The Imagined Universe

Two surgeons were talking in a London hospital over a cafetaria lunch.

Dr. Rob was staring intently at his soup bowl as if he hoped to find Nessie in it. “I hate this new performance based bonus system” he said.

“You mean NHS’s idea of giving us a bonus for every patient who doesn’t die on the operating table?  What’s not to like about it?”  Dr. Nife asked.  “Why, is your success rate low or something?”

Dr. Rob smiled.  “Not at all, these days practically nobody dies on my operating table.”

“What, not even the complicated cases?” asked Dave. “Your surgical skills must have improved, then!”

“Oh no, I don’t even operate on any of the complicated cases!  I just refer them to other hospitals!”

“Wouldn’t it look a little..” Dr. Nife paused, “awkward if you only operated on easy cases?  Plus, I think the bonuses are better if the surgery is complicated.”

“But the surgery is always complicated” Dr. Rob grinned.  “I have mastered the technique of making routine cases seem like really complicated ones.  Like, I can look at a scan and see suspicious lesions that no one else can. ”

Dr. Nife wished he had thought of all these things.  He was suddenly rather jealous of Dr. Rob.

“Seems to me you are doing quite well then”, he said.  “Why do you hate the new bonus system then?”

Dr. Rob suddenly looked very haggard.  “I met my nemesis yesterday.  The system hit back at me”, he said.

“Why, what happened?” asked Dr. Nife, sounding very concerned.  Secretly, though, he was a little pleased.

“Normally, I look at a patient and put them in three categories,” Dr. Rob said.  “High-bonus, medium bonus and low bonus.  The low bonus patients I refer to others.”

“But this patient who came in yesterday”, he continued, “was high bonus.  Middle aged but fit woman, the case itself seemed complicated but I knew it wasn’t, and I knew this patient’s history really well so it was an easy surgery.”

“Then, what was the problem?”, Dr. Nife asked, puzzled.

“Well, she was my ex-wife’s mother “, Dr. Rob said. “We don’t, you know, get along that well.”  He paused. “Oh, who am I kidding? I dislike her intensely. She made my marriage fall apart.”

Dr. Nife thought about this.  He was a fair man.  He was a surgeon and he also had a mother in law.  “You did say it was a complicated case”, he said.  “Nobody will blame you if the surgery didn’t go well.  Of course you will lose the bonus, but what’s a little sacrifice?”

Dr. Rob laughed bitterly into his soup. “That’s what I told myself”, he said, “all the way to the operating theater. But do you remember that boat I always wanted?  The bonus from this surgery would get me to the down payment.”

“So… you saved her?” Dr. Nife couldn’t believe it.  “You had her on the operating table…and then, you saved her.”

Dr. Rob nodded to his soup bowl. “I saved her,” he said gloomily.  He looked almost pleadingly at Dr. Nife, “I wanted that boat! I need a vacation.  I have been working so hard now, seeing hundreds more patients because of this new bonus system.”

Dr. Nife could empathize. He, too, badly needed a vacation.

“And today”, Dr. Rob said, now again talking to his soup, “the ex-wife called. She wanted to meet me.”

“She wants to thank you?”

“She does, but I’ve been behind on the alimony payments, and you can be sure she’ll bring that up.” Dr. Rob laughed bitterly.  “There is no gratitude left in this world.  Let’s hope she doesn’t find out about the boat, at least.”

Dr. Nife looked into his soup now.  “At length I realize, he said, the bitterness of life.” he quoted.  “Lewis Carroll wrote that.”

Dr. Rob nodded vigorously.  “Was he a surgeon?”

Growing up doesn’t seem to have made me less rebellious.  It seems to me that even now, my Mom only has to tell me that something is not a good idea, and suddenly it suddenly becomes the most attractive option.

So there I was, stuck with a gallon of expired milk, as I mentioned in my earlier post.  Rasagullas were the only way to go, my Mom told me.  Theratti paal was a definite no-no, it would take far too long and I would be bored.  Are you surprised, then, that I suddenly wanted to try making theratti paal ?

