Pinku-Enchanted Life

 TRAVEL!  In our household the word has magical powers. We consider even the most mundane trip something to look forward to and any hint of anything outstation is always welcomed with glee. Since 2020 though for a variety of reasons our trips as a family have been limited. The last we travelled together was in Oct 2022 for a trip to Dharamshala and Dalhousie which we had to cut short due to unavoidable reasons. This year with temperatures in Delhi often touching 50 degrees, we were hallucinating about the mountains and cooler climes. Not holding a regular job makes the financial scenario very dicey and it made me extremely uncomfortable to spend on what can best be described as an indulgence. The partner however insisted promising that we would stick to a shoe string budget. The look of anticipation the kids gave me eventually made me capitulate.  We had often spotted the Delhi-Kathmandu Bus on the Expressway and wondered what that journey would be like. Quick checks onli...

Some places you visit and then yearn to go back to. Some places your friends in distant cities visit often, swear by and you keep oscillating between what the fuss is all about and wanting to go and check it out for yourself. Lings in Bombay which Knife from Finely Chopped visits quite often has been one such place for me. Since I live in Delhi this has not been an easy thing to accomplish then last year Knife came to Delhi NCR stayed for a few days and reviewed Canton Spice a restaurant at Cyber Hub which happens to be run by the Ling family. This had me excited, now was my chance to try out the Chinese food I have been swooning over long distance. One thing or the other prevented my visiting Canton Spice till the past Monday when I finally got a chance to walk in with a few friends for a on-a-whim dinner plan. The place had a pleasant ambience and it was very non chinese in its décor. What I mean is it didn’t  have red, dragons or frilly lamps. What it did have was a comfortabl...

Dwarka where I live is a big sub city populated by middle to high income families from almost all over India. So it really surprises me why the place has so few 'swear by' eateries to boast of. Every time I think of having a meal to remember, I have to head for South or Central Delhi or towards Gurgaon which in the past few years has come up with quite a few note worthy places. While I do so my hunt for worth mentioning places in Dwarka continue and as often as I can, I try checking out new places in an attempt to figure out nice options within the sub city. One such attempt had led me to Baba Ganooosh - a small eatery in the sector 11 market which had an interesting name. I walked in to find that true to name they do serve Lebanese dishes and hummus, falafal, shwarma, labneh etc were all on the menu. Though limited demand meant the owner who had been a chef in Saudi Arabia had to also offer Chinese and Indian dishes to sustain. Happily I ordered two Shwarma rolls as takeaway a...

A three day weekend, nothing much to do, a hubby who thinks the only vegetable worth putting in his mouth is a potato and my weekly challenge of feeding him some veggies culminated in a Chinese style dish...whose highlight was the amount of vegetables that went into it. It went pretty well with rice and with bread and did its jobs of putting some veggies in the hubby’s tummy, so thought I should share it here as well. I usually do these food experiments and then forget what exactly I had done and then am at a loss when asked to repeat any of it – so am using the blog as a self note as well. Ingredients: For marination: Boneless chicken half kg,   Ginger paste 2 tbsp, vinegar 2 tbsp, soya sauce 2 tbsp and Tabasco 1 tbsp. Mixed all these well and let it rest for   4 hours. 3 medium size onions chopped into big chunks, 1 tbsp garlic, 250 gms each of tomato, capsicum, French beans and carrots, had fine cut the beans and carrots while the capsicum was cut into bigger slices. The t...