Day 5 Navratri in white

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I am wearing this lovely easy-breezy saree that my perima gifted me. I do have very generous perimas and chittis who have spoilt me silly and I don’t want that to change ever.
The transition to being given sarees from salwar materials as cloth gifts happened in college when I started having events to wear them to and I really enjoyed that phase a lot – you know how you wait to be an adult to enjoy certain perks ? This saree had my heart the minute I saw those dainty parrots in green, blue and silver. I decided to pair this blouse just so I could wear this lovely glass jewellery set I got from Murano from our X’mas trip to Italy in 2015. 
When we were in Venice, K and I visited some glassmaking centres and watched some beautiful glassware being made. Those colours, the craftsmanship blew us away every time the glass was blown! We could not carry back anything heavy and I spotted some glass jewellery in one of the boutiques attached to the glassmaking centre. It was quite pricey and I was not sure if I wanted it so after dilly dallying, we left without buying it. We had walked about a kilometre from the place when I could take it no more and K who very calmly professed he had seen this coming, told me to hurry along and get it before they closed. I ran. I really did. I will never forget that evening as I ran across a couple of small bridges and my absolutely pathetic sense of direction left me in peace for that one moment. When I went back, the owner was almost getting ready to close and he smiled at me and said, “Ah, there you are! I knew you would come back darling.” I could not say a word or smile. I just picked this up, mumbled a thank you and walked back with the nervous energy and excitement that had not left me and K was sitting on the steps across the bridge waiting. It is in these moments I have felt acute elation and I am aware I can never quite put them in words.
Will you believe it if I tell you I have never worn this jewellery ever as I kept waiting for an ultra special occasion? But today? After a lot of what we have been through, today is the surest and most special occasion to celebrate, after all.

Day 4 Navratri in orange

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This saree is given to me from my mother in law for one of the events at my BIL’s wedding. It is sort of in between a yellow- orange and I love it. It is super easy to drape and looks even nicer if I had put in some effort to iron it. We were in Singapore when she got this and so she had gotten the blouse and everything done for me and it fits me to a T ❤
There is a little story behind the accessories too. I am wearing a necklace and huge earrings I got from Jodhpur when a group of my uni friends and I went for a classmate’s wedding there. We did a fair bit of sight seeing and I bought this from a small shop run by an elderly person. It was all of 150 rupees but has stayed with me all these years in perfect condition. I still remember the joy with which I brought home a piece of Rajasthan which has always meant a lot, bringing home a piece from your travels.
We also had a lovely day today, as bright and special as the saree and the pairings. 

Day 3 Navratri in grey

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I am wearing another of ma’s sarees that I flicked the moment my perima gave it to her when I was in university. It is so soft and slides off weightless.
I know we have a lot of mix and match saree blouses now that really look stunning but I have a soft spot for blouse pieces that come as part of the saree. If you swipe, you can see the blouse that came with this and I got this stitched right away. It has been a while since I wore this so I was surprised the blouse still fits me. My perima had gotten some work done on it as well and as I took some pictures in our dining hall by the window, a million lights danced on the wall and it took me a few seconds to recognize that the sequins were dancing in the sunlight. K took some lovely pictures today but I am saving them for another day and sharing these timed selfies for today. 
For a while now, I have been thinking of a grey saree but somehow it never materialized but here is what I have realized – your saree will find you. They come to you in all forms and from all kinds of people, but they will find you when their time comes. And then they find their way to another. 