It seemed the simplest recipe on earth too.  Boil milk.  Add sugar or jaggery and (optional) elaichi.  That’s it.  Even making Maggi noodles involves more steps. (Boil water. Break Maggi brick into little pieces.  Add masala powder. Add (optional) peas, vegetables.)  So how difficult can theratti paal be, I thought.

Except, of course, Maggi is usually finished, if not in two minutes, at least in five.  Theratti paal is not a dish that cares for Time.  You can see that this dish belongs to the times when people had never heard of kitchen timers and dusk meant that the cows came home (or the husbands did).  The men spent hot afternoons sleeping or chatting at the village pipal tree (and in later generations, reading the Hindu).  The women, meanwhile, passed their time making theratti paal.  You might, of course, consider that the women were wiser.  Making theratti paal is way more interesting than reading the Hindu.  Watching paint dry would be more interesting.  But I digress.

There is no quick way to making theratti paal.  Boiling the milk in the microwave doesn’t help either.  It still takes close to an hour, I am told, and continues to require constant attention and stirring. This dish is an attention-seeker cum laude.

I had chosen to boil the milk on the cooktop.  I divided my gallon of milk into two saucepans. One was destined to become rasagullas and the other, theratti paal.  The rasagullas were progressing at a fast pace.  But the milk in the other saucepan was still boiling sedately. At least, the milk was still good, despite being a week past expiry.  Otherwise, I doubt if I could have made theratti paal at all.

I finished making the rasagullas and peeked in.  The milk was still turning over lazily, blowing bubbles at me.  It had shrunk to half its volume, but did not seem any thicker for it.

I was suddenly assailed by doubts. Wasn’t the milk supposed to change color before you add the jaggery?  Wasn’t it supposed to thicken and turn creamy and stick to the bottom of the saucepan?  Did this milk know what it was supposed to do? Does theratti paal only work with whole milk?  Then I realized that the milk you get in India does not remotely resemble whole milk, and brightened up.

I turned up the gas.  I stirred madly.  Nothing happened.  I left it alone. Normally, the milk would have boiled over the moment I ignored it.  But not this time - it just ignored me back and continued to boil lazily.  What was it thinking - its toasty here, nice and cozy, let me snooze?

I lost patience and added the jaggery.  I added 1 cup of jaggery to the roughly half gallon/ 1 liter of milk, though you can add more if you have a sweet tooth.  In an ideal world, you would powder the jaggery, but small blocks are fine too; it’s going to melt in a few minutes anyway.

At least the color changed to brown now :)  The milk also seemed thicker, though it may only have been due to the jaggery.  I then added the elaichi.

The theratti paal started looking thicker, suddenly.  The milk had come out of its siesta and realized it was supposed to do something. So it stopped blowing bubbles and started sticking to the bottom of the saucepan.  It was clearly agitated.  I let it simmer for a few minutes before turning the gas off.

Next morning, on Skype, my mother couldn’t believe her eyes. Rasagullas AND Theratti Paal? Made by her daughter?   What was the world coming to?  And then she wondered why I wasn’t making any of this stuff when she was here last.

The question remains - would I do it again?  The next time I find milk expiring on me, that is?  Or the next time my parents visit?  Reason tells me rasagullas are tastier and much easier to make.  But I am too irrational to rule out the possibility :)  Maybe all it needs is my Mom to tell me the theratti paal success was just beginner’s luck, or a flash in the (sauce)pan!

Tags: theratti paal

The numbers in my WordPress dashboard screamed silently at me, as if they were on the wrong side of a rolled up car window.  I didn’t notice, my mind busy wondering whether I should install the latest WordPress update.  In the short time that I have been using wordpress.org,  it has managed to come up with more updates than even Windows.  Which must be a record.  Is there a curse surrounding all software that begins with “W”?

Then, finally, I saw it - “You have 100 posts..”  my dashboard was saying.  Wow! I had managed to write a hundred posts!

