If you had any doubts about how hard being a parent can be and how much of a demanding and agonising job it can be at time, any school functions should do the trick at clearing them.

I can really only speak of my experience in India, but I am sure my parents hated school functions they had to be part of as much as I hate them now that I am in their proverbial shoes.

That said, among the worst of the worst of the events that can be hurled at you in India, "Annual Sports day" makes the top of the list.
Ishita is a 1st grader, and I already had my fair share of them. Each year they get worse, and more unbearable, and this blog post is coming while my butt is still super sore from sitting on a plastic chair for 5 hours this morning.

5 long hours of speeches, ceremonies, pomp, military marching, and official bodies recognition, all this to get to see my daughter perform a few cartwheels and a karate chop for 5 minutes.
It's the same every year, and as a seasoned parent you know that this is the day of unavoidable agony, that you must attend. Mainly because your child is super exited about it and practiced for weeks (guilt trip anyone) and because the school's officials have an uncanny ability to force you to stay in your seat by refusing to release children after their performance.
I compiled a list that WILL happen at any of these dreaded sports meet and for which you shall be prepared:

1) The invitation will ask you to be seated by a specific time, say 8.30am even though we all know that once translated in IST it means 9am or later.

2) You must arrive at 8am if you want to have a decent shot at glimpsing your child's exploits. Simply because most Mumbai schools have over 2000 students and it means at least 2000 devoted parents all fighting for the prime photo and video capturing first row.

3) Officials and the Guest of honour run on IST, this means they won't see it fit to come at 8.30, but closer to 9.30.

4) This leaves you with plenty of time to people watch and hear a remix of "Is this seat free?" and a few parents that came at 9am to declare it is unfair that people save chairs for their spouse.

5) Once the officials made their entrance, parents must be immediately put into a semi comatose state by running a competition for the most boring official speech. As a result you are submitted to performance reports, a reminder of the school value, punctuated by frequent mention of the various trustees and philanthropists associated to the cause of your child's bright future prospect.

6) By then the Guest of Honour is looking as bored as the parents, so they proceed to delivering gifts and flowers to the VIP and ask said guests to make a speech...you know just for good measure.

7) Once all the bla-bla has been done with the opening ceremony can start. Parents are asked to stand for the school prayers, and most are happy to get off their butts, as they've all been sitting for over an hour.

8) Following the school prayer is the flag parade, all houses march, and it may or may not be a competition. Minus the military salute, it is full of "Attention" "At ease" clipped marching and heavily codified flag movement. By then most parents are going back into their comatose state, except for those who have kids in the military marching style parade who are all out with their smart phones and tablets.

9) Then they will launch balloons and unveil the mascot, which isn't even a school one, but a Disney character or an animal chosen just for that edition. This year it was an Eagle supposed to inspire majesty and exellence. Well, we parent excel at sitting on plastic chairs pretending to care...so there!

10) And because unveiling a silly mascot isn't enough, we must all witness the passing of the flame, because God forbid we don't get as much oomph as the Olympics.

11) Finally, all students recite the pledge for fair play and spirit of sportsmanship...don't ask me or any parent how it goes, we were all listening to the voices in our head, namely the ones screaming CAFFEINE

12) Let the smart phone supremacy war begin! The actual sporting events start, and each class gets a maximum of 3-4 minutes in the spotlight.  Parents stand, ignore all warnings of remaining seated and not taking pictures or videos.

13) The school then proceed by putting everybody back into that blissed state of coma by listing all the achievements of the school in various sporting events through the year and deliver awards for the same.

14) The officials then all vanish to the comfort of an AC room and good breakfast while parents are reminded to please stay seated for the track events. Track events for which only a few kids from each class are selected.

15) 90% of the parents try to bear with the heat and dehydration on their plastic chair wondering when they will get to pick up their kids. Sure the invitation said 1pm, but hey it is 11am, they can't make you go though 2 hours of that crap right? They have a heart, they sympatise with the people that pay the fees? Right? RIGHT?

16) WRONG parents that attempt to retrieve their kids are publicly humiliated on the loud speaker and reminded that we have to stay put until the end. The warning is delivered by a staffer since all the officials have vanished and don't give a hoot about kids running in the sun on the track.

17) 2 hours of parents rubbing their neck, back and crossing and uncrossing legs. Babies start crying and we all spy the staff doling out snack boxes to the students...lucky them!

18) 30 minutes from the end of the ordeal the impatience is highly perceptible, among parents and students alike. Parents are or half dead on their chair, or walking around desperate to regain blood flow in their buttocks. Students have all launched themselves into the timeless game of making their empty "Frooti" box explode or are running a contest of who is going to rocket the Frooti straw further on the sports field.

19) The officials come back to a scene of chaos : Parents chasing toddlers on the field, and Frooti boxes exploding all over the place. They deliver a few more words to attempt to sedate the dissidents back to their seat, istribute a few more awards and announce that now is time to close with the National Anthem.

20) The last Jaya He uttered parents bounce off their plastic chair and rush to the school building to beat the stampede and escape Sports Day hell with their kids in tow. Anarchy reigns supreme!

21) This is followed by a mad rush for Auto-Rickshaw finding to go back home. Wise and seasoned parents know this is futile and march to the nearest junk food joint to eat what is probably their first real meal of the day at 1.30pm. You are sure to find half of the school in those restaurants, and you can tell from all the sports day uniform. The kids are still hyper, the parents are just glad to be in AC

22) You finally make it home and realise that you are dead beat tired from not doing much of anything at 3pm while your kid still bounces up and down on the sofa.


