Day 104

100 days already! More than a quarter over?!! This is going so fast.

The past week has been nice. More fancy cooking at home. Last week's cuisine was Mexican. We made burritos with home made tortillas, soya mince and kidney bean chili, salsa, sour cream and salad. We also made cheese stuffed deep-fried jalapenos. What we used wasn't actually jalapenos, but it tasted really good. I spent a lot of that evening with my hands soaking in cold water because cleaning those chilies had really burned my skin.

Over the weekend, we went for a trip. Was pretty unplanned because we only decided to go late on Friday evening.

I've always loved road trips and this was a super fun one.

I managed to get the hang of the camera thankfully except for pictures in low light.

As usual, I have a lot of pictures and lots to write and this time had to split the post into 2 sections.

I managed to finish part one today.

Southern Escapades (part 1)

Day 96

I've been here more than 3 months! That went by pretty fast. 

In my research of desserts that don't need baking, I remembered that I had attempted a Banoffee pie a while ago in Bangalore. Despite it being a relatively easy recipe, it didn't come out perfectly then.

You can only judge a pie after it's been cut and a slice is taken out. This time the layers cut through perfectly and the consistency, flavours and textures were pretty much spot on. The only problem was that I didn't make enough.

I cannot remember the exact quantities I used to post the recipe here, but I am quite sure I will make this again.

The combination of biscuit, toffee, banana, chocolate and cream was absolutely yum! 
The rest of the weekend was a blur.

:)

Day 91

We have a new plan. Every week, one of our dinners is going to be a special one based on one specific different cuisine.

We did a Thai night a few weeks ago. Today we had a Japanese feast. 
I did lots of researching since I've never really attempted Japanese before. When I was in Bangalore in June, we had quite an authentic Japanese meal at Harima. I have since been inspired. Such an interesting cuisine. So many methods of preparation and yet their ingredients remain so distinct and fresh in each dish. Such strong flavours and enough substitutes to make vegetarian adaptations.

Nen found a Japanese store where she picked up wasabi, sesame seeds, seaweed and chopsticks. We may have lacked some other essential ingredients, but in general the meal came out really well. Next time, we'll add tofu to the menu.

We were quite pleased with how it turned out that we spent extra time in serving it up and taking pictures. I was a bit too tired to take out my camera, so relied on my cousin's phone picture for this post. Clockwise starting with the rice- sticky rice, oyster mushrooms in oyster sauce, bok choy with sesame seeds, tempura fried zucchini, sushi with dipping sauce and wasabi, fried eggplant and satay sauce.

We started watching a Japanese movie (I think it was a Chinese movie actually, but I wouldn't know the difference) to add to our Japanese evening, but it was so hard to pay attention with all our focus on the chopsticks and trying not to drop the sushi in the dipping sauce.

And if that wasn't enough, we had apple pie (bought, just in case you thought we had time to bake a pie too) and whipped cream for dessert.

I'm so stuffed and there's enough leftovers for lunch tomorrow. 

Next week is either Mexican or Burmese. :D

Day 90

Hello to routine- work, home, cooking, a movie maybe and bed.

I still have so many pending posts from my South Africa trip, but sadly haven't managed to finish any. Last week my laptop crashed. It's five years old and has been though a lot, so it's probably just old age, but I was determined to fix it. I went through website after website and read through too many laptop forums that went way over my head and I managed to get it to some form of working condition. Unfortunately my graphics is a bit conked and all attempts to save it have so far failed. All hope is not lost (yet).

I had to edit pictures blindly and then check them on my phone to make sure the quality was good. My laptop makes movie watching very vintage now.

I did manage to finish one post about driving though South African countryside- Yellow Buildings, Canyons and Macadamias

Today got to go on a site visit two hours away from here to Kitulgala. This little town set in a rainforest up in the hills is known for the sets of the 1957 movie The Bridge on the River Kwai. I remember watching this movie about 14 years ago with my Dad. 

We stopped for breakfast and lunch at the local rest house and had the most beautiful mealtime view. The river, the forests and the clouds moving over the mountains.

The site we visited was set alongside a waterfall of one of the tributaries of the main river. Each chalet was barely 15m from the edge of the water. The surroundings were very overgrown with ferns and moss of all types covering the forest floor. Rubber and teak trees formed a canopy over the site making the rain fall unevenly over us. 

Unfortunately this was a site visit trip and not a holiday. I would have loved to walk downstream or possibly jump in for a swim or even better- raft down. Kitulgala is known for white water rafting. Definitely cannot wait to do that while I am here. The setting was so perfect, it seemed almost a crime to have a steel/concrete roof over your head. A tent would be so much cooler.

The coolest thing I saw at the site was a really interesting mushroom- Phallus indusiatus or the stinkhorn or the fanciest of names- the orange veiled lady mushroom. At first I thought it was a mushroom growing through some plastic mesh and only when I looked closer did I realise that it was a part of the mushroom. Now I wish I had gotten close enough to smell it's distinct odour. It's not a very common species, but is known to grow on extremely wet forest floors.

They say you can't visit Kitulgala without taking at least one leech back with you (my boss's words) and I stuck to tradition and left the site with a little black bloodsucker on my leg. Thankfully I found him fast before it got fat and ugly. Blahh.

Day 81

The weekend came and went. It was another movie marathon weekend. My cousin and I are (over the course of the year) going to attempt covering as many as we can from the IMDB top 250 list. I mean a lot of them don't interest us at all, so we're likely to skip them, but lets see how far we go. This weekends list was  Immortals (slightly rubbish, but liked the 'renaissance painting' genre), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (totally entertaining!), Pulp Fiction (didn't quite get why it was no.4 on the IMDB list, but I guess for 1994, Quentin Tarantino took commendable risk) and then off to the cinema to see The Wolverine which I enjoyed a lot more than I expected to. 

I've been missing baking this week. I went through so many of my old food pictures and blog posts. Came up with a list of non-oven desserts that are possible to make here. Chocolate and coffee mousse seemed like a good one to start with. I improvised a lot to the recipes I read and unfortunately it didn't set like I hoped, so froze it and had mousse ice-cream. I have now found a Julia Child mousse recipe which has the same ingredients, but different process and proportions which I will try out the next time I want to perfect this.