The Miller Melting Pot

Skitch for iPad

2012-01-27T19:56:00.000-05:00

Its good for annotating. Its also good as a doodle pad for the kids.

No more abundance of messy paints, broken crayons, dried-up pens or wasted paper. Never again be faced with making that heart-wrenching decision to put the prolific products of your little one's artistic endeavors into recycling and furtively execute on that plan when she isn't looking, taking extra precaution to dig it in deep enough so as not to be visible from the top. Yes, in our house, "artwork" (and grocery-store balloons way past their prime) have magically made their way back from the trashcan to the table. I'm making myself sound like a heartless parent, but I know many of you secretly do the same.

Another advantage is you don't have to keep the grandparents on a rotation schedule to receive the occasional masterpieces - you can send the same image to all of them. And make it your screen saver too.

Don't get me wrong. The traditional paint and paper is not going to be phased out. I will still value some kids' artwork on paper. Plus serious art involving shading, textures, mixing colors, etc. can't be done on this app. But I will find this useful while traveling, going to the pediatrician and such - any place I need to keep them busy without the hassle of carrying art/writing supplies.

The picture shown is not drawn by my three-year-old or six-year-old, of course. Their mommy had fun finger-drawing this, and it took only about 3 minutes, including figuring out the fairly intuitive interface.

Kindergarten Bento

2012-01-16T15:58:00.002-05:00

Monday morning. The alarm rings. I go into autopilot mode. Wrist support band, socks and sweater. Feet count thirteen steps until they hit the hardwood. Fingers flick on the light switch, press the up arrow on the thermostat - once, twice, thrice. Fill the kettle, turn it on. Lay out six empty boxes on the counter. Start with the most challenging one. Chop, slice, roll, prick, place in box. Three compartments packed, two more to go. With the warm air from the vent blowing directly on to my feet now, my brain starts to thaw. And I remember that for the first time in my life, I have a holiday on Martin Luther King Jr. Day! And so does N. I start to put away four of the boxes, feeling a little bummed out at goofing up on the chance to sleep in. Then it hits me, the silver lining of this sleep-deprived Monday morning cloud - when the sun comes up, I will be ready with my camera! Happily, I finish packing the only two boxes that will make it out of the house today, then go on to finish N's bento box for the photo op.

Featured in this lunch box today are
(1) Top left - Tomato slices
(2) Top right - Turkey avocado spinach pinwheels (recipe below)
(3) Bottom left - Pear slices
(4) Bottom right - Chicken and cucumber on toothpicks (recipe below)
(5) Center - Dried plum

Recipe for (3): Lay out a slice of deli turkey (or other cold cut). Place a few avocado slices on it and mash gently with fork, spread out over the turkey slice. Place a few baby spinach leaves in the middle. Roll up, pressing down a little to shape it, like you would with a sushi roll. Slice into pinwheels.

Recipe for (5): Roughly dice some cooked chicken. Heat a little oil, add a tsp of tomato paste and any herb or spice you like. I used a pinch of cumin powder and a pinch of coriander powder today. Dried herbs work really well too. Add a squirt of water to dilute the tomato paste a bit and add the chicken. Stir to coat the chicken. Give it a minute to heat the chicken through, then turn off heat. Skewer chicken pieces onto toothpick with other vegetables or fruit. I used cucumber. Some other things that work well are pineapple chunks, grapes, cherry tomato.

This lunch is geared towards a Kindergartner who eats like a bird and is optimized for nutrition, not calories, with plenty of nutrient-dense foods - vegetables, protein, fruit, which I prefer he eat over a serving of grain carb that fills him up without giving him much nutrition. This Kindergartner has strict standards around acceptable presentation of food - certain things can't "touch", things should not adhere to his fingers or fall apart when he picks them up, etc. Yes, I have tried other approaches which have not worked. I bow with reverence to people who have successfully implemented "cry-it-out" sleep solutions and "let-em-starve" dietary discipline. But I am an intuitive parent and I make choices that optimize my peace of mind.

I Am Swell

2012-01-13T23:24:00.003-05:00

What's in a name? Plenty. Having an uncommon name and an even more uncommon combination of first name and last name, because they originate in different cultures, ensures that I never face any contention for a choice of user name. Except when I am given no choice and is dished out one that is arbitrary and makes no sense at all. Some people must be working really hard behind the scenes to create deliberately bad user names. After several other people's phonetic spin on my user name, I have come up with a sweet anagram for it. Its the title of my post tonight. See if you can come up with something sweeter.

Incidentally, my creative anagram was prompted after a directory search today revealed that I have a namesake where I work. And it is someone I have actually known. And I use known in a very loose sense. When I set up my first free personal e-mail account (happened to be on yahoo), my first name was already taken as a username. So I opted for a creative anagram of it. Which was completely lost on some of my undergrad classmates. Over the long summer, when class was out, it seems two of my classmates poured out their hearts in long e-mails that never made it to me. My namesake, who is some years older than me, had a blast reading them for a bit, and then tried to figure out my real e-mail address by writing back to my classmates. One of whom promptly called me up on the phone to ask if I was playing a prank on him. I never cease to be amazed at some people's overestimation of my prank-playing capabilities, but I digress. So finally my namesake contacted me, explaining what was going on. Quite hilarious, in hindsight. And what a coincidence to have discovered her again after so many years. My first name is so uncommon even in my country of birth, that I have no doubt that there are not two similar aged people as my namesake who have the same first and last name in a completely different part of the world from where the name originated. So its got to be her. What a coincidence! And all because of a name.

The Blog-xperiment

2012-01-12T21:43:00.001-05:00

Okay, I am ready to give up the whole "reclaim my anonymity" exercise now. I admit that I have been rather naive. Once upon a time, in my days of ignorant youth, I thought I could simply not put my name on my blog or profile and that way no one would ever find out who I was. Right? Wrong! If I could go back in time, I would set up 17 levels of indirection to my blog from any e-mail address that has my real name on it. (Set up a fake e-mail address from the real one, another fake one from the first fake one and so on and then use the last one to set up the blog.) I would use that fake address also to submit to any "blog events" so if the event organizer blogger accidentally uses the name on my e-mail address instead of my profile name, then my identity is not compromised.

