Myriad Musings

There used to be a time when I would turn my nose up at many dishes my mom cooked and refuse to eat any of her "experimental cooking".   My most hated dish was my sister's favourite, Mulangi (radish) Sambhar and Kathirikkai (eggplant) curry.   Every time she made the dish, my mom would recall, I once said it looked like cockroach sabji.  Yet she still made it and ate it. BTW in what seems like another lifetime, DH used to cook for his room mates in his UT Austin days.  Once he made something and the girl eating it found a cockroach in it!  She put it out and continued eating.  Are graduate students really that starved?  I certainly wasn't.   And I never ate his cooking in those days because he was still a meat eater.  The vegetarianism started in our engagement period.   (Coincidentally. I take no credit for it.  He is pig headed and probably makes it a point of morality to not take my advice. I am going to enjoy the repercussion...

I may have spent close to a decade in Texas, but when I say soul food, I certainly don't mean Southern African American cooking.  I mean food for the soul, music. Now that I am sitting home alone most mornings, wading deep into my thesis, I spend quite a bit of time setting the tone of the hour with music. I love Susheela Raman's voice, especially in the song "Yeh Mera Deewana Pan Hai" .  Her voice has a blues-y touch reminding me of Billie Halliday, though, after I had started exploring her (Raman's) albums,  Ella Fitzgerald or actually Aretha Franklin may be a better fit.  Lady Day touches you with the depth of feeling in her voice, just like Susheela Raman in this particular song, somehow Mukesh, the original voice of this song, only manages to annoy.  (Mukesh does have a whiny voice doesn't he? It is pure and simple Bathos!  Like a country singer cribbing his truck broke down, dog died and wife ran off with best friend, all to age old guitar stru...

Yet another weekday morning and I had no baked goods for my son's breakfast. I did however have 3 organic lemons, 1 avocado languishing in my fridge from the previous week's organic market and this months eggless baking challenge still pending- lemon coconut bread.   I had no coconut however and no time to buy 1, break and scrape at 7 in the morning with the day's work still ahead of me. I decided to make a healthier muffin with the same core ingredient lemon. I made a egged version soon after, so I offer recipe for both versions Ingredient list  1 cup pottukadalai finely powdered (successfully used previously) 3/4 cup whole wheat flower 1 tsp baking powder zest from 3 lemons 3 lemons juiced and juice divided 1 cup sugar (I didn't try brown sugar, worried it would overpower the lemon taste) 1/2 cup butter (recipe called for softened butter, I was in a hurry so I simply melted my butter; no harm done) 2 eggs 1/2 cup milk Or 1 cup y...