Tomb raider T-Rex battle - Tuesday toot

Yay!!!!! I guess this is may not be something to toot about unless you happen to be soo computer (un)savvy like me!!

For the past 4 months I have been trying to get away from the jaws of the T-Rex, from the Lara croft Tomb raider anniversary edition game ,to no avail..

But today, I cracked it..after finally seeing the directions that appear simultaneously and not panicking and pressing all the buttons at once!!!!!!!!



My nearly two-year old, also realised that the lady did not get stuck between the bobo's (in her language) teeth and started jumping up and down, clapping.

SO, I am now stuck with the next part.

In case any of you want to know what i am talking about, check the link.

Leftovers overhauled - Kothu Porotta

Porottas are sometimes the best things to find as leftovers. Unless it is Pizza all cold after sitting in the fridge atleast 8 hours. The combination of piping hot coffee(black) and almost frozen pizza slices is my special favourite....

Don't give me that look.

By the way, before I started salivating about pizza, I was talking about porottas. Good old Kerala porottas, not to be mistaken for Parathas, paranthas etc..

Just heat a frying pan, add 1 tsp of oil, saute 1 onion, 2 green chillies, 1 tomato, saute, add a dash of soy sauce and tomato sauce, 2 eggs, scramble well, add 2 porottas distinegrated by hand and then finally add some crushed pepper.

It is amazing.

I sometimes also make nice and spicy omelettes, heat the whole porottas and have Mott-porott a-la Mohan uncle.He was an old friend and colleague of our dad and one of our sweetest neighbors in Dukhan. Sadly,he is no more . He used to love making Mott porott and named it too.

Beans and Potatoes dry (mezhukkupuratti)

Beans - 250 gms
Potato - 250 gms
Onion - 1
Red chillies - 2

Cut beans and potatoes into bit-sized pieces, wash well. Add enough water (just level), add 1/4 spoon turmeric powder and 1 tsp chilli powder, keep on medium and cook till the water is all gone.

In a kadai, heat about 1 tsp of oil, add finely chopped onion, fry well. now add the the red chillies and the beans and potatoes, add salt to taste.

Great combination with tomato curry and rice.

The simplest dal curry - Mulakoshyam to some!

This is yet another one for B (Gooey Kablooie)

Thur dal - 1 cup washed well
Onion - 1 Sliced
Tomato - 1 sliced
Green chillies - 3 slit
Red chilli powder - 1 tsp
Turmeric - 1/4 tsp

Just put all the ingredient into a pressure cooker with 2 glasses of and cook till 3 whistles. Wait till the steam goes. open the lid, add salt to taste. Temper with

Curry leaves - a handful
oil - coconut oil preferred - 1 tsp

Voila! it's ready. Chuck in a potato to make it thicker. When we add ash pumkin to the same dish, we call it Mulakoshyam. Dunno if it is spelt right, or pronounced right either!!!

If you fry a clove of garlick or seed onions cut into pieces in the oil and temper it, the smell and flavour is amazing.

Puli Chammandi - A simple tribute to Mattemma

This is my entry for JIHVA FOR LOVE

Mattemma is short for matte amma in malayalam, literal translation meaning the `other' mother. She was my maternal grandma's aunt.

She was widowed at a very early age, and shortly my grandma lost her mom. So she was brought up by mattemma.

Tall, slim, with salt and pepper hair and golden skin, she was the kind of person every child would dream of having at home. She lived in my mom's ancestral home and made all our vacations the most heavenly days.

Thinking back, those days we were interested only in the amazing variety of sweet and savoury snacks that she would provide. The normal food items were never very interesting, though I remember everyone raving about her food.

She used to make jackfruit, banana, tapioca and a wide variety of chips and anytime we passed thru the kitchen, which was often, she would give each of us a handful...then there were sharkkaravaratti, madhura seva...so many types of adas, paayasams, kozhukkatas...oh the list would go on and on...and she would make everything from scratch...

I have joined her many days to put the rice, kondattams, pappads and other things that had to be dried in the sun.

The only leisure time she took was about an hour from around 1 to 2 in the afternoon when she would sit facing the east and read aloud some novel from the weekly magazines. She would start making some snacks for the 4 o'clock tea as soon as she put down the book.

And between tea and dinner, she would help us roast tamarind seeds, jackfruit seeds, onions, tapioca and any other thing we could get our hands on. We were really fascinated with the old wood-stove she used to cook everything on.

Ever since I started cooking, I have been thinking how remiss I had been in not appreciating how great tasting even her simplest dishes were.Just talk about mattemma's cooking, and my dad would start drooling.

So in her memory, I present the simple Puli Chammandi


Imli/tamarind/puli (the type used for sambar) - size of one lemon
Curry leaves - 2 stalks
Green chillies - 3
Red chiilies - 2 (or can use 1/2 tsp chilli powder)
Ginger - 1/4 inch
Small onions - 5

Grated coconut - 3/4th cup
salt - to taste(rock salt would add to the taste)

Grind it so that the texture is just short of fine.And add as little water as possible. In the end, she would just roll it into a big ball and place it on a steel plate.Every cooking member in our family has made puli chammandi, but the taste is never the same.

Alas! I cannot produce the kind of taste where the chammandi is ground on the stone.But it is not too bad since my husband has also acquired a taste for this.


I remember leaning against her and rocking to the rythm of her grinding chammandi on the stone..imagine the endless patience it takes to make chammandi for a housefull of people while having a 10 year-old lean on!


And so thank you to Indira who started JFI, Jigyasa and Prathibha for giving us this opportunity for a tribute . Salutations to Pedatha for leaving a great legacy.

Window hanging

I am endlessly fascinated with Batik, unfortunately have not had any chance to do anything about it.

And another thing I absolutely love is mural art. So for this home-improvement excercise of mine, I decided to have a faux-batik border with something to remind me of mural art...

I love the bold colours. I have drawn Krishna and Rukmini, and the lovely clouds with the bold blue borders and a lotus.

Since I was using poplin to draw on , I used fabric colours. I am not very happy with the end results, but an active baby around trying to pull whatever she could reach, it took me longer than expected.

I will be making a few adjustments later on, but for now, I think this is okay to cover up the window.

My attempt at Home improvement - Window

Speaking of view from windows....

There was one window in the house that needed a cover-up very badly...Under an ancient air-conditioner,with the wires hanging from it looking out into the balcony, providing a view of the washing line and some things stored for repair...

I guess Nate Berkus would have extended the curtain rod over the balcony door to cover the window too. My friend who stays in a similar flat has got her window done that way and it looks really elegant..

But as this is not our home, and we are just tenants,making a change was not an option...

Ohhhh..did I mention that this is the first thing anyone would see when they entered our home? yeah this infamous window is in our living room....

So I did what I could to make that window look interesting with the resources at hand.... and between caring for my baby.I would say that it fell a bit short of my expectations, but I just wanted to cover it up ASAP. Maybe at a later date I will get round to modifying it. You can see the result for yourself.

Would dearly like your comments on the same.