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 🙂

Detox

After the whirlwind trip last weekend, my sole aim was to go for an Internet detox. The marathon had me spend every available minute looking for fodder online and when the month ended, I was like – no more Internet for few days. In these days, I re-organized my bedroom ( yet again), did spring cleaning in general and tried to make the bed every time Moo was done playing on it. It felt good striking off items from the to-do list and suddenly, the non-blogging phase transformed to more free time at hand.

There are loads of clothes which will not fit me anytime soon and I have stacked and packed them up in the loft. Some pieces I had to think twice before putting them away, it is just so hard to let go of perfectly fine clothes just because they do not fit, sigh.

The pen-pal post I did in the marathon? I am going to write to all of you who signed up 🙂 I so wanted to start writing immediately, but getting ideas for the posts and putting them together consumed most of the time.

This month has one house warming function, anniversary, two birthdays, passport office visits and Moo’s vaccinations, Quite jam packed!

On neatness

My home is clean, but not neat.

Whenever I visit someones home, I observe how neat their living rooms are. And bedrooms, if I am invited to enter. And the bathrooms, if I need to use it. I mean everything is so neat and organized in the visiting place that during and after the visit I keep thinking why does my home always look like a scene out of a typhoon ravaged house. Newspapers all around, books and flyers lying here and there, clothes to be folded, folded clothes to be kept inside the wardrobe, etc, etc.

Its not like when people come announced we have a messy home 😉 😉 But when someone comes suddenly, we always keep putting things away while welcoming them.

“Oh welcome, welcome, long time eh, please come in”

In the background, we are making the sofa presentable by clearing the clutter, setting the living room teapoy in the center and taking away the junk on it, sweeping the dining table of the innumerable knickknacks and assembling chairs for the guests to sit in.

And when you have the kids playing the hall, your feet will invariably hit something and you have to catch yourself from falling or hurting. With Moo, we always have the squeaky toys in all the rooms, even in kitchen 😀

We cannot blame the kids really. Even when they are not around, things are never where they should be. I sit and organize the bedroom every Sunday, but come Tuesday all the open cabinets become messy. The living room I have lost hope that it will ever be organized and neat always.

But, a strange thing is, you wont find a speck of dirt and dust anywhere, MIL is very particular about it. A clean, but disorganized place is where I live, sigh!