Potato & Keerai poriyal

Hello all,

Here I am with a recipe post on a combo that I ever tried and tasted for the first time in life.

Ingredients:

1. Potatoes - 3 medium sized
2. Keerai - 1 cup - washed and cut into small pieces
3. Oil for sauteing
4. Dry red chillies - 2
5. Shallots - 8 - cut into small pieces
6. Mustard seeds, Urad dal, Channa dal - 1 tea spoon each for tempering
7. Jeera - 1 teaspoon
8. Turmeric powder - a pinch
9. Salt as per taste

Method of Preparation:

1. Wash the potatoes, boil them, peel off the skin and cut into small cubes
2. Take a pot/ kadai, add oil for tempering. Add the mustard seeds and let it splutter
3. Add the urad dal and channa dal, and let them turn into light brown
4. Add the jeera followed by the dry red chillies after a minute
5. Add the shallots after a minute and saute till they burn transparent.
6. Add the potato cubes now and saute for few minutes.
7. Add the green leaves now and saute for a minute or two. Add the turmeric powder.
8. Add salt as required for taste, stir a little and keep the vessel closed.
9. Water from the green leaves will be sufficient in most cases and you can just splash a spoon of water if required in between.

P.S.:

• Add grated coconut as the final touch before turning the stove off - this step is optional.
• Serve this dish with rice for lunch. This goes well with simple dhal, sambar and rasam with papad.

Mastering the Art of Influencing People

Hello everyone,

I accidentally came across this free course of 1.5 hours on "7 Scientifically Proven Steps to Increase Your Influence" at Udemy and found this to be really amazing!!

Key take aways for me from this course are as below:

1. Always have killer conversation starters
• Turn people on with interesting topics to get the dopamine flowing in them so that they start liking your presence.
• Make people talk about themselves and be genuinely interested in what they talk
• make them feel valued
• add your opinion with open ended statements using "Yes, and...." or "No, but...."
2. Use high power body language
• High power body language is the one where you kind of expand and occupy space confirming your territory
• Avoid contracting your body in any way.
• Keep shoulders at the back, head up, body relaxed, chest out, etc.. 
3. Use stories from your own story toolbox
• end your story with a thought provoking question to get people talking on the same line.
• avoid complaining/ criticizing/ gossipy stories to avoid getting remembered for the same.
4. Embrace your weirdness and imperfection
• Be vulnerable to allow people to associate themselves with you
• This makes them realise you are human too and establish an empathetic connection.
5. Ask for favor and advice.
• This often ends up developing a bond or a friendship.
6. Mood is contagious.
• Charisma is spread non-verbally (Tilt, torso, toes).
• Tilt your head slightly, keep the torse and toes facing the audience to show that you are really listening and engaged in.
• Think of 5 things that you are grateful for in your life right now.
7. Color psychology
• Various colors vis-a-vis mood is explained in this.
• Color cheat sheet is also provided that you can take print out of and stick on to your wardrobe so that you can decide the color of your attire appropriate to the occasion.
8. Exit gracefully from the conversation.
• Always start with non-verbal clues
• Use verbal notes like 'Thank you, I would stay in touch through LinkedIn./ Facebook/ whatsoever", etc...

Reviews/ Thoughts on this course:

• The way the course is presented is so charismatic and it draws you into it.
• Very useful resource for self-improvement and personality development.
• You also get a Certificate upon completion and you can share this certificate in LinkedIn or Twitter.👍
• Thanks to the course instructor (Vanessa Van Edwards) who is so adept at what she does. :) :) She gives examples for each of the principles. She even shares ideas on how you can use her scripts in case if you run out of thoughts on your own. Truly inspiring, isn't it? 😊
• Visual representations used in each of the topics enhances the learning experience.

I recommend everyone to enroll and take this up. 👍

Tater Tots - SouthIndian version

Hello everyone,

Here I am with a post on one of the yummiest recipes of potato.

This is called 'Tater Tots' and I stumbled upon this at https://damndelicious.net/2015/04/10/homemade-tater-tots/ when I was googling for an interesting recipe using potato as main ingredient.

I adopted the recipe in the above given link and made few changes to make it a South-Indian version. Below are the details.

