So its Friday night and I am sitting in office, waiting for a deliverable from my team. Well actually I went home, played with my son for a couple of hours; thank God I live a stone’s throw away. Came back to find that the kid is still working on it and did not think it necessary to let me know that making a trip to work to review it would be redundant. Very very annoyed, but thought I could use the waiting time to add to my blog. Seriously, in my time, my seniors made me wait for hours on end and now its the juniors who make me wait for hours on end. Most of the time they end up giving me documents to read on Friday afternoon or evening, especially when there is a Monday deadline. And I so hate working on the weekend nowadays. Since I joined work, I have worked probably 4 or 5 weekends and only in cases of extreme emergencies. I have no qualms telling clients, partners and any one who may ask that weekends are for the baby (husband is in office most weekends so he does not count). In fact, lately I feel more and more that I do not want to read emails, review documents or get onto calls once I get out of work. So I have taken to taking the baby along with me if i need to step out after 9 pm or on weekends. So that means that I have taken him to the rare office party, or the rare weekends and late weeknights, where he entertains my colleagues while I work. Thankfully all of them are most happy to see him (the reverse is not necessarily true) and love to play with him. In fact, I get repeated demands to bring my kid to work, specially during high stress times. He is a stress buster, true.
Speaking of stress busters, over the last year or so, I have discovered that cooking to be mine. I have been trying and testing recipes almost every week and now have a few things that I can make very well. I try them on my colleagues at work with varying degrees of success. The husband is useless at these kind of things, because I am cooking salads and soups, and using “fancy” vegetables and cheeses, while he wants “patal sabzi” and “aloo gobi” and “kali daal”. Frankly I still havent mastered his version of aloo gobi. Almost every 2-3 days he will come home and rave about a colleague’s dabba and his cook and wonder why I can’t cook like that. Oooof!!! Anyways, I am trying to reach a compromise, where I cook his favorite dishes once in while too. Although, to be honest, he is a great taster. He can always spot a missing element and gives very precise and to the point critisicm.
Baking is an art that I am trying to master though with very great difficulty. The biggest problem that I face with baking is that I am a vegetarian and will not cook eggs at home (although i eat them in concealed form, like in cakes. If I can see it, I am not eating it). There are vegan recipes, but they also rely on fancy ingredients, like molasses and buttermilk, which are not available here. But I shall persevere. My New Year resolution (which earlier was to not have any resolutions) is to try different recipes from different sources (family, blogs and my good collection of recipe books) and record the experiences on this blog. Nope, I am not doing a food blog, one, because there are far too many good people doing that already and two because I can just replicate an existing recipe very well; I am unable to come up or create a new recipe. The only value addition that I will have is to veganise a non-veg recipe.
Tomorrow, I am going to be making the pahadi paneer wrap from Tarla Dalal’s cookbook. I am not a big fan of her books; for some reason, I feel her recipes cater to an experienced cook. But I love wraps and paneer is healthy (mostly).
Need to go back and find out what happened to my draft. God, this is going to be a long long long night. Not a good start to the weekend
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