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Umrao Jaan

xlent song and xlent acting.

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The breakfast conundrum

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If you are gloating over solving the day’s Wordle on your third attempt, try the daily breakfast/tiffin conundrum. For someone like me who hates cooking, this is the worst puzzle that tires me out at the start of the day. Most of you may have your favourite word to start solving the daily Wordle puzzle. The keyword that you rely on to find the word of the day in minimum attempts. Similarly, I have one for my breakfast riddle. But this one’s usually towards the end. After exhausting the options of Idli, Dosa and Pongal, this serves as my saviour of the morning dilemma. Yes! You guessed it right! As copy editors, we were always taught this universal thumb rule to follow when editing a story: When in doubt, cut it out. Similarly, I follow a standard proposition to crack my tiffin conundrum: When everything is out, bring  upma  out. Ah! Was that my son frowning at me? Never mind. That is a universal reaction from most people across the country. I have never understood why a breakfast item
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Menopause and MasterChef

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  I am not a fan of cooking. And I make no bones about proclaiming it. However, to my surprise, of late I have become a sort of an expert in the smoked style of cooking and have been churning out a variety of dishes day after day. And no, I haven’t got a new barbecue or an oven.  Since I couldn’t put my finger on what triggered this spree, I decided to pass on the credit to the back-to-back episodes of MasterChef Australia that I have been watching ever since the start of the pandemic in Star World. (I choose to ignore the annoying Koffee with Karan that always gets tagged along with the cookery show.) I now invariably end up naming my smoked items in some fancy chef terms that I picked up watching the cookery contest. Be it, eggplant with spicy lentils and herbs (sambar), mixed veggies in coconut and yoghurt sauce (avial), greens simmered in spices and coconut (arachuvita keerai) or even Indian wafers (appalam), the smoked list doesn’t end!  I can hear my son grinding his teeth in
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A Steamy Story

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    One of the comforting sounds at home for me is the whistle of the pressure cooker. Not just for the fact that it is a handy appliance that helps me scoot out of the kitchen at the earliest but also for the reason that it has been my sole companion who still gives out a naughty whistle even as I get older. I take great pleasure in keeping count of the number of whistles that it lets out.  I don’t think I can ever imagine any Indian home without this ubiquitous vessel occupying its rightful place on the shelf. It came as a surprise to me when I learnt that pressure cookers had invaded the Indian kitchens only as late as 1959 when both Hawkins and TT Private Ltd (now called TTK Prestige) introduced their products into the market.   The idea of using steam pressure to cook made its first appearance in 1679 in the form of Papin’s Digester, a vessel named after its inventor, Denis Papin, a French-born British physicist. But the concept paved way for greater inventions as the steam engine
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