Ingredients I used:

1. Large potatoes - 3
2. Finely shopped Garlic cloves - 1 tablespoon
3. Finely chopped large Onion - 3 tablespoons
4. Finely chopped Ginger - 1 tablespoon
5. Asafoetida - a pinch
6. All-purpose flour - 1 tablespoon
7. Rice flour - 1 tablespoon
8. Dill - 1/4 teaspoon
9. Chopped fresh Coriander and Curry leaves - 2 tablespoons
10. Black pepper powder - 1.5 teaspoons
11. Salt - as per taste
12. Oil for frying

Method of Preparation:

1. Wash and peel the potatoes.
2. Cut them into halves, place them in a large pan and cover with cold water by 1 inch. Bring this to boil for about 5 minutes.
3. Drain the water and let the potatoes cool.
4. Grate the potatoes using a grater.
5. Squeeze the grated potatoes in a clean cloth to remove as much water as possible.
6. Add the items from 2 to 11 in the Ingredients list and mix well.
7. Make the mixture into smaller portions and shape each portion into tots (small oval shaped).
8. Heat oil in a kadai or a post over medium heat.
9. Add the tots, 5 or 6 at a time; Cook until it is golden and crispy.
10. Transfer to a paper towel lined plate/ container.
11. Serve immediately.
12. Optional - Use tomato sauce or ketch-up for accompaniment.

We loved this recipe and it was a big hit at home. Do try and post in your comments on how it was. :)

Healthy & Easy breakfast - 1

Well, the Sunday mornings are the ones that often call out for our lazy selves..

Last Sunday was no exception. So we opted to an easy make breakfast - Varieties of puttu along with slices of nendhiran pazham, which was also very healthy and less time consuming in terms of preparation.

Puttu is very easy to make and you wouldn't need much of ingredients apart from the regular staples in your kitchen.

We often have make puttu with ragi flour(brown ones in the picture above) and the rice flour (white one in the picture).

My personal experience is that natural brown sugar or palm sugar along with shredded coconut goes well with puttu than refined sugar.

The family also enjoyed this food compared to the ritual of having idlis for breakfast on most days. 😊

Craft - 1 - Recycled Jewellery

This is a bracelet I had created for my niece who is only 2 years old. All the beads are reused out of the broken beaded necklace to create this and she loved it.

Isn't this very adorable for kids?? :)

Rangoli - 1

This is a picture of the Rangoli I had drawn with the limited colors available in our home for this Deepavali (Diwali).

Talking about festivals and rangolis, we have this habit to doing rangolis or kolams after dinner the previous day of the festival so that when you wake up and come out on the festival morning, the color patterns will welcome you. :) :)

This year, the ritual was slightly altered as we were too lazy to bend down and do this after eating/ tasting too much of murukku. So I did this as the first thing in the morning. I also ended up in doing a good deed by contributing to blood donation for mosquitoes as I was doing this patiently for almost an hour single handedly.

Do let me know your feedback in the comments. :)

Grilled Paneer

Helllo everyone,

I came across this recipe in one of the youtube videos and tried it on the same day for dinner.

It was yummy in every bit and byte.

Ingredients:

1. 200gms of Paneer cut into slices/ cubes (in any shape or form as  you like)
2. 1 table spoon of olive oil
3. Salt as required
4. 1 tea spoon of red chilli powder
5. 1 tea spoon of garam masala powder

Method of Preparation:

1. Mix salt, olive oil, red chilli powder and garam masala powder well.
2. Coat the Paneer with the mixture on all sides and let it sit for 15 minutes.
3. Take a pan or sandwich grill and coat it with olive oil.
4. Place the paneer on the pan and let it cook for 2 mins if medium flame or 3-4 mins if low flame.
5. Tilt the paneer and let the other side cook for a minute.

Tada, the tasty tasty paneer grill is ready!! :)

P.S.:

No pictures available as the grill was all gobbled up hot before I could click pictures. 

:facepalm:

To all the Coffee lovers

Quite often, finding the perfect blend of Coffee looks more difficult and equally more critical than finding the perfect partner for life or finding the perfect equation if you have a partner already. 😉

Image source:

https://www.maxpixel.net/Cappuccino-Mug-Espresso-Drink-Caffeine-Cup-Coffee-1845314

Into the ocean of love

This poem is the result of gushing thought waves during a hushing time in December 2017 resulting in me pouring it out in this form using art and text. 😊

An attempt to translate this to English for the benefit of non-Tamil readers (have tried to retain the essence):

Mighty Ocean is thy heart
The waves are thy love
Droplets of the waves are thy kisses
The ship that dances in it is my heart! :)

The last line of this poem has 2 ways of association - When you are happy in your love relationship, your heart dances out of joy. When you are in pain, your heart gets pulled and distorted by the waves.

P.S.: Image was created using an online mobile application using stickers and text features.