Strange

Friday, February 3, 2017

Recipe - Rava Upma And Coconut (Thengai) Chutney

Rava Upma:

Take ladleful of rava and roast the same.

Sautee mustard, urad dal, chana dal. Add this to the roast rava. Add curry leaves and dhaniya leaves. Add butter or ghee.

Boil 20 ladleful of water. Add cut potatoes, carrot, tomato, peas and salt into the water. Add cut ginger and green chilies. Let it boil sufficiently. Filter the water and add the solids to the roast rava.

Finally the most important step - add water to the rava and keep stirring well.

Rava packet, frozen cut onions to be fried, peas and tomato on the left, Other vegetables and green chili to the right. And a peeler for potatoes and ginger.

Coconut Chutney

Grind grated coconut, imli, green chilies, salt. Add dhaniya leaves at the end. I ground dhaniya leaves while grinding. So it turned out green. See picture below.

Upma in the casserole and coconut chutney (green because of dhaniya leaves).

Recipe - Paruppu Usili And Paruppu Urundai Kozhambu (PUK) And Other Tamil Dishes

Paruppu Usili

Soak Paruppu (Thoram Paruppu: Kadalai Paruppu in 4:1) in water for 3 hrs. After soaking, remove water, add salt, red chili, hing, grind.
Then steam / boil the ground dal (in pressure cooker with the weight on top or cook it in a small vessel which is an island inside a larger vessel!! The way one would cook rice without pressure cooker. Oil the insides of the smaller vessel before steaming) Then grate. Grating cannot be done if the boiled dal is too soft and hard. In which case just stir vigorously while frying in oil. Steaming step is optional. One can directly fry the ground dal - more oil will be consumed in that case. Soaking and grinding makes the dal like coconut. And hence the dish looks like Vazhakkai Podi

Beans And Soaked (overnight) Tuvar dal and Chana dal

Ground dal (after removing all water) with hing, red chili,salt.About to be steamed.

Boiled Beans with salt water

Dal after steaming. It should be fluffy not hard

Fry ground dal in oil

After frying

Finally mix dal with beans.

Paruppu Urundai Kozhambu

The base for the balls is same as for paruppu usili (in usili the ground dal will be subsequently steamed/fried and mixed with beans/avarakkai). This is same as the 1st step for Paruppu Usili. Remember the dal balls have to be tasty by themselves. Then add coconut. Do not grind coconut. (Coconut is optional). Beat the ground dal for 10 mins until it becomes fluffy.
The ground dal has to be mixed with til oil and then the balls have to be made. The balls are then dropped one by one into sambar. Keep stirring. Be very careful not to "disintegrate" the balls in sambar while stirring. Steaming is not needed here because the balls are boiled in sambar unlike in usili. This is almost same as sambar except no boiled tuvar dal is added. The dal balls are added. The balls play the role of "thaan" (pumpkin / potato / ladies finger / brinjal) in sambar.

Tuvar dal and Chana dal soaked in water (+salt) overnight

Base for PUK (Paruppu Urundai Kozhambu) - same as in sambar, Except no dal

Filter out water from soaked dal (add the water into sambar base or rasam or throw it out), add red chilies, salt, hing and grind well. Make sure all water is removed before grinding.

Make balls out of the ground dal

Drop the one by one into the PUK base. Be careful so the balls don't break.

Boil the dal so the urundai solidifies. Poke ball with a knife and if no dal sticks to knife its fine.

Lemon Rasam

Potato (also raw banana) Podimas:
Urulaikizhangu (vazhakkai) Podimas: Cut green chilies, ginger add curry leaves, Chana dal, urad dal, red chili, mustard and fry the same. Mix with boiled, mashed potato. Boiled potato can be replaced with boiled (and peeled) raw banana to make a nice side dish. Squeeze half a lemon

Pattani Chaadam (Peas Rice / Pulao)
Roast a little grated coconut and then add Dhaniya, Chana Dal + urad dal, Red chili, hing, salt. You can add green chili and jeera also while frying (and subsequently grind). Grind the roasted stuff. Break raw Cashew nut into smaller pieces. Fry it in refined oil. Mix the ground powder, rice, ghee dhaniya leaves, fried cashewnuts. (Good idea to add boiled peas also). Add tadka.

