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Sunday Recipe: Aloo Gobi (Potatoes & Cauliflower)

Aloo Gobi is a classic Indian recipe, and one of the easiest to pick up for total Indian cooking novices. It’s also where I was first introduced to Indian cooking, so I think it serves as a good starter here, too. I considered starting with the simple stir-fry noodles, but that seems to be aiming a little low. If you can’t do noodles, stir-fry or otherwise, please find your way around a kitchen before attempting the following.

Pardon the terrible pictures. My phone camera really isn’t up to the task…

Ingredients

Indian cooking tends to be very open to interpretation when it comes to amounts, so I’m going to give some rough estimates here.

  • Cauliflower – Half can typically feed two or three people as a main, or four to five people as a side. I’ll use half, as it’s easily available from the supermarket, wrapped in plastic & ready to last longer.
  • Potatoes – dependent on how large the potatoes are, how many people there are, and how much of a fan of potatoes you are. I’ve used two average sized potatoes, diced. I aim for a roughly even amount in visual terms:
    Roughly this much

    The best potatoes to use for Indian cooking is Desiree – they’re pinkish and dirtless, readily available from your local supermarket.

  • Cooking oil – take your pick. Canola, Sunflower or Olive oil work well. Keep the bottle on hand.
  • Spices –
    • Haldi (Tumeric) – for colour, approx half a tea spoon. We’re going for a nice yellow-brown colour.
    • Salt – about 1 and a 1/2 to 2 tea spoons
    • Garam Masala – a mix of spices, lit. “Hot Spice”, available from all good Indian shops and maybe even your local supermarket – it’s one of the basics of Indian cooking. About 1 tea spoon.
    • Lal Mirch (Red Chilli) – powdered form, about 1/2 to 1 tea spoon, to taste. Not strictly necessary, but it gives it that little bit of zing, I think.
    • Podhina (Coriander) – powdered, about 1/2 to 1 tea spoon, to taste. I’m not sure what it does to the taste in the end, but it’s in there. Similarly available from Indian stores or supermarkets if you look hard enough.

    Again, spices tend to make the cooking, so these items will probably be the hardest for you to find. If stuck at all, let me know and I’ll try to find out what the closest Indian store is to you. I’ve also added some seeds I know not the name of (in either language), but they taste good. You’re going to have to ask my mum for those.

  • Ginger, chopped – can also use frozen & preprocessed one that I do. About 1 tea spoon of the processed stuff, or about 20g of the chopped stuff, though that’s really a guess. If you think I sound vague about this, it’s because I really am – it’s never actually quantified, and the amount you use is entirely to taste.
  • A wok or saucepan with a lid.
  • Half an hour to 45 minutes.

Continue reading “Sunday Recipe: Aloo Gobi (Potatoes & Cauliflower)”

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Modern Spam

In the past month or two, there’s been a steady trickle of spam comment attempts on this site, and while most of them are the usual viagra-xanax-casino deal, some spammers have been trying to get creative. There’s the flattering comments, which say “Wow, love your post” or “Great site!”, and occasionally they tack on “Can we exchange links with your site?” and so on. At first, the not-so-vigilant moderator might in a moment of weakness allow the comment, before they check out the site that the commenters name is linked to – but when you do, you easily realise and can that spam that slipped through.

The ones that are really getting creative are putting complex words & sentences in so that the average spam-detection algorithm might think it a particularly intelligent reader expressing overly-complex thoughts. This of course fails the first-comment test (all first comments are held in moderation) and provides me with some amusement when attempting to understand the meaning and/or the source (blockquotes from famous books, for example). One of these attempts at intelligence simply states “Your site is very cognitive”, which is a dead giveaway to me – who the hell ever uses words like “cognitive”?

But the one that amuses me the most is this:

I just don’t have anything to say right now.

I mean, come on, just try a little?

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Mood Swing

Some days you’re up, and then some days you’re down. Thursday and Friday were good days, but I woke up on Saturday morning with my throat hurting and a distinct sense of crap running through my head; Sunday morning bore it out and it appeared that a full-fledged cold had struck.

Now I’m not blaming anyone – it was my own damn fault for forgetting so readily how cold Melbourne actually is at this time of year, and not packing appropriately. But come work this morning, all that postiveness and relaxation I’d aimed for, and even partially achieved, were totally wiped out, negating completely the value of taking a few days off. All I want to do now is take some more days off.

I did however carry away some valuable conversations, and some insights, however brief, into life, the universe, etc. It’s those things that you reflect on later as showing your signs of maturity approaching, of growth on an emotional level instead of merely phsyical. Occasionally, because of all the wonderful people that surround me, I feel wise beyond my years, and I don’t think I thank people enough for sharing their world with me.