I don't know about you, but I am convinced that Sports Day is the parent equivalent to Board Room meeting boredom...

When we moved out of our old flat 3 years ago, we knew that the new place HAD to have a spare room, for many reasons. The first one being that DH used to pull long hours of work, often at home and needed a space to do so undisturbed.
The second strong point in favour of a spare room was that we have out of State and even out of the country family and friends. We needed that room to accommodate guests properly and give everybody a minimum of comfort and privacy.

I remember that when we moved in, our spare room was a big hot mess...emphasis on the word MESS.
I managed to find the first ever picture I took of that room:
Cringeworthy huh? If the urge to click the "X" and leave this blog page crossed your mind, please wait. I promise you it gets better.
The first thing we ever did in this room was getting an electrician to install a plug point where we needed it for the fridge.
Fridge which doesn't fit in the kitchen, sue me, I lived in more homes that had fridge space issue than you'd think ever possible. And that was even before we got a bigger fridge...that bad!

Anyhow, the fridge stayed in the spare room, but in a more convenient and less "space eating" spot:
While not the perfectly ideal scenario (seriously having it in the kitchen really wouldn't hurt), I can live with it. This room is just a few steps away from said kitchen anyway. Living with that waterfall painting I did a few years ago is a different story, but there are plans to change it.

The second thing we changed quickly was putting a proper desk in this room. And for the longest time it was the only big update. Apart from finding a crafty way to hide the boxes of old college and IT books that is:
I know I know, another Pinterest worthy picture! It's the last of the frumpy ones I promise. I am getting somewhere nice with this blog post. It's just that the only way I can tell you how much this change means is to take you down through time and through horrendous pictures.

So, as I said, we spent a lot of time with no other improvement to that room. Mostly because we couldn't quite decide on what we wanted for it. And when we figured that out, we didn't really see an urgency to it. It was a "Maybe if we have money to spare we will do it" kind of deal.

That was until the money to spare bit got solved by a surprise win in a contest from Urban Ladder.
You see, I managed to win a 20k voucher in a photo contest with my "Lhasa chest of drawer" earlier this month.
20 thousands rupees to buy things I loved from Urban Ladder!!!!! I am not ashamed to say that I did the happy dance when I found out (ok I jumped up and down like a maniac in the Study, don't judge).

This meant my study plans, or at least some of them could become reality. The first one was to have a proper bookshelf to tackle the never ending problem of book storage in our home:
Enters the "Boeberg" bookcase! This one has been on my wish list for a while let me tell you. This is a better looking, better quality, sturdier version of Ikea's Expedit, which is been a hot seller ever since they launched it. There is something about basic square cubicle units that sells, and for good reason, this design is versatile and you can add up to it as you go (Urban Ladder sells quite a few variant and configuration of that shelf unit).
This shelf solved all our Study storage woes, in style and it has really opened up the space.
The other item I absolutely knew without the shadow of a doubt that I would buy should I ever win one of their contest was their tripod lamp:
This lamp is one I have been practically drooling over since they launched it. Since we moved in this flat, I knew this was the lamp for the study/spare room. When either DH or I work late in the evening night, this room can either get depressing with the tube light (we rarely use it because the light is horrible) or downright gloomy with just the tiny table lamp (which is a tube light too anyway). For a while we've been talking about having a floor lamp in that room to have a more cosy light source. Thanks to Urban Ladder, this is one of those problems solved.

Ideally we will want to see these two piled up mattresses go and be replaced by a sofa cum bed, and yes we have a few we like on Urban Ladder (we really got hooked to this site). That will be an update for another time, as for now, the spare room is quite liveable as it is. On the decor plan, I want to finish that gallery wall one day. I have tons of ideas for it, but nothing concrete as of now...stay tuned.

With my winnings, there is one more piece of furniture I bought, but for another room, and the topic of a different blog post. 

I hope you all had a great weekend and are ready for another productive week, I sure am. Today I want to share what has become an hot favourite at home. Especially in the cool winter month : Pot roasted chicken drumsticks in a curry leave flavoured gravy.

This is one of this fusion dish I came up with over the years. In essence it looks and taste continental, with the nice zing of curry leaves giving it a taste twist.
The beauty of this dish, is not how it taste (though it is divine, no discussion) but how easy it is to pull at the end of a busy day. If you have all the ingredients on hand, it is pretty much a leave alone to cook dish.

The one thing you ABSOLUTELY need to cook it is a "Dutch Oven" or deep casserole dish. Mine looks very similar to this one. I tried cooking it in a kadai in the past, but it tend to over cook before it ever get that nice roasted look. Kadai (or woks) do not give the all over even heating a Dutch oven (also called cocotte or casserole) will give you.
As you can see from the affiliate link above, they aren't even super pricey to begin with and it is an investment you'll be glad you made as it can be used for a variety of dishes (even Indian ones).

The other thing you will need on hand is a chicken stock, you can make your own by boiling curry cuts pieces of chicken in a large pot of water for a couple of hours (the Dutch oven comes handy again), and freeze it in batches. If you don't have a stock on hand you can still make your own using "Maggi Magic Masala cubes", it won't be as good but it does come handy in a pinch.

Now that we are done with the chit chat, let's get down to business:

You will need:

6 Chicken Drumsticks
1 large onion, thinly sliced
2 cups chicken stock
A generous handful of fresh curry leaves (I do about 4-5 sprigs worth of leaves)
salt and pepper to taste
A little corn starch to thicken the gravy

How to do it:

1) Put your Dutch oven on the stove and heat the oil along with the onion slices.

