Two achievements

Somehow our Professors seem to have a knack of recognizing Indian festivals much beforehand, we had a midterm on Diwali last quarter and again one quiz on the day of Pongal this quarter. However the lucky bugger that I am, I gotta eat some wonderful Gulabjamun on Diwali (courtesy: Nalabagam Sid aka my roommate:)).

For Pongal however I was determined to make Pongal and eat it too! Turned out that we didn't have stock of jaggery to make my favorite Sakkaraipongal. Ithukkellam asaruvomaa! I decided to make vennpongal for the first time in my life. As luck would have it, paasi paruppu (not sure of the name in English) is supposed to be one of the ingredients and ofcourse we didn't have any of that as well. When has lack of an ingredient stopped arvi the great! So I settled on an approximate substitute-toor daal and started off the process after a few phone calls and some browsing on how to actually make vennpongal. After the cooker was on for fifteen minutes I realized that I missed out one small ingredient-salt! So again off went the cooker to the sink for emergency-cooling and opening, (don’t ask me what the mixture looked like at that point). After adding the salt cropped up another hitch-I knew how many whistles meant the pongal was ready under normal circumstances, but under these extraordinary situation I had created, I really wasn’t sure. Resolving to myself that I will feed this Pongal to others before I ate it, I made an approximate calculation with the original cooking time and the new cooking time. Finally ofcourse the-savior-of-every-dish-Arvind-has-ever-made (to quote Rachael “that’s an expression”J), lots and lots of ghee and the Pongal was ready! I don’t like self-praise, but cant help it this time-whattay Pongal it turned out to be!!! My cooking has a new fan now (of course me).

And today I reached another milestone I made Dosa from scratch i.e. from mixing the flour upto the final (semi-) crispy Dosas. Ofcourse the Dosas turned out white as milk is another matter altogether (well that’s way I always intended it to be!!). Feeling on top of the world right now. I am the best!!!

And for some sumaar recipes of a disciple of mine check out http://meerablogs.blogspot.com/search/label/Reciepes

[Note: Comments on my past cooking triumphs are not welcome unless they are filled with fulsome praise]