Aparna’s Blog

This is my entry for the contest by Kitchens of India and Indiblogger. I came to know about the contest from Bhushavali’s blog.

When you have a husband who is a big fan of the ready-to-eat foods available in the market, it is inevitable that you end up tasting the food offered by most of the brands since your kitchen is bound to be full of them. We both liked the Vegetable Biriyani masala by ‘Kitchens of India’ the most and it was reserved for those weekend leisurely meals. My husband and I, both novices as far as cooking is concerned, took quite a bit of time to perfect the chapatthi after several attempts with different brands of atta and different proportions of atta and water. Finally it was rotis from Aashirvaad’s atta which satisfied our taste buds. The husband went on to make tasty phulkas too with it!

So, being fans of ITC’s products, the moment I read about ITC’s contest, I got all excited and told my husband, ‘Hey, see! A contest is being organized by our favourite brand. Why don’t we plan for a party for real since you will anyway want to use at least one of ITC’s products if we were to host a party?’ ‘Why don’t we have a get-together with some cousins of ours at our home?’ was the reply. We discussed and came up with a guest list comprising of a good mix of adults and kids.
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The only thing that I hated the most during the time in Singapore.

In the HDB (Housing Development Board) apartments in Singapore, the method of disposing the garbage from your house was to open a door beneath the sink in the kitchen and throw the bag of waste into it. There is a vertical passage that runs through all the floors and every house will have a door to that passage. The garbage from all the houses gets collected in that area and the ground floor has a door to it. The waste is then collected from it by the workers from SembCorp (remember our good old Onyx?).
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The catchy tune appealed to me right in the first listening and it was the only song from Kadal that I was initially listening to. One fine day, it so happened that I listened to it in the presence of Sahana and guess what she did, she started dancing to the tune! From then on, there were several days when you would find the mother and the daughter happily listening to this song on a loop with one, all smiles seeing her daughter enjoying herself and secretly harbouring the hope that she too might become a Rahmaniac and the other, happily smiling and dancing away, innocence and beauty personified.

And how! Feels really, really good to be posting something here. Looks like writing about my love for Madras unleashed the blogger in me once again.

Yes I really do! I have to somehow sacrifice that ‘2-minutes’ of blissful sleep post switching off the alarm in the mornings and try to squeeze in a bit of cooking into my otherwise mundane routine involving just taking bath, having my breakfast and leaving for office.

Back in Singapore, the recent routine was to wake up by 7, see the clock and mutter to self that I should have woken up at least 10 minutes earlier and hurriedly start cutting the vegetables to cook lunch for the husband all the while praying that Sahana shouldn’t wake up in between. But, alas, the always-right Murphy’s law comes into play and exactly on days when I am already way behind schedule, Sahana will wake up crying and my husband will start saying he is already getting late and I, in a state of craziness trying to calm a crying baby and finish off the cooking, will somehow finish the cooking, pack it on time (8 am) or a few minutes behind time and what’s more, even accompany the husband till the end of the road since Sahana’s crying would resume again on seeing her dad leave her and go. That one hour in the morning would be a crazy time. The feeling would be similar to having the deadline of having to catch the bus to office. Oh I miss that feeling too nowadays since I come by car.

Coming back to the topic, I thought I should tell you about my cooking skills, or the lack of it. Before the Singapore stint, I would have hardly cooked for a maximum of 10 days in my entire life! So having to suddenly do full-fledged cooking on my own meant having to eat food that didn’t taste good! But, as the days passed, my cooking slowly improved and I had finally graduated to becoming a decent cook with some dishes even turning out to be really tasty.

But now that I am back in Madras, it has already been two months since I cooked! I don’t know the state in which my cooking skills are now.

A nice, long, fast drive coupled with Rahman’s music is THE best thing that can drive away the blues caused by a severe cold and head ache that refuses to go away even after a week since its onset and made all the more worse due to a disturbed sleep during the night.

The weekend before last saw me realizing yet again how, to me, there is no place like our home – Madras. I read this article in The Hindu’s Sunday magazine about how comforting it feels when consulting your family doctor and even as I read ‘thanking my stars I live in Chennai’, I felt like joining in saying ‘me too’.

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