Anyway, in the spirit of keeping this fun (for me), I am going back to my regular blogging habits. I promise not to check my blog stats (unless I'm really really really really really bored) or look over my shoulder when I write. I think my new profile introduction clearly makes my point.

Deep breath. I am a blogging addict and I am not in denial. There, that feels much better.

Now that I am not thinking about sheltering my own blog anymore, I turn my thoughts to what kinds of things I can find out about someone else's blog. I looked a little at what free of cost analysis tools I could use to analyze my blog as an outsider. This is not an entirely pointless exercise. If I owned a company wanting to place ads on somebody's site and I wanted to investigate the site's potential and what kind of traffic it draws, what can I find out on my own without relying on the site's own analysis of itself? Here are some of the things I found, there are probably others, but I'm not thinking too hard right now.

According to http://www.websiteinsight.info/millerkitchen.blogspot.com my blog's estimated worth is $37.28 (at a penny for my thoughts, that's a lot of thinking!), and it contains 269 indexed pages on google and 2 indexed pages on bing. I clicked on the icon next to the indexed pages count and holy guacamole! The first few lines of many of the posts I had taken down showed up in all their cached glory. I could also find a whole lot of cached entries on all 3 search engines - google, bing, yahoo (site:url).

Next I wanted to see if I could find out sites that have a link to my blog (search for link:url) and Google found one link on columbus foodie. Bing and yahoo found none.

What about search traffic trends? There were a few sites such as http://www.semrush.com/info/millerkitchen.blogspot.com where I could get some very limited data about it. But it matches the stats I see as a blog owner. The paid reports probably have a lot more detail.

As I found out a whole lot of detail about my blog visitors from what flash version they are running to screen resolution on their display, it made me wonder if there was something I could conceal about myself as a blog visitor. It turns out that if I have a google account and use it for my searches, then some of the information such as my geographical location and my search keywords are not ratted out. Not in individual form, that is. The data is still collected and displayed in aggregate form where it won't be identifiable. Unless I am the only visitor, of course.

I also found that I could reverse lookup my own name from my blog - I am not telling how, though (unless you bribe me with mocha almond fudge ice-cream.) That is a scary thought (not the ice-cream)! Not only could you find blogs from people's names but you could also find people from their blogs. The strange thing was that the reverse lookup came back with a very very old profile from more than 4 years ago. Digital memory dies hard.

Comfort in a bowl

2012-01-08T21:00:00.000-05:00

Lately I have had little exclusive time with A. Except for when she has been sick with all those daycare bugs and I have had to camp out with her all night as her human pacifier. So when the guys made plans to go to a womens' college basketball game with N's friend and friend's father, A did not protest being left out. Instead A was thrilled at the rare opportunity of spending an entire afternoon exclusively with me.

I wanted to make the most of my time with her. I am also exhausted, what with the start of a new cold and my busted wrist. After getting the guys out the door for the game, I wanted to fix a simple late lunch for the two of us girls with little work. I was completely out of ideas and yet craving something to pick me up. And suddenly I remembered those quiet evenings with my own mother after my brother had left for college and my father was gone. It would be just the two of us and my mother would skip elaborate cooking in favor of throwing in some things to boil in the pressure cooker. Usually, just a few ingredients like rice, orange lentils and potato. We would mash it all up together on our stainless steel plates with butter or ghee and chopped up red onion and green chilli pepper. She would talk about her own childhood memories of having the same meal with her grandmother who she grew up with. Of how they did not have butter, but unrefined mustard oil, with the bright yellow color reminding her of soft-cooked egg yolk. I loved hearing her talk about her childhood. It painted an image of an idyllic simple rural life, far different from the noisy bustle of traffic and the vast sea of humanity surrounding the vertical blocks of brick and concrete where I spent my childhood. I liked when my mother used black salt, an odoriferous volcanic rock salt, instead of sea salt. The sulfurous smell reminded me of eggs, too. Occasionally my mother would add to the mash real boiled eggs, which I loved or boiled green papaya, which I disliked. Today, the memory of those meals filled me with comfort, like having arms wrapped around me, and I set out to recreate it with A.

I used rice and orange lentils, but skipped the potato as an adjustment for my insulin-resistance. I used several boiled eggs for a protein boost, in keeping with my current first world circumstances. The green chilli peppers, which unfortunately I did not have, would have made a huge difference but I decided to make do with a few grinds of black pepper instead. I added chopped onions and salted butter, skipping any more extra salt. Comfort food indeed. A sense of safety, community and familiarity all in one bowl. My little A listened with wonder to the stories of my childhood. Perhaps I painted in her mind an exciting picture of a busy urban life in the third world, as different from her own surroundings as my mother's were from mine. I think I also managed to pass down to her a little piece of cultural memory from my great-grandmother.

Picture Update 1/16: I got so nostalgic just thinking about this that a few days later I got myself some Indian chilli peppers from the South Asian grocery store. So now there is a picture to go with this post.

Search Engine Traffic

2012-01-07T23:39:00.000-05:00

For a little while now, I have been watching off and on the search engine traffic to my blog. It all started a few days ago when I wanted to figure out how I could make my most frequently used blog disappear from the first page of google search results for my name. I was trying to do the opposite of what most bloggers do, which is to direct more traffic to their blog. I was trying to unpromote my blog and get less traffic so I would not have to take the painful step of deleting my blog.