Day 2 Navratri in green

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I have a few green sarees and it was a bit of a battle between choosing my Nalli Silks saree from my wedding and a beautiful Godavari cotton and this. 
This is the first saree K and I bought together in Singapore for a puja. And it tickles me as I realise it is the last saree we bought together. I have bought sarees for myself after that but never with K. I think this is a good reminder to change that.
So anyway, we picked this up in one of the shops in Little India. I had zero knowledge of sarees and weaves and K was just there because well, I had dragged him along though he did help me pick one. This has patchwork border and pallu and drapes so so easily. I have come to realise that draping takes 2 minutes or maybe 2 mins 50 seconds but getting a picture of yourself by yourself that does not just show your face takes eternity and I really had to squeeze it in my lunch hour as my tummy groaned for attention and it was quite gloomy outside.
I wore my first necklace that my chitti gave me when I was in 3rd grade, it has stayed with me since and perhaps one can tell its age but for me, it will always be evergreen and the pun is not lost on me. 
Hope you are enjoying your Navratri, dearest people 🙂

Day 1 Navratri in yellow

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Entering Navratri with one of my absolute favourite colours – yellow! 🙂 

I decided I would wear a saree only if I don’t feel too hassled with all the work meetings today and am so glad I did, because if anything, it brought me out of a state of daze (slipping in and out of online meetings does that to you on some days) and took me to the time I stole this saree from ma the minute her cousin gave it to her. I don’t think ma has ever worn this saree as I have preciously carried it with me everywhere I went. It is so light that it threatens to fall off me and the silver thread work that is barely there and yet so pretty always makes captivates me. This saree has seen through an invocation, a compering, a dance at a wedding and every time I realise how what we may call as material objects are so much more than that. I have so much to say but I have such an endless day ahead of me but I will say this again – I am so glad I did this today even if it means sitting at a desk and attacking tasks. I am fairly certain, it will be with renewed vigour.

Fall-ing for fall

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There is something about fall that makes me do these captures almost every year now. As someone with intense olfaction and an undiagnosed synaesthesia, my senses are heightened when I see the leaves that seem to spread a golden carpet in our garden everywhere. The aromatic apparitions are coupled by strong emotions of course but that has not been seasonal. I try to keep track of what triggers what and where the cycle begins (?) but it is a complex web. Some of these are pure associations of a yesterday and I can discern those in a sniff. Like the pumpkin body butter that takes me to the streets of Auckland, the hand cream that takes me on a trip to Shropshire and a particularly green road that housed a teeny Dominos. There was a time I would buy a small perfume for every trip I made but eventually stopped. I realised the place brings with it, its own sensorial mirage and it is more lasting than anything money can buy. But this Kama Ayurveda oil surprised me – it takes me to the wire basket that my grandfather would carry, with several many paraphernalia all neatly arranged. He was an Ayurvedic doctor but the bag smelt of a mix of incense, old papers, freshly laundered garment and perhaps an uncture? But when I think of the bag, this is the smell I smell. And it oddly is also the smell I associate when I think of an afternoon when we made kohl at home with hibiscus. It smelt nothing of bringadi but that is also perhaps why it is a mirage. They bring me an overwhelming sense of comfort, despite what may seem like a sensorial overload. Something I have been going back to and will write about is also this beautiful book by Charlie Mackesy that I first saw on @namrathakumar29 feed. It is filled with the comfort and warmth that I can only describe through some of the above smells. I rarely write about this because it is hard to describe abstraction. So I dig into my Lara bar (stories I will tell you another time!) and watch the fleeting shower of leaves from my window.

A Goan breakfast at Casa de Goa

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There is this lovely, almost hole-in-the-wall Goan restaurant in Hounslow called Casa de Goa that has been an absolute gem of a find. They have few vegetarian dishes but boy do they make them well! 
We sometimes pick up a side dish or two but I had been wanting to have breakfast there for so many months now and it finally happened. And I chose to make a beginning with the Goan style puri bhaji. It seemed the most exciting of vegetarian options offered to me and though I knew you cannot go wrong with a puri bhaji, I was a little skeptical of how different a Goan puri bhaji can be. Trust life to remind you to not judge and walk in with preconceived notions. This bhaji was different and splendid – it was a mix of Patal Bhaji made with dried peas soaked overnight in a paste of coconut and spices (I could smell and taste coriander and cumin and red chillies) and atop it was the Potato bhaji which also had a gravy consistency. I absolutely loved it. I am definitely going to try making this myself because God knows I can eat a couple of plates of this on a weekend. 
K ordered the ros omelette which is an omelette in a chicken xacuti curry served with pav and as tempting as it looked, I could not taste it but he loved his breakfast as well! The pav was just okay and not the kind of pav you would eat if in India.