2) Once the oil is hot and the onions start to turn translucent, toss in the curry leaves and stir. Add the chicken immediately after the curry leaves.

3) Brown the chicken drumsticks for 2-3 minutes, turning them so they get done on all side and add the chicken stock once they are all sporting nice light brown roast marks.

4) Cover the pot with a lid and let it cook for 20 minutes on medium high heat. Check the liquid content every now and then. You don't want the water to evaporate too much, so keep adding fresh water as needed. Toward the end of the cooking process, there should be about 1.5 centimetre water at the bottom of the pan (using a 24 cm pan).

5) Just before the end of the cooking time, dilute 1-2 teaspoon of corn starch in a little water and pour in the pan. The gravy will thicken within seconds of you doing so. Turn off the heat as soon as your gravy has thickened.

6) Serve hot with your choice of vegetable and a side of either rice, bland pasta or potatoes.

We like our potatoes mashed for this dish, but any type of potatoes will do. The one part protein, one part vegetables and one part starch, it the ratio you will find in most of everyday meals in continental cuisine. Serve as a leafy green salad on the side to make it even more authentic. 

This has been another very productive week for me on the blog (and offline) and a few projects that were in progress have been completed. The biggest one being the revamping of our spare room aka "The office".
While I won't go into all the details here, a contest win at Urban Ladder has finally turned that room into a cosy space rather than a dump for all things that aren't welcome elsewhere.

With it came the absolute necessity to do something about one of our spare dinning chairs :
This picture above shows you the finished product (and my new bookshelf in the background...squee!)
Not all of you might know it, but in Switzerland "Decorator" is a term often used to describe an "upholsterer decorator" and this is what I did. Yes I did re-pad and recover chairs, sofa and armchairs (among other things).

This chair, is part of set of 6 that came with our dinning table, and in this flat, we only really can accommodate 5 of them around said table. The spare one has been sitting in the spare room for about forever. And it wasn't much of a problem before, as it was hidden under a small wooden desk (a desk we plan on selling).

And, it was a good thing it was hidden, because this is how the chair looked before my handywork:
The hazard of family life and kids immortalised on dinning chair. I did try to clean that fabric countless time but non avail. It is permanently stained with grease and food stains, result of a growing child who treated it as a napkin.

To be fair, none of the 6 chairs are looking good, this one is just probably the worst, and utterly embarrassing for guests to sit on. The first problem of these chairs, which I sadly can't fix without a proper arsenal of upholsterer tools and supplies is the padding. The padding on these chairs is GONE. I solved the problem by getting removable chair pads for the ones in the dinning area. That one, we never bothered.

But now, this nasty looking chair is in full sight, in a corner of my study, and it really had to get a makeover, for both its sake and mine.
It turned out that I have two old curtains I no longer use sitting in my wardorbe, yards of fabric that apart from a few fading spots are still in great condition, and typically thick enough to be used as a chair cover.
Don't mind the cat, she fell in love with the fabric, and was a happy little helper during the whole process.

My initial plan was to make a removable cover, but as I went about it I realised it would just be quicker and more practical to cover the chair in a more permanent way.
The problem: a professional recovering requires nails, and a staple gun. Two things I didn't have. But since this chair is really not going to be put through any kind of heavy duty use, I decided my hot glue gun could come to the rescue.
Hot glue guns excel at holding fabric to any kind of surface. Back in my decorator days we used them to glue fancy trims and fringes to refurbished pieces that required such treatment.
Hot glue is really just a type of plastic that melts at high temperature and dries in seconds once removed from the heat source. On decorative pieces they can be a good substitute for nails.
The first thing you need to do is measure your chair and cut the appropriate length and width of fabric to cover it. Make sure you include one extra centimetre to fold the fabric under the chair as you measure and cut.
Once you have your square of fabric, you will need to position it on your chair using sewing pins. Ideally, you should use longer and thicker upholstery pins, which for some odd twist of luck I had in my craft supplies (don't ask...). In this picture above, they are the one with the orange head. If you have only the regular sewing pins, no problem, just use a lot more to hold the fabric into place.
These pins help you secure the fabric while you stretch it to really fit your padding.

You will need to split the fabric at the back of the chair where the wooden leg gets in the way. To do so, first ensure that the fabric is position correctly all around your padding and tightly secured with pins. Then, fold the flap of fabric in the back (just as in the picture). You need that fold to be parallel to the thread of the fabric, with the horizontal part following the horizontal threat of the stretched fabric, and the vertical length following the vertical length.
Make sure the fold touches the wooden corner as well. Once that flap is positioned correctly, take your scissors and cut toward the wooden angle at a right angle. Repeat on the other side.
Start hot gluing at the back of the chair first, from the center toward the edges. as you near the edges of that back portion, fold the cut fabric to give it a clean edge. Put the hot glue on the underneath of the chair frame (as shown in picture). You want the fabric to stay put all the way under so that the fabric looks like it is wrapping the whole padded area perfectly.

Once you have done the back, do the front section of the chair, stretching the fabric as you go. But CAREFUL! Do NOT glue all the way to the front leg, leave about 2-3 centimetres loose for now (you'll see why later).
Once the front has been glued, proceed to glue each sides, again stretching as you go, always starting in the middle of the section rather than the back. Again, leave 2-3 centimetres unglued toward the front leg of the chair (as shown in the picture above).

