With love to my haters !

 Dear haters,

I am sure there are many people who want to say many things to you. Sadly, these people lacked the courage to speak their minds. And maybe that’s a result of your comments and taunts. You may not have realized how your thoughtless comments affect others when you first utter them. But these said comments sometimes do have a very significant impact on your victims’ minds. More often than not seemingly insignificant remarks can go onto have very adverse and long-term effects on the mind. It Lowers self-confidence. More anxiety. More insecurities. Bullies are the most evident haters that I can think of. Being bullied teaches you that you are undesirable — i.e. that you don’t belong and you don’t fit in. By virtue of the way that identity tends to work, you are being set up to believe that these things the bullies are saying about you are true. It would be great if the average person was possessed of unshakable self-confidence, but this just isn’t how identity works.

I feel like all bullies have an endless repertoire of things they can use to rag people with. Calling people fat. Calling them skinny. Critiquing appearance (skin condition, colour) such as acist slurs. Inevitably, it is the sensitive kids who get singled out for teasing; the kids who cry easily; the kids who prefer to be alone than with the wrong company; the “geeks”; “the nerds”. It disgusts me to no end as to how stereotypes are taken so seriously by these haters. Just because you like comics that doesn’t make you a raging fanboy/girl who won’t talk about anything else. Just because you have glasses, doesn’t mean you are a scrawny nerd. And just because you are a nerd, doesn’t make you “uncool”. In fact — nerds are some of the “coolest” most passionate people in the world. It would do us so much good if we put aside our petty differences and judgements and actually embraced them. No one has the right to taunt or hate on another person because of his/her hobbies, interests, sexuality, race, religion, beliefs and/or appearance. There is no such thing as wrong size, wrong face, wrong skin color or even wrong personality.

Despite all of your intentions, I know that you (like everything else in this world) have a purpose. I want to thank you for teaching me a few things. Thank you for making me realize that loving myself for who I am is more important than fearing your opinions. Thank you for making me realize that I need not give a shit about anyone’s negative opinions of me. I know me more than you know me. We all have our insecurities and vulnerabilities. Plus, we’re only human. We don’t need to get it together every minute of the day. Everyone has bad days, right? And through those bad days I found out that it is up to me to recognize those few genuine people who love me. Over time, I have come to understand that the quality of my friends is so much more important than the quantity of the same. Those few people are the ones that are worth it all. Just like that I say thank you for being my greatest teachers about the power of words. Because of your words I choose mine carefully. Thank you for teaching me, though it has taken me years to learn, that just because someone says something about me does not make it true.

Learning not to give a shit about people’s opinions of you is tough. It may sound surprising to the carefree and nonchalant people out there but it is true. As someone who suffers from social anxiety, I find it difficult to explain why that is so. My brain goes into haywire mode and I end up overthinking and over analyzing every little remark. This leads to insecurity and it is a downhill spiral from there. Once or twice is tolerable. Anyone can understand a joke or a tease but saying it repeatedly makes us think what if it is actually true? You can say why do you care? Well of course I care! It is me you are talking about! I have self-respect and I care about my self-esteem. You can’t expect us to brush it off or take it lightly once it has already lowered our self-confidence. But now I know better. I don’t need to care about what you say about me to me or whoever. It is a slow process but I am learning that loving myself is more important than fearing your opinions of me. It takes time but I know that I can overcome my insecurities.

You have to realize by now that your thoughtless actions show your true colors and not mine. It shows how sad, petty, hateful and maybe even jealous you are. There is a thin line between joking around and actually being rude. The limits exist and what may seem funny to you may not be on the humorous side for me at all. I really wouldn’t know what turned you into a hater or what past experiences made you be like this. But I hope to god that he/she gives you the strength to overcome whatever the negative feelings you are feeling. At least for your victims’ sake if not for your well-being. I advise you change your attitude before it is too late. Before your cunning attitude affects or even ruins your future relationships. Before you can’t go back and before you lose something dear to you. There is absolutely nothing to gain from being spiteful and hateful. Be kind. Be thoughtful. Think before you speak because the saying that “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” is not really true.

With Love, 

Me.

*I am not rude. I am outspoken

Sticky Soft Noodles

I LOVE Chinese. Who does not? There is something about the spices, the fresh ingredients and the simplicity in Chinese food, that always makes me a huge fan of them. Noodles, being the king of Chinese food, is undoubtly, everyone's favourite! 

