The Luxury of Home-made Food

It's harder to be a working wife some days more than others. And it goes deeper than bad days at work or a messy house: days with good food are good, days when I don't cook at home are not. It's as simple as that.

Practically speaking, canteens, dabbawallas and food courts have made my life much easier. I can let lunch slide a couple of days and it won't mean going hungry. I can send LH to work empty-handed knowing that he can buy something to eat. But nothing can beat seeing home-made chicken and curd rice when you're hungry at work and open your lunch expectantly.

Ideally though, I'd love to stay at home and cook. There's something about eating a hot meal, or a cold dessert that you've made which makes it taste like the best damn thing in the world. Darned if I know what that is. Before I married, it was all the same to me, but now home cooked food takes on a whole new meaning. 

Maybe it's knowing about the effort and care that goes into a meal. Maybe it's the satisfaction of having created something that you know is good. Whatever the reason is, home-made food is something I've learnt to savour after close to 20 years of shoveling restaurant-made buttery, spicy delicacies and store-bought snacks into my gut like a bear just out of hibernation.  

So cooking well is a skill that pretty much everyone needs to learn....sometime or the other. It will stand you in good stead when one day your taste buds say 'Wtf, Chinese food again?' and your brain sends you unwanted images of masala omelettes, chicken curry with some steaming hot rice and potato fry - like mom makes it - on the side. 

Great, I've just made myself hungry. I'm thinking buttermilk, rice, and karuvadu....

To get out of bed or stay inside the sheets forever? Decisions, decisions...

I've started working full-time again. And I'm getting closer to finding what I really want to do. After five years of going in the completely wrong route, I finally feel like things are moving slightly towards the right direction. However, that doesn't mean that everything is hunky-dory. I'm now trying to juggle a home and a job and so far, I've had a couple of break-downs plus a hundred-and-three degree fever.

My job isn't so terrible and LH is, surprisingly, not very demanding so life isn't all drudgery and nervous melt-downs. But you know what the worst part of the day is? Getting up from bed. Just thinking about what I have to face that day completely overwhelms me. At that point, I want to curl up in bed with LH and never get up. Ever.

And it doesn't help that he never wakes up before me. I feel jealous of his extra sleeping time. I feel tempted to let breakfast and lunch slide, and pretend I don't have two crowded buses to catch in the sweltering heat, to go to a job that is still not exactly what I was hoping it would be. I feel like a big cry baby.

But yes, I wake up. I whip up something to eat half the time, and survive on cornflakes and bread the other half. I catch two buses in the scorching heat and go to office. The rest of the day somehow goes past me when I'm not looking because I'm kept pretty occupied with work as the company's only content writer. And then suddenly I'm catching two buses back home and cooking dinner. Or asking LH to be a doll and buy me takeout.

And the day is over. Somehow, after deciding that it is impossible to get through that day if I get out of bed, I've gotten through the day.

But I'm still going to be depressed getting out of bed tomorrow. Manufacturing defect.  

How to Follow a Recipe

I remember the first time I cooked chicken for LH. He said it was more like chicken rasam (soup) than chicken gravy. So after the wedding, armed with resolve and my mom's recipe, I went forth into the chicken..er, kitchen to amaze one and all with my culinary skills. No one would call my gravy as rasam this time because I was going to follow that recipe like Hercule Poirot on the tail of a clue.

Not ignoring a single hint from my mother that I had scrawled on the margins of my notebook, I diligently chopped, stirred and added stuff. It looked right, it smelt right, the initial tasting was quite passable and I patted myself on the back for doing a good job.

On went the lid of the pressure cooker. The steam hissed out as expected. I put on the weight. All was well with the world. I prepared to wait out the ten minutes watching TV, but kept a vigilant eye on the clock. That chicken was not messing with me this time.

Five minutes passed and there was an acrid smell of burnt food in the kitchen. I rushed in waving my hands like a fan in a pitiful attempt to make it all go away. The problem? I didn't know the right heat settings for the induction stove. I called up my mom and informed her of this development. She laughed. Then she reeled off heat settings for possibly everything I might ever attempt to cook in my lifetime.

Thanking her for the late information, I did  the only thing I could: damage control. After transferring the slightly burnt chicken to another cooker, I finished cooking it and then spent fifteen minutes scrubbing away at the blackened remains of scorched chicken from the other vessel. Fun night.

And it wasn't that bad. I thought it had a smokey flavour, but I think LH only ate it because we were just married and he didn't want to say anything except, 'Yeah, it's nice. A little burnt, but uh....nice!'

Three months and many chicken gravies later...

Yesterday, I made chicken gravy again. And this time, I said to myself, 'screw the recipe!'And what do you know?
The damn thing tasted pretty good.

Advice from the Future

What would you tell yourself if you could go back into the past one year and tell yourself, 'Dude, you're going to do some stupid things. Please don't do them.'