The reason why you should not glue this section now, is because you will want to shape your corner folds and trim the extra fabric in said fold first.
There are two different type of fold you can do on a chair like this one: one fairly simple, and one a bit harder.

The simple way is this one:
This is a single fold on the corner. This is a method more suited if you are a beginner and only requires you to first pull the side pannel to the front and fold the front portion over it (a bit like a gift wrap). Then it is only a matter of trimming and folding the excess before gluing into place.

This is of course not the fold I went for, I only took a picture of a single fold for the sake of this tutorial.
What I went for is a "double fold":
In the picture above I already glued, trimmed and folded the excess fabric, and the needles were in place just to hold the fold tightly before I stitched them.

This fold is a bit more complex, and if you aren't confident enough, don't attempt it (at least don't cut the fabric).
To pull this fold you need to pull the fabric down vertically below the sharp angle of the padding and secure and stretch it horizontally on both side, the fold the excess fabric into one fold on each side.
I can't explain it better than that without a live demo. The bulge of fabric is then cut and folded on each side before the to flap is glued to the bottom flap.

Once your folds are prepped, flip the chair over again, and hot glue the 2-3 centimetres you left unglued.
In both the single fold and the double fold technique, it is a good idea to make a quick invisible stitch with some needle and thread. This will prevent the folds from getting loose overtime as the fabric is put through the stress of people sitting down on it.
Ideally a small curved mattress needle would work best, but on such a short length you can totally do it with a regular straight needle.

From experience, I will say that the hot glue technique isn't even faster than using a staple gun, but comes handy when you lack the proper tools. It is a bit faster than the traditional magnetic hammer and nails in the mouth technique I learned in my days and should be used on antique pieces if you want to preserve their market value.

At this point, I am toying about covering my remaining 5 chairs, but since they are put to far more intensive use, I might want to invest into the right kind of tools before attempting it.
One thing is sure, my work is officially cat approved!

Ok, confession time has come. We are well into January already and the question is : How many of you guys kept with your resolutions?

I am willing to bet that for a lot of you, they are either long forgotten already or in the process of being put in that mental box labelled "resolutions" which you will store in the back of your mind until December 31st.

As you might know already, the only resolution I ever take is to keep on being awesome. That's no joke, I do, every year. This is the type of resolution I can totally keep. Because I don't really believe in things like "loosing weight", being more organised, or vowing to workout more, at least not as a resolution.

You see, the thing with these New year resolutions is that they are really made on the spot without any idea of how you will go about them. You can resolve to loose weight all you want, if you don't make a plan out of it, it won't happen. And it doesn't help to make that kind of statement after a month long of festivities either.
Don't get me wrong, loosing weight, going to the gym, being more organised, spending more time with family are all wonderful things. But they won't happen until you make them your GOALS.

That's right, goals, NOT resolutions. Do not resolve in vain to achieve something without an aim. That is stupid and will get you nowhere. Aiming at a reasonable short term goal is a smarter, better idea on so many levels.
The first one being that if you make it a concrete goal to, lets say loose 2kg in January, you will not feel discouraged. 2kg in a month is an attainable thing you can work with. "Loosing weight"in 2016, not so much.
Loosing how much? How? By when? Why? This is why resolutions don't work, they are way too vague for any sane person to keep with them, especially when they involve massive changes in your lifestyle.
It's the same with "Going to the Gym regularly". Define regularly to begin with. If you make it a goal to go every Monday and Wednesday instead, you are probably going to have a far better chance at keeping that one up.


Today is January 21st, we are 10 days away from kissing the first month of 2016 history (time flys I know). So if you have given up on your resolutions already, it's not to late.
You can keep them, but rewrite them as a goal. Take a moment to sit down, and make your goals for February. What is it that you resolved to do this year? How can you break it into small short term goals you can easily achieve?

Has, eating healthier in 2016 been your resolution? Yet you can't seem to switch from a carb loaded diet to a more sensible one? That's because you need to look at it as a progress. Try to make it your goal to make at least one day a week a healthier one. Pick a day a week that will be all about fresh fruits and vegetables and no carb and stick to that in February. Then by the end of next month, review your performance and plan on doing two days a week in March. When you break it down, it suddenly becomes less daunting.
Proceed the same with every single vague yet life altering resolutions you might have made last December.

If you can't trust yourself to remember your goals, write them down, and then write down how well you did, and don't forget to reward yourself as you progress with it as well.

And of course, remember to remind yourself that you are awesome...daily. This is what I do. 

One of the few things I really really really miss in India are those little salty pretzel sticks that are so commonly served as a party snack in Europe.
To the point I have desperately tried to make my own for YEARS. It involved a lot of trials, and as many errors. And all those years later, I am still not able to replicate them, I came close, but that is the highest commendation I can give : close.

Through all my trials and errors I found out that getting matchstick thin sticks is near impossible, but that making small crackers out of the same dough will give better results.
As I type this, I am still figuring out how to get them to be as crunchy as those store bought ones (which are ridiculously costly in India, import tax oblige).

Nonetheless, the taste of these crackers is right on the money, some are a bit more chewy than others, but they make a great alternatives to the overpriced pretzel sticks.

The dough used to make them is a standard yeast dough, and the salty brown coating is achieved the same way as in my "Pretzel bread" recipe : by coating them with soda bicarb diluted in water. The only difference with the pretzel bread is that you don't need to poach the crackers one by one.