Chana and urad dals, jeera, dhaniya, red chili and coconut

Frozen peas below for peas rice. Rice used 1cup (about 150ml)

Pattani chaadam

Vazhakkai Podi:

Boil Raw banana in a pressure cooker (if you are boiling rice, you can cook raw banana along with it). Then grate boiled raw banana and coconut.
Fry all dal, hing, red chili and salt. Then grind this. Mix grated raw banana with grated coconut. Mix grated stuff and ground stuff. All dal means tuvar, chana, urad. Add tadka. White powder in the cup below is ground dal (all 3).

Tomato Kozhambu

Boil cut tomato (Retain the hot water). Boil dal (tuvar dal or moong dal) Take the tomatoes out, cool them in cold water and peel the skin and mash the peeled tomato well. Put the mashed tomato back into the boiled water. Add salt and haldi powder.
Add roasted and ground mixture of red chili, dhaniya, methi, jeera, hing and pepper
Add the ground mixture in water and let it boil for some time. Sautee mustard and green chili. Then add dhaniya leaves. Difference from sambar: no sambar powder but roast and ground dhaniya, jeera, pepper (no imli because of tomato). Almost same stuff to be ground as Pattani chadam, methi also needed in addition.

Mor Kozhambu
Wet grind Grated coconut, green chilies, rice, salt, then mix with buttermilk (on the side) and heat less than 5 mins.. Add fried red chilies, mustard, methi.

Varuththu Araicha Mor Kozhambu (VAMK): Add longitudinally cut eggplant, potato. Fry and then grind urad dal, red chili, rice, methi then grind with coconut. Add this and cut vegetables to boiling water (no imli, no hing), add salt and buttermilk. (Imli can be added instead of buttermilk.) Eruvali kozhambu: Same as VAMK except use chana dal instead of urad dal.

Aviyal:

Coconut Rice and Lemon Rice - Usually made on Kanu (Day after pongal and for Adi Perukku);

Seasoning for both: Mustard, red chili, green chili, curry leaves in til oil for all rice.

In addition: Lemon rice: Chana dal seasoning. Lemon rice: Mix lemon juice, haldi, salt. Then add seasoning with rice to make lemon rice.
Coconut rice: Urad dal, grated coconut, cashew nuts, coconut must each be fried separately (and then added with seasoning and rice). Coconut must be roasted until it becomes red. Add salt. Mix with rice.
Tomato rice: Cut tomato into small pieces. Sautee Mustard, jeera, chana dal, curry leaves, onion. Add sambar powder (and garam masala powder or my suggestion: garlic and ginger paste). Add cut tomato, salt. Mix this with rice. Add curry and dhaniya leaves.

Tarka, Ghooghni, Aludam, Khichdi, Dal Makhni:

Lemon pickle:

Cut lemon (remove the seeds) and mix with salt and haldi for a couple of days
Roast methi then powder
Fry solid hing then powder (or use hing powder)
Add Red chili powder (1:1.25 by volume of lemon: chili powder), methi and hing powders from above.
Heat oil, fry mustard seeds, add above ingredients
Only til oil to be used for all pickles

Inji Jeeram
Peel ginger, add jeera, methi, dhaniya. Grind this mixture and then add jaggery and grind. Take the ground stuff and stir in ghee. This is good for indigestion. This is to be eaten like a medicine 1-2 tsp.

Stir Until Very Thick

Inji Char:
Optionally inji, jeeram, pepper, haldi can be wet ground adding sufficient amount of hot water. Then squeeze the ground ingredients and retain the liquid (throw away the solids). Add sugar and squeeze lemon.

Puli Molagai (Milagai):

Kozhukkattai:

Grate coconut. Make paagu by adding a little water to jaggery. Filter it and remove the solids (dust, stone etc). Heat the liquid, then add grated coconut and keep stirring. It will become sticky after it dries. Add elaichi powder. This is the poornam.

Soak raw rice in water for an hour. Remove the water, and powder the rice fine (not coarse) in mixie. Boil water (the volume of water to be same as volume of rice powder), add til oil, a little salt and switch off the stove. Then slowly add rice powder and keep stirring and make it homogeneous until it become like roti dough. Then use til oil to ensure the dough doesn't stick.. And then make a choppu (semicircular) shape and then fill the poornam and close the choppu. Make a few such. Then steam the batch for 5-8 minutes. Kozhakkattai ready. You may have to steam them in batches depending on the quantity you plan to make.

Note that fried dal mixture, red chilli, hing, coconut are used in VAMK (varuthu araicha mor kozhambu), coconut rice, vazhakkai podi and vaazhakkai koottu.

A friend sent me this: use at your peril -https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1xQDlpMnLKxd0RqMnhzRzBuTzg/view?usp=sharing

Sunday, January 15, 2017

Miscellaneous Problems In Maths

Every answer needs to have steps.

