Muttor And Sweet Bell Pepper Spread

Muttor And Sweet Bell Pepper Spread

Last week when i decided to make paratha, I didn't have green chili in the fridge so I decided to use the sweet bell pepper instead. When I minced it in the mixer, the idea suddenly came to me to use mutter as well and make this tasty mixture. When the parathas were done and we tasted it right away it was tasty and crispy. But when we actually sat down for lunch, that's when the parathas had cooled down a bit and they had started to get soggy and somewhere too difficult to eat without creating mess. So in the evening I used the remaining mixture on the bread along with some tomatoes and cucumber and it made perfect sandwich. The taste of spread comes out better too. So I think this one definitely works better as spread on bread, burgers or as side chutneys than paratha stuffing.

Ingredients

2 Cup Muttor

1 Sweet Bell Pepper

1 Lemon

4 Garlic Cloves

Handful of the Corriander Leaves

1 Spoon Red Chili Powder

1/4 Spoon Corriander Powder

Salt to taste

Method

• Squize lemon juice in the mixie.
• Add in chopped sweet bell pepper, garlic, salt and coriander leaves and make a smooth paste.
• Add in muttor, red chilli powder, coriander powder and make fine paste in the mixer.

Notes

I used frozen peas without thawing them but fresh peas could be used too.

We had this one as one of the chutneys for burger breads when we barbequed and everyone loved it.

Personal: My random day

I was out and about doing errands in Dearborn.  I met up with an old friend for a ride then once done with my task I decided to walk back to Detroit where I could catch the bus back home.

After taking what I considered a scenic route, I ended up running out of road to walk on because the service drive turned into the freeway.  I however had already walked a mile and didn't want to walk a mile back so I pressed on.
I ended up walking through tall grass towards a place under the freeway bridge hoping it wasn't another highway as it was fenced off.  I found a path to walk down which led to an opening in the fence.  I walked through and saw tall hills far from me but directly in front was a small muddy stream.  I thought about walking back the way I came because being here seemed like a bad idea but I pressed forward anyway.

Under a bridge to the west I noticed a man and his collection of items.  The man obviously lived there and was making water in the stream.  I quickly walked east, to avoid contact and being sighted by the man.   I was headed towards what I believed to be my destination somewhere near Greenfield.

I observed the birds and insects around noting hawks, geese, ducks, butterflies, and whatever was rustling in the tall grass and in the stream.  I walked on in the hot sun and contemplated crossing the stream because I concluded that I could reach my destination quicker that way.  Behind me I noticed a group of men all on motorcycles quickly approaching on the other side of the stream.  As they got closer I noticed they're all older white men.  That made me suddenly more nervous, a natural instinct.  I watched them pass by and snapped a few photos of them.  Across the stream I noticed more men standing and talking and then noticed some sort of water release gate like in a dam.  Further ahead on that side was a golf course.

I watched the bikers as they bobbed and weaved up and down on the causeway.  I had hoped they would lead me to an exit but those dreams were dashed when I discovered I didn't want wet toes.

I walked on and grabbed a walking stick because a journey aint a journey without one.  I walked nearly a mile down noticing that my way out was barred by tall weeds and a tall fence.  In the weeds some creature stirred, rustling the bushes loudly.  I looked but couldn't find the creature and was glad to keep it that way.

I walked under a quiet little shadowy bridge where I couldn't even spot a bird or any other sign of life besides graffiti.  On the other side of the bridge I had hoped to find an exit and wasn't disappointed.

There were thick weeds all about but in the middle a path was made which made the walking path look more like a tunnel.  I smiled at my fortune and walked up the path which quickly turned into a hill.

I dropped my stick and marveled at the civilization around me.  I now saw where I was, it was some sort of flood control area.  I looked around at the street signs and saw that I ended back at the street I first started on.

"How the hell did I end up back here?  Stupid shortcut!"

Chocolate Cupcakes

Chocolate Cupcakes

This was one of my impromptu attempt to bake something that turned out quite great. It had been long time since I had the frosting in the fridge so thought about baking something to use that one and these cupcakes worked perfectly well with the frosting.

Ingredients

2 Cup Sugar

2 Spoon Vanilla Essence

1 Egg

1/2 Cup Oil

1 Cup Milk

1.75 Cup Maida

1 Cup Coco Powder

1 Spoon Baking Powder

1 Spoon Baking Soda

1/2 Spoon Salt

2 Spoon Instant Coffee

Method

• Preheat oven at 325F/160C
• Mix together egg, sugar and vanilla essence.
• Add in oil and milk and whisk the mixture over medium speed.
• Sieve maida, coco powder, baking powder and baking soda couple of times to form homogeneous mixture.
• Add the sieved contents and salt in the egg-oil-milk mixture and whisk on low speed till well combined about 2 minutes
• Warm 1 cup of water with coffee in microwave for about a minute.
• Add the coffee to the cake mixture and whisk on low speed for another 2 minutes.
• Line around the cupcake pan with around 14 cup cake liners and fill them with the cake mixture about 3/4th level in each.
• Bake in the oven for 18 minutes.
• Allow the cakes to cool off for at least an hour and then serve with frosting and optionally filling

Notes

I didn't use the filling but chocolate ganache would be great option.