If you are prepared for a slightly time consuming baking session, here is how to pull them off:

Ingredients:

350g plain white flour (Maida)
1 tsp of dry yeast
1tsp of sugar
2-3 tbsp of melted butter
2tsp of salt
Coarse salt to decorate (optional)

For the coating water: 

500ml of water
50g soda bicarb (baking soda)
1tbsp of salt

How to:

1) You need to start by making a yeast dough. Disolve the dry yeast and sugar in 1/3 glass of warm water. Put the flour in a mixing bowl and dig a well. Pour the yeasty water in the well and cover with a thin layer of flour.
Let it rest until the yeast oozes out of the well and through the flour cover, this is a sign your yeast is doing its yeasty thing.

2) Once the yeast is activated, add the melted butter and salt to the flour and gradually add water to form a smooth elastic dough. Cover the bowl with a kitchen towel and let it rest until the dough has doubled in size (1.5 hours usually)
3) Once the dough has doubled in size, line baking sheets with baking parchment and knock back your dough. This is a fancy term that means you are deflating to bring it back to its original size.

4) Roll out your dough as thing as you can and start cutting shapes with a small cookie cutter (as pictured above). Place all your little dough cutouts on your baking sheets before proceeding to the next step.

5) In a sauce pan, pour 500ml of water and add the soda bicarb and salt and bring to a boil, this will help the soda dissolve better. Turn of the heat once it is all dissolved and set aside.
IF you bake pretzel bread often, you know this water can be reused and keeps in a bottle in the fridge for a month. In this case, I already had the water ready, and I didn't need to warm it for this recipe.
6) Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius. With a wooden skewer, start poking tiny holes in your crackers. This is a step you do not want to skip, the holes prevent the crackers from bubbling and puffing unevenly while you bake them.

7) With a pastry brush, brush all your crackers with the soda bicarb water. If you are using the coarse salt, sprinkle your cracker with it.

8) Bake in the oven for about 12-15 minutes in the middle of the oven. The heat of the oven is what will activate the soda bicarb water to give a brown coating.

9) Transfer to a wire rack when you take them out of the oven and let them cool down completely before storing them in an air tight container.
I found out that the crackers I baked on the "crispy plate" my Samsung oven came with made them crunchier than those baked on my regular baking sheets. The next time I'll make them, I will try using a mesh rack to bake them. It could be that the way to get them to crisp is to allow the hot air to circulate above AND below.

Every blogger will tell you that blog post planning and scheduling is something you need to master if you want your blog to go places.
Gone are the days you could just sit down and write whenever your inspiration stroke. This might have worked when blogs were just personal diaries you shared with the world (welcome the 00's).

Blogging in the 10's means you got to keep a very consistent pace in your post publishing if you want people to keep reading you. Otherwise, they'll soon get bored of the erratic and rare blog post and move to greener pastures.
Greener pastures, aka blog that keeps coming with fresh content regularly.


This is usually where it gets though.

You see, we all have to juggle offline lives along with our online presence. There are meals to cook, homes to clean, social events to attend, kids to take care of and a whole lot of unpredictability to take into account

This all requires planning, a lot of planning.

Blog posts don't just happen out of thin air. Nowadays it requires often hours of your time to just get one post out (a thing I remind all those who keep stealing my pictures).
This blog would not be what it is now if it weren't for two things : 1) Blog Post Planning and 2) Blog Post Scheduling.

Blog post planning is that phase where you have your ideas, and need to decide how to use them and when. I myself keep a notebook with lists upon lists of possible blog posts topic. Whenever an idea strikes, it goes into the book, whether I am ready to use it or not.
The lists have grown so much over the years that I now keep topic specific lists. There are recipe lists, craft projects lists, and even season specific lists I use constantly.
Some of these post ideas have been left untouched for years now, simply because I am not in that place just yet (inspiration wise). Some make it to the list only to be used within a day or two.

Every week I make a little time to go through my lists and pick up topics I feel I can write about in the next 1-2 weeks and work on a draft (or two or three...creativity is a process). Whenever I write a draft, I also add a few lines about pictures to use at the end of it.
Whenever I have time to take said pictures, I'll go work on it.

At this point, my blog post is ready for the next step :

Blog post scheduling. For me, it takes two distinctive forms. There are the blog posts that I suddenly have time to write weeks in advance and schedule in "Blogger" and there are the posts I will write either the day before or on the day it is meant to go live.

Usually, by the time I have a good draft and a set of picture ready, I go ahead and write it in Blogger. Even if the post is so seasonal it cannot be published right away. This is often the case with my Christmas and season specific posts. Sometimes they are planned and written a year before they are due to go live.
For example I could have a great salad recipe that would be best suited for a hot Summer day, but have all the essential means to publish right away (except the right season and mood), if that happens, I will simply set the publishing date in the future. In Blogger, you can do that simply by clicking the "Schedule" option on your right hand menu and select the date and time you want it to go live.

When I do that kind of scheduling, I also write down about it in my day planner so that I remember something is going to go live on that day. I do so for two reasons, the first one being that I will want to give that post some "Promoting Love" when it goes live. The second reason being that I do not want to just publish two posts on that day.

Because you see, I also do short term scheduling. Every Saturdays, I sit down with my blog lists, my drafts, and my day planner, deciding what can be reasonably published in the week ahead. I check if my schedule allows me to work on pictures I might not have, or drafts that need to be perfected.
By schedule, I of course mean anything else that isn't blog related. If my week is jammed packed with other events and obligations, I will keep the blog post schedule much lighter for that week.
Regardless, I aim at a minimum of one post a week. 

