Pinku-Enchanted Life

We shifted from one flat to another the past weekend. While we are just a stones throw away from the previous flat yet shifting meant digging out things from all nooks and crannies and turning all parts of the home upside down quite literally. It is an exhausting task in most households and in ours more so with the husband’s ability at hoarding all sorts of paper memorabilia, our combined love of books, music and films and the fact that we both do not have a parental home where some of our childhood stuff could be kept. Instead lots of things from both homes are kept with us as they have too many sentiments attached and I find it very difficult to throw them away. So after four days of sorting through piles and piles of stuff, continuously sneezing thanks to the dust and body ache I wanted to eat something different and feel a little sane. Since it was also a work day and time was of the essence I decided fried rice with lots of veggies and thick chicken gravy would have to suffice. A

Growing up in Faridabad an industrial township adjacent to Delhi what kept us rooted to our traditions and our culture while living far away from Bengal was the occassion of Dugga Pujo. Studying in a convent saying Hail Mary and knowing Our Father all faded in the background when those special five days of the year came by. Suddenly we were as bengali as our cousins in Kolkata (all Probashis have family in Kolkata). Pujo those days started on Sashti evening with Anandomela - where all the bengali aunties came with basket loads of delicious, home cooked delicacies and we children drove ourselves into a frenzy running from one stall to another and pestering our parents for more money to buy yet another plate of the fast disappearing goodies. All of these memories came flashing back yesterday as a colleague from work and I alongwith hubby set up our stall at our local Deepanwita Durga Pujo in Dwarka.  Rushing from work where a last minute meeting cancelled our plans of sneaking out early

Walking out of office for a quick lunch and a few laughs with a girlie gang is a complete life saver when you feel life isn’t taking you the places you were promised as part of the grown up deal.  And so it happened that four of us escaped for a quick lunch last week – the destination Dana Choga a restaurant with a long history of feeding Gurgaon people delicious, Punjabi food in a no nonsense straight to the tummy way. Accompanied by giggles and gossip we landed up at the Atul Kataria Chowk outlet and were lucky enough to grab the last empty table before the place completely filled up with the lunch crowd. The fact that the place was packed on a hot weekday said something good about the food. Now two of us are Non-Veg eaters with a vengeance, one sways in between and the fourth is a strict vegetarian and this means that we always end up ordering too much. After much asking around for each other’s preferences we settled on a crisp honey chilli lotus stem and some soft drinks as starter

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 tomatoes w