mom's garam masala, and chopped cilantro at the end.
Thank goodness it worked, I had sworn this was my last attempt :)

Eggplant Tofu

This is an attempt at cogging (or more politely, 'recreating', or 'reproducing') a dish I had liked in the office cafe a while back. I couldn't find a recipe, so I just tried to approximate it best as I could.
Happily, the approximation was pretty decent- according to Sam, it was 'really good on an absolute scale, and for a dish containing eggplant, just astounding' :D.

Here is how it all worked. Central to the proceedings was the newly purchased Pam cooking spray, which by virtue of being 0-calorie makes me feel very generous with it :D. First I fried the tofu in the 0-cal spray separately till it looked reasonably fried-tofu-ish. In the main pan, I sauteed onions and eggplant together for a long time, with some garlic paste and dried red-chili . Since nothing was smelling promising, I added some Thai red curry sauce (Trader Joe's yay), and another Oriental sauce (from TJs also). There still wasn't any action, so I decided to let all the ingredients get to know each other better, and after a while there was a nice eggplantish taste (the tofu had been added at some point prior, never mind when). Finally I added (lots of) basil, extra salt and sugar, and let it cook till it was good :)

This is the first time anything Asian (non-Indian) has ever turned out reasonably well- yay!

*.Soup

I am beginning to think that the following formula works reasonably well for soup.
Saute onions in olive oil. Add *, sufficiently preprocessed (which is a function of *), add boiled potato (or sweetpotato, depending on *) for thickening, cook it all bit, and then puree with milk.

This post is inspired by * = canned beet. Here preprocess = canned, thickener = potato, and I also added some fat-free half and half that I had.

I absolutely swear that most of the soups I make seem to fall into this category. They also seem to be fairly popular (at least with me :P), so (used with good sense and understanding) I think this is a fairly general solution to soup :D

Experimental black-eyed peas

The other day (many days ago- I'm very behind on blogging!) I decided to make an experimental version of black-eyed peas, based on the Search-Your-Feelings method of cooking.
According to the results of Searching-My-Feelings, I sauteed onions, roasted some coconut with it,
added some mild amounts of ginger (and garlic?) paste, then added the (nicely pressure-cooked) black-eyed peas, and finished it off with basil.
This is definitely quite different from the Indian way of cooking black-eyed peas (chawli), but it worked out really nice. There is something to the SYF style, I think :D

Masala Chappati

The other day in a fit of extreme laziness, I came up with the grand idea of a masala chappati. This was a techonological breakthrough, in that stuff that you can normally find only at rajjot (masala paratha) can be made at home. And the the preparation is simplicity itself :)
- Create a dry masala mixture of garam masala, chole masla & salt
- Put the roti-land chappati on the tava.
- Smear butter on the chappati.
- Sprinkle on masala mix to taste. Try to keep it evenly distributed.
- Make chappati as usual
- Eat with butter. :D

Genetics

The Strongest Boy in the World by Philip R. Reilly
This is a great collection of 20 essays on modern developments in genetics. In all of them, Philip does a great job of summarizing the history and current state of research on that topic, how he sees things going forward, ethical issues, and his take on them.
For me, the great take-away from this book was just the background and recent developments in so many parts of genetics. The moral part was also interesting and informational, but well, I wasn't really as troubled by genetics as many other people.
But I kind of whizzed through it. I definitely would like to reread it slowly at some point, and think through all the issues to understand them a lot more thoroughly.

Watching baseball smarter

Watching baseball smarter by Zack Hample.
This book was a great introduction to baseball for me. I knew the absolute basic rules of baseball (4 bases, 3 strikes & you're out etc), but didn't really know much more than that. This covered a lot of material from all parts of the game, some obvious, and some esoteric, and really made you feel like a seasoned baseball viewer. Also, the writing is really conversational (i.e. non-pompous), so it is just like what you would hear talking to a friend who knew a lot about baseball.
My big conclusion after reading this is that baseball has just way more options than cricket, and to use some asic lingo, is a lot more stateful. So, the strategy is just way more complicated than cricket. The skill required might be a bit lower though. :)
Two Thumbs Up.