One thing is intuitive and obvious. If a link shows up in a search result and it gets clicked on frequently, then it must be what people were searching for, or at least what people thought they were searching for. It makes sense for search algorithms to assign high relevance to that result for the search. But it leaves the algorithm wide open to manipulation, of course, such as with the Santorum search that my co-workers zealously educated me about. How can I manipulate this situation to unpromote my blog? Well, I have a few things working in my favor. First, there are not a lot of people who are searching for my name. Second, there are quite a few other relevant things that show up in the search result, like my linkedin profile, which most people I went to school with will click on first. If I made my facebook profile public, then a lot of people would click on that first, or at least second. (But that might be a whole other can of worms, which I don't want to handle right now.) Which means that the reason my blog started showing up in the results is because a few people have suddenly been clicking on it. I can not make people stop clicking on it, but I can promote the other search results by clicking on them myself or encouraging other people to click on them. So I could search for my own name and click on something that appears after my blog. If I do it enough times, then I can manipulate the system. I can do this single-handedly because of the low traffic to my blog; it wouldn't take a lot of clicking to skew the relevance. As the sudden spurt of people looking for me and clicking on my blog died down, my blog came down to #10, the last result on the first page. The easiest way to push it beyond by one more so it goes on to the second page, is to make a lower ranked link more popular than my blog and the one link I could use to do that easily is my facebook profile. My assumption is that other people searching for me will help the process by clicking on the facebook link for me. Is there another link that everyone I know would be interested in clicking on? Not really. Such is human nature, that I am willing to bet that if people could see my facebook profile, they would. A lot of old friends would rather look at a few pictures of me than read through my 200 posts over 6 years. I cannot say the same about the popularity of my research papers or anything else. Most of my old friends' eyes would glaze over at the mere mention of my dissertation topic, sigh.

I do have other blogs, quite neglected, but they do exist. Those blogs rarely get any traffic, like 3 clicks a month kind of rare traffic. What is different about those blogs and this main blog? I frequently update my main blog. Search is largely content driven. If you have content and maintain content, you will get traffic. Even though the traffic may not be coming from a search on your name, it reinforces your blog's existence and puts it "on the map" so to speak. If there were no traffic coming in to your blog, it would be in a state of limbo and the algorithms which try to infer relevance might forget about your blog. The most effective way to cut off the traffic is to remove the crowd-pulling content. That is, to take popular old posts offline. I did a few experiments around taking selected posts offline, and found that within two days of taking posts offline, the traffic falls off sharply. It may take longer if your blog is highly popular which mine is not, thank goodness! What course of action does this dictate for me? I would have to be a moving target for searches. I can still post, just don't keep the stuff around for too long to be attracting search traffic and clicks that reinforce relevance. So for now, I will be posting and then if the post starts getting search traffic, take it offline. Posts that don't get hits could probably stay around, but I haven't thought about it yet. Maybe someday, I will feel less paranoid about all this but for the moment, I am actually having a lot of fun with this.

Search results apart, what are some other sources of traffic to my blog? People can subscribe to get updates through a few different channels (feeds, atoms, etc.) or type in the URL of my blog. The latter is something that only I would do anyway, plus someone would have to know my posting pattern to directly visit my blog at the right time to read my posts before they are taken offline. I doubt that will happen. As for subscribing, I tried to subscribe to my own blog and saw that the feed shows the first 5 to 10 lines only, not the entire post. So the person reading the feed would have to visit the full post before it gets taken down, which is unlikely. I do need to be extra careful about those first 5 to 10 lines that will remain visible in a feed even after the post is unavailable. I might even exploit this to write completely unrelated things in the first part than in the rest of the post.

All this said and done, there is a lot of magic that I have no idea of. Such as what kind of content and keyword could attract search results. On one of my other blogs, for example, there is a recent interest in one post from people searching for Bengali nursery rhyme Tai tai tai. Bengali must be a dying language and people must not be teaching their children enough nursery rhymes, so my post comes up in the first page of results. But as it is one of my very neglected blogs, I am not concerned about 6 people in the world stumbling upon it once a year. It wont get associated with my name and wont start showing up in search results for my name.

What did I miss? If you are a regular blog reader or a search algorithm savvy friend, and you can think of something that I haven't thought of, let me know.

Disclaimer: I am doing this for fun, not because I am pissed or embarrassed or anything like that. I am trying to figure out how to make my blog anonymous because I think it is possible even if not easy, and I would like to figure out how. I like little challenges like that. You can always set things correctly when you start a new blog and follow some guidelines about not giving your blog URL to people who may not be able to safeguard its anonymity. Sort of like your password (which I have known some people who will give out indiscriminately!) However, if you are blogging about something you really do not want the world to know, such as those bodies buried in your backyard, please do not assume that it will not become publicly known. (Also, please consider turning yourself in to law enforcement authorities, if you are responsible for those bodies in your backyard. )

Remodelling

2012-01-06T17:00:00.001-05:00

The content of this blog is going through a remodel.

It is a minor attempt to beat the clever stupid search algorithms and regain my anonymity as a blogger. Not because I am hiding a deep dark secret, but because I believe I have a right to it. I refuse to be bullied out of blogging by the big bad algorithms. I think sadly about all those tweens and teens signing away their private lives on various social media channels without even realizing it. And I hope that when my own little ones will be that age, I will be able to guide them on safeguarding their privacy while adopting all the cool trendy technology available at their disposal.

It is also an attempt to redefine the purpose of the blog, which has evolved considerably since the beginning. I do not quite have it figured out yet, but know that I want to do something differently. Ich habe zwar keine loesung, bewundere ich aber das problem!

The One Syllable Post

2012-01-05T22:22:00.001-05:00

This Guy Steele speech made me try a post, with words of just one syllable, but for the word "syllable", of course.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8860158196198824415

One. Two. Three. Four.
More more more more.
Ten and ten and ten.
Rest a bit and start once more.
Sweat rolls down my arms and face.
Drips off the tip of my nose.
Sweat out all that rage
Feel the burn from head to toes.

Sweat, sweat, sweat, sweat.
Lets try it one more time.
Feel the burn from head to toe
Till I feel that rage no more.
Till I drop down on the floor.

Not bad for a first try, though it seems more of a song than a post. And I did not need "kvetch". That was fun!