But wait, did that include drafts?  Did that number include scheduled posts, which were mostly posts that were so bad even I couldn’t publish them but didn’t have the heart to delete either?  I quickly checked my sidebar.

Yup.  I had completed a hundred posts, and hadn’t noticed.

So what does one do on completing a hundred posts?

-  If I were playing cricket and had completed a hundred, I know that I should raise my bat as if it were the Olympic torch, and wave to the crowd.  Then, I should look upwards as if expecting rain any moment.  Or a shower of gold coins from the Gods.

-  If I were an old man turning a hundred, I should rummage in my desk drawer to make sure I had written my will and had it witnessed.  Or dance the cha-cha with my walking stick.

-  If I were a painter and had turned a hundred.. scratch that.  Who has ever heard of a painter living to be a hundred?  You are supposed to die young if you are a painter, unless you are the kind who paints walls.

There are no answers, I can see.  Plus, it’s not as if my blog has turned a hundred. (Thank God! How old would that make me?)  My blog has not even turned one. It’s only the posts that have turned a hundred.

Which reminds me that I should stop gloating now.  The credit really belongs to you, readers, for reading my posts and even commenting!  Obviously, I would have closed shop long ago if not for all of you.  So many thanks are in order.  Of course, like all bloggers, I wish more of you would head to the comments section!

Have some of my rasagullas!

By the way, what kind of amazing coincidence is it to find that one’s 100th post is about a sweet dish, and an Indian one at that !   I mean, I have written only 2 other recipe posts and only one of them is a sweet dish (apple pie).   I have no explanation, except to think that my blog somehow schemed to make this happen.  I am very glad it did

***

One final note - all the baseball fans among you are going to sidle up to me and say “The title is not exactly right, madam. “Batting a hundred” means you got only 10% of your hits right, or only 1 hit for every 10 at bat. To get a perfect score, you should be batting a thousand”.

Well, 10% sounds like a good rating for this blog, thank you.  But what makes you think I am talking baseball lingo anyway?  No, no,  I am too desi for that! I don’t speak baseball, I speak cricket.

I am not going to the pavilion any time soon, and thankfully this is not twenty-twenty.

So I’m going to step back and ask you guys - what do you think of this blog?

Specifically, I would like feedback on :

1.  What is your most favorite post on this blog?

2.  What changes would you like in this blog?  (Layout, content, anything)

3.  Could you hop over to the sidebar and answer the poll on what kind of topics you like?  You can click on multiple answers too..

Thanks!!

I opened the refrigerator and came face to face with horror.  The gallon of milk was past its expiry date.  I usually cheat and use it for another day or two, but this was a full week past its expiry date.  Worse, it was an unopened can.

How does one throw away a full can of organic, low-fat milk?  I could not bring myself to do it.  All my thrifty Indian genes rose up and stood at attention.  We will find a way, they said.

I poured the milk into a large saucepan and turned up the flame.  Then I called my mother.

“How do I make khoya? ” I asked her.  “Or, er, theratti paal?”

“Boil a liter of milk, keep stirring continuously,” she said. “For theratti paal, add a cup sugar or jaggery.  But it takes hours, though you could do it on the microwave, it would be faster.”

Milk boiling has always remained a mystery to me.  Maybe aliens come into the picture. Maybe time machines do.  All I know is, I can keep staring at a pot of milk that is heating up nicely, but somehow, just a few seconds before it boils over, it will distract my attention and I will be looking elsewhere.  Even milk that looks ice cold and hours away from boiling will prompty boil over in seconds if I ignore it.

I have tried milk cookers, but they scare me even more with their banshee shrieks.  So I have resigned myself to mopping the cooktop every time I boil milk.  Usually I never boil milk if I can avoid it.

Microwaving doesn’t help either.  So my Mom’s idea gave me a sudden mental picture of a huge bowl stuck in the microwave, overflowing with milk, dripping on the floor, setting off the smoke alarm..

“I have this huge amount of milk” I wailed.  “Close to two liters! I don’t want to microwave it”.