My ideal pace being 3-4 blog posts published a week. This is a pace I can keep because I made my blog my day job, and I have a daughter going to school full time. But even when she wasn't I would plan ahead so that this minimum of one post a week would go live on the blog. I'm not going to lie, it was at times easier when blog posts weren't expected to come with pictures, but those days are gone, especially for personal and lifestyle blogs.


My best advice to anybody going into blogging is to keep writing, often, if not daily. What you write may not be publishing worthy at this point, but at least you have a draft to work with. And whenever something is ready to be published, go ahead and schedule it. Schedule it in such a way that you general publishing pace is maintained. So that if your personal goal is to have two blog posts a week, but have 6 posts ready you can span them over the next few weeks.


How do you approach blog post writing? What is your process? Do you plan ahead and schedule? How do you do it? I would love to hear about it in the comments below. 

When you think of strings of lights, aka fairy lights or mirchi lights in India, chances are the first thing that pops to your mind is either Christmas or Diwali (and possibly both).

I personally thing it is a shame to air them out only during the festive season. Especially when you can do this with them:
I always loved the soft glow they can give to your decor, year round. For a while I had some in my kitchen. Back then I used the cheap kind that kept frying and needed to be replaced.

When I took down my Christmas tree earlier this month, I decided I wasn't just quite done enjoying the fairy light glow. I already had stuffed my white lantern with them before Diwali, but I wanted more.
I added a string of light around the flower painting that is hung above the dinning table and glued it to the wall using a hot glue gun (you totally must have one of these if you are going to do a lot of craft projects).
The hot glue gun will secure the string to the wall and won't leave a mark once you want to remove it.  All you need to do is warm the glue again (it works with a hairdryer). and it will come right off. Because this glue isn't really glue you see, it is more like a soft plastic resin that melts at high heat and solidifies quickly once the heat source is taken away.
One of the thing you ABSOLUTELY want to keep in mind with fairy lights is that the cheap incandescent bulbs type will fry VERY quickly. I went through way way way too many of these cheap Chinese import rubbish one in my kitchen. So this year, after burning a few more on my Christmas tree alone, I invested into LED bulbs strings.

They last much longer, and they don't give a lot of heat which could burn your walls and furniture. I myself prefer the warm white light over the cool white, or even colours strings for light. But this is really entirely a matter of taste.

This blog is, and always have been hosted on Blogger, from the time I first created it in 2004. I never saw the point to move it to Wordpress, self hosted or not. The Blogger vs Wordpress has been raging in the blogger community for as long as these two platforms have existed, and Dana from the Wonder Forest explained the pro and cons of each platform.

One of the many point I have heard against blogger is that it doesn't allow for a lot of customisation options and has very few plugins or Widgets you can add to it. Which couldn't be further from the truth. There is a LOT you can tweak, alter and customize in a Blogger blog.

This very blog is the living proof you can as it is currently using the simplest, barest, most minimalistic template blogger offers on its dashboard: The simple white template.
It hasn't been my template of choice in the past, in fact over the 11 years this blog has been up and running it went through quite a few design changes (from back when it was called "Cyn's Adventure in India").
Since changing the name of the blog in 2014, I want for a cleaner, white theme I could customize more easily and which would look good with my image header. I then added a lot of HTML codes and CSS to modify the look further to look like the blog you are reading right now.

Here are some of the things you can do to make you plain "out of the box" Blogger blog look a bit more custom made without using a paid template :

1) Get rid of the the Blogger Navbar. That search bar that stick to the top of the blog and has the orange "B" blogger logo isn't that good looking, and guess what? It doesn't even have to stay, you can choose to hide it.
To do so simply go to the "Layout" tab on your dashboard, click on "Edit" on the Navbar element and select "Off" then save your chage.

The only drawback from removing the Navbar is that the option to search your blog disappear with it. But, this is not much of a problem. You can add a search box to your side bar, either by adding the standard "Blogger Widget" for it or using a custom code. The one I am using right now can be found here.


2) Add a custom header. The blog title with my picture is an image I created using Paint Shop Pro 8, but you can use Canva or Pickmonkey online to do it as well. You can use custom fonts, graphics, or photos to make a Blog header that is truely unique. Once done, you simply need to go to the Layout tab in blogger, and click on Edit on the "Header" part of the layout.  You will have the option to upload and image and have it being displayed instead of the title and description.


3) Make full use of the "Customize" feature on the template tab. When you click on the "Template" tab on your dashboard it will let you chose between Editing the HTML and Customising the template. While the HTML is a bit tricky and I would not recommend changing anything there without knowing how, the Customize option is a pretty easy tool to use and it let you do a LOT of things.
Changing colors of the different text area, changing the fonts, changing the width of the blog, the number of side bars, adding a background image, changing the content area's colour, it can all be done in the customize feature. It also has an Advanced section where you can opt to enter CSS codes that will change the look of some of your widgets and elements (and there are plenty of tutorials around to teach you how).

4) Add LinkWithin. This nifty little widget will suggest some of your older posts that are related to your current content to your reader. This is a great way to ensure your readers stay on your blog longer and help lower your bounce rate and boost your SEO. You can follow the instructions to instal it on the LinkWithin website. Then, you can head to this blog to learn how to customise its look, the round thumbnail look I have going on can only be achieved using a fair bit of CSS coding I got from the aforementioned link.