And one more fun speech, but I wont get to the end of it too soon (its 80 mins long).

http://blog.jaoo.dk/2008/11/21/art-and-code-obscure-or-beautiful-code/

Marmalade Spare Ribs

2012-01-01T14:30:00.000-05:00

How do you cook pork spare ribs? Broil with salt and pepper? Smother with a sugar-based sauce? Honey, molasses or bone-sucking barbeque sauce? In an effort to make something different, I scoured the web for pork rib recipes and then decided to make my own. I have been eyeing a jar of Seville orange marmalade that has been sitting in the fridge for a while now and going nowhere. Being an import from France, it lacks the requisite amount of sugar to satisfy more American tastes. So despite the fancy packaging, it has been sitting rejected and forlorn in the very back of the top shelf. While I was feeling adventurous enough to deviate from the standard ribs recipe, I was not quite willing to skip the sugar altogether. So this jar of marmalade seemed perfect. I looked around a bit and rounded up a few more ingredients that might go well with that French delicacy - a sprig of rosemary from my garden, fresh squeezed lemon juice with a generous drizzle of balsamic vinegar, a squirt of soysauce (yeah, not at all French) and a generous amount of grated ginger, garlic and onion. The resulting marinade soaked right through to the thick layer of fat at the bottom (though next time I might trim it off to make momos) and infused the meat with a delectable orange rosemary flavor and a harmonious balance of salt and sweet. More marmalade basted on in the last 10 minutes of baking created a seductively rich sweet glaze. Grind a few peppercorns on top for a kick of spice. Ooh la la, tres sensuelle! Not willing to plate this beauty alongside plebeian mashed potatoes, I whipped up a light mesclun salad with walnuts and fresh mozzarella and a heart-warming bowl of split pea soup. Bon apetit!

Cheese-stuffed Jalapenos

2011-12-31T22:28:00.000-05:00

Peppers filled with cheese, ready for the oven

Cheese-filled peppers, after baking

The sugar-high season is coming to an end. Between six kinds of baked goodies that I merely taste-tested (who can resist the provocative allure of a pan of triple fudge brownies or a peanut butter cookie topped with a Hershey's Kiss) and three holiday parties with their excessively indulgent dessert trays (in a good way, thank you to all my generous hosts and hostesses), my glucose and insulin levels have been going through the roof. It is time to wean myself off the sweets. No gentle step-down, quitting cold turkey is the only sure way for me. And to help with the process, I swing the pendulum of my palate to the other extreme with fiery hot indulgences that are no less addictive, at least to those with an acquired taste for masochistic heat.

How does that ever work, you ask? Doesn't spicy food make you crave even more sweet? No, it doesn't. Its like when you have a bad case of the giggles, and if you are like me, you have them quite often. You start with a little snicker at a highly inappropriate time and it keeps building up inside you, spilling out through the cracks and crevices of your composure, threatening to explode into a loud uproarious laughter unless you can quickly and effectively stifle it. What do you do at those times? Think of something a little less funny, and then something a teeny bit funny and then something not funny at all so that your imminent guffaw dies down to a mere chuckle? Every obsessive compulsive laughaholic (my spellcheck and my high school english teacher just died of shame as I typed that word) knows - and mind you, I am not saying that I am one - the sure way to deal with such a situation. You delve into your memories and/or your imagination for something so painful it would suck the joy out of three generations of anyone sitting within a 10 ft radius of you, like a dementor's kiss. Seventeen angry bears chasing you, bamboo splinters being driven under your nails, having to accompany your extremely garrulous cousin-in-law's girlfriend to a pedicure appointment, being stranded on Mars with no sunscreen...you get the idea. Spicy heat has a similar effect on your taste buds. It burns off all your sensations of sweet making you immune to that addiction. If you can go for a full day without putting anything sweet inside you, you have won. It gets exponentially easier the next day. Not going hungry and eating more protein helps too, but my proteinaceous (okay, spellcheck, you got a better word for me?) recipes will have to wait for a future post. A final note of warning to fellow hot pepper aficionados - you wont be able to stop at one or two so don't make a big trayful.

Ingredients:
1 tbsp edible oil of any kind OR food-safe gloves
6 jalapeno peppers
3 oz cheese (I used a mix of leftover cheddar, muenster and jack. Almost any kind will do, just use something you like)

Method:
Start by rubbing oil generously on your hands or putting on your gloves. This will prevent the natural oil from the peppers from getting on your skin; otherwise it wont be easy to wash off the "heat" from your hands. Slice each pepper in half by first letting the pepper "sit" on a flat surface to determine how you want to slice it. You will want the sliced halves to sit without tilting to one side. Otherwise the cheese, when melted, will flow out of them. Carefully remove seeds and pith from inside each half - this is where the gut-damaging heat lies. Roughly chop up the cheese and fill the pepper halves. Bake in a preheated oven at 375 F for 15 to 20 minutes until the cheese is hot and bubbly and the peppers look somewhat roasted.

Masala Tilapia

2011-12-29T22:47:00.001-05:00

Whenever I crave a taste of the land where I was born, I resort to some authentic masala mix. There is nothing authentic about the premixed boxes of spices but they are a lot more authentic than my fusion cooking. The food I cook is authentically ethnic enough for my own little family but whenever anyone from a first-generation immigrant family tastes my cooking, they ask me a lot of questions about my recipe. Nothing I cook is true to any traditional recipe, I did not even cook until my second year of grad school far away from my childhood home. Its a matter of availability of ingredients and improvisation, and a delicate balance of creativity and convention. Cooking for me is both an art and a science. I eyeball a few recipes to infer some basic rules and then let my creativity run loose. But enough with eccentric introductions, let me present today's lunch recipe for masala tilapia.

Today I am indeed missing what I left behind a long time ago and craving a taste from my place of birth. As much as food can fill that void, this recipe hit the spot.

Ingredients:

4 tilapia fillets
1/4 medium lemon
2 tsp chana masala powder (or other premixed boxed masala)
1/2 tsp crushed black pepper
salt to taste
2 tsp extra virgin olive oil

Method:
Rinse tilapia fillets and pat dry with paper towels. Squeeze the juice of the lemon quarter onto the fillets. Rub the masala, pepper and salt on to the fillets and let sit for 10 minutes. Drizzle oil over fillets and bake in a preheated oven at 350 F for 20 minutes until tilapia flakes easily with a fork.

Empathy

2011-12-28T20:11:00.001-05:00

A whole week of vacation with the kids now takes on much more meaning than the two years I spent at home with them, because now I know that all too soon in a matter of days I have to go back to work again. I am taking every chance to hold them and hug them, play with them and talk to them.

On workdays it seems like I see N and A for only a couple of hours, and that time is spent in directing them to the next task - getting dressed, mealtime, homework - in an assembly line leading to the next destination of daycare/school or bed. But now I can slow down and indulge them with saying "yes" to ten more minutes of playtime, dance with them to one more song before dinner or read them one more story before bedtime.