Would you never get that credit card? Would you quit your job? Would you break up with that guy/girl earlier? Would you get off your arse, go apeshit crazy, give away everything you own and go off on a cross-country motorcycle ride with your ingenuity and naught else?

The point is, sometimes there are things we wish we could change. And usually, I would be all 'Oh God, it sucks that I can't do that. Woe is me!' I haven't become wise overnight. There are huge things that I would like to change. I would have liked to be more in charge of myself and not listened to other people's opinions to make important decisions. I wish that I had gone out more, learnt to drive a car, or do what I was meant to do in life and not take drastic detours which cost loads of cash.

But you know what? I don't know how my future is going to play out. And I've learnt by experience that listening to someone else telling you what you should do will never work. Not even if the someone else is me.

Women's day is the day us lucky women get spa discounts.

What's up with Women's Day? Why are there discounts on stuff for women for simply being...well, women? Does the fact that girls are generally undervalued make society feel guilty enough to give us a 15 percent discount on one effing day of the year? Why is there no Men's Day? (Whew! That's too many questions. Even for me.)

Women's Day originally had political roots. It was a socialist movement by working women to break out of the cooking and child bearing mould they were forced into. It was a sign by the women that they wanted to be treated equally no matter what the other male half of the planet thought about them. 

If they wanted to work, work they would. If they wanted to vote, they were going to get that vote. If they wanted to bring up their kids teaching them to respect and not deify women, by God those kids came out of their vaginas kicking and screaming and they would, thank you very much. 

Today, Women's Day is a more like Valentine's Day and an end-of-season sale rolled into one.

Buy that special woman in your life a diamond ring.

Treat her to a facial at our salon for half the price!

Show her you care by getting her the best kitchen gloves. Buy one, get one free!

On this special day, ABC&Co., applauds all women for their vague moral attributes.

Yeah, nothing spells equality like a diamond ring and hair straightening.

The Academy award of Attention a.k.a Look at all the pretty gowns!

The Oscars, as always, was studded with the glamourous, the talented, the not-so-talented, the weirdos, and the stoned. Right away with no dilly-dallying about the history of the Oscars or more witty yet insightful comments from yours truly, let's get to the crux of the event: the attention.

The awards, don't mistake me, are very nice and all, but in the end it's about dressing up and entertaining the world with a glimpse of the best slice of the American pie: Hollywood. For Argo and Daniel Day-Lewis, the little gold man was obviously well deserved. However, what will this year's Oscars really be remembered for? Going by all the memes on Reddit, Jennifer Lawrence's little trip up on the stairs, that's what.

While the world talks about the awards for the next two weeks max, fashionistas and style blogs are fawning over and making snarky comments about the women's ensembles. Reddit and Facebook are full of memes, and utterly pointless disappointment and delight.Twitter is a-tweet with 140-character rhapsodies. The TV telecast and recast were eagerly watched by many, many people in India who were patting themselves on the back for Life of Pi bagging four Oscars because we Indians are always very delighted with any attention we get from the rest of the world, and especially from something as over the top as the Oscars.

Any-whoo. 

The Oscar trivia takeaway for this year, ye unfashionable TV watchers and people who don't really give a damn about who won, is:

The Oscar statuette's real name is Academy Award of Merit. Oscar is presumed to be the uncle of the then-Academy librarian Margaret Herrick, who thought that the statuette looked like him. Maybe he also stood on film reels without any clothes on, and carried a sword. Who knows.

Anyway, the people who named the little gold guy scratched their heads and said, 'Meh. Oscar's shorter.'

Read like a writer?

I read for pleasure. And I'm not ashamed to say it. Any book I take up, I get completely immersed in it and experience everything along with the characters. I go on journeys with them, mourn their losses, laugh at their jokes, and learn from their mistakes. There are takeaways and insights in all good books, and I learn from them.

However, I read today that to be a writer, it is not enough to merely read a book for entertainment.  You have to try to understand how it was written, how the sentences are formed and what kind of methods the author uses to introduce characters, build suspense, to end the story, to begin one and pretty much everything in between. Huh. I've got to start reading like a writer.

So I saw Argo

...and it was effing great! (By the way, read no more if you don't like spoilers.)


CIA 'exfil' agent, Tony Mendez, sets up a fake movie and production studio to smuggle out six Americans hiding in the Canadian Embassy in Iran. And Ben Affleck nails it. It's nothing short of impressive the way he's reconstructed the movie from actual photographs taken in 1979 when Iranian revolutionaries stormed the US Embassy. As an actor, there were no pretentious moments where he's the dashing agent come to the rescue. Most of the time he's frustrated, and desperately trying to help the six Americans out of the situation alive. There's no glamour, no heroics, just realistic acting.


In fact, the whole movie is characterized by a lack of sensationalism. What makes it so believable (of course, it is based on a true story culled from declassified CIA files) is that although the idea is preposterously movie-like, the actual implementation of that idea is so far from being theatrical, that it's almost ordinary. There is no 'villain' who is on the trail of the Americans and can anticipate all their moves, none of the six Americans are action heroes or super smart, and Ben Affleck does not hog the screen. I thought that it was more gripping for being so subtle and natural.