I adore Kylie Kwong and her style of cooking. (Not to mention, her style of chopping up vegetables)  As her program is named, she does cook with Heart and Soul ! Her cooking has this sense of simplicity and clean flavours. The kind of ingredients that she used, makes my head spin so much and think of so many other alternate ways of recreating her own dish. What inspiration. 

And so, I was watching one of her episode where she whipped up an extremely easy and healthy noodles. Right after her program, I watched Gordon Ramsey whip up a pasta with Asian flavours. You guessed it right. I combined, Ramsey's flavours with Kwong's noodles, a bit of my own twists and came up with this Sticky Soft Noodles, with chili mushroom soy sauce and honey glazed stir fried vegetables! :) 
Name sounds so complicated but trust me, its an easy peasy 20 minute meal.  

Ingredients

Carrot - 2 Nos thinly sliced
Capsicum - 1 No - thinly sliced 
Mushroom - 1 packet - thinly sliced
Palak - Roughly Chopped
Spring Onion -1 cup Roughly chopped and place it in ice water 
Dried red Chili - 10 Nos roughly chopped 
Soy Sauce - 2 Tsp 
Vinegar - 1Tsp
Salt - To taste 
Pepper - 1/2 Tsp 
Ginger garlic paste - 1Tsp  
Olive Oil - 4- 5 Tsp
Honey - 3 Tsp 
Hakka Noodles - 2 Packets 

Method 

In a shallow pan, add the Olive Oil and once its hot, add the chopped dried red chilies, Ginger garlic paste and Soy sauce. 

To this, add Carrot, capsicum and the palak. Saute it for about 5 minutes. 

Add salt and pepper, saute for another minute. 

Now add in the mushroom and Vinegar and saute for another 5 minutes on a low flame. 

Meanwhile, in a deep bowl, fill half of it with water and add some rock salt to it. Once it boils, add the Hakka noodles and let it cook for about 7 minutes. 

Before draining, take about half a cup of the starch water and add it to the vegetables. 

Once thats done, add the honey and the cooked noodles, stir well.

Take it off the heat, add spring onions and serve in a nice colourful bowl. Afterall, you have added so many vibrant colours to your dish :)  

Serves - 4 


NOTE - 

1. After chopping up Spring Onions , give it an ice water bath for about 10 minutes as it makes them crunchy.

2. Be easy while adding salt as, Soy sauce already gives the saltiness.

3. Dried red chili does not hit you with so much spice. It gives colour and a hint of the awesome spice. So incase you want more fire, add some chili flakes. 

Mushroom Biriyani

Biriyani.

The though is just enough for me to drool :P

Mushroom.

I could die for it and eat it every single day. Such an amazing ingredient with so many varieties and textures when cooked the right way.

So this is again one of my favorite dishes and made easily without much effort! I know this is not the authentic way biriyani is cooked. My version, cooked easily and it such a hit specially when people are hungry and you need to have good solid food.

Ingredients

Button Mushrooms - 2 cups (cut into quarters)
Onions - 2 medium sized (finely chopped)
Tomatoes - 2 (roughly chopped)
Capsicum - 2 (roughly chopped and can use different colours)
Ginger garlic paste - 1tsp
Ghee - 2 tsp
Cinnamon - Small stick
Clove - 2
Cardamom - 2
Bay leaf - 1-2 
Chilly Powder - 1 1\2 tsp ( differers with the chilly powder you use and the amount of spice you want. I like mine spicy)
Garam Masala - 1tsp
Coriander Powder- 1/2 tsp
Ground Pepper - 1/2 tsp
Jal Jeera - 1/3 tsp 
Salt - To taste
Basmathi Rice - 2 cups
Chopped Corriander - 1/2 cup 


Method 

In a deep pan, add ghee and once its hot enough, add cinnamon, clove and bay leaf,  saute for a minute and add the onions, ginger garlic/paste and saute them well. I generally add a pinch of sugar and salt while sautéing the onions as I find this enhances the taste, smell and colour. Once the onions are nice golden brown, add the tomatoes , mix well and now add chilly powder, garam masala, coriander powder, pepper, jal jeera and salt. Sprinkle little water on top of the spices and mix well. Simmer for about 10 minutes and add the mushrooms and coriander. Once you add the mushrooms, you will notice that it will start letting out a lot of water. Once that happens, add the washed and strained basmati rice, stir well and take it off the heat. 

