The festive season is there, the public holidays vortex is about to suck me in. From then until Diwali there is pretty much one school holiday a week, and thanks to a few politicos, this year we are seeing a repeat of the extended Ganesh Utsav, which will be a whole 5 days long thanks to a weekend that falls in the line up. On top of it, a vast majority of Ishita's friends are born between July and September. So much so that until The end of the Diwali break, my life is a succession of social engagement, parties, meet ups, and plots to keep my little monster occupied on those days off.
This is the time of the year I try to simplify things even more than usual, especially in the kitchen. As you all know, I love to cook...and eat. However, cooking is an activity that should remain stress free, and hassle free. So, when I find myself on edge, running from A to B, I'd rather put something simpler and far less time consuming to pull on the table than exhaust myself cooking a multi course meal. I cut corner, find shortcuts, and save myself oodles of times and sanity with a few essentials my kitchen is never without :




1) Always have the ingredients to make a cake on hand and a recipe you can do by heart. I have a basic sponge recipe that need only 5 ingredients. I can from that base make any flavour, and even turn them into cup cakes. If you don't have an oven, find a cold microwave mug cake recipe. Why? because on a stressed out day, a cake can fix anything.

2) Maggi Noodles, or any ramen type noodles really. Do I need to say more?

3) Your favourite tea, or selection of favourite teas. Because a cup of tea and a few munchies makes for the perfect stress relieving snack.

4) A pack of pasta, because this has been a houshold staple in Switzerland for ages. You are always guaranteed to have enough veggies on hand to toss together into a healthy topping. You can toss pasta with just about anything...ANYTHING and a meal on the table in 15-20 minutes. Toss a salad on the side if you feel the need to and you are good to go...tension free.

5) A few bags of frozen things in the freezer. There always be days of chaos, frustration and hair tearing in your life, especially if you have children. These days it is actually simpler to just pull a few cutlets, nuggets, meatballs out of the freezer, cut a few tomatoes and steam some broccoli than attempt a complicated recipe. My favourites are the chicken meat balls from Venky's that just go with anything. I can make them in a creamy sauce, a desi tomato gravy, an oyster sauce, grill them to use I a wrap or sandwich, add them chopped to a soup.

6) Ready to use masala paste mix to pull an Indian dish in minutes. Don't give me the stink eye, or protest that those ready to eat packs are disgusting just yet...hear me out. There is no question that those MTR meal pouch are tasting bad. These, are NOT the one I am talking about here. I am talking about these new masala mix that just help you make your gravy faster. You still have to chop your veggies, paneer or chicken. I have tried a few of these, and they all end up pretty much cutting the prep time in half, freeing as much as 15 minutes of my time in the process. Always have a few handy, a paneer dish will then pretty much be about just buying the paneer from your kirana store.

7) Instant soup packages. It is the same idea as above, saves you time, and you can always garnish then with fresh add ons like chopped carrots, corn kernels, toasted bread cubes or prawns. Serve it with fresh toasted bread and you have a light meal...in minutes. This has been a favourite of Ishita's for dinner this monsoon.

8) Corn flour (known as corn starch by some). All it takes is one teaspoon diluted in a little water to give a new dimension to any gravy or sauce. ONE TEASPOON! You can turn a watery Chloe gravy to a thick velvety one with it, or pull a creamy sauce out of the cooking juice from your chicken if you are cooking continental.

9) An assortment of basic seasoning from all the cuisines you cook the most. I always have olive oil, rice vinegar, soy sauce, fish sauce, barbecue sauce, oyster sauce, chicken and veggie stock cubes and fresh cream around. With all these I can pull any seasoning I need for the dishes I usually cook often.

10) Last but not least, a stack of take out menus. Yes! Because there are days that will be so hectic, that cooking will not be an option...at all. Days it will be safer for all involved if you don't cook. And that is fine, don't feel guilty of that, we are all only human after all.



Cooking everything from scratch, at every single meal and on every single day is an idea that should die once and for all. Our lifestyle has envolved drastically over the decades, people in cities are living hectic lives. Taking a few shortcuts on occasion has never killed anybody, and if the worth of a woman was only measured by her excellence in the kitchen, she would have been a chef, not a homemaker.

