Veg puffs

As a child getting indulged was a rare occurrence. You had to do something exceptional to deserve a special thing. Weeding the cleaning the garden meant a snack of hot jalebis and samosa from the neighbourhood store. Dusting the house and clearing the cobwebs in and out meant one extra half an hour of cartoons in the evening. We used to have an attic in our childhood home which stored goods and stuff from the bygone era. I would be deathly scared to get into it but my younger brother would buoyantly jump into it because who doesn’t want to gobble up gulab jamuns hot off the stove. I know most of them sound food bribery but we knew how much of an effort and money it took to get them to us.

When I look back my parents had introduced meal planning into our house since we became school going kids. Wednesday would always be lauki-chana-dal and phulka no matter what season or phase it would be. We had a standard menu for the week which would change only if we couldn’t get that vegetable home during the weekly shopping. Desserts would strictly be during festivals as an offering to God or birthdays. Except when we did some physical hard work. Which made all the pain and effort absolutely worth it.

One such item which used to be a big indulgence according to me was to go to the local bakery and get veg puffs for the family for evening snack. We didn’t have any oven or any idea of how to make them so it held greater importance than jalebi/ samosa. We still bought the later from shops but we knew what goes into it if we were to make it from scratch. But puffs! It was a royal treat..the flakiness and crunch when you eat them hot, with the perfect spiced fillings, dunk into ketchup which the pack in small pouches and you go into a bliss. When as a family all of us would be tired and spent running around or finishing chores, the puffs would come home to indulge us and make us feel special.

Now I make the puffs at home using ready made pastry sheets. It’s no more a thing of wonder. Which makes me think how far have I come. Or you can say how far I have gone 🙂

The one where no one knows

Which sentence is often repeated at my household with an average of ten times per day?

I don’t know.

Moo doesn’t know where her sock is. Zack doesn’t know where his watch is.

Zack doesn’t know where the tissue box is. Moo doesn’t know where her drawing book is.

Moo doesn’t know where the sellotape is. Zack doesn’t know where the car’s duplicate key is.

Moo doesn’t know where her hair bands are. Zack doesn’t know where his gardening gloves are.

And I don’t know where my kitchen scissors are.

Weathered

In recent times, I can’t think of anything or anybody that holds so great an importance in our daily lives as does the weather.

What to wear?

What to cook?

Weekend plan outdoors or indoors?

The wonder of having four seasons in a day has started rubbing off me. Sydney weather is so unpredictable that even the trains are more dependable in comparison. There are clear divisions of winter, summer, spring and autumn and it would greatly surprise me how everything happens according to the weather forecast. Like December 1 is the start of summer and exactly on that date the temperature would soar up to 35 C from 25 C. Up until few years ago the weather patterns followed the calendar to the T.

But off late, we started having mixed weather in a single day. Early morning will be crisp and cool so you wear a jacket or cardigan when out, by midday it will become sweltering hot so you search for your hat and sunglasses which you didn’t pack because who wants to wear a hat with a jacket. Come late afternoon there is a thunder and storm and now you are wearing your jacket but searching for an umbrella because a downpour has started but that’s okay if you don’t find one because you still have a jacket to not get soaking wet. By evening when you are back to home you are chilled to the bone because have you tried walking with a wet jacket in cool wind and wet hair and you decide to check the weather app tomorrow to dress appropriately and it shows the hottest day of the week with clear blue skies and zero percent of rain.

Experience makes you wise so you carry a hat, jacket, umbrella, mittens, a wet bag and all the paraphernalia but the weather has today behaved like an obedient puppy so you are lugging everything around sweating profusely because it’s a hot clear day. Oh those days when I used to travel for work!

These days it’s a battle between the weather gods and my laundry. I don’t use a dryer and line dry our clothes either on the clothes line or a portable drying rack. I check the weather it says hot sunny day so I diligently put the clothes on the clothes line to dry in the morning. It would be blazing hot so I think I will pick them up after lunch. All of sudden there will be a storm for 5 minutes in the afternoon and everything will be soaking wet. And the next week’s forecast is cloudy and heavy showers 🤦🏻‍♀️