odzer's blog

Thank you kanagu for tagging me. The photo tag seems to be the sixth picture from the sixth folder of your blog. The picture that I came across was that of a duck in the ueno pond! So here I present to you the duck ever so proudly :

Ueno is one of my favourite parts of Tokyo if not the favourite. I love the garden and the pond because it brings a sense of relief from the bustling city. It also has a nice flea market. You can read more about Ueno on my previous post on this topic by clicking here. As for ducks themselves I think they are pretty animals not to mention tasty ones. Although by nature they can be quite vicious. I have obsereved ducks defending the places where they live quite aggressively. So they are certainly animals with quite a lot of character. So thanks again once more for the tag and I shall be tagging Nita, Rolling and Priyank. Its been a while since we heard from Priyank so it will be interesting….

Some days ago I have made a chocolate cake. I used 80% cacao chocolate and added even some cocoa to it. It came out fairly well. So you can say that I like my chocolate cake quite ‘chocololaty’. I usually like non-frosted chocolate cakes but I suppose a black forest cake can be good occasionally if it is done properly. One of the most amusing things is what happens if you keep a cookie jar full of this cake around. It seems that it keeps disappearing on its own. It’s almost magical. Although I suspect it may have something to do with my mother.

I have decided that I am going to bake a batch of brownies soon for a change and it may be as early as today because I plan to host a dinner party tonight. So just keep watching this space for yet more cakes…

I made Earl grey tea cup cakes. I love earl grey tea. In the summer tea I usually drink it iced. Sometimes though in winters I like it in the evening with a spot of milk. I had never used any earl grey tea in cooking before until I came across this recipe that I really liked and I tried my hand at making some earl grey tea cup cakes. My feeling towards cup cakes is sort of mixed. It is easy to eat them of course and you do not have to bother slicing them but at the same time spooning dough in to individual cup cake thingies is sort of sissy if you ask me. 

However if you do have cup cakes its great to have a couple lying around for breakfast the next day. It beats muffins any day. The whole bran thing is just okay not that great. If I need fiber I would rather drink a glass of isabgol as a medicine rather than eating something that tastes like sawdust. So the cup cakes had this nice bergamot flavour due to the earl grey tea and the flavour became even more intense after I came home from a movie and had let a few cool down. I can normally not help wolfing down some cake while it is still hot. The tea leaves also gave them a nice speckled look. 

I am sure to make some more of these excellent cup cakes in the future and since this time it was nearly an experiment I deliberately kept the size small. I also plan to do some chocolate chip cup cakes soon.

Ema Datshi is a Bhutanese dish crafted from cheese and chillies. Bhutan is a country famous for copious consumption of chillies. They like to eat them by the ton really. I first had Ema Datshi way back in 2000 when I was in Bhutan but I had a few interesting variants of it at the residence of my friend in Thimphu. It seems that they cook this dish with a wide variety of chillies. The large ones are usually mild and the small ones can be quite fiery. I have not cooked this dish much but I have done it one occasion previous to this.

My attempt paid off because I could find the larger chillies in the market. I usually do not like the ultra hot small ones because my stomach does not really agree with extremely hot food. I have also added some onion and tomato to the dish. Usually Ema Datshi does not have any potatoes but I added some. There is a separate dish with potatoes and cheese that is called Kewa Datshi. I liked the result of my cooking and my neighbour who had joined me for dinner liked it as well. He was a bit wary of it when I first started cooking it so I had also made some Thai red curry chicken. However he agreed afterwards that we could have probably made do with Ema Datshi alone. I have often noticed that this dish is eaten in Bhutan with lentils.

I wake up fairly late but I was moved out of my bed yesterday by the loud shrill voice of my neighbours wife. She sounded like a rabid cat. As I could not help my morbid curiosity and she was screaming at the bin men who had come to collect the payment for their services I eavesdropped. It seems that our local ’safai karamchari’s’ or bin men have decided to work independently from the association that runs this area. Now some days ago I had received a letter from this association which is mostly a silver haired club warning me about the dangers of paying the garbage men who had dared to step out of their domain.

Interestingly this letter does not mention anything significant about garbage collection except the fact that if the association loses control of the garbage collection then the prices for such services are sure to shoot up. They are also worried about the fact that the garbage collection guys will take many days off. So what are the conditions in which these guys have to work? Garbage in India is just a mess, literally. People seldom use bin liners or bags and its collected in cycle carts and it smells. These guys handle this noxious stuff with their bare hands. Probably they get paid a pittance and I can imagine they are sick and tired of these old fuddy-duddies telling them what to do all the time. So I say yeah let the garbage guys run the garbage. I am sure they can do a better job and for once let them tell people how they want their garbage laid out for them. It is time that the grossly spoiled people of this country learn how to manage their trash.

As for the price at the moment we are paying around 150 Rupees or around US$ 4 for garbage collection services. This has to be paid every third month. I think it is a ridiculous price per house for such services. It should be this much at least per month! People do not mind paying for useless things here so why not pay to have a cleaner environment around them? Remember the plastic ban? Which has failed by the way since plastic bags without handles are now used by everyone. When I said in my previous posts that garbage was the main issue I was not that wrong. This post basically proves it. I am glad the bin men have gone on the war path. Basically we are all in a mess.

