Epic fail !!... Well, not exactly.

I like to experiment with food. Their normal form looks and seems far from intriguing. Yes, there are some classics that are better be left pristine, for instance, mom's Rajma-Chawal but with the rest, a fair amount of personalization and customization sounds is just, specially if one knows the original and nature of the original recipe. You may sometimes...actually have a 'recipe' for disaster, but in the hind sight, you just might end up knowing what not to do the next time.
For instance, I bring to you the 'Banana cake'.
Trust me, the day I thought of this dish, it sounded absurd to myself. But I was tired of the chocolate cake. Yeah, I could have tried a dozen more kinds of cakes, which sounded a lot more familiar. Somehow I was rather adamant about this one. For starters, I was slightly skeptical about the existence of the dish. But I had a sort of a mind map of the 'how-to-go-about' of what I was shooting for.
Nothing too acrobatic. I was pompous enough to check the recipe after I had put my creation into the oven(I was unhappy to discover that I couldn't apply for a patent for my creation.)
I was at least delighted that what I had thought of, as the steps of the recipe, were exactly the same things mentioned online. Yaaaay!!!!!
For the banana cake, take the chocolate cake recipe. Chuck the chocolate out of it(until that is that the next thing I will try...leaving the chocolate in place). Toss out one egg from the mentioned recipe(not if your recipe has only one in it!!). Blend one-and-a-half bananas with half a glass of milk and tip it into the batter. Beat the batter up like you haven't beaten a single soul in life! Take out all your frustration down on the batter!!! Beat the air into(Not out of) it!! Just beat it!!(R.I.P MJ!! Do the rest of the drill as the original recipe tells you to and VOILA!!

But, I had faultered somewhere...Not a glitch in my method, but that in my execution.
I forgot to put sugar. I realized this after all the beating and after putting all the batter into the baking tray. Strangely enough, I was feeling bloody lazy! So I just powdered some sugar, put it right over the beaten-up batter, mixed it all in and popped straight int the oven.
BIG MISTAKE. I was actually supposed to take all the batter out of the tray, put in the sugar, beat the poor thing all over again and then pop it into the oven.
I was particularly feeling bad for the batter. So I was like "Look, okay, don't cry! I'll spare you the horror, and myself the effort of beating you up. Happy?" The batter happily stepped into the inferno that awaited it.
45 minutes later, I had a cake... Instead of being light as a cloud, this thing squatted like a ruddy sumo wrestler!!  My fears came true!!!!!
But I am fine with things going bomb! It is sort of a pricey proposition to learning stuff.
Bullshit okay!! Why the hell can't I get it at first shot??!!!

ICE-CREAM SANDWICH

No apples, no jellybeans,nothing of the nerdy stuff in here...at least for now.
It is about the dessert. Ice-cream sandwich..

It was over 5 years ago that my mom took me to this pretty famous Ice-cream shop, down south in Church Gate,Mumbai. It was this shop,nothing very fancy about the way it looked, nothing pretentious, no glitz or glamour ,that which is an omnipresent trait of south Bombay. By the way, Bombay beats Mumbai HANDS DOWN,ANY DAY, ANY NIGHT,ANY MICROSECOND BETWEEN 11.59.59 hrs AND 00.00.00 hrs ..Phew!! Being emphatic about things takes quite a toll!
Sometimes, in the evenings, this shop packs in quite a crowd...quite a startling one at that for such a quaint looking place.

So the shop...Yeah, IT is located on the main road of a very posh locality,but for those who aren't looking for it, they will never see it. It's like platform 9 3/4... Remember that one??
It's like over 50 year old, run by a Parsi family for about 2-3 generations. The shop goes by the name K. Rustom. Goodness I love Parsis' for their influence on Mumbai's food culture!!!!
So I go to this place for the first time, I check the menu. These fellows have like 20 odd flavors. None of them are 'odd' as such. I spot this flavor 'bitter chocolate'(Dark chocolate basically) and I have a place I cannot live without visiting whenever I am back in Bombay for my vacations!