I am very happy and relieved to see them venturing away from my side with confidence, going further and further each time, esp. A who has been having a hard time adjusting to her daycare. Yet there is that slightest tinge of something I can not quite explain when they do not want or need me to do for them some little thing that I have always been doing for them. I can not help but wonder, if I still hold the same place in their hearts as when I was available on-demand to rough and tumble with them in their boisterous moments, snuggle and cuddle with them in their tender moments and administer endless all-powerful all-healing magical mommy kisses on all their boo-boos.

Today, when N and I played a game of Monopoly Jr., he won, with just a little bit of help from me. He was happy, he gets what "winning" is. But the next moment, he looked towards me with concern and said "Oh , but now you have no money." "No, I have none" I replied, a little surprised and a little amused by his concern. He immediately split his stack of fake money into two parts and held one out to me. "Here, Ma, you can have mine." This little act of empathy touched my heart, made my eyes moisten and reassured me in a way that no words could have. Life flows on like an unstoppable tsunami that, most days, I have no control over. Yet somehow everything will turn out just right.

Chicken and Greens

2011-12-27T11:57:00.000-05:00

I have not written much about food lately. Most of my cooking happens when the sun is barely up, or late in the evening after sunset. So even though I have been whipping up scrumptious platters in a time-crunch and been packing spectacular bento boxes that have earned me the reputation of a gourmet chef at N's school, I have not been capturing pictorial proof of these creations. Now that I have a whole week off from work, I am making the proverbial hay while the literal sun shines - photographing food in natural light. Even when the sky is overcast like today, the soft diffuse light filtering through the window shows off my culinary creations much better than any combination of all my indoor spotlights, diffuse lights and flash. Featured today is loochi, lentil fry and my improvised recipe for chicken and greens. An impatient hand eagerly reaches in even as my culinary model romances the camera. And the photo shoot went downhill from there.

This recipe for chicken and greens is a great way to use up leftover chicken. It is also a quick-fix dinner on a busy weeknight if you have some cooked chicken on hand. Like most of my improvisations, it is also a very forgiving recipe that does not rely on precision of ingredient measurements or time. Serve it over rice or with wedges of flatbread.

Ingredients:

1 Tbsp tomato paste
1/4 cup water
1 Tbsp oil for cooking
1 medium onion, grated
2 cloves of garlic, grated
1 inch ginger root, grated
1 tsp cumin powder
1 tsp coriander powder
1/2 tsp turmeric powder
1/2 tsp paprika, optional
1 cup baby spinach (could be substituted by other greens, such as, kale, mustard greens, etc.)
2 cups bite-sized chunks of cooked chicken (I used a mix of white and dark meat)
1/2 cup packed cilantro leaves, chopped
1/2 tsp crushed black pepper (or cayenne pepper or red chilli powder, if you like it hot)
salt to taste

Method:

In a small bowl, stir the tomato paste in the water to a uniform consistency and set aside. Heat oil in non-stick frying pan or skillet. Add onion, garlic, ginger, cumin, coriander, turmeric and paprika and fry over medium high heat for about 5-7 minutes, till the mixture comes together as a somewhat thick paste. Add cayenne pepper at this point if using, followed by the baby spinach, chicken and tomato paste mixed with water. Stir up the contents of the pan so the spice mixture and sauce infuse the chicken, the spinach wilts a little and the excess water evaporates creating a dry consistency, about 3 minutes. Finally, mix in cilantro, pepper and salt and turn off the heat.

This dish is best eaten within a few hours of being prepared. If you must store and reheat later, skip the spinach and cilantro; the greens wont look too appetizing when reheated.

Onion, ginger and garlic can be processed together in a food processor to cut down preparation time.

A Day Of Vacation

2011-12-26T09:00:00.000-05:00

I woke up to the fragrance of burnt oatmeal. What a divine feeling! I kid you not. Lying awake in bed and staring at the ceiling with the smell of burnt oatmeal wafting through the air is truly divine.

First, it means that I have my olfactory senses back again. After three miserable weeks of having my olfactory system straitjacketed, I have a new appreciation for the often overlooked taken-for-granted sense of smell. Second, it means someone else is in charge of breakfast this morning. That in itself is such a restful thought. Today I am not making breakfast and packing lunches and snacks while its still dark outside. Third, there is a minor crisis going on downstairs and I have not been called upon to intervene. My three direct reports are competently handling whatever has come up, or in this case, boiled over.

I have been given a very generous entire day of complete and utter vacation, to do anything I want to or nothing at all. I could plan my entire spring garden, except that it might never get planted for lack of time. I could spend the whole day shopping, except that I hate shopping. I could write 24 posts for TriangleMommies and be covered for the entire year ahead, except that I do not have 24 bright ideas to write about. I could take an hour long shower, paint my nails and drive around aimlessly listening to my music, except that would increase my carbon footprint. I could play N's new video game with N, or show A all the things she can do with her new remote control car, except that that is what I would've done if I were not on a "mommy vacation". I could brainstorm about all the ways I could use a day of doing anything I want to and then do nothing at all. What would you do, if you had a full day of vacation from your mommy duties?

Adding "non-vegetarian" labels

2011-12-25T23:00:00.001-05:00

My earlier attempt at correcting the mistaken notion of me being vegetarian was half-hearted. Recently, this came up again where a blog reader got the impression that I am vegetarian. This time I am making a more whole-hearted effort to dispel that myth by creating the labels "meat" and "chicken" in addition to the "seafood" label I have used before for some of my non-vegetarian recipe posts. Because I am combing through my old posts anyway, adding the new labels do not incur additional overhead. Nevertheless, it makes me wish that blogger had better support for label management - I should be able to select posts from my list of all posts and apply label X to all of them.

Update: Oh yippee, blogger DOES support selecting posts and applying labels to them in one step.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-24T00:00:00.000-05:00

Tin Foil Hat

2011-12-22T22:00:00.000-05:00

Hello there, Stranger.