5) Add pages. You ideally want to have an "About Me" and a "Disclosure" page among other more blog specific. Pages are blog posts that are stand alone posts and do not get lost in the date stream. They can be displayed on the Tab bar (on my blog that is the light pink one right under the header). You can choose which of your pages will be displayed on that bar by going to the "Layout" tab on your dashboard and clicking "Edit" on the Pages element.
The About me let your readers know more about you and your blog, and the Disclosure page becomes handy to let people know about any affiliate programs you are part of, your Copyrights terms, and warn people about the use of cookies on the blog (EU now requires websites to disclose it).


These few points alone will help your Blogger blog look a bit more personal and less "Blogger-ish". There are of course TONS of other tweaks and tricks you can apply to it. In fact I have been thinking about writing more "Blogging tips" post this year.
Not just about how to customize the look of your blog, but about taking pictures and editing them, scheduling posts, using social medias to promote your work and just plain old blog writing tips.

A few days ago I gave a shout out on my Facebook page and my G+ profile asking you to let me know what you would want help with so I can build a list of topic to work with.
I will again, invite you to do so by leaving a comment below, if your question is simple enough, I might even help you right away by replying to it. 

Oranges are in season in India right now, and along with them a world of culinary possibilities. But, wait! Oranges? Didn't this recipe say something about tangerines?

This is because what we call oranges in India is in fact NOT an orange. It is far closer to tangerine in size, feel and taste. These oranges also go by the name of Nagpur oranges and they might be the fruit you would overlook at the market if you aren't familiar with them
Their skin might not always look appealing, it's puffy, battered at times, and the hint of green on some might even trick you into thinking they aren't ripe. As an expat freshly arrived to India you could easily ignore them for not looking the part. Truth is, you will be missing on something good ignoring them.
If you grew up in Europe, you probably have sweet memories of peeling tangerines and clementines during the Winter months (and placing the fresh peels on the radiator to perfume the room). These less than picture perfect "oranges" will bring you right back there, and they will soon be the thing you will wait for all year round in India (along with Mangoes)

So now that I pretty much clarified that the Indian orange is actually almost the same as a tangerine, we can go back to the original intent of this blog post : a Chicken recipe
This can't get any more seasonal over here: the gamy taste of liver paired with the sweet goodness of an Indian Winter fruit. The kind of dish you will ONLY be able to cook during the orange/tangerine season in the country!
What's more, it is a quick and super easy dish to pull, we are talking less than 10 minutes folks! Chances are the rice you can serve it with will take more time to cook than this dish, that is how awesome this is.

My recipe serves 2 decent portions, or 3 small ones. You can easily double the quantity if needed:

Ingredients:

200g of Chicken livers
1 tangerine/Nagpur orange
2-3 table spoon peanut oil (this gives a far better taste than generic vegetable oil)
2-3 sprigs of spring onions (scallions) chopped
1 tsp of each black and white sesame seeds
a handful of chopped coriander leaves (cilantro)
salt to taste

How to:

1) Wash and chop you livers into bite size chunks while you heat the peanut oil in a wok/kadai

2) Once the oil is hot toss in your liver and sear, stir regularly and cook for about 3-4 minutes, they should be just done in the middle and have some golden brown streaks on the outside.

3) Add the tangerine wedges, sesame seeds and spring onion and stir for a minute. The tangerine wedges will cook very quickly, you want them to be soft but not mushy. Turn of the heat and transfer to a serving dish immediately (do not leave it in the pan, it will dry the chicken).

4) Add the coriander leaves to it and serve hot.

It goes really well with rice and a side of vegetables, or vegetable stir fry noodles. 

When I took down my Christmas decorations on January 1st the void left in my living room was so unbearable that I had to come up with some very quick decor ideas to liven up the space. The first idea was to spray paint old glass jars and turn them into pretty cookie jars to display on my chest of drawer.

The second project was to use some of the yarn I had left over from my pom pom snowmen project (and I have a lot of leftover yarn).
I also happened to have picked up two bags of black and white tiny pompoms from the stationary and art supplies shop in my neighbourhood (just because it was finally available after months of me wanting some).

Those two items combined gave birth (with the help of Pinterest) to this pretty little tassel garland which I hung in the frame of my balcony door.
I also ended up making a tassel ornament for my curtain, you know, just because it is cute and fun:
These curtains are about 2 feet too short for that extra tall balcony door (and they already were longer than normal curtains to begin with). For this reason, said curtains serve a purely ornamental purpose. We never draw them shut to darken the room (the room is North facing already anyway).

To hold them in place I used a couple of old green bangles and this what has been holding them for as long as they have been assigned this curtain rod. To prettify this setup all I needed was to tie two tassels.

This brings me to tassel making. This is one of these fun DIY project that will take no time to pull.
All you need is some yarn (I used some similar to this one), a scrap of cardboard of the desired tassel length and some scissors.
You start by wrapping your yarn around your strip of cardboard just like in the picture above. The more yarn you wrap, the more voluptuous your tassel will be.
Once you have wrapped enough yarn (this is entirely up to you, tassels can be as skinny or as plump as you wish), take a small length of yarn and slide it under all the other yarn loops and bring to the top of the cardboard.

In the picture above, you can see that I tied the length of yarn on top this will gather all your strands together and serve as a string to tie your finished tassel to something.
Once that string has been tied, cut the strands of yarn at the bottom of the cardboard.
Once you you are done cutting, take another length of yarn, and tie it tight toward the top portion of your tassel, as in the picture above.
And voila! One tassel done! Repeat as many times as you need tassels for your garland.
In the picture above, I was stringing my tiny pompoms to a tassel that would go on my curtain decor. But the process for the garland is fairly similar.
For the garland, you will need a long piece of yarn, small pompoms and a tapestry needle (the needle with the blunt tip and a huge hole on your standard needle pack). Simply string the pompoms poking them with the needle and tie a tassel on the length of yarn wherever you need one:
For my garland, I went for one black, one white, one black, then a tassel, and then repeated the pattern until the end of the string.