Now here's the deal. The ice-cream on offer has no magical texture like a Gelato or some other rich and fancy variety. It nevertheless tastes ABSOLUTELY AWESOME. Getting into minor technicalities, the ice-cream looks like a 300 ml Tetra Pak carton in terms of volume. They quite literally hand you the ice-cream as it is in your hand,just that on two sides of the ice-cream,they slap on a biscuit-wafer,wrap the whole thing in tissue paper and hand it over. Annnd you then happily chomp along!! Even the price is reasonable. 50 bucks a piece.
Here's what I frankly fear. These folks invented the ice-cream sandwich around 50 years ago, about the time, Douglas C. Engelbart had thoughts of making a Computer Mouse, never thought of their ice-creamy concoction worth calling an invention, kept running the shop, SOMEONE COMES ALONG, SEES THEIR CREATION, TAKES IT SOMEWHERE, MAKES IT MORE FANCY AND PUTS UP THE NAME 'ICE-CREAM SANDWICH'!!!! Notice the crescendo in my tone??
The story sounds very akin to Steve Jobs glorifying the mp3 player by giving the world the IPOD!!
(That device definitely was remarkable though...or so was his presentation!)
You see the tragedy how Apple's software is being challenged by something fancifully called the ICS?? See?? See??
But all said, the one place that shall remain my favourite place in my hometown, at least till either I, or the place shall exist,will be
87 Stadium House, Opposite Ambassador Hotel, Veer Nariman Rd, Churchgate, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400020
"Majja ni life!!"

Discovery!

It's been a while that I wrote a post on cooking. I recently realized that if one can't come up with something, there are 2 things...
1-Think more
2-Quit it.
It's not like you have many more options....well,if there are in your mind, OUT WITH IT!!
I had nothing new on the Foodie-frontier..
Then I suddenly had one. This one's  nothing fancy. Rather a bit too simple. But amazing stuff. At least quite so if you are damn hungry and will do anything to eat something in 5 minutes.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!!! No FRILLS!! No FANCY!! I present to you...the humble KHICHDI
As far as 'Wikipedian' accuracy goes.... Khichdi is a South Asian preparation made from rice and lentils (dal). Frankly speaking, that's all there is to it.
So it all happened this one fine not-so-shiny morning. My mom was late for work. She had not made anything for the afternoon to feed her only son. Never mind.. So she was like... "Kiddo! I'll tell you the secret trick that my mom told me to fill my stomach"(that must have been told to my grand-mom by her mom and so-on-and-forth) I was like OKKAYY!! :)
So she told me the following....I just put the same stuff in steps...
1-Take rice:lentils(any variety/type you got at home) in a 1:2 ratio.
2-Wash this mixture thoroughly,drain the water off 
3-Whatever volume the rice-lentil mixture comes to, add 2-2.5 times that volume of water into a pressure cooker.
4-Add the rice-lentil mixture into the cooker too(yeah,don't forget this step please!).
5-Add turmeric,chilly powder and salt as per volume of your khichdi(Ideally,for one person consuming one cup small cup of the rice+lentil mixture,half a tea-spoon salt, a bit less than half a tea-spoon of turmeric,chilly as per your liking...)
6-Shut the cooker and put it on high flame.
7-Let the cooker "Blow it's whistle,baby" for 3-4 times at max....and 'There we go!!'(Do not let the cooker's whistle go off more than 3-4 times!!)
Eat it plain, with yogurt, or anything else you please to eat it with.  

Big MISTAKE!!!

I had written about this dessert called almond Mela'nge a while ago...and completely forgotten about it. I shouldn't have done that. I got the spelling quite badly wrong... Thankfully, the word I spelt wrong was not 'Almonds'. Otherwise, I'd have had to go and sit back in grade 5 or something..
Okay, for some reason, I ran into this word while watching a lady cook some french dish. Annd I made a discovery.
The word is... MIRANGUES... It is pronounced as Mer-(as in mermaid) and Rang-(As in boomerang)...so it sounds like Merang if you utter the word. Damn you!! French cooks!!!
Damn!! The guy who told you the 'Mela'nge-or-whatever-it-was' story was DEAF!!
Okay, I took the word at face value!! But damn the French...
You see, Right now, I feel like the guys in those 'BLOOPERS' type videos. Even better, I feel like a Newspaper editor who just found out that ... there's something wrong. Not with the article content,but the name.....
And, as we all know, it is a crime to spread wrong information.Hence......