Dumpling Delight

When you're scanning through Masterchef recipes, and you're really really not doing much with your life at that point, you don't mind going for technique intensive recipes, as long as you have all the ingredients, or, they are within walkable distance of your house. You actually kinda enjoy it.

And so I woke up early today in the morning, dropped off my brother for his cricket practice at school, and popped the lid of my laptop open to the Masterchef recipes page. Since my judging panel is composed of just my one demanding and fussy but awesome sister, I ran my list of cook-able recipes by her and lo and behold she chose:

GREEN TEA CHICKEN DUMPLINGS WITH CHILLI OIL, ORANGE, AND GINGER VINEGAR

No kidding. Once you've gotten over the name, I'll get down to explaining how I gave up on sleep and rest to make these beauties. Most of the morning and all afternoon!

Let me say this to people who make perfect dumplings first: R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

There is no dearth of things that can go wrong.

By now I'm almost perfect at kneading any kind of dough on demand so the green tea dough was cheesecake (pun so not intended). The stuffing was an entirely different story. I had to mince my chicken myself: wash it, boil it, rip strips off the bone and shred it in the grinder. Learning experience! Post that, the stuffing came together really well.

The chilli oil and ginger and orange vinegar were intriguing: I didn't know you could do that! I was so proud when I smelled the delicious and so very appetizing aroma of my chilli oil post-infusion.

Now the parts where the little disasters started happening.

Disaster no. 1: I HATE actually physically rolling the dough to paper thinness and stuffing it.

I had to make 24 little circles rolled to paper thinness and spoon fine stuffing into it. Can you imagine the patience required for that?

So I got lazy and took a leisurely break in the middle and watched some TV, to the super-annoyed looks of the kitchen staff. :P

Disaster no. 2 : The recipe required me to golden-brown the dumplings before steaming them in a fry-pan. I went a wee bit-overboard on the golden browning and for some reason I now had 4 little fried dumplings (did them in batches THANKFULLY). Then I tried steaming them for damage control (also just to adhere to the recipe) and now the fried bits actually peeled off and stuck to the pan. I had some yummy-ugly looking stuff right there.

Yowzer.

I was displaying all signs of distress and abandoning ship when one of the staff was like hey, this happens, just think clearly and do what you think is best.

So we formed a party of 3, with one person making little dough balls of appropriate size, the other rolling them to paper thinness, and a third spooning in the stuffing and sealing the dumpling.

To my joy, what had lingered all morning, was done in 20 minutes :D

Now for the actual cooking. I pretty much said: ohkay screw the pan, bring me a pot of hot water, a metal strainer mesh and a big pot-lid.

I threw the dumplings into the mesh hung over boiling water, and sealed their fate with the lid.

35 minutes later, they were done.

To my surprise (not so much actually, now that I think about it), my last minute gamble had worked. The dumplings looked tender and pretty and nothing seemed to have exploded under the lid(yes those are my culinary fears).

So I pulled out a glass dish, set the dumplings about beautifully, poured the orange and ginger vinegar around them, leaving pretty long strips of ginger on top of each dumpling.

Then I spooned the bulky part of the chilli oil onto each dumpling.

The combination of both sauces unleashed some beautiful smells and I went about proudly serving the dumplings to family. :)

I feel like cooking dessert tomorrow.

Hmmm... Masterchef into thy hands, I commend my spirit.

*raises toast*

To Green Tea Chicken Dumplings with .... oh bah whatever.

:P

Taking on Masterchef

In architecture school, you pretty much HAVE to stay up entire nights working on your design, most nights of the week, especially in third year. More often than not, what you end up slaving upon throughout the night is an execution of design ideas: drafting, drawing, rendering, formatting, model making et al.

Well, beyond the designing stage, it's basically not mentally engaging, which means I can have the television running in the background. And thank God I do. Because I discovered shows I know I wouldn't ever have thought twice about during the day. Also, God bless the 1:00 am re-run of Masterchef Australia; it has changed the way I look at food.

:)

Cooking has always been an art, but true application of culinary genius, in preparation AND presentation never hit me till about 2 months ago, when this whole Masterchef ordeal started.

From a pinch of ground rosemary, to a careless dash of liquidy meringue, by jove I was hooked.