And that is about it!
You can use tassels on a lot of decorative objects, and use different colour combination. But my January decor is white and gold. 

With the holiday season ending and leaving us decor-less I found myself on a crafty/decorating spree. Plus, I had a 6 years old who've just had about enough of school holiday. We after all clocked a grand total 5 weeks of holiday between November 4 and January 4 (not for the faint hearted, and gotta love the ridiculousness of the school).

A few days before we rang the new year in, I took Ishita to the art supply shop and asked her to pick anything to make a project for her room. As usual, she went for the huge selection of stickers they have and had no interests in anything else.
Fortunately, my artsy brain had all its cogs and wheels running and we ended up with this :
For the lack of better terms, we'll call it a "Paper patchwork". Which, it pretty much is anyway. You see, it pays off to be an arts and craft picture junkie as I tend to collect odds and ends and paper that spark my attention.
A few months ago,  I big pad of square craft paper caught my eyes and I bought it. To be fair I already had an idea of turning them into a big "quilt-like" artwork, but lacked time, and inspiration. I bought it just the same and it sat in my craft supplies drawers waiting to be put to good use.
Ishita helped me select the colours we would use and I got to work taping each squares together to form a big quilt.
I then taped the big patchwork of paper to the wall in her bedroom and we got going on decorating each squares with stickers, buttons and paper cutouts. Ishita did some of the squares with her beloved stickers, I used some of the odds and ends I found in my drawers to do some others.
For example, I had these butterfly cutouts for years, I used them on many other projects in the past, but I still had some leftover. The "Tutti Frutty" Cupcake was an old dress label (yes I keep cute outfits' labels...art junkie I told you!)
Speaking of labels, we used quite a few of them on that project, all from Ishita's clothes that we bought over the year: an octopus, two Hello Kitty bows, a Frozen one, the cupcake, a round one with a bunny and this little girl with pink hair that is by far my favourite.

This ended up being a super fun project that both Ishita and I enjoyed making and which covers a lot of that old "whitewash" paint job in her room. Paint job that was so botched and ugly that in many spots the paint has cracked and fallen off (got to love rental properties in India).

I took down all my Christmas decorations on January 1st, ALL of it. It left me with a disturbingly empty room and almost sterile look that reminded me a bit too much of what happens each time we just move into a new flat. I kid you not, there was even a faint echo as I spoke in the room (ok yelled at the cat...). It felt way too odd to leave it like that more than a few hours, I HAD to do something about it.

But you see, we get so consumed by the holiday season that we tend to forget that our homes deserve some TLC and pretty decor all year round, and if you Google "January decor" you are usually stuck between a glitzy New Year's Eve party decor or an avalanche of snowflakes. None of which is practical as a decor when you live in a tropical climate where the only marker of a season change is in how high the mercury climbs in the thermometer.

In the end, I decided to go with a white and gold theme inspired by all the New Year party decor but with a more long lasting and practical take on it.
The top of my Lhasa chest of drawer is the best place to create seasonal decor vignette in my home. Especially now that it has the black board photo display I made a few months ago hanging above it.
During the month of December it became the home to my cookie tins, and various Christmas-y decor elements.
The thing is we aren't done eating and enjoying cookies (of any kind, the Swiss homemade ones are all gone). We enjoy them all Winter long, with a steaming cup of tea for companion. Those cookies just needed a new home and I am not going to lie, I totally got my inspiration from this candy jars blog post (it has convinced me to keep on hoarding collecting empty glass jars).

All I needed to get myself started was a few big sized old food jars like these:
And, fortunately, I have lots of these around. Blame it on my inability to throw them away, you know just in case...
I ended up only using two of them in that particular decor. The Ragu jar still has ridiculously stubborn label glue on it that I didn't have the patience to tackle (I needed that decor fix FAST).

The first thing I did, was spray paint all the lids with gold paint, and had a though time doing so as the brand of pain I used was a bit runny and didn't dry as quickly as I wanted.
Then, I decided to spray paint the jars themselves using some stencils to make some cutout patterns on them. Again, the paint was a bit runny and I ended up having to clean up my design using some nail polish remover and my trusted 3D liner glue (and no, I haven't made the resolution to stop being so addicted to it, thank you very much).
My two jars looked a bit "lost" on the top of that chest of drawer, and didn't make much of a statement on their own. What they needed was to be placed on an interesting tray. For a moment I considered spray painting one of my stainless steel plates, but remembered I use them in the kitchen regularly enough to bake pies and would miss them. So, I went for the next best thing : a Styrofoam disposable plate. I always keep a few of these around, for both party hosting and DIY projects.

I painted the edge of said plate with silver acrylic paint and added some accents in 3D gold liner before placing my two jars and a candle on it.

This made for a fairly quick and inexpensive decor update for my too bare for comfort post-holiday living room:
The cookies jar have been liberally raided by Ishita and her friends between the time I completed the project and the time I found to take a picture. This has become the perfect solution to Ishita's school break playdates hunger pangs. The answer to "Auntie do you have anything to eat" has become "Help yourself to some cookies over there".

This is the first part of a series of January decor posts, as I have been busy making tassels (picture above as a proof), hanged some fairy lights, and still have a few ideas left to materialise.