Life

How is it that something is right under your nose and you just take it for granted? That’s my story. For 21 years it was my husband who looked after our garden, with me just admiring it… from afar 🙂 And suddenly, the love and memory of one particular flower which bloomed abundantly in my nani’s house… the Raat Ki Rani, botanical name Cestrum nocturnum… awoke the sleeping gardener in me. I suppose it was memories of me, at a very young age, going to visit nani at Kanya Shala Road with my mom and staying till sundown, when these magical flowers let out a heady fragrance… a beautiful childhood memory! And the quest for this beautiful plant took me all over Google land. Bringing in a live plant from India was of course out of the question, since that is illegal… all I wanted was the seeds. And finally I hit paydirt on eBay… got the seeds from the USA and planted them. While waiting patiently for the sapling to appear, I looked around for herbs, which suddenly seemed to be so easy to grow… and so started my love for gardening. The immense pleasure of nurturing, loving a plant, watching it grow from seed to sapling to a plant which gives back the love by blooming into wonderful fragrant flowers is something so beautiful… it makes one thankful for bountiful nature. The past four years have seen me build a small terrace garden with my favourite plants… herbs, roses, parijat, kemuning, jasmine, manaca, raat ki rani, to name a few. It’s my private space… not intruding in the landscaped garden in our home, which is my husband’s love.

I am here… it took a lot of convincing from my family and my friends …. Blogging always seemed rather formidable to me..but when it comes to my passion for food I felt I had to start putting down all that I have learned and still learning… the kitchen and me are partners in crime, whether failures or triumphs, many a dish has found its way to the bin when I felt it was not upto the mark or the table when it feels and tastes perfect… Cooking has been an interest since the young age of 12 when I saw my mom catering for weddings…sindhi weddings had a particular rigidness to the food offered during the 1970\’s..if you were from a middleclass family the norm was to serve A PLATE., so called plate was either a paper plate or plastic. Normally a chutney sandwich , a sindhi sambosa, a potato tikki, some potato chips and a gulab jamun… and to wash it all down u were given a drink…cococola or limca or Fanta. When mom had a catering order for 100 0r 300 people, her kitchen was busy with her two BHAIYAS, cooks from bihar. The tantalizing fragrance of the sambosa fillings to the sweet gulabjamun being fried, were truely amazing. The best part of it all was the leftovers we got to eat…even bring to school for breakfast…of course those were the days when we could eat and eat without even thinking about the calories…calories was an alien word…life was simple and fun…. As the years passed it was my mother who was my teacher for the sindhi food and tarla dalal for more adventurous cooking…. I just wanted to experiment with food and more food…. Today as a mother of four beautiful children, I feel I still have a lot to learn… and so the experiments and trials go on.. I hope you will have a chance to look into my life through this blog…..