Never did cooking look so creative, never did I see endless possibility in ingredients and their various permutations and combinations. Ordinary food became boring and looked lovelessly cooked, as I gazed longingly at the forms and colours of food swimming in front of my eyes.

A year or so ago, I saw 'Julie and Julia' with the amazing Meryl Streep playing the amazing-er Julia Child. Basically it's about a young woman (Amy Adams as 'Julie') who takes on recipes from Julia Child's cookbook on French cooking and blogs about her progress through 524 recipes in a record 365 days.

First off, I have no such intentions, OR inclinations. But I DO want to cook for the sheer joy of it.

So the semester has ended, and I need to indulge my creative side, AND my sister (a victim of the CBSE 12th Board Exams).

So yesterday, I tried my hand at my first Masterchef recipe (click to go to the recipe):

HOT SALAMI PIZZA

Let me state right at the beginning that I know what most Pizza chains in the world do wrong in their pizza: the base.

I've been to Naples, the birthplace of pizza, and TRUST me the base is supposed to be more like naan than the insanely thick oven-browned bread that we are used to.

So there I sat, on the kitchen floor, kneading pizza base dough, throwing in much more than just flour (the base has it's own flavour), then rolling it out to 3-4 mm thick circular elastic awesomeness. I did try the chef pizza base hand-spin, but I sucked :P

Everything else, from the tomato-base sauce to the grated mozzarella progressed smoothly.

Some things in the cooking technique changed, obviously, like I didn't have a ceramic tile to cook my pizza on, so I used my limited baking knowledge to butter and flour steel plates to cook my pizza in. And I switched parsley with basil, well, just because it's my favourite food ingredient :P

'Complete' is a good word for how I felt when I pulled those plates out of the oven.

'Happy' is a good word for how my sister felt when I 'plated up' and put the pizza in front of her.

'Proud' is a good word for how my grandmother felt.

I wanted to click a picture, but my parents have run off on a vacation with my camera. Sorry!

AND...

Thank you Masterchef! Partners in crime, you and I ;)

An Architect

View Ar. Peter Zumthor and Ar. Romi Khosla here.

Theory of Design Project.

Madrid, for Theory of Settlements

The Evolution of Madrid, Spain, by Amri Chadha, SPA Delhi, A/2044/2008, for Theory of Settlements, 5th Semester, 2010. Click HERE.

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B8TpBgr9CENWOGYwODVkZTYtOWQyOC00MzA0LWIyMGQtYjgyNzMxNDhjM2E2&hl=en

Invisible Cities Sketches

Argia, Cities & The Dead 4

Zora, Cities & Memory 4

Urbanism

Job Opportunities...

Infrastructure...

Services...

Connectivity...

Branded Necessities...

Loneliness??

Transcending Time and Space

INVISIBLE CITIES- Italo Calvino

(Copyright © 1972 Giulio Einaudi Editore

English Translation Copyright © 1974 Harcourt, Inc.)

‘KUBLAI: We have proved that if

we were here, we would not be.

POLO: And here, in fact, we are.’

And thus is captured, the essence of ‘Invisible Cities’, by Italo Calvino.

As one leafs through the first few pages of this book, one finds the conventional notion of a ‘book’, shattered. Fiction within non-fiction; what was, shrouded by what cannot be, as you try to make the book speak to you in YOUR language, peeling off layer by layer, as though in pursuit of an unattainable goal.

As references to planes and airports; San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles crop up in this 13^th Century setting based on the interactions between an emperor and his explorer, one really marvels at how the author has treated this same setting as a portal to times and places long gone, to times and places that may or may not come, and most prominently to times and places that CANNOT BE.

The whole narrative is a spin off from human nature, its complications and eccentricities, and how the same is expressed through the built environment.

For example, two parallel perceptions of the same city of Despina, which sits on a lip of desert jutting into the sea, include a sailor gazing onto the city, comparing it to a camel rising from the desert, and a camel rider gazing onto the city, comparing it to a ship looming on the horizon. It’s like looking at two sides of the same coin.

Then again there are cities which push the limits of human imagination and perception.