The chai – what songs do I sing for the chai served in my favourite kind of glass? It was sweet and hot, just the kind of sip you want as you dip your poori in that hot gravy. It is so affordably priced and so easy to miss, it truly feels like a find. And you know what? It is, the kinds to keep. 

Getting to the restaurant:

They don’t have the most updated website and calling them is your best bet.
Website: https://casa-de-goa.business.site/?hl=en-GB
Address: 113 High St, Hounslow TW3 1QT (they are located near Shri Krishna Vada Pav and opposite to Madras Flavours)
Phone: 07808 197021
They do deliver through Ubereats, Just Eat and Deliveroo based on your location.

As the festivals transport me…

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Come August and September, there is a chain of festivals that get triggered and that sets off a series of memories that transport me to a different world and era indeed.

I really really miss the smell of new clothes on festivals, dabbing some turmeric to something new before wearing it while your parents check and double (and triple) check on whether you have done it or not, what a celebration new clothes were because they signified a special day or event. Oh that hustle in a market that smelt of fresh jasmine and marigolds and kanakambri, camphor, agarbattis and banana leaves that heralded a festival! Or when it inevitably rained on your day out but nothing mattered, not even the fact that you parked roads and roads away from the shopping street because you could look at all the new dresses on display, the happy smiles on people out for shopping, wondering what their shopping bags contained. And finally that moment when you found something you liked and your parents remarked it looks good on you, the pride with which you watch your parents pay for it and clutch it tight all the way home only to do a dress rehearsal again. 
I do feel happy when I buy something new, but these shopping trips that happened before festivals and birthdays, occasionally will always remind me of gentler lighter times, of unbearable happiness and rich pride. So when I do wear something ethnic especially on a festive day, it takes me to those times even if it is for a brief moment and I feel ridiculously happy to have those memories to relive until we recreate them again, someday soon. 

Zucchini phula bhaja / Zucchini flower fritters

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Being exposed to Odia cuisine through K opened up a new world of ingredients and methods to me. There were vegetables I didn’t know of, spices and pastes I had never tried, methods especially the diaspora of steamed dishes I took to really happily. It was also the first time I tasted and slowly developed an appreciation for mustard oil in cooking. 

One ingredient that fascinated me most and still does is the use of pumpkin flowers/ blossoms. I now know that squash flowers are used in different cuisines but somehow the prospect of making a savoury snack with a flower and such a wonderful simple dish at that quite blew me away. I eat these fritters made with pumpkin blossoms called khakharu phula bhaja, every time I visit K’s place in Bhubaneswar.  But this time, looking at all the zucchini blossoms I wanted to have a go at making it. We have a lot of squash blossoms coming up too and I must tell you that the success and ease of making them will only see us trying more. 

On seeing the burgeoning blossoms on our row of zucchini plants, one of our friends who was visiting us commented how Italians make fritters from them. Off-late, I have also seen it being used in salads and pastas. It is amazing how flowers have found their way to our dining tables and feature in such an array of dishes and share similarities across continents.

One of my key hesitations with picking these flowers was if they would be interfering with the pollination and affect the plant’s productivity itself. After all, I was looking forward to pulling the zucchinis off with gay abandon. And then I did some reading and realised that the male flowers are produced in much higher numbers than needed so plucking a few should be okay. This was really all I needed and you know the rest of the story. I am so glad I made these because I love them – the batter coating that turns so crispy and the subtle flower encased in it as you blow your way through eating it hot off the pan. The joy of fried food is never lost on me, I really enjoy it – especially when I am frying them at home, when there is the goodness of all that fat without it being excessively drippy to the point of churning your stomach. I eat them to my heart’s and stomach’s content but I am quite particular that it is fried in good oil, and not re-fried if I can avoid it.