It is perhaps appropriate that Monash University’s emblem has the words “Ancora Imparo” on it, because it really does apply, even beyond university – “I am still learning.”

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Graduate!

Officially a Bachelor of Computer Science Degree holder now, and thus can finally claim the term bachelor in all ernest. Or something to that end. Very exciting day, either way. If anyone ever says “oh there’s no point going to graduate”, tell them… well, tell them they can skip their own if they really want. Don’t skip yours, no matter how bad that gown/hat looks on you! (looked terrible on me, I know that)

Congrats to all my fellow graduating peeps – the quick run down the list gives shoutouts to Brendan, Chris, Li-‘Chingy’-ching, Kevin, Gareth, Fay, Eugene, Happy, and all the rest of them random semi-strangers who look so familiar but through my lack of effort over the years, alas, unnamed.

Update: Photos up on flickr

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The Letter Writing Experiment

I’m in the middle of an experiment right now: writing real letters. It all came about because of a movie which featured letters prominently as a plot device, and the discussion that followed in my family about how letters used to be the only way to communicate across distances. Telephones reduced that, and email has virtually eliminated the need to send a letter which is not business related.

I left that in my ideas drawer for a bit, noting it as something to perhaps come back to in the future. (I don’t actually have an “ideas drawer”, it’s more the abstract concept.) A few weeks ago, I picked up the book White Mughals, which is about the East India Company and its rise in the late Mughal era of India – nicely historical, engagingly written book. I noticed that the primary sources for so much of the writer’s information was letters (other sources like journals also cropped up). That got me thinking… what would the historians 200 years from now scour over? Google’s old decaying datacentre hard-drives? An Archive.org that was bigger than the ‘operating net’ itself? History rarely records the emepheral things such as conversations, and one could say quite easily that emails etc are just digitized conversations, not letters in the same sense they were 200 years ago.

So I hit upon an idea: why don’t I do some letter writing? =) I’d send it to some friends, see if I got a reply, and if things got interesting we’d have a bit of a correspondence going.

It would be conceited of me to say that I want these letters to preserve somehow a snapshot of life as it is now, and that perhaps a book would be written in the future on the basis of my letters. It is far more likely that the net will endure, in some form, and that this blog or my emails are more likely to survive in the great archive, to be indexed and searched and cross referenced by increasingly smarter programs. But, well, there was a bit of a novelty to the idea of writing letters – something which perhaps 10 years ago would have been considered far more normal.

I don’t even know how to write a letter in the conventions of those who’ve gone before – I know how to write a super-serious business-related letter, and I can recall some conventions when writing a letter to relatives, but that always felt a little too formal, a little too serious. I tend to write my letters as I would emails, albeit longer and more stream-of-concious because I can’t go back and edit them like I could a long email. I’m using the techniques of writing double-spaced I learnt so well in year 12 because my handwriting was atrocious, and hasn’t really gotten better the more I’ve used computers nearly exclusively to write things. Occasionally even I can’t decipher my own writing, which is kinda tragic.

So, perhaps expect a letter from me, or at least a message asking for your address =)

Update: Writing letters takes much longer than I thought it would.

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Movie Review: Mission Impossible 3

Watched M:I:3 last night. First impression within 30 seconds of the start: Wow, get a bloody steadycam or tripod, will you? Yeesh. I don’t know what makes film makerst think a camera shaking like crazy, at an unecessary time (i.e. when the action is mostly static), is somehow “modern” and “cool”. All it does is make me want to close my eyes before I get a headache. Also, most overused plot technique in movies these days: the flash-forward, or perhaps half-movie-is-flashback-from-first scene. I don’t know which movie did it first – Fight Club is the first example I can remember – but now it’s just getting predictable – “Oh look! First Scene and we’re in the thick of things and we the audience have no clue what’s going on! I know, we’ll wait for the plot exposition.”

On to the movie itself, or the what meat there is to it. There’s little to no reference to the past movies, especially MI2. Ving Rhames is back, which is always good, but somehow you feel there should be a little more history in there. MI3 also lacks the tension that was there in the first, which made it a hit in the first place. It was all a little more cloak and dagger then. MI2 moved towards the action end of town, and now it’s virtually an American Bond With A Team. Also, some of the setup is ludicrously weak. It was 2 hours long, but at times you believed they made up the plot in less time than it took for me to get the popcorn at the candybar.

Utterly unbelievable, but Seymour-Hoffman puts in a great performance, and Maggie Q, Keri Russel & John Rhys-Meyers totally underutilised. Morpheous looks old and fat, unfortunately. Good laugh from “We Are Family”.

★★★