There is a cubic box of size 1m by 1m by 1m. It is filled to its capacity with solid spherical marbles, all of the same size. Then the box is filled with water. What should be the radius of the marble so that max water can be filled. And what is the minimum volume of water than can be filled?
There is a circular park which has a path on the outside. What should be the ratio of the inner radius of the park to the width of the path so that the area of the path and that of the park are the same?

Additional reading

http://vbala99.blogspot.com/2015/06/maths-and-logic-puzzles.html

Working On Filtered Data

Problem no: 1

Let's assume there is a table in Excel with 10 rows and having data in columns A to J.

How do we find sum of all the cells in all the rows and columns mentioned above. There are filter conditions to be applied on some rows as well as on some columns.

Assume we have frozen the panes in the excel so that row headings are frozen to the left (say cols A and B) and column headings (say row 1) on top. Now filter conditions have to be applied on cols A and B and row 1.

Countifs and Sumifs won't work on both rows and columns. How will you address this?

Problem no: 2

Now let's assume we need to find the minimum (or max or average) value in a column while also applying a filter on another (or same) column. How do we do that?

Additional reading:
A friend sent me this nice article on Vlookup: https://exceljet.net/things-you-should-know-about-vlookup

Recipe - Chakkarai Pongal, Badam Halwa, Gaajar Ka Halwa

Chakkarai Pongal:

Boil moong dal and rice in the ratio 1:4. Mash the boiled mixture. Boil water and then mix jaggery. Jaggery by volume should be twice (actually about 1.75 times) the volume of rice + moong dal used to boil. Water should be just enough to cover all the jaggery. Filter the jaggery solution and throw away any solids (typically dirt).

Add ghee and stir the water - jaggery + ghee mixture until it starts foaming. Add elaichi powder. Transfer the jaggery + water to the mashed rice + dal and mix well. சக்கரை பொங்கல் ready.

Water being boiled

Jaggery to be added. It was mashed in the dark container. Moong dal and rice mixture to be boiled (after adding water)

After adding jaggery to water

Stir. Filter out extra water.

After adding rice-dal and ghee. Almost over. Made on Pongal day 2017.

Almond (Badaam) Halwa

Heat almonds in boiling water. Cover the vessel and let it soak for couple of hours then peel the skin. (Maybe we could pressure cook almond). Then grind almond and get a paste. Make cheeni paagu by heating sugar in water. Mix the paagu and almond paste and heat. Keep stirring while adding ghee. Add saffron towards the end. This is very similar to chakkarai pongal except for jaggery, use of almonds and how almond is processed.

Carrot (Gaajar) Halwa:

Grate 3 carrots. Boil half liter of full cream milk. Keep stirring. Add grated carrot when the milk volume has shrunk. Finally add about 175 ml of sugar and keep stirring. That's all.

Boil milk in a large container and keep stirring

Grate Carrot

Add Grated Carrot to Boiling milk when milk has shrunk

See how thick it becomes

About 175ml sugar to be added, right at the end

Almost the final stages

Finally, Gajar Halwa. (Unfortunately, red color shows up as yellow in my phone's camera.)

Additional Reading:

Recipe: Making Ghee From Home Made Butter

Making Ghee From Home Made Butter:

This consists of a few distinct steps (this is for buffalo milk - I don't think it's much different for cow milk). The steps (bullet points) are in reverse order.

Heating the butter in a kadai for about 20 minutes with constant stirring until you get ghee: I take the butter out from the freezer. It will be frozen. Wash it in tap water (hopefully it removes any remnants of buttermilk). Then transfer the butter to a kadai and heat it. The butter color will change from white to yellow to green to brown and then froth.. Then you switch off the gas and let the ghee cool down (filter out the kashandu - dark brown or black solid stuff and, well, eat it) and store the liquid ghee in the fridge. I get about 1 liter ghee per 45 liters of buffalo milk. The milk is from a milkman (not Aavin). This works out to about 2% ghee to milk ratio. I have friends who get almost double of what I get.. That (getting 3%), I think is true expertise.
Taking butter out from aadai (or malaai): I make butter every alternate day. I take the aadai out from the fridge, pour it into a tall vessel and add a glass of water and let it almost come to room temperature. Then I use a hand mixie on the tall vessel containing the aadai for about 7 to 8 minutes. Then I switch off electricity and slowly move the hand mixie in a circular fashion for about a minute so that the butter coagulates. Switch electricity on for 2 to 3 more minutes and then off and rotate the hand mixie again. Now butter should have formed. I use my palm to scoop off the butter and store it in a box. I would then add another glass of water and repeat the hand mixie stirring process once again and get a little more butter out, which I again transfer to the box. You can drink the remaining butter milk. I put the box containing the butter in the freezer. I collect butter 3 times over a period of 7 days (once every 2 days) before making ghee.
Taking cream (aadai) from milk and yoghurt: Boil the milk. Use it for coffee etc, if you have to, making sure that you don't pour out aadai along with the milk. Boil it once again. Let the milk cool down and then store the milk in the fridge. Take it out from the fridge, take out the aadai and store the aadai in a separate container. When you make curd from the milk, transfer the top layer of the curd using a spoon into the aadai container. Essentially, the aadai comes from both milk and from curd. I collect aadai for 2 days before going to the next step of getting butter. The fresh aadai taken from the milk has to spend a few hours outside at room temperature before being moved to the fridge.