When I started my blog, I was careful to not have my real name show up on my blog and kept private any identifying information on my profile. Over the years, I became lax and shared my blog url on food allergy and mommy support groups and forums where no one knew who I really was. I participated in a few themed blog events where a few people inadvertently shared my real name linked to my blog posts. But every now and then, I searched for myself to check that my blog could not be traced to my name.

But all that was in the past. Recently I threw all caution to the wind and eagerly joined the newest social network without checking on the implications of that action. Quite unlike my usual self. But what has been done can not be undone. As a consequence, some meta data seems to have become associated with my blog that caused my blog to start appearing in the search results for my real name. (I have been told that my blog appeared in the search results for my name in the summer, just that I did not know it because I only ever checked the first 2 or 3 pages of results. Also, my blog does not appear on search results for any of the other search engines I have tried, so I am not even convinced that my blog was always associated with a search on my name.) Less than two months ago, my blog moved up to the last result on the first page (#10) on my browser. A couple of weeks ago, it crept up to #8. And then, astonishingly, a week ago it shot up to #2. Really? Suddenly, I wished I knew more about how the relevance of my blog to the search terms was being determined. Or at least, who was searching for what when they discovered my blog. So I turned to the stats page on my blog, something I had never cared to look at before. Unfortunately, the data is very limited and does not provide the granularity I would have liked, but here are some interesting bits I got.

(1) In the last month, 4 keyword searches on my name

have directed traffic to my blog.

(2) In the entire history of my blog's existence since 2007, there have been less than 16 keyword searches on my name

that have brought traffic to my blog. Keywords searched less frequent than 16 were not shown, so 16 is probably an overly inflated upper bound. I doubt that any traffic was led to my blog by a search on my name prior to my joining the social network.
(3) The recipe for rice flour bread is the all-time favorite and has driven the most amount of traffic to my blog over all time and continues to do so as recently as this week. So I searched for rice flour bread myself and was amused to find my post sharing the first page of results with venerable dignitaries such as Gluten Free Goddess.

(4) In the entire history of my blog, Windows and IE have driven the most traffic to my blog. But in the last month, Mac OS X, Safari and Firefox have driven the most traffic to my blog. Most notably, in the last week, Apple PubSub is in #1 place having driven more than half the traffic to my blog. Apparently, Apple-PubSub is the identification provided by the feed reader that is built into Safari on Mac OS X.

(1) and (2) support my idea that joining the social network was what led to the very recent phenomenon of my blog being discoverable through a search on my real name.

My first impulse on realizing that my blog was now wide open to all people who actually know me in real life without voluntary consent from me was that I had to take down my blog. Then the voice of reason prevailed and I settled for a milder course of action - editing some of the previous content - an ongoing tedious effort punctuated with late night holiday baking; but I have already made a lot of progress and anticipate being done before the new year. Truth be told, over the years, I have grown rather attached to my blog - I enjoy spontaneously hammering out my thoughts without proof-reading or editing. So I am keeping my blog.

Maybe I will start writing stuff that is much more boring than the boring stuff I write now. Or write completely outrageous or outlandishly funny works of fiction. Or better still, interlace fact with fiction so the blog is purely a reflection of my literary interests and not some kind of window into my persona. Which it never was anyway. And while I'm at it, let me cover my blog with a tin foil hat, too.

Two early New Years' resolutions

2011-12-17T00:04:00.001-05:00

I am getting a headstart on my New Years' resolutions. With a few weeks to go still, I have a couple of them chalked out around weight and exercise.

My online health assessment quiz reveals that I need to gain some weight to reach my range of healthy BMI and recommended percentage of body fat. Strangely it seems that I was at the very bottom of that range (104-130 lb) two months ago and have somehow managed to shed pounds at an alarming (for me) and enviable (for many others) rate in the last two months or so. So my first resolution for next year will be to pack on the lost pounds. I sense a collective eye roll from those of you that will be resolving the reverse, so I recommend you go watch the movie Thinner to understand my predicament. The catch, there is always one, is I have to do it in a healthy way with increasing my intake of healthy calories and not the easy cheat way of Supersize Me. I am not allowed to jeopardize my already problematic insulin levels.

The second resolution is to start a regular exercise program - not to lose weight, of course, but to develop more muscle and tone the ones whose existence I discovered the morning after my recent gym evaluation. This partly has to do with a conversation I had with the gym guy that did my assessment before conferring on me the legal right to mess with heavy gym equipment. Now Mr. Gym Guy had no sense of humor. Halfway into the evaluation, he assumed that I was showing off because I chose to do the male version of pushups instead of the female version. The faithful followers of my blog know that this assumption is completely untrue because you remember the overly dramatic sport injury I sustained in my living room last February trying to beat my formidable 6 ft 4 wall of muscle Beau at Kinnect Sport. It was really bad at the time and still makes it painful for me to kneel on my left knee. Of course, Mr. Gym Guy did not know that, so he got back at me on the next part of the assessment where he "forgot" to tell me that I could stop doing the abdominal crunches (the target was as many as possible in 3 minutes) and had me going for some extra time until I suddenly noticed that he had turned off the stopwatch. He also assumed that I was the gym-type that would eagerly start pumping iron and running marathons on the treadmill the very next day. A completely ridiculous assumption based on the first New Years' resolution I just described, as you can easily tell. So when I turned up more than a week later to do my frou-frou non-sweaty non-calorie-burning yoga/dance routine, he demanded to know if this was the first time I was coming in after that evaluation and why the heck I hadn't come in earlier. Excuses about my cold did not seem to convince him and he is now going to hold me accountable for showing up "regularly". I'd rather show up a few times a week than subject myself to another round of interrogation from a guy that has an uncanny resemblance to my very scary PE and martial arts teacher from 8th grade. It will give me the chance to play my new car radio with its windshield vibrating bass (I had no idea what I was missing with my 10+ year old car!) for an extra 7 minutes of driving sans kiddos. Plus a free onsite gym is one of the perks that I did not have with my previous job so I am not going to let that part of the benefits package go to waste.

Not quite common remedies for a common cold

2011-12-14T19:13:00.000-05:00

I have been remiss in my TriangleMommies blogging responsibilities with being sick along with everyone else in my house. So in the spirit of making lemonade when life is raining lemons, I am going to write one for TM about the common cold. Or rather about home remedies for it.