“Oh well, but it will take hours if you simmer it on the cooktop”, she said.

“Don’t worry,” I said.  “I will go off to the basement to exercise.”

“Then it will all get burnt and stick to the bottom of the pan”, she said.

My Mom does not know that I don’t really exercise for very long.  This did not seem the right time to enlighten her either.

“It’s okay”, I said. “I will hear the smoke alarm from downstairs if it does get burnt.”

Then I heard it - a sizzling noise that was growing steadily louder.  I turned around.  The milk had boiled over.

As I rushed to the cooktop, I heard Mom laugh. “Why don’t you make rasagulla?”

I switched off the gas and started mopping operations.

“So how do I make rasagulla?”  I asked.

“Google it”, she laughed some more and ended the call.

That, dear readers, is how I came about to making rasagulla.

There is one easy way to make rasagullas.  I learnt later from friends’ experiences that there are even more easy ways to make rock-gullas.  But I shall stick with the rasagullas for now.

Rasagulla recipe:

1.  Boil milk.  Try not to have it overflow all over your counter top.  Mop cooktop.

2.  Switch off gas and squeeze a lime into milk.  The milk will break up instantaneously and rather satisfyingly into a million pieces, which will then clump together, leaving a lot of greeny white whey.  You have now had your revenge on the milk for messing up your cooktop.

3.  Drain the whey.  If you are a SuperWoman, you will have cheesecloth lying around right beside you, all organized.  If you are an industrious cook, you will at least use white towels and such things.  If you are me, you will just pour the whole saucepan into a large steel strainer and just trust to beginner’s luck.  Amazingly, it works.

4.  If it doesn’t drain out fast enough, squeeze it, use ladles to press it, crush it with cutting boards, anything.  The recipes will all tell you it will take 45 minutes to drain. Don’t listen to them.  You can’t let this thing get lazy.  Give it five minutes at most.

Squeeze the lump that remains to take out every last drop of whey.  You now have paneer.  You can use this to make paneer dishes like paneer makhani or palak paneer.  But since you are making rasagulla now, there are a few more steps.

5.  Dump the stuff into a food processor and grind it for 1 minute.  You will now get a nice, smooth paste.  This is the most important part of the recipe.  The traditional recipes call for rubbing the paneer with your hands until it becomes soft.  Not too much, they say, and not too little.

You can imagine how that will work.  A friend who tried the hand-rubbing technique tells me she tried 3 times, and each time she got rock-gullas instead of rasagullas.   The mixer is much better.

6.  In a saucepan, boil a mixture of 1 1/2 cups sugar and 4 cups water.  If you like your rasagullas extra sweet, you can add a little more sugar.

7.  While the sugar solution is boiling, roll the paste into small, round balls. Don’t make all the balls the same size.  That is when you will get interesting conversations like “You ate all the big ones and left just the small ones to me!”.

8.  Add the paneer balls into the sugar solution.  Reduce the heat a little and let the rasagullas absorb the sugar solution.

9. Once the rasagullas have boiled for, say, 10 minutes, switch off the gas and cool.

10.  After the rasagullas have cooled, add some rose water.  Then refrigerate.

Resist the temptation to eat one immediately. Take pictures and send them to your mother. She will never believe you otherwise.

The recipe makes around 40 rasagullas.  They were quite delicious too.  But if you’d rather make rock-gullas (I hear they make excellent projectiles), you know what to do!

Tags: rasagulla

The local newspaper has a weekly column that answers questions on driving etiquette.  A very good idea, but unfortunately the worst offenders are not the ones who are likely to read such columns.

Anyway, the other day there was a Dad asking whether he could drive with his four month old daughter in the car pool lane - did she qualify as a second person ?  Duh, of course.  Though the columnist warned Dad that he could be pulled over if the cop couldn’t see the baby.  Tall bonnets are very important, we are told.

This got me thinking - shouldn’t pregnant women be allowed to use the car pool lane?  Life begins at conception, right?  So doesn’t the baby make two?

Where are all those pro-lifers?  We need them as traffic cops