I have a dream…

Having done a Book club at one time in my life, I have been tinkering with the idea of doing something that involved the other great love of my life, food. This blog is from the diary of a self-confessed foodie, bitten by an insatiable wanderlust and a love for music. They’re not just memories, but life itself…. combining all flavours of life…. some food and a little story to go with every recipe. A book or a travel memory to go alongside.

• Of Everyday Musings (about things we take for granted)
• Of Exotic Somethings (Off-beat thoughts, which I think plenty of! About life, humanity, issues etc. And of course food!)
• Of tradition, habits and hand-me-downs

Quoting one of my idols and celebrated scientist and mother, Madame Marie Curie, “Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained. Perhaps everything will turn out well, at the moment when we least expect it……”

2015. We are at the dawn of yet another new year. Time for making new resolutions and discoveries about yourself. And I realize I am exactly where I need to be at this moment – at the right place doing the right things. Telling a story. About life, about food, about all those experiences that make me who I am. Perhaps that moment for me has arrived…

On being thrifty

The theme of conserving from my last blog continues. Our parents’ frugal lifestyle and way of thinking has affected my day to day life and thinking far more than I would have thought possible in my younger days. In fact, as a teenager, I positively thought that my mother’s ideas and habits were outdated. Why was it that the kitchen sink had to be cleared up before going to bed? Would the world come to an end if the mess on the counters was left on overnight? It was only when I was grown up and had a kitchen of my own to keep clean did I realize the wisdom of her habits. You had to wake up to the mess the next morning had you not cleaned it the night before! After a couple of times I was on to her. On this Mother’s day, I want to come clean and admit my foolishness.

On being highly available

So, we recently bought a new bauble for my husband. A new laptop. (And I would like to think…) Taking inspiration from me, he wrote a guest blogpost for my blog. Here goes:

High availability is important to us techies! The systems hosting critical services such as Google, Facebook, online banking, stock exchanges or most of the modern online services cannot afford to go down even for a very short period. It is not difficult to understand that any and all equipment is prone to failure and hence failure of components of any complex systems is inevitable. What makes a system highly available is that the design of such a system considers a component failure as a normal business event, has a built-in redundancy and in the event of a component failure the system continues to operate, sometimes with a degraded performance, and informs the operator. When the operator replaces the component, the system gains back the redundancy and repairs itself in such a way that it is again ready to tolerate such kind of component failure.

Even in other areas of our lives, several systems are made highly or moderately available by introducing some level of redundancy, spare tires in cars is a good example. In fact in the wake of the recent Germanwings flight tragedy, aviation agencies and airline companies have mandated a “not-less-than two” crew members in the cockpit at all times, introducing redundancy to address the malfunction of a human mind to ensure that the complex system keeping an aircraft on its course, which involves machines and people, remains highly available at all time.

Overall it makes a lot of sense to make important systems in your life to be sufficiently redundant so that they stay available in spite of failures whether it is spreading the investments across a portfolio or keeping spare keys with your neighbor. In other words it is important to follow the age old logic of not keeping all your eggs in the same basket.

How is this relevant to food? Nobody will dispute that in a well planned menu for a meal, a diner should not have to stay hungry just because one of the dishes does not quite suite the person. I think there is no better example of a menu design than the most common Indian meal constituting of rice, roti, curry and dal. On one hand if the diner does not want to eat rice, roti provides another form of carbohydrates, while on the other hand if someone is not fond of the curry, they always have the dal as the side dish. The thali is highly available, indeed!

On Spring break… and doing my part in the drought

For the past couple of months, I have started working at a part-time job, which somehow manages to occupy my attention full-time, leaving me no mind-space for even thoughts of writing. In the interim, chores don’t go away – there are household chores, laundry, putting food on the table, getting the groceries so that there can be food on the table, driving kids to and from their classes, doctors’ appointments and of course, Spring Break! When my garden is full of the sweet scents of newly bloomed flowers and when kids are home from school and expect out of the rote culinary exploits from me. I have to be fair though and admit they too indulge in their fair share of the above-mentioned culinary exploits. My son made whole wheat pizza from scratch and daughter has been busy baking all kinds of cakes!

Meanwhile, the weather outside has been warm to hot, the kind of unrelenting heat that if you are out in the afternoon, saps the energy out of you. The hills around the Bay are all brown not green, as are lawns. And everyone is talking about the never-before experienced kind of drought in California. You get to hear about the “water police” – citizens who take it upon themselves to patrol their neighborhoods making sure no drop of water is being wasted and if it is, enforcing moral policing, shaming the offenders into stopping.