Transfer this mixture into a rice cooker and add water accordingly. Thats it ! 15 minutes and your yummy biriyani is ready ! You can serve this plainly or with some onion or boondhi raita 

Tip - When you are adding water in the rice cooker, add hot water. This cooks the rice much faster and much better ! Also, while chopping the coriander, don't throw the stem away ! That gives maximum flavour. 

Serves - 4

Wheat and oats Halwa with pumpkin and sunflower seeds

This morning, I woke up with a sudden carving for Indian sweet ! As I was stirring my oats for breakfast, I though why not use this to my all time favorite and easy to make sweet, Wheat Halwa. Trust me, this is so easy and quick to make that incase you have guests at home suddenly and want to impress them with your culinary skills, this is the trick !

Ingredients

Atta (Wheat flour) - 1 Cup
Sugar- 1 Cup
Water - 1 Cup
Ghee - 2 tsp
Pumpkin seeds - 1/3 cup
Sunflower seeds - 1/4 cup
Oats - 1/2 cup
Cardamom powder - 1/4 tsp

Method

In a pan, add sugar, saffron and water. Let the sugar dissolve and water come to a nice boil.
Simantaniously, in another pan add ghee and add some cardamom powder to it.Then add the flour and oats and mix well and on a low flame, keep stirring it till the raw smell of the flour and oats goes away ! You can add more ghee if you want to.

Once the water boils, pour it directly into the flour and keep stirring so that there are no lumps. It might look watery but don't panic. As you keep stirring, the flour pulls in all the water and gives you that thick gooey consistency. Toast the pumpkin and sunflower seeds or you can directly just add them and stir it along with the halwa and use some to garnish as well. (Can secretly add another spoon of ghee while no one's watching ;) )

Serves - 5

I assure you, even if you are not a huge fan of oats, this will change your idea. You can also knock off the oats and the pumpkin/sunflower seeds and add just normal almond and cashew nuts to it ! 

Fruit and Vegetable Chaat salad

Ok Im back to this blog after 2 whole years thanx to my friend Gayathri who has constantly been pushing me to (in a good way ofcourse) to start posting recipes specially easy simple ones since she stays mostly in hostel or home alone. 

Cooking and baking has been a big part of our family. Its runs down in the family tradition. Being brought up in such a family, passion for cooking, experimenting and eating has been very high in me. This passion started off from a very young age of 10 and increased even more because of my love for desserts and as of how to prepare them. Television shows and videos in youtube kindled the baker in me and I started experimenting with different kinds of food and flavors. My biggest break was during my undergraduate in my college bazaar where students could put up various stalls ranging from clothes, shoes, accessories and food for 2 days. I had put up a muffin store and among the 88 odd stores put up, mine was selected for the top 10 stores and was asked to put up a store in a leading IT company on the occasion of women's day. This was like a breaking point and after all this, I started getting orders and started baking from home. With all the support from family, friends and well wishers, I'm here in London, Le Cordon Bleu pursuing what I have dreamt of all my life ; Baking and Pastry making course. It's been more than a month in London and it still feels surreal for me. 

So now getting back, this blog is dedicated to Gayathri and also my mother because she was the one I inherited this recipe from :)  This simple yummy recipe is something very close to my heart and a very healthy, filling one. It's something close to my heart because for the very first time in my life, I participated in a cooking competition (8th grade) and won the 1st place! :)

Wish I had snaps but promise to post good snaps from the next blogs :)

Ingredients

Apple Cubed 1 cup

Orange Deseeded 1 cup

Papaya Cubed 1 cup

Pomegranate seeds 1 cup

Ripe Mango Cubed 1 cup

Boiled, lightly fried and cubed potato 1 cup

Parsley finely chopped 2 teaspoons

Salt ½ teaspoon

Lemon Juice 1 teaspoon

Chat Masala/Jal Jira 1 teaspoon

Oregano- 1/2 teaspoon

Toasted crushed walnuts and peanuts - 1/2 cup

Method:

Add all the ingredients except Parsley, walnuts and peanuts and toss it till all the ingredients are equally distributed.  Garnish with parsley, toasted walnuts and peanuts. Tastes better when served chilled. If served chilled, add the garnish and nuts just before serving.

Serves- 6  

The Magic of Dark Chocolate

"In a box or in a bar

with nuts or raisins or creams,

Chocolate fills our deepest desires,

it’s just as simple as it seems."