Do watch. It's hands-down one of the best movies I've seen.

Phoenix Market City

There’s a new mall in Chennai! Yes, another brand new mall much bigger than all the other already existing malls with an IMAX, and eleven Sathyam movie screens. And many fancy installations like the one below. And shops! Oh, the shops.

Um. Sorry.

It’s just that while Phoenix is a good mall with lots of shops and a Cream and Fudge with ridiculously good mint ice cream, I've just been there so many times already that I've almost memorized the layout of the place. This is the curse of all those who live relatively close to a mall. Ice cream? Mall. Clothes? Mall. Electronics? Mall. Bored? Mall.

In fact, people are so unimaginative that they hang out in malls for Valentine’s Day. LH pointed out that we were also in said mall on said day, and all those people could be just like us: not giving a shit about Valentine’s day and just out because of ennui. I disagree. I mean, come on. You see the place packed exclusively with couples who are holding hands. The food courts are full. Archies is having a record breaking sale of teddy bears and heart-shaped pillows. Yeah, love is exciting these days.

Anyway, a quick guide for the uninitiated. These are a few stores in Phoenix Mall that you might like:

1.      CEX – They buy, they sell, they exchange cell phones, game consoles, DVDs, so on and so forth. Great idea, and the last time I saw the store, it was pulling in crowds like a boss.

2.      Lifestyle – Every Madrasvaasi by now knows about the wonders of Lifestyle. I see maamis, mummies, chicks, professionals, hipsters, geeks, and grandpas alike converge in on Lifestyle for retail therapy.

3.      Cotton World – Comfortable, stylish, and reasonably priced cotton and linen clothes. Summer’s around the corner. Stock up, yo.  

4.      Donut House – Good doughnuts!

5.      Cream and Fudge- Amazing ice creams and sundaes in any combination that you fancy. And they’ll create orgasmic food porn right in front of you on a frozen marble slab. Oh yeah, baby.

6.      Manchester United – The official Manchester United store. For all you Man-U fans out there.

7.      Big Bazaar – almost a staple in every mall these days, it’s a supermarket which all home makers and families are in love with. Where else can you get a broom, cauliflower, clothes, milk cookers, and dhal in the same place?

8.      The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf – A very woodsy décor and the quaint name lured us in. And we didn't regret it.

9.      Mamma Deli – Expensive, but delicious. And speaking from experience, you won’t have a choice on weekends, when the food courts are jam packed.

10.  Loads of electronics stores that my husband is in love with. Bose for speakers, Poorvika for mobiles, Reliance Digital for everything.

This is only a partial list because a lot of stores haven’t opened yet. Like Hard Rock Café and California Pizza Kitchen, both of which I’d like to try. Of course, we’d be first in line to watch a movie at IMAX, and will be regular movie-goers when Luxe opens up.

And Phoenix isn't just a mall; it’s a market city with office spaces, apartments and even a club, as I was told. Convenient, but a little up-market. Okay, a lot up-market.

Meh. I just go for the ice cream.

How does a housewife spend her time at home?

I've been unemployed for a month and a half till date, and this is the single most frequent question I get from anyone I talk to.

Most of the time, they're just trying to make small talk, and I completely understand that. I'm so conversationally awkward with people for the first half an hour of any meeting that I pounce on the least opportunity to nudge the conversation along. It's like a hundred tonne tortoise that you've got to push to the finish line. But after the fourth or fifth or twentieth time, I'm this close, this close to letting that tortoise keel over and die.

That's why I've made a list of everything I've done in the past month and a half. Maybe next time someone asks me, I'll ask them to read my blog.

1. 2-week trip with le Husband to places I've never been to before.

2. Cooking. Something I only began learning in earnest a month ago. 

3. Managing a house. This includes cleaning, laundry, the works. 

4. Weekends are fully spent : 

     a. Watching movies, 

     b.Visiting friends and family, 

     c.Friends and family coming over to our home,  

     d. Occasional trips to amusement parks and adventure camps,

     e. Shopping.

5. Reading. (I've cracked open Kurt Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse five', and I'm bravely sailing through Che Guevara's biography.)

6. Writing. (Or thinking about writing. Professionally and otherwise.)

7. Keeping up with Twitter and Facebook and Reddit and StumbleUpon and many, many food blogs for inspiration.

And of course, there are other things I must do apart from getting a job, like: 

1. Learn to drive a car. 

2. Start blogging seriously again.

3. Read more! 

This seems like a great list to me because finally, my list doesn't just read wake up-go to work-be bored-eat-sleep-repeat. I love the independence of having my own place, I love spending time with LH, and I love that I have the freedom to plan my day the way I want to.

So yeah. I'm a temporary housewife/amateur cook/avid reader/hopeful writer. Any other questions?