Coming from India, I am used to having water restrictions. In fact, the town that my parents lived in, had drinking water supplied for fifteen minutes only twice or thrice a week in the summer. People there are used to filling up their supply of drinking water in huge pots and bathing water by the bucketfuls. In fact, my mother would routinely wash her vegetables and lentils and rice in a colander and use that water for watering her precious plants. Hand washing all their clothes, the water from the last rinse would be similarly used. Taking a shower was or still is, unheard of. Only if you were washing your hair would you be allowed to use two buckets of water for your bath, in the days of summer water rationing, you had to make do with just one. Leaving the tap running while brushing was certain to earn a reprimand!

That got me thinking. What can I as an ordinary resident do? Besides not eating beef or almonds or walnuts apparently, as it has now been proved that both guzzle massive amounts of water that could be otherwise used for drinking. I cannot not take showers nor can I do without my washing machine. The only place I realized that I could cut back on, was not using the dishwasher. So now I wash my dishes as soon are they are ready to be washed, so I think I use less water.

I wonder if similar water restrictions were to be unleashed on Californians, what the range of reactions would be!

Seeking validation

Psychology books have probably known this from time immemorial, but continuing from the same ‘perspectives’ thread as yesterday, I realized that the urge to get approval begins at an age where you probably don’t even realize that you are seeking approval. Babies as little as 4 months old look into their mother or care-giver’s eyes for that nod of approval when they flip on to their tummies. So when they are able to recite their alphabets or numbers all by themselves, it’s no wonder that they feel they deserve applause!

Point of view

How perspectives can change from person to person! I recently started working in the area of child care. Being a parent, my instinct is to think from a parents’ mindset. But as a care giver, even though I might be concerned about the exact same thing, namely the well-being of the child, the point of view changes equations completely. The parent is always in a position of dominion. And I am getting to know so many more types of parenting. Until now, there was just one type – mine!

The Eternal Optimist

I am the ‘glass half-full’ kind of person. Though I have my off-days, I personify the eternal optimist. In fact, one of my all-time favorite movie lines is from ‘Gone with the wind’, where after Rhett Butler, the man she loves, tells her in no uncertain terms, “My dear, I don’t give a damn,” she still has the tenacity and spunk to say “Tomorrow is another day…” It is perhaps one of the few book to movie adaptations that I truly like and can enjoy anytime.

Priorities priorities priorities…

‘Location, location, location’ defines your home. So what is it that defines you? Your job or your family or your gender? Or the place where you live or your material possessions or your age? Or your educational qualifications or your friends? Is it personal values that define you, like kindness, empathy, honesty and humility? Is it sheer ol’ hard work that takes you where you want to go or is it being street smart?

Checklists!

I’m a ‘follow-the-checklist’ kind of person. I usually like to have my day planned out (well, at least roughly) in advance and be prepared with my ‘prep list’ the day before. So when I wake up in the morning, that’s the first conscious train of thought that goes through my mind – what am I going to do today and how am I going to go about doing those things? One of the books that influenced me tremendously in this space was a book called ‘The Checklist Manifesto’ by Dr. Atul Gawande.

While I wasn’t particularly a ‘planner’ until recently, I have come to realize that having a checklist helps immensely in the running of a household consisting of a husband not too keen on domestic chores and two teenagers. And then, once in too frequently a while for my liking, those dripping showers and broken water heaters pop into my life from time to time breaking the monotony of dreary and habitual routine.

Soul food

What do you do when literally a thousand things start happening and going off course at exactly the same time? That’s right what I have been experiencing for the past few weeks. Therefore, no blog! Well, to be honest, some of the events were entirely pleasurable, like having some really close family come over for a visit. In fact, that probably was the only silver lining in an otherwise hectic/ gloomy scenario.

Rules are good!

For the past few days, I had set up a system in my mind, where I would take care of my morning chores as I did when I worked full time. This meant getting lunchboxes made as soon as I woke up, making sure I knew what I was cooking for dinner and preferably having all prep work completed for the same within a definite time frame. And relegating all cleaning and related activities to the weekend. The target was to sit down to write just as I would were I being paid for my writing. ‘Discipline’ I told myself, was all it takes.