Here is how I made it (I have some videos of the process of this up on my Instagram):

You need:

Zucchini blossoms – say 6.
Rice flour – About 3 table spoons (depends if you want to have a thick batter coating, I like mine just coated and not too much. If you like a dense coating, increase the flour keeping a 3:1 ratio of rice to chickpea flour)
Chickpea flour – About 1 tablespoon
Red chilli powder – 1 tsp/ to preference
Cumin powder – 1 tsp
Turmeric – a pinch
Salt – to taste
Neutral oil like sunflower to shallow fry – I use a spoon of oil for each blossom.

Method:

1. Clean the blossoms in water. Gently pat them dry with a paper towel.
2. Make a slurry of rice flour, chickpea flour, chilli powder, cumin powder, turmeric and salt. This should not be too thick or too runny. You want a consistency that you can immerse the flower in and when you take it out to fry, it should hold the batter. If you want a thick batter coating, make the slurry thicker so it hangs on to the blossom.
3. Take a small pan, bring to heat and add a table spoon of oil and bring to heat
4. Dip the zucchini blossom in the slurry (from 2) and fry it in the pan, flipping it and making sure it is done all through. I added some slurry as mine was thin. The extra slurry I added took the shape of the pan and cooked to a nice golden crisp around the edges.
5. That’s it really.

We enjoyed ours with some zucchini pasta 🙂

Some other ideas to try:
You can add garlic paste to the slurry. I don’t do it.
You can add finely chopped green chillies or make a paste of green chillies and garlic and add it to the slurry too. That would taste really nice and as I type this, I am tempted to try it myself.
You could make this with blossoms of pumpkins, zucchinis and quite a few squashes. I have only had pumpkin and zucchini ones.



Because a Bombay sandwich may be just what you need.

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I did not eat a Bombay sandwich when I was in Bombay years ago. Is it just called a sandwich there? (laughs at own “joke”). I am not surprised though – I have not eaten a lot of *obviously-you-should-have-tried-that-when-you-were-at-X* dishes. I took my time appreciating regional cuisines and food in general. Now, it is the top web search I run when we travel. Travel? Okay, I hear you laugh – it has been a while since we travelled, but you know what I mean.

Having eaten this first time last year, I have often asked myself “How could I have not made a Bombay sandwich before?” I think it is my general disdain towards potatoes on most days (except in fries, of course). Now I have a deep love for bread in all its variety and it forms part of at least one meal almost everyday. Use white or brown, wholemeal or seeded, but do make this. Add beets if you fancy, or don’t, but make this. Make it yours.

This is K’s recipe and my execution and even though I assume you don’t need another recipe for a sandwich, I will go ahead and tell you anyway because I really liked it. 

A cheese version

All you need to do:

  1. Take a slice of bread with the crust/ borders removed (keep them aside to make crumbs or fry them and use in soups)
  2. Make a chutney of corriander- mint – green chillies- tamarind – black salt
  3. Slather a nice layer of that coriander mint chutney on one side of each bread slice.
  4. Delicately layer some boiled and sliced potatoes, slices of tomato, onion + sprinkle a bit of black salt + a slice of cheese if you like and cover with another slice of bread with chutney on the inside.
  5. Now slather (there is a lot of slathering, I know) the top of the bread slice with butter and heat some butter on a pan and toast this to a nice golden with butter on both sides.
A no cheese version I made a couple of days ago

I can understand if you feel an uncontrollable urge to eat this right off the pan, hot, gooey and fragrant. In fact, I would highly recommend you to. Unbeknownst to you, it may be just what you need.