I used chocolate butter cream that I have made previously to frost another cake as the frosting and it went well.

Kaju Katli

Kaju Katli

I had been wanting to try this for a while now. I made this almost two years ago for Diwali when mom dad were here. After that it just slipped out of radar so this time when Ajoy asked me to make these I was not sure if I will remember what I had done and the learning's from the last time. But thankfully I had rough notes from then that I had sent to mom. So it was pretty easy to recollect. This time it came out perfectly and I did big photo session of them :) so I cannot find any excuse to not post this. This recipe has to be easiest to make and something that will get you lot of appreciation in return.

Ingredients

6 Cup Cashews

1 Cup Milk Powder

2 Cup Sugar

Pinch of Cardamom Powder

Silver Leaf

Method

• Grind cashews into fine powder in the mixer
• Mix the cashew powder and milk powder together
• Heat tawa till very hot and then take off the heat
• Add the cashew and milk powder mixture into the tawa and keep stirring till the mixture is warm to touch. Keep aside in a bowl
• Heat 1.5 cup water with sugar to make 2 string syrup.
• Add in the cardamom powder and the sugar syrup in the cashew mixture and mix well. Knead to get the soft dough.
• On a baking pan or any big plate, lay out butter paper and put the dough and press it hard and spread the mixture.
• Apply the silver leaf and let the mixture cool for atleast couple of hours.
• Cut the kaju katlis and serve.

Notes

Getting the sugar syrup right and kneading well is one key for the success.

Also when spreading the mixture into a plate, pressing it hard and then smoothing it with butter paper will get you correctly set katli.

My Top 3 Ouya Games So Far

So far I'm enjoying my Ouya.  The truth of it is that they need better quality software for it.  A lot of the games are either shovelware or unplayable and are already saturating that market.  However with free downloads I don't care about that so much.  There are however some pretty solid gems in the lineup.  Anyway here's a list of my top three personal favorite Ouya games:

Shuttle Rush is a timed platformer where the goal of the stage rests in keeping yourself alive.  You play as some type of spacefarer in an oxygenized spacesuit.  At the beginning of every stage the spacefarer's oxygen supply is punctured (in a hilarious animation) which starts your mad dash for the exit.  You can temporarily refuel your oxygen in most of the levels but you must escape to survive.  The levels require tight platforming and, for most, rudimentary stage memorization for success.

+ It's fun, levels are fast but require a lot of thought, there are plenty of levels, there's progression in the form of character upgrades such as a stun gun, tight platforming.

Vector is a 2d platform game that harkens back to the first person parkour game Mirror's Edge (in style and setting) and the old school 2d Prince of Persia games.  Your character is always in constant motion as he attempts to outrun an equally nimble futuristic law enforcer.  Throughout the level you're using buttery smooth and simplistic controls to make your character jump, slide, climb, and 'trick' his way to the end of the level.  There are plenty of hazards like pits and if your platforming isn't timed tightly enough then you'll lose precious time and get caught by the enforcer and tasered which starts you over.

The art style takes a minimalist approach with simple colors combined with black and white characters and objects.  Which is fairly cool and fits the game perfectly.  The animation in the game is top notch too, especially on the special unlockable parkour "tricks" which are actual parkour moves.  I know because I dabbled with the hobby.  There were several moments in the game that had me step back and go like "oh s***!"  A lot of the jumps and obstacles really get the blood pumping.  There is some slowdown sometimes though.

My only hope is that with the sequel they give you more control over the movements and allow you to use the buttons to jump and stuff.  I guess what I want from it is to take a few more elements from traditional platformers but as it is it's definitely solid.

+ Cool minimalist art style, detailed animations, real life parkour techniques and tricks, ramping difficulty, cool high flying moments

ChronoBlade is an arena style beat-em-up with various rpg like items and spells thrown in.  The art style reminds me of League of Legends and so do the main champions.  The two playable characters that I had (not sure if there are more in the paid version) were very unique.  There's a small girl that uses some intricate martial arts in combination with this floating metal ball for some brutal combos.  The other guy is large and uses some sort of twin claw axe weapon and does heavy damage, he can also launch his claws off and pull an enemy towards him.  Both characters have long flowing combo sequences but I enjoyed the girl's play-style a lot more.

The game starts you off in a room full of loot and so you do what comes natural to your videogame influenced mind and reap those resources.  After that you walk to the arena and the combat begins.  It's deceptive because you get your punching bag enemies immediately but then comes boss after boss and enemies that can juggle you and attack through your guard.  It's definitely a hard ass game but the difficulty keeps you playing to win.  It's definitely unbalanced though.  Once I learned what all the spells were I was clearing out rooms of the difficult enemies until I ran out of it and got juggled which took my full health bar to zero.  As unbalanced as it is I still had a lot of fun.  There's also no tutorial here but if you're not afraid to experiment with buttons then it isn't difficult at all to hop right into the action.

+ Unique characters and fighting styles, tight and fun beat-em-up action, plenty of moves and magic