Home Alone making paranthas, salad & pizza and thinking of all things sweet & scary!

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So I am home alone for three nights.

V had to go for some office stuff to Texas, and I am left home alone.

This is the first time I am staying alone in our house. And I was very nervous about it. Our town is quite safe. So I was not scared of somebody breaking in (although, I made sure all my windows were closed and do not laugh, but I also put a chair/stool in front of the front and back doors. Just in case someone does decide to break in, I will be warned by the noise. Too much of CSI does that to you!)

Like I mentioned, I am not scared of someone breaking in (you are rolling your eyes, aren’t ya?), but all the horror movies I have seen have made me a little scared of the paranormal- ghosts to be more precise. So that you are sure, yes, I am an adult. But I have an overactive imagination. A very overactive imagination.

I remember after watching the movie The Ring , I slept with my lights on for a month, imagining the girl ghost in the movie standing next to my bed every time I switched off the lights off and then even when the image of the ghost left after a month, I continued sleeping with the lights on, thinking the ghost would get pissed off that I wasn’t sacred anymore, and would be tempted to scare me off.

Yes. Overactive. Imagination. Mine is.

So, how I always do when I am alone, the first night I slept with the lights in my room on. And with the TV on. And the bathroom lights on. And the hallway light on. And the living room light on. With the phone in my hand every time. I felt really bad that I was wasting so much electricity, but honestly I could not help it. This is how I slept last night as well. Today though, my protector, my husband, will be back home, and I should live in a world less scared of the evils it possesses. (I repeat- do not roll your eyes! or laugh! Please?)

Besides being scared at night, the other thing that was bothering me about being home alone for three days was the food situation. With V gone, I knew I would not feel like cooking for one. I knew I would be cooking Maggi noodles for lunch, dinner, and well, even breakfast. But, I did not want that. So, instead, as soon as V left I made it a point to pre-make things. I made the tomato feta pasta salad. I made the topping for the artichoke spinach pizza and also had the necessary leftovers for the chicken paranthas I had packed for V before he left. The maggi packets are left to be eaten some other week.

This post has no recipes. It has links to some of my previous recipes though. And all of them are good. Some are quite old, some not so much.

Chicken Paranthas

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Garam Masala Tuesdays: Baingan ka Bharta

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Marriage changes you. It influences your personality, and your responsibilities and priorities change. Your partner’s personality rubs off on you a little and vice versa. I have definitely become more calm, and patient after marriage. Things that would bother me earlier, still do bother me, but to a lesser extent. I would not attribute all the changes to V, although his role is undeniable, but marriage brought with it certain changes which have changed me, for the better. So, yes marriage changed me.

Marriage also changes your eating habits. I have seen a change in what V eats. He has started accepting mushrooms in his diet- he is still not crazy about them but has made his peace with mushrooms. All for me.

I too have adjusted my taste buds to his. From someone who wouldn’t touch bharta with a ten-foot pole, here I am writing about it on GMT.

That’s Change.

That’s Growth.

Baingan bharta is a dish made from roasted eggplants cooked with onions, tomatoes, chillies, ginger and garlic. Some people also add peas and other various vegetables to it.

Baingan (pronounced bane-gun) is what Indians call eggplant in hindi. And bharta (pronounced bhharta with the first “a” in bharta pronounced the same way you pronounce “u” in mud. Pardon me, but phonetic symbols are not my strongest point!), is the hindi word for roughly mashed/pureed vegetables.

This dish can be prepared two ways with roasted eggplant – one with accompanying raw ingredients which typically includes mustard oil and the other with cooked ingredients. The recipe below uses the latter method.

Honestly Baingan ka bharta was my least favorite dish growing up. It was hardly made at home, and when made, I never ate it. I wanted to like it, because eggplants are good for you, but I just found it too slimy to look at.

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Garam Masala Tuesdays: Shahi Paneer

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When I was in India this time, the cook at my parents’ place made this amazing shahi paneer dish at a party that my parents hosted. Now, I have made shahi paneer in the past from a recipe my mother uses. The results have been good, always good. But, both my mom and I liked this recipe. And when I found out it was so easy, I had to try it out for myself.

“Shahi” means royal in Urdu and “paneer” is the name given to Indian cottage cheese. Indian cottage cheese is much firmer than the cottage cheese that we get here in the US. Unlike most cheeses in the world, the making of paneer does not involve rennet as the coagulation agent, thus making it completely lacto-vegetarian and providing one of the sources of protein for vegetarians in India. It is generally unsalted.

Shahi Paneer is the slightly richer version of Paneer Makhani or Butter Paneer (the vegetarian counterpart of the famous Butter chicken). A major difference in the nomenclature comes from the use of nuts and raisins- the former includes them in the recipe, the latter doesn’t.

As how all recipes go, there are various versions of shahi paneer out there in the cyber space, in Indian kitchens and in cookbooks. My mom’s recipe uses dried fenugreek recipes (which I have seen other recipes also mention). But this doesn’t. Yes, there are different versions online, but I like this recipe for its straight forwardness.

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