The city of Argia is made completely of void spaces and mud, the city of Octavia is hanging between two mountains and Ersilia is 'survived by' literal threads of human relationships.

There are certain points in the book where the author plays with the natural human train of thought, where his style of writing leads you on to believe that the city of Sophronia is made of two halves, one permanent and the other temporary. One is made of houses, offices, mills and courts; and the other comprises ferris wheels, carousels, rides and motorists. Yet you see, with every season, the houses, offices, mills and courts come down and move with the permanent city, the one of ferris wheels, carousels, rides and motorists.

The book moves through the darkest of human emotions, to the lightest of human aspirations, using as a medium the cities it explores, or rather Marco Polo explores, in the quest of human satisfaction in relation with space, which also, surprisingly, when I re-read this very sentence, comes across as a dubious claim.

Looking back at the narrative, I would say it was a fairly inconclusive account of human imagination interspersed with the imagined perceptions of two very important people from Medieval History.

Reading the book was like taking a holy dip in the river of imagination, wherein it flowed long before you came along and will certainly flow long after your time, and how your little immersion will not affect the river, but will definitely change you for life.

For me, the book did not finish with the last page, and even though I spent an exhaustive 40 hours reading it, I daresay, it had not even begun...

Paradise lost

PWD Guest House, Barot, Himachal Pradesh

I squinted as my eyes popped open, one chilly May morning, back in 1996. I turned around to wake up my sister, then hopped out of bed to go irritate my parents. I couldn't help it. I was six.

They brushed me away and thus snubbed, I slipped on my chappals and bounded outside into the fresh air.

Ah.... Barot...

The above picture can never do justice to the Barot of my memories, simply because this picture is not my own but a more recent one. The PWD guest house then, was set a short trek away from the town, a steep climbing path up the road, which led to the crest of the hill. When one climbed atop, a clearing would come into view, with the green-wooden slatted cottage sitting plumb in the middle, against the backdrop of a mountainside dotted with leeches and daisies. In front, was a single tree, whose solid branches I remember trying to climb on and off many times.

It was pristine, I remember everything as if it were yesterday. Me wheeling my sister around the house in a wheelbarrow, us playing catch-n-catch around Dad's freshly washed, unrolled turban drying on a huge span of grass, my mother giving us a good tel-maalish before splashing us with ice-cold, mountain spring water. I don't remember the bedrooms much, but the bathrooms were scarily fascinating. Every rare bug on your green window sill, next to exposed metal pipes, which in turn only added to your fear of the deathly cold water, as you shivered in anticipation, on a plastic stool too cold for your backside.

I remember trying to climb up the mountainside of daisies and leeches, running races with my sister, and at the end, collapsing in a heap and sticking my foot into the ground, trying to heap mud over it to build little castles, and giving them the finishing touch by sticking daisies in them. I remember trying to draw my foot out carefully without letting it collapse, and then grimacing when it did.

Many times, the whole family would bundle down the path to the town, which intrigued me because it had things other mountainous towns from my knowledge then, didn't. Like a fish farm. Or the river-sized trough of gushing water over a turbine. Only upon googling now did find out that it was a state Hydel power project on the Uhl river, and the fish farms were derived and operating on the fish from the reservoir. What I remember from then is a dread in my heart, standing on a bridge over the river-sized trough, watching at the falling water, and trying to imagine what would happen if someone fell over. What if that someone was a family member? I closed my eyes and wished back my thoughts as I ran across the bridge to where the rest of them were, my father leaning down to explain to me the concept of turbines and electricity generation. Whatever my understanding then, I remember thinking, 'Great, falling in the water is not good enough, now we get to die of shock too.'

The fish farms were a different story altogether. Rows upon rows of water channels, with silver glinting in it everywhere you looked. I would bend over and try to touch, but a quick look from my mother would stop me. The black water, the man with the long cleaning brush, the glint of silver in the water and my mother's look. Memories work in strange ways.

Often, we would plan a trek up and out from the guest house, crossing streams and cooking next to the river, with cowdung as fuel and a few pots, pans and matchsticks. The rice was sticky, and the curry being cooked watery and spicy, but it felt good to eat, probably because it seemed to have come out of nowhere, in the wild. I'm struggling to recall whether the curry had fish in it or not, and I can't be sure, but I'm being completely honest here.