Warm and melted, chilled and crunchy, dark and bitter, chocolate in all its many forms is much loved all over the world. Almost every single person would have heard their mothers talk about the risks of eating chocolate where this assumption was based on the fact that the excess consumption of chocolate caused obesity and dental problems. Believe me, I got more than a talk from my mom! (I know she will never agree with that)

As a teenager, chocolates were my addiction. I could just keep devouring them. The joy that occurs at the moment luscious, succulent chocolate shavings touch the tongue is not quite definable! As for me, my all time favorite any day would be dark chocolate. The darker, the better. Infact, the core reason for me to write on this topic!

"Science is important, but Chocolate Health is much more than chemistry and equations. We know that eating chocolate is a sensuous, emotional, and quintessentially human experience." It may sound crazy to some. Can chocolate really be healthy? Well, as long as it is the right kind, it absolutely can be. The higher the cocoa content, the more health benefits the chocolate can offer. Typically dark chocolate contains a higher amount of cocoa, and it doesn`t have to taste bitter. As long as it has atleast 70% cocoa content, chocolate can be a tasty compliment to your health that you are looking for.

When I spoke to a renowned nutritionist, about dark chocolates, this is what she had to say "Since dark chocolate contains antioxidants and polyphones, these nutrients contribute greatly to improving one’s heart health while also preventing the risk of cardiovascular disease. In consuming a good amount of dark chocolate, one will be able to counter depression because the serotonin contained acts just as effectively as the anti-depressants."

What does this mean? The body actually utilizes the flavanols found in chocolate and absorbs them almost quite readily. This leads to improved blood flow and, therefore, improved heart health. Chocolate, which is considered to be a danger to health, is actually a heart-helping treat given that it is in the right quality and quantity.

No one is saying that you can consume as much chocolate as you want. But what would days be like if you could by no means have chocolate? The upbeat benefits of chocolate can be dotingly incorporated into a healthy lifestyle.

Following are the links, related to the topic, which I found interesting.

http://www.chocolate-is-healthy.com/

http://www.darkchocolatehealthblog.com/

The Language of Food

"Out of the kitchen! NOW!" That's how my mom would screech when I was ten, trying my hand at cooking. I wouldn't blame her because I've set my share of records at being clumsy and butter fingers especially around the kitchen! For a girl so young, a kitchen is not the right place to experiment were exactly the words from my mother! But this scenario changed. When I was thirteen, I used to sneak into the kitchen with my childhood best friend Shankari with the motive of cooking "paneer butter masala". God, I used to love the way my mom prepared it. We came, we saw but did not conquer. The dish was a complete disaster. We were left with no choice but to force ourselves and eat what we prepared. This didn't stop my will to learn how to cook properly like my mother and grandmothers. Being daddy's girl, I couldn't stand it when my dad would compliment my mom every time she cooked something amazing( which was every single day) Yes, it's true my mom and grand-moms where my first inspiration to learn the culinary arts. But there is someone else who left me open mouthed when I saw her cook and proceeded to read her books. Her language-AMAZING! That would probably be an understatement. She actually speaks 'food'. "You need a balance in life between dealing with what's going on inside and not being so absorbed in yourself that it takes over." That by the way is Nigella Lawson for you all. A British food writer, journalist and broadcaster.

In the busy, stressful life of the modern woman, there could be more feel good mileage from running up a tray of muffins or baking a cake than in almost any other cooking. But we're so busy making efficient, 'modern' food, that we too easily forget, what Nigella demonstrates in her mouthwatering and deliciously reassuring cookbooks, blogs and cookery shows is that, its actually not hard to make any food, that the appreciation and satisfaction it brings are all in proportion to the effort involved. Writing in one of her blogs about her very first book, "Domestic Goddess" she says how a domestic goddess has to maintain her cool when faced with pastry. After reading that, I would say, with Nigella's guidance, even shortcrust pastry can be pretty pain-free.

Ten years later, cooking dinner for my family every night, I sleep peacefully after a hug and kiss from my dad and to top it all he would say "I loved the food today", just like the icing on a cake. And oh yes, this daddy's girl's day is made! Thanks to you Nigella. I started experimenting with food after reading one of her blogs in particular which says "Cook for yourself. When I cook for myself, I don't mind taking a risk with an ingredient because it's only me and I don't have the fear of disappointing. You discover what works and you suddenly have this reward which is a lovely supper. You need to feel free to make mistakes or you're not going to learn anything, and this is true in life."

Those were the magic words that made it all happen for me!