Aloo Jhinge

Today I made Aloo Jhinge with tomato, after shooing Arpi out of the kitchen. It turned out fairly tasty, but still quite light. Great meal for a healthy meal day, like today :)
I cut 3 potatoes fairly small, and put them to fry with panchforan tadka. Turned the gas to min and left it there because I still had to peel the jhinge, which took quite a while. I sliced and halved the jhinge, waited for the aloo to cook (back at medium heat now), and then added the jhinge and salt. At some point after that, I added the tomatoes and covered the whole thing, and left it to simmer for a while. At the end, I added the haldi and mirch, which should have gone in earlier, but Arpi had forgotten to mention it to me. :) Sabji didn't seem any the worse for it though.

Who wants to make aloo gobi?

In case you're wondering, that's what the star in Bend it Like Beckham says when her parents want her to learn to cook instead of playing soccer :)

I want to make aloo gobi.

Did it too, and it worked out. Exactly when I had no idea how :). This is what worked (ie, what we liked), and it makes sense in retrospect. Slice onions fairly long, and fry it in kalonji tadka (also a little jeera) and turmeric. I've used both baked cauliflower and plain cauliflower, and it was good both ways; add in gobi when the onions are ready. Boil potatoes to firm but mostly cooked in the microwave, and add these in when the gobi is ready. Add dhaniya powder, and let it cook awhile, add a little water if you're feeling like it. Throw in chopped cilantro when the cooking is done.
Won't have much trouble with the "who wants to eat aloo gobi" question after that. That would be me :)

Homo Domesticus

I have decided to revive my old plan of using a blog to record the books that I read. Because there are a lot of them, and many times, after I while I can't even remember the title/author. So ...
Homo Domesticus by David Valdes Greenwood.
This a book about a gay couple, and the evolution of their relationship over many years. David VG is a pretty engaging writer, and I never really felt like putting the book down. Luckily, it is not that long either :). The big takeaway message from this book was that gay couples are just like straight couples in almost every way. Sounds pretty obvious, but it wasn't before I read the book. Not that I had thought too much about it :)
Another nifty thing from the book was the term awfulizing - thinking the worst interpretation of any conversation / outcome of any situation - which really was a concept waiting to be named.
So, overall, a good fun book.

Advice from the Wise

Leave the artichokes in the grocery store.
After an excellent dish with artichokes and lemon butter sauce in Namu (San Francisco), we foolishly got enthusiastic about trying out artichokes.
Ha.
In fact, ha ha ha. We boiled the artichokes forever, and poked ourselves with the thorns while trying to peel out the outer leaves. Then we pureed it, and built some serious biceps trying to strain out the fibre. (There's a woman going on about fibre on the TV, she should have tried the leftover from our strainer yesterday - I'm sure it's enough fibre for a year!)
Then we finally made the soup (according to some possibly misguided recipe with white sauce).
Guess what it tasted like.
White sauce.
So much for all that artichoke effort- next time I feel like that soup (which is very unlikely), I'll just make white sauce :)

Return of the Jedi

After a long break from being enthusiastic about cooking, we have returned to our good ways today :). (The long break happened right after we returned from Banff, where we experimented with cooking in a kitchen equipped only with olive oil, salt and pepper. You can do a surprising bit (especially if you have a Safeway with readymade curry pastes handy :P) . )
So getting back to today. Cabbage with peas and potatoes, as per Sameer's request. My mom makes this, and I'm using her recipe (probably not quite as precise or perfect though :) ).
Fry the potatoes with panchphoran in a little oil. Add haldi when the time comes :P. And add peas and cabbage and tejpatta and fry it all for a while. And salt too, whenever. Finally add in freshly grated ginger and crushed elaichi. Garnish with chopped cilantro.
Yo.
Yum.
Here we come.

Eggplant-apple (Kashmir) - :O!!

It's been an interesting week foodwise. On Friday evening I finally tried out a recipe with eggplant and apples from the Kashmiri cooking book (A Taste of Kashmir, Geeta Samtani). The combination was so hard to believe I had to try it out and see if it actually would work! This is what I did (subbing all deep frying with baking/sauteing): Baked eggplant for 12 mins at 325F. Coarsely pound cumin seeds and throw into hot mustard oil along with fennel seeds, turmeric and pinch of asafoetida, and chili powder. Saute the apples in this and throw in the eggplant with some salt, cover and cook.
Shockingly good, who would have thunk it?

How long will it last?

We've just created a new blog. The address is after trying out many many possibilities, most of which were taken. Made us feel very nonunique in my thought processes, so here we are. Not sure how long the blogging will last, though :).