I know we went down to the small market set across the hydel project and the fish farms, but I can't really remember anything of it. Packets full of bread and eggs, maybe. Then again, maybe not.

Sometimes, the days would be spent soaking up the sun, sitting under the single tree in the yard, as our mother tried coaching us about our pending homework and my sister messed around with her alphabets. My dad stretched out on the ground, sleeping with abandon, a small part of the whites of his eyes showing, giving me and my sister reason to snigger.

Oh, Barot. I can't not think back to simpler times without my eyes misting over. When life was easy, vacation periods coincided, when we were innocent, stupid, and shamelessly happy.

I wrote this whole monologue in one go, and I know what flowed from my fingertips were not words, but carefully stashed away memories, of a small insignificant place long ago... of a paradise lost.

Barot, Himachal Pradesh

Fish Farms, Barot

A Thousand Splendid Suns

A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS- Khaled Hosseini

(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007)

-------------------------------

'One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,

Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.'

And so the 17th century Persian Poet Saib-e-Tabrizi immortalized the spirit of Kabul forever.

Prejudiced and judgmental to a fault, I happened to pick up 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' at a time when the out-sourcing of terrorism (and terrorists) from Islamic States into the West was at its peak. I flopped on my bed, swimming in all my preconceived notions, and turned to the first page of the book.

And then I started reading.

Before I knew it, I was sucked into the magical world spun by Hosseini, landing bang in the middle of the narrative of a woman in Pre-Taliban Afghanistan...of her trials, her tribulations, the stories of the lives that revolved around her, that came before, with and after her time.

The book starts off in 1959 Afghanistan, with Mariam, the protagonist, as an outcast living on the edge of the city of Herat, a hustling-bustling melting pot of Persian culture, art and literature. Herat, with its towering minarets from Queen Gauhar Shad, green wheat fields, plump grape orchards and crowded, vaulted bazaars would be the setting of the first 15 years of the protagonist's life, yet she would never come around to experiencing it.

For Mariam was confined to her ghetto, set a hill and a stream away from this cultural paradise, a one room kolba made of sun dried bricks, plastered with mud and straw, housing two cots, a table, two chairs and wooden shelves around a single window. Outside, among a few other things, a chicken coop and a trough for feeding sheep. That and the endless green.

A 'bastard child', she tried escaping to her real father's house, spending a night getting rejected at the doorstep of his mansion, only to be brought back home to find her mother swinging lifelessly from the branches of a tree outside the kolba, not having had the strength to stomach the apparent abandonment.

Soon after, Mariam's well-off but socially insecure father took her in, and put her in an alien world, a prison of marble statues, expensive vases, richly colored tapestries and carpeted hallways, from which she was rarely allowed to step out, for 'honourable' reasons. All that before he married her off to an apparently 'rich', abusive shoemaker, thirty years her senior.

And THAT is how Kabul happens to this story.

As a reader moves through the various phases of Mariam's married life, Kabul's changing face and seasons serve as a suitable backdrop. When Mariam first comes to the city, Kabul betrays its big-city self, with its bursting populace, big cars, grey administrative buildings, crowded markets, lipsticked and skirted women, with all the steely resolve of a city in progress.

This same city transforms itself during the month of Ramadan, taking on a sort of golden hue by night, since it is mostly dead during the day. Sweetmeat sellers with delicious wares piled up in carts, men and women dressed in their finest, lights decorating the facade of anything and everything, and firecrackers lighting up the sky, as the city pours into the streets and crowded markets for iftar together.

Hosseini's Kabul is a joyful place, a potpourri of people from all walks of life, with ethnically diverse backgrounds, co-existing with other people and the elements. Kites, pots, pans, cycle tyres, public tandoors, et al. Here, poets and artists teamed with ordinary men over cups of cardamom tea in roadside cafes. Here, the wise and the foolish, ate together and made merry together. People were kind, people would share, and people were happy. Kabul was alive.

Mariam's street itself is an expression of the people of Kabul trying to make the best of what they have. Public wells, shared cooking spaces, gossiping women, and blossoming friendships in the shadow of bad administration, worse amenities and the worst, abusive husbands.

This of course, was the pre-war scenario.

