Jan 6, 2023

This is a lot harder than I thought. Without blinking I am 3 or 4 days behind. So what did I do on the 6th- let me see this must have been friday. It was a working day for me so I think I cooked up some mutton curry with the remainder of the mutton. This time I went for the full monty with onions and garlic- ofcourse I had to be satisfied with the smaller onions that seemed now to have become the norm in Manila. Were they onions or were they challots? In any case this new bag I bought was slightly larger than the previous bag- so may be things were improving and soon we will get back to full size. Not that it matters when you are planning to use a nutribullet and pulverise them to a liquid anyway. I cooked the mutton long and slow- using a recipe from habit and memory - a slight combination of various recipes ranging from the mundane jhol to a peshawary karahi mutton. In the end I got a lovely colour- not too dark but dark enough to qualify as a rich curry redolent and remiscent of kosha mangsho. It tasted nice but I must admit I could not get the mutton to fall off the bone ( cooked it was though ) without my whole potatoes beginning to fall apart. I understood why the long and slow kosha mangsho is not paired with potatoes. With the remaining smaller pearl onions I made mishti moong dal- which is a favorite that I seldom bother with because who is going to peel all those tiny onions. I did this time. I may have added too much milk-and I am certain I added too much sugar. I also added some grated ginger raw- my own touch to the recipe which does not call for it. But I somehow like my moong dal gingery. I recall this is one dal you can have cold with rice- very satisfying. And while it had got to the point now where I adjust the dish after tasting it multiple times, almost involuntarily- I did not quite like the product when it was still soupy- the flavors in the soup were not balanced. I left it at that and reduced it down to the moong dal slush. Later when I tasted the product with my meal it tasted great! So the learning here is that tasting the watery soup midway is not representative as there are flavors below that have not come to the fore…

I had a few calls and emails to do late evening- particularly a call from Randie- which I always find difficult because I cant quite follow him. He has a stop-start style and never finishes a sentence before starting the next and even moving across lines of thoughts in a seemingly random way. In a weird way he reminds me of “baapre”- our lecturer in Varanasi on Steel Making. Mr. Bhanu Prakash ( Baap Re ), who had got his PHD from Yugoslavia ( there’s some trivia for you ) had a similar delivery- and since our topper Muthukumar took notes verbatim, this was well captured and could be analysed later. I make a point to spend more time with Randie this year- I think he needs my help as I may have pushed him into the deep end with Penn Chem.  He is being torn apart little by little everyday with the stakeholders- who are simply waiting to throw someone from the Manila Hub under the bus- and I cant blame them. No one likes jobs offshored especially when there is not much expertise there. Which is the case..and it is my job to build this expertise. Fast.