This morning I received a package from Hong Kong. It was something that I had ordered online from e-Bay. It is something that I do occasionally when I cannot find what I need in the local markets. I often receive other packages that are mostly gifts from my friends abroad. When I went to take the package from the postman he told me that in the future I should avoid ordering things online. I was shocked! I asked him the reason and he said “Well I can not be held responsible if something goes missing!” He also claimed that it was customs that pilfer things from the packages and if they steal things then I might blame him for it.

I could barely believe my ears. Here was someone whose job it is to deliver post safely and securely telling me that he could not guarantee its safety! This is the country that claims to be the leader in Internet technology and in fact one of my businesses is selling e-commerce websites. If the largest delivery organisation in this country cannot guarantee delivery what future does my business have then? I am just happy that I do not have any Indian clients then because they should never use such a horrid service provider.

Coming back to my experiences with India Post, it is a terrible organisation. The staff at their post offices are rude. They lose packages and post. They do not sell any packaging at their post offices. Their stamps are ugly and so badly manufactured that most of them do not even stick to envelopes. They seem to do everything at the post office from selling insurance to gold but deliver post! It also seems that they are ready to overcharge you because if you go to two different post offices with the same package or letter you get two different rates!

As for me I do not intend to stop ordering things online but perhaps I should pay a bit extra and get insurance for my post. Since the postman will not take any responsibility if he can’t deliver post. This is what I mean when I say there is no professionalism among Indian people. India Post is the image of India abroad, I should say someone should fix it.

Its a relatively simple dish made excessively complicated. Fried rice traditionally uses old leftover rice, some eggs and some sort of pork. Thats about it. You can ofcourse add some aromatics like spring onions/onion, ginger and garlic. I cooked some fried rice some days ago with the only twist that I used bacon instead of ham.  The reason, well I did not have any ham. I fried the ginger and the garlic in bacon grease to save on further having to add oil. It is important for this dish that you fry the egg chinese style. I usually lightly whisk the egg with some chopsticks and then fry and scramble it in the wok instead of a pan. Although I suppose a pan can do equally well.

Spring onion is the only vegetable that authentic fried rice needs and I like a lot of it because it has a unique taste as well as it makes the dish look nice. Soy sauce is usually the other most important part of the dish. If you can find authentic Chinese or Japanese soy sauce it is nice. So if you like you can make this as a quick lunch but make sure you never use any fresh rice or you will end up with a goey mess.

Thank you Kanagu for giving me the versatile blogger award. You really do spoil me. I would also like to pass this award along to Priyank for starting to be more versatile, Vikram for sometimes moving away from the academics and Hedonist for being everything from a skilled south Indian cook, purveyor of ‘interesting objects’ and provider of humour. I would like to take this opportunity to write a bit about blogging in general. I have been a bit quiet in the last few days well mainly because of a lot of work. Recently rolling remarked “somehow I love your cooking posts better than the rest.” I guess perhaps I am not a very versatile blogger but then I really do not have any agenda when it comes to writing this blog. As a writer usually people tell me what they want me to write about and I get paid in return. When I started this blog the idea was that I would write something about what really mattered to me. So perhaps food is really what I do care about the most. So the comments of rolling — they hold ground.

I have read a lot of posts as I have written some. I noticed that a lot of my blogger friends write a lot about their surroundings and the issues that they feel strongly about. It is nice to see such a caring and social side of the internet. However it tells very little about who they really are. While a lot of time people ask me what my ‘real’ name is or ‘which religion I belong to’ or sometimes quite directly ‘who are you’  I feel I have here a very personal blog. A blog that really does say who I am. Someone who basically is living the best he can in the circumstances that surround him.

I am not really going to be very wordy because some of my friends accuse me of being that! I will make it short and sweet. It is best to live your own life, spend some time that you have and do everything you want to do then try to make a difference. In some ways being your own person is one of the biggest contributions that we can make to our world. If everyone just did that the world would be a much ‘friendier’ place. So does anyone still want to know who am I
I am Odzer.

Last evening I cooked Tofu. In India you can find Tofu quite easily but the variety of Tofu is limited to hard tofu. The reason seems to be that here it is treated as a ‘paneer’ substitute by vegan type fanatics or hardcore vegetarians. Interestingly there are two types of Tofu I can buy in this city. I can opt for the cheaper locally made Tofu or I could buy something that has been imported from East Asia at about 200% the price of the local variant. Since both of these Tofu’s are essentially the same I opt for the local one. Cooking Map-Doufu is not something that requires a lot of skill though, all one needs  is a package of Mapo-Doufu sauce that is quite easily available at stores. The dish involves minced meat and the preffered mince is either pork or beef however due to the non availability or reliable meat I usually use minced chicken.

This dish goes along well with both rice and noodles. You can choose anything that you like. We had it for dinner with rice though and if you like it you could try it with some plain or some fried noodles as well. I remember reading somewhere that this sort of dish was quite in favour with Chinese Buddhist monks because this dish requires very little meat. I guess it can be so and it does make for a tasty and wholesome meal on its own.