When the Taliban finally descended upon the streets, it was mob rule at best.

Rockets bombing friends next door, houses collapsing, as the skies outside lit up in garish shades of orange and yellow, with flashes of blinding light and deafening roars at all odd hours of the night. Kabul was a changed place, the spirit of a city raped. Bodies piled upon bodies, as the people took sides between the government and the Taliban, some choosing to stay on and die, some leaving for safer skies. The infrastructure collapsed, as the streets became the death zone, with occasional fires in mountains of rubble. Death and disease were as prominent as Kalashnikov-toting, bearded Taliban leaders with suffocating rules, patrolling the streets in jeeps.

The civil strife reached it's ugliest lows when people accused of flouting senseless laws were publicly prosecuted, either shot, or stoned to death in stadiums, in front of thousands of other people. During the war, these public executions served as perhaps the only way of gathering communally, exchanging news, and inquiring about family.

The main characters of the story then choose to leave Kabul for safer lands in Pakistan, where they live and work, albeit half heartedly, for their hearts and minds are still in Kabul. Their story meets its just end when they return to Kabul and are a part of a new wave of reform sweeping through the country, slowly prodding it back onto its feet again.

This story is as much about Kabul, and the author's longing, for its dining halls piled high with meats, for the joy resonating through its hallways, for its centuries old Pashtun- Uzbek ethnic mix of culture, for the call for azaan as the sun rises, for the din on Id in its marketplaces, and for the people who lived, and died in it, long long ago...

At your service

This too shall pass

OBITUARY

AMRI CHADHA

Architect, Visionary

(1990-2032)

One of the world's first advocates of blue architecture, Amri Chadha, designer of the modern underwater cities of Hudronia and Glascliff, passed away at the age of 42 yesterday in an unfortunate accident, descending the summit of peak Lhotse in Nepal.

A two-time Everester, Ms. Chadha was loved and respected by one and all in the disciplines of architecture, marine engineering and mountaineering. She completed her Bachelor's degree in architecture from School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi and went on to pursue a Master's in Urban design from Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, MI.

An avid nature lover, Ms. Chadha worked on many urban renewal projects, commercial complexes and residential assignments, in many parts of the world, stressing on sustainability and the environment. In her early 30s, she began developing prototypes for aquatic cities and is known to have subjected herself to under-sea pressures and currents through extensive deep-sea diving along trenches in the Pacific. In 2025, her blueprints for the twin cities of Hudronia and Glascliff in the Polynesian region of the Pacific were accepted and commissioned by the UN.

Ms. Chadha is survived by her husband and two daughters.

Services shall be held this Friday at the family home at the Aldhedge Estate, Geneva, and her ashes will be scattered over the Pacific by air, as per her own wishes on Sunday.

Blogger- Happy

And then she said 'Blog'.

I am truly very very happy today. For the sole reason that our 3rd Year Theory of Settlements class requires us to 'Blog' our assignments. Gives me a reason to keep coming back to the wonderful feel of little keys tapping beneath my fingers at lightning speed as I try to pour my heart out through my fingertips yet again. Not that I couldn't do it earlier, but as much as I love writing, I realized I turned to it only under the influence of an emotional overdrive.

So the great Amri then realized that every time she felt like writing on her blog, it must be due to something that she left sitting on her conscience or something equally obnoxious, and that always psychologically deterred her from taking to the keys again.

Weird, I know.

But when my TOS faculty popped the idea, my joy REALLY knew no bounds. Oh JOYYYY I could write about what I felt about various parts of my coursework (can be pretty damn interesting, mind you)! Part of me is also happy that my college, guilty of imparting ancient wisdom through ridiculously obsolete processes, is FINALLY taking a step forward and leaping off the mountain of curricular regimen. Or at least WE are.

Another little part of me is excited to see what my friends and classmates will put up as part of their personal selves on the blog. Blogging, I feel, takes socializing a step further and lets you peep into another's world through his or her eyes.

I look forward to this very obvious intrusion into my colleagues' minds and psyches. Let's make this an enjoyable violation, friends. Muhahahahaha :P

But then you always knew I was a voyeur.

Oh but WAIT!!!!...

SO ARE YOU.
:D