Here are photos for step 2, the most critical step:

Aadai transferred to tall vessel and ready to make butter with hand mixie

Stirring with Hand Mixie

You can see butter

Butter to be taken out

Transferring butter

Bottom left is buttermilk: the rectangular box has butter, Conical vessel with a white spoonin the center has ghee, the vessel to the right of ghee with a spatula has curd, to the north of curd is milk. - They aren't in any particular order.

Aadai collected from milk and curd:

Aadai Collected from milk and curd -

Making Ghee from butter:

Yellow a few minutes after I start heating

Getting Green

Towards the end: Brown

At the end: ghee almost made

After it's all over:Kashandu at the bottom. With the filter and wooden spatula.

Making cooking ghee:
Buy cooking butter (unsalted) and heat it and stir it to make ghee. Store it in a vessel.

Additional Reading:

Repetitive Patterns In Excel

Using Excel (No macros) how would we create a repetitive pattern? For example, let's assume we have the list of students in a school, with their class, section and we need to print students' labels with the same fields and "Subject" and Year with blanks (to be filled by students).

A sample label is shown below.

Name: <__________________>

Class: <__________> Section: <________>

Year: <___________> Subject: ________

XYZ School: <_____________>

Now assume we have an excel sheet which contains the student names, their classes and sections as a table (name of school is also available). How do we use the data in the table to create these labels for all the students using formula?

Next Problem
Create a transpose of an excel table with, say, 5 rows and 6 columns.. Use only formulas.. Meaning in the transpose all formula should be the same (I should be able to copy and paste one cell to all other cells (6 rows and 5 columns) and create the transpose)

Friday, January 13, 2017

Rommel And Canaris (and Guderian) - Rose Among The Nazis (WW II)

World War 2:

Roses:

The Dirty ones:

Additional reading:

Monday, January 9, 2017

Control Freak

A friend asked me whether a high energy J can't be a control freak. I asked her to find the difference between Naveen Babu - the character played by Saif Ali Khan's father in the movie Parineeta and Anniyan (the negative role played by Vikram in the movie Anniyan). Anniyan was a high energy J (as in MBTI) who was very fussy about discipline and about right and wrong. Naveen Babu, on the other hand, was not about rules. He wanted his wife and his son to do exactly what he said. And he, unlike Anniyan, didn't have a constant set of rules.

Quote from the wiki that describes Saif's father: "Sabyasachi Chakrabarty as Naveen Roy. Cold at heart, a shrewd and a conniving businessman who even places human values and relationships below his greed for money. Surinder Kaur as Rajeshwari. The mother of Shekhar [Saif] who scornfully watches how badly her husband treats the neighbours and gets ill."

Are Naveen and Anniyan similar? Are they both control freaks? Can a J be a control freak? I say No to all questions.

Is every P a control freak? If the P has low energy then No. Is every high energy P a control freak? No, all P's are not control freaks. I would probably guess that an Enneagram 8 has a high potential to be a control freak. And a control freak is very likely to be a P.

Friday, January 6, 2017

Why Do Women Always Want To Look Younger

I have always wondered why women tend to reduce their age. And I thought the reason was that they wanted to portray plenty of child bearing years remaining.

And maybe I was right. Closely related is the topic of biological clock which is very critical and treated as such by women. But men, as far as I have seen, rarely think of themselves as having a biological clock.

Ask any 40 year old woman her age, she is likely to round it off to 37. Now we know why. I am guessing that if you ask any 9 year old girl what her age is, she won't round it off to 5 - she may want to be considered to be 10 or even 11. She would want to get into the child bearing range without even knowing what it means. Hardwired?