I spent the last weekend cleaning up the house. It now looks liveable and fit for human habitation. I should’ve listened to my better half ages ago, when she was telling me that a clean house is the only kind of house worth coming back to at the end of the day. It actually feels good to be home :)
I went one step further and made dinner today. For long (ever since I’ve been married, actually), I have boasted of my latent culinary skills to S, and she has been skeptical of my claims. The only evidence to the contrary that I showed her was on two or three occasions, when I dished out a Spanish Omelette, came up with an impromptu recipe for chicken breast in white sauce (it called for marinating the chicken in port wine for about a couple of hours, which was my major contribution to the recipe), and there was the time when I learnt to make Pongal and Rasam, courtesy S. The odd combination of Pongal with Rasam might sound sacrilegeous to hardcore Tams, but trust me on this – the Rasam is not the usual kind, and goes very well indeed with the Pongal. Heavenly!
Today was different – I was entirely on my own :) My culinary skills are actually not very great, and evidence of this is the unfortunate Volcano Sauce Incident that LG and I were involved with during our bachelor days. (This is a real incident, and is not a parody of the Noodle Incident from Calvin & Hobbes – I shall save the story for another day). There was every chance that the elaborate meal that I’d planned for would come out a disaster, but what ended up on the dinner table was this:
Wholewheat crackers topped with a slice of mozzarella, half a black olive, half a cherry tomato, and julienned basil.
Rice cooked with oregano and basil, combined with olives, sundried tomatoes, yellow capsicum, oregano, thyme and olive oil in a frying pan. A small lump of mozzarella went in as well, which was made to melt and blend well with the rest of the dish to give it a faux risotto-like consistency. Freshly ground pepper in a neat circle on top of the rice, and a cherry tomato with a sprig of basil right in the centre of the peppery ring.
250 ml vanilla ice cream, 200ml coconut milk, 500ml pineapple juice whipped till frothing in the mixer – a quick and dirty pina colada without the ethanol
The high point of the dinner was the pina colada impostor, it tasted just as good as a pina colada from any of the good restaurants that S and I have been to. It took me about an hour to get everything done. The rice was neither a risotto nor herb rice, but something in between. A salsa or some kind of spicy sauce would have set it off well, but I didn’t have the time (or the ingredients) to make one. We had to make do with some readymade salsa. So there we are, I’m not really a chef, merely an engineer who moonlights with the culinary arts about once a year or so. I’m hoping to increase the frequency of my moonlighting, and hopefully I get better at it :)
P.S (04 May 2008):
I visited Beijing Bites on Mosque Road two days ago, to take some food with Chinese-sounding names back home for dinner. Don’t get me wrong, I simply love Chinese food, but the way they make it at Beijing Bites these days has my sarcasm flowing like molasses. As is my usual practice when I’m waiting there for my order to materialize in neatly packed cardboard boxes on my table, I ordered a Pina Colada (sans the alcohol, sadly) to while some of my time away. It was good, and I enjoyed every slurp while it lasted. In short order, my order arrived, and so did that ugly four-letter thing, the Bill. I was livid with rage when I saw that the Pina Colada had set me back by a Pink-and-Yellow Gandhi. Fifty Bucks for that thimbleful of pineapple juice and coconut milk, offset by half a ton of ice! I resolved never to order a Pina Colada outside again, unless someone else was footing the bill.
The food that I took home was a different story altogether. The Basil Fried Rice was good, the Thai Red Prawn Curry had about four sickly looking prawns that had surely been snatched away from their mothers about a day after they’d been born. Either that or they had been prey to some genetic disease that did not let them grow beyond a quarter of an inch. The prawns had one-tenth of a carrot, half a basil leaf, and about three tiny florets from an entire forest of cauliflowers for company. The Dragon Prawns lived up to their name, but there weren’t enough of them. Shame. The Chilli Vegetable gave a whole new meaning to the word Chilli – it was as though each fragment of vegetable that went into the dish had been steeped in Tabasco Sauce for half a century – much like Kimchi, except that they don’t use Tabasco in Kimchi. I’m giving BB a wide berth – about as wide as the Great Wall of China at its widest – for a long, long time to come.
, threw me off balance, and I just had to do this for myself to see that it was for real. It took me a couple of weeks to get it right, including learning C all over again from my dog eared old copy of Gottfried’s green Schaum Series book, and more battles with learning how to use svgalib. The rewards were beyond compare. Next on the list was the Lorenz attractor, the story of which Gleick had written well in his book, and this was a real devil to get right. Mind you, all this while I learned next to nothing about chaos – I did learn a lot of programming, though! For many days, I saw the Lorenz attractor in my dreams, I just had to close my eyes to see its moth-wing like structure. A few weeks later, I was idly browsing through a bound volume of journals at the college library when to my great surprise, I caught sight of something that very strongly resembled the Lorenz attractor. What shook me up even more was that this was no matlab plot, it was a photograph of a CRO display! This wasn’t something that existed as a mere equation, to be marvelled at on computer screens – this was for real, it was produced by a circuit made up of simple op-amps, resistors, capacitors, an inductor and diodes! Thus I stumbled across the Chua circuit, and attempted to build one for myself. I tried, for I don’t remember how many months – but I didn’t get it right :) Those months that I spent trying to get the Chua circuit to work were extremely trying, but I think I learned a lot more than I thought I would. I never would have stumbled across Chua’s circuit if I hadn’t spent time trying to plot the Lorenz attractor. If not for the Lorenz attractor, I would never have appreciated the beauty of differential equations, among many other things. So it is that I am saddened by his passing away.
.