Suffering three consecutive colds in three consecutive weeks can become quite noticeable in circles above the age of ten. So yours truly has been receiving advice from well-meaning friends and family on treating her symptoms with home remedies. Here is a compilation of advice in no particular order. I cannot vouch for several of these, not having tried them myself. But the people that told me about these seem to think they help.

(1) Honey. A teaspoon of it dissolved in a cup of warm water soothes the throat.
(2) Lemon juice. Squeezed from a real lemon. Squeeze a quarter of a lemon into a cup of warm water. The Vitamin C sure cannot hurt.
(3) Mustard oil. Rubbed onto the soles of the feet before going to sleep. Do not use your fancy satin sheets, oil stains are going to be hard to get off them.
(4) Black pepper. Spike your food with generous amounts. Other spicy foods might work too.
(5) Chamomile. In your tea. And in your bathwater.
(6) Neti pot. Can be found at places like Whole Foods or online. Its a little pot with a long straight spout. You fill the pot with water, stick the spout into one nostril and tilt your head to inundate your sinuses. Everything gets flushed out through the other nostril. It will feel like voluntary waterboarding, but provides instant decongestion nirvana without the use of meds.
(7) Sleep. This is a no-brainer, but often overlooked. Especially good after number (5).

Hundsmiserabel

2011-12-06T18:25:00.001-05:00

Have you noticed how some words that seem to express exactly what you want to say do not exist in all the languages you might know? Like the word Hundsmiserabel. Its a word in German, one of the four languages I speak reasonably well. If you look up a translation to English, you will note that it means "lousy" or "rotten". But there is something about the way it rolls off my tongue and the mental image it conjures up of a scrawny lonely street dog out in the wet and cold howling its complaints up at the sky, that whenever someone asks me now "How are you doing?" I am tempted to answer "Ich fuehle mich hundsmiserabel". But I can't think of an equivalent way of saying it in English (or in Bengali to my mother on the phone) and saying anything else would be an approximation of how I really feel. So instead I smile and say "Fine, thank you." Or "Good. How are you?"

Hundsmiserabel sums up exactly how I am feeling. It started as a little cold in my throat and invited his two big brothers to stay downstairs in my bronchioles and upstairs in my sinuses. While my lungs feel like they are being squeezed tight depriving me of air, my sinuses feel like they are about to explode my skull splattering mucus and bits of brain all over the back of my chair. Is this what our toilet feels like after A and N empty entire rolls of papers into it? Clogged, gurgling, threatening to overflow, with no relief and nowhere to go.

Yet life goes on. And so must I. I wear more dressed-up clothes to make myself believe I am feeling wonderful, wear pink clips to hide the fact that I am too tired to wash my hair. I find myself some quiet time to meditate in the yoga room at the gym after a long tiring weekend of constantly nursing one sick child while reading to another sick child. I stay strong, I stay determined to pull through, and when I get the chance I put my head down and forget the world. Thank you, world, for not forgetting me and listening to me whine.

Birthday Wish

2011-11-14T22:13:00.001-05:00

My birthday calls for a post. So here I am flushing out my stream of thought before turning in to sleep.

My fondest birthday memories are of the "treasure-hunts" I did on the mornings of my birthday from when I could read to when I left home for college. My father started this tradition where he would put a little note under my pillow which would give me a clue for finding the next note. And so the trail of notes would go on for a bit and lead me to "the birthday present". And the clues would follow a specific theme of some sort and tell a little story. I hardly remember what the presents were, the fun and excitement was in the process of discovering my little treasure.

My father has moved on to his journey beyond life. But he has left me with a wealth of beautiful memories and life lessons. Just like the birthday treasure hunt, happiness and excitement has always come into my life in the form of a journey of discovery rather than in attaining an ultimate goal. I hope I will continue to learn and discover even as I age (gracefully, I hope!). That is my birthday wish today.

My little piece of heaven

2011-11-05T17:38:00.000-04:00

17:00. After maneuvering several precarious U-turns and weaving in and out of traffic heading home from work, I finally have N and A packed and strapped into their car seats after daycare and afterschool. After a long day of "being good", N and A are letting it all out -- a contest to see who can scream louder, a song N made up to tease A (met with severe reprimand from me, of course), all the "why"s and "what is"-es that I try to answer with a straight face.

17:30. We are finally home. Couch cushions are being tossed, entire baskets of toys are getting dumped out, a box of tissue has been discovered and bits of tissue go flying. (I have limited each kid to waste no more than three paper tissues.) And through all this chaos, I am valiantly preparing dinner -- washing, peeling, chopping, double burners going simultaneously, pressure cooker hissing, pans are sizzling, the air is fragrant with fresh cooked Jasmine rice.

18:00. Beau has called to say he is running late after his meetings, we should get started without him, but he will help with the clean-up. I am disappointed and really want to wait, but the kids are hungry. So we are preparing to sit down to dinner anyway.

18:15. I have the kids seated at the table. I have even allowed them to bring a toy each to the table. (I am tired and don't want to pick any battles right now.) As we are about to start eating, the garage door rumbles and moments later, Beau comes racing in. The kids are excited, hurried kisses are exchanged and we finally settle down to the only meal of the day we can share together.

18:30. A moment of calm. The kids are talking about their day in-between bites of food. Beau has not even changed yet, but is playing along. Our eyes meet across the table and we smile. I look around at my little family. I want to close my eyes and capture this moment so it will last for the next 24 hours. The most important part of my day. My little piece of heaven.

The hardest thing I have to do...is let go

2011-10-20T10:51:00.001-04:00

Today my littlest child, who is not so little anymore, started daycare. I knew that this would be, by far, the most challenging thing on my way to going back to working full-time outside the home.

The last three years, I have kept her close to me and in our home. Other than the two months in the NICU after her very early arrival, she has always been taken care of in our home. And for about two years now, I have been the one closest to her and she has spent more time with me than with anyone else. Her starting daycare full-time is harder on me than on anyone else. So I gave myself some extra time to adjust to the change and decided to get her started a few days before I start going to work.

We visited her class a couple of days ago so she would be familiar with it on her first day there. She warms up slowly and cautiously to new people and new surroundings. During our visit, she was shy; timid almost. She would not leave my side or talk to anyone. The teacher asked if she was excited about coming to school and she shook her head "no". Silently, my heart broke into two. But today was a different story altogether.

She helped me put things into her bag for daycare. Blanket, check. Soft toy, check. Extra set of clothes, check. She even carried her bag herself. Proudly. She asked me again and again to tell her about the little girl who had spoken to her during our visit. We arrived right as circle time was starting and she quickly went and seated herself when the teacher invited her to join in. She sat, crisscross applesauce, straight back and looking and feeling important to be in "school". (For about a couple of months now, she has been watching older brother going to school every day and accompanying me to pick him up from school.) In my heart, she is a fragile three-year-old. In her mind, she is a grown-up today. I had taken time for a long cuddle with her this morning. I gave her a quick kiss goodbye and left her classroom. I lingered a while watching her through the two-way mirror, entirely for my own sake. Her teacher suggested I should call in the middle of the day to check on how she was doing, if I feel anxious. I hope I will make it to the afternoon without having to call.

The "Back to Job" mother's checklist

2011-10-10T20:56:00.001-04:00

Almost two years ago I decided that it would be best for me and my family if I took two or three years off from a full time job and be home with the children. Now with my older child starting Kindergarten and my younger one eager to make new friends and playmates, the time seemed right for me to go back to a paying job again. I avoid the words "working mom" and "going back to work". If the last 2 years have taught me anything, it is that a working mom is the only kind of mom that there is. The transition back to a full-time job with pay is going to come with a few challenges of its own. So I made myself a checklist of high priority things I really care about. When I worked a full-time job before, I had much higher standards for myself. The past two years have taught me to let go and accept the existing state of many things that are not essential to my happiness. Needless to say, things like spotless kitchen countertops, co-ordinated outfits for the kids or neatly folded laundry are not going to make it to my checklist. (Why did I not know that two years ago?!) So here is my checklist: (1) Hug my kids before I send them off to school and daycare for the day and report to work. (2) Hug my kids when I pick them up from after-school and daycare. (3) Kiss my kids goodnight every night and tell them how much I love them. (4) Spend quality time with Beau at least once a month. (5) Take five minutes each day to close my eyes, stop thinking about everything I need to do and breathe deeply.

My Garden in Fall

2011-10-03T23:15:00.002-04:00

A while ago, I shared my summer gardening experience. At the time, I promised to report back on how things went, esp. with my newest venture of growing (and therefore, also cooking) okra. Now the time has come to look back at the lessons learned this summer and look forward to gardening plans for fall and winter.

Let me start with the stuff that went really well - the strip of flowers edging our front lawn. Lots and lots of flowers bloomed throughout the summer and are continuing to bloom. I do not water them at all. They have done great with natural precipitation, even in the hottest driest parts of July and August. What is more, I have second generation zinnia and marigold plants popping up all over the largely dead lawn. That could be a good or bad thing, depending on how you look at it. If I had a large area I wanted to cover with flowers that would sustain themselves and reseed from year to year, this is a great thing. If I want to keep the garden contained within its boundaries, then maybe not such a good thing. Since this is the work of the birds spreading seeds everywhere, I do not even know how I would prevent that from happening.

My stand of okra did well too. They thrived in the heat and grew in spite of neglect. Other priorities took over and I did not keep up with watering them regularly. Still I am enjoying a moderate harvest. I planted a bit late this year, as an afterthought, when nothing else fitted into the gardening scheme. Next year I will start them earlier, so the plants can start flowering and fruiting earlier and last longer. I am guessing that soon the weather will turn too cool for okra. And last but not the least, I am amazed by the okra blooms! I walked out into the garden one day after a long break from gardening and wondered what those beautiful flowers were doing in the veggie patch. I could almost grow okra for just its flowers. That said, I did find a way of cooking the vegetable in a non-slimy kid-approved (at least, by mine) fashion which does not involve breading or deep frying. The recipe is given at the bottom of this post. I also found a "palatability test" for okra cooked this way, whether you are growing your own or buying them from the store. If the tapered end snaps easily, then its good. Otherwise, it is going to be too woody. (Maybe the whole okra-eating world already knew about this, but it was new to me!) By the way, even woody okra can be put to use in gumbo, if that is your cup of tea...or soup.

Some of the other things that also did reasonably well were the various herbs - dill, basil, cilantro, parsley - and cherry tomato. But the things that I will never grow again, or at least not for the next two years, are squash or cucurbits of any kind. The plus side is I now can identify and know a lot about the stages in the lifecycle of certain bugs like cucumber beetles, Japanese beetles and squash vine borers.

Looking forward to the cooler weather, I plan on trying to grow cool weather leafy things like spinach and lettuce. Some of the annual herbs that went to seed with the onset of hot weather have reseeded themselves in the last week or so, giving me hopes for a fall garden.

And now for that okra recipe. This is a completely non-gumbo recipe, designed to get rid of the slime factor in cooking okra. (If you have no problems with the sliminess of okra, you almost cannot go wrong in cooking it.) Little N commented on how beautiful okra looked, like a flower, pointing to the pentagon-shaped cross-section studded with tiny seeds that I served on his plate. That alone scored the first bite, yay!

Ingredients:
(1) Fresh okra, tender non-woody kind
(2) 2 tsp oil, whatever kind you like to cook with (more or less depending on size of pan)
(3) 1 medium onion
(4) salt and black pepper to taste

Method:
(1) Wash the okra, then dry it as thoroughly as possible on kitchen towels. This is a crucial step to preventing slime in the next step.
(2) Chop the okra into pieces that are about half an inch in length.
(3) Chop the onion finely.
(4) Heat a wide non-stick pan coated with the oil to medium high or high. The amount of okra you cook should be such that it will not crowd the pan and not stack on top of each other, but will lie only one layer thick.
(4) Dump the okra into the hot oil and fry for a few minutes. Then stir to turn most of the pieces over, approximately. Fry for a few more minutes and add the onions. Cook a few more minutes to get the onions cooked.
(5) Season with salt and pepper to taste and turn off the heat.