Last year, I came up with a tool to teach Ishita the days of the week and the notion of time passing which you can see here.
That tool has sailed, and while she still isn't remembering all the days of the week in order, it has helped a lot. The poor thing got so abused and distorted and discoloured I just hat to let it go. Beside, this year she has to learn sight words in school. Words that she needs to be able to read just by looking at them. The list of them is likely to grow as we progress into the academic year, so I decided to find a way to rotate them on my kitchen door. This is what I came up with:


I took a big sheet of craft paper I had left from a previous project, taped little plastic pockets I cut out of page protector sleeves and used pretty masking/Washi tape to make it look good. And, because we aren't yet quite done with the days of the week, I used some duplicate princess stickers from her Princess album to assign one Princess picture to each day of the week. I also added a pocket for the Months and pasted a little square of transparent plastic on which we can write the date with a white board marker.
I wrote the sight words given to us by the school on business card sized paper and keep them in a basket nearby, every other day, I change the sight words by placing a new card in each pocket for Ishita to see and learn.

So far it is working great, and she is learning her sight words quickly enough and can now help me read some of her story books already.

I decided to do a little Google reverse image search on my blog this morning. I do things like that from time to time, if I am not googling my blog URL, or running a image search directly on Goolge. And I occasionally find little surprises. Namely my pictures ending place without me having been informed about it, asked permission, or even getting a link back to my blog. I got a few of these thieves this morning, and reported it.

Let's be clear people. Just because it is on the internet, and because this is a blog does NOT mean it has fallen in the public domain. If you were under that impression, here is one link about copyrights to get you started. I am still writting this blog, it is active, and ALL content on it belongs to me, you can link back to it, you can ask my permission to reproduce pictures and paragraphs, but you CAN'T save picture and use them as your own on another site, or copy my articles and pass them as yours. You may not get caught today, but one day you could end up in big trouble.

Simply put, if you are taking any of my work, words or picture without asking me, and linking back to me you are STEALING. I work hours every week on that blog alone. This is MY WORK. How would you feel if someone took any of your work from you and was getting profit from it instead of you? My point exactly.

So let's be clear once and for all, everything on this blog, past, present and future IS copyrighted. There is nothing that falls in the public domain from it. You like what I write and what I show, you leave me a comment asking me if you can borrow it. be it on this blog, on Google + or Facebook. Because I made it clear I have presence on all these platforms. You can reach these with the buttons on the right column. The Facebook page even has my email address should you prefer contacting me privately. There is no excuse for you snagging my content shamelessly the way some do.

And rest assured that in all the cases I have been asked nicely about borrowing, I said yes. Unless you are trying to use my content for some questionable adult websites that is.

If you ever thought there was never a copyright on my blog, scroll down and you will see there is one. and again remember that displaying a disclaimer of copyrights on an intellectual property is optional since 1989 but that the abcense of one does not mean the content is not copyrighted. All intellectual property are copyrighted by default, unless stated otherwise.

My mission to make our study room more pleasant to the eyes continues. I tackled the wall art over the past few days. First I painted the frame of DH's college class picture green (you can see it in part on the right). Then, I decided to do a little painting myself. I few months back I started reading the book by Rhonda Byrne called "The Power". In it, the law of creation : "Imagine it, Feel it, Recieve it" really made an impression on me. Not because it is new and foreign to me, but because I have been applying this law countless time over the years since my childhood. I ended up knowing it under the technique of "Goal visualisation" when learning about Sophrology. Simply put, that simple little quote is part of my life, and in my case has always worked for me. I achieved great things implementing it.

So much so, that this quote seemed like the perfect one to have in our study. Which after all is a place in which I spend time to be creative, and productive. And, because I am...well...me, it had to be something crafty, original and homemade. And, for once, I didn't spend months and months working on it. First, because it is not a huge painting, and then because I was very clear about what I wanted it to be. I just took a little time deciding which colour and style I wanted, which for me is a quick decision, considering that all the paintings I painted in the past were long projects that kept me busy for weeks if not months.

Our study room is coming along nicely and we end up spending more and more time in it because of it.

Don't you love how our generation is ridiculously involved into being perfect parents?

No, I mean it, we are. And, we seem to have no excuses not to aspire to this parental ideal of perfection. Our own parents could get away with it. Bless their souls, they didn't have internet, google, Pinterest and about three bazillion TV channels and magazines to help them on their parenting journey. Poor things, they had to improvise, and use a lot of creativity to bring us up. Poor us kids! We were the guinea pigs of their trials and errors. We had to suffer the indignation of growing up without rainbow spaghetti, and our parents idea of a sensory bin was to let us play in the grass, sand and dirt...yes real dirt! Can you imagine the horror? What were they even thinking letting us play outdoor like that? And letting us be in the park with...gasp...just a ball to play with? Or, even insisting that there was some fun in going by the brook, or lake to just walk without engaging us into a structured activity like picking up 20 different types of leaves? How did we survive this caveman age of parenting and hours of free play? Why oh why didn't they even think of introducing us to 101 ways to use glitter? Clearly we have a mystery on our hands here I tell you. Miraculous even, that we survived eating all the cake we wanted at parties; and downed it with enough soft drinks that would get the judgy brigade of today go wild and condemn our own parents for child neglect.

Clearly, we had a lot of wrongs to right. Our parents were totally out of their minds thinking children only need food, sleep, water, love and a lot of space to grow. I will say it again: what were they thinking???? And so we came up with the idea that our children need to have every single nano seconds of their day under control...our control, because we owe it to them to be better parents than our own parents. Days loaded with games, quizzes, sensory bins, seasonal craft projects, structured TV time, mom and me cooking, activity classes, tuitions, coaching, educational trips...We dutifully pin craft projects and recipe on Pinterest to keep ourselves and our kiddos busy for at least three lifetimes. The perfectionist agenda wins above human needs. Perfection is the only thing that matters. No more giggling over an old shoebox of reject photo prints; the perfect way to preserve memories are through fancy scrap booking, and if we can't pull it off...sign up for a class to learn the art...we owe it to our kids after all? how could we bear for them to have any regrets about their childhood?

We also have the duty to relieve simpler times, but only when it comes to cooking.Our grand mothers sweating the whole day in the kitchen to make the perfect stocks, sauce, cakes and preserves must have had it right. Never mind that both mine took whatever short cuts available to deliver them whenever it came and were shocked to hear I had not other choice but make my own puff pastry in India. Our generation thrives on that kind of masochims. Unlike our parents and grand parents we have access to a battery of books, magazines and you tube videos to teach us how to cook gourmet restaurant food at home, raise kids the right way, how to clean everything better than a pro, and look our best doing it. We simply can't afford to let anything to chance the way our parent did, or else we could take the risk to be publicly humiliated for doing so.

So, here we are, pretending to be perfect...no striving to be perfect, aiming at being better than perfect, raising perfect kids. never loosing our cool, never admitting defeat, or confessing that parenting actually sucks a lot at times. We will hide the fact our kids do drink juice from time to time, because we might as well confess we are turning them into drug addicts. Our child smiling at the taste of a glass of juice is definitely not worth the judgy look from random strangers. And we have the duty to be utterly delighted at all of our kids antics, be it smearing poop all over the bathroom or throwing a plate of organic pasta and sauce across the pristine white living room. We must at all time marvel at their imaginative power, never yell because it would kill their spirit, keep a smile on our face and keep going. We have no right to have emotions of our own in this quest for perfection, because you know, kids grow up so fast. We must cherish these moments, even the bad ones. Let's cherish them moment of pent up frustration, or else we won't have much to tell our shrink in 20 years from now.

I say we, but I'll have no part in this. I think my parents had the right idea. I yell when I am angry, am tired when I feel so, smile when I am happy. My sensory bin, rainbow spaghetti less childhood rocked. And I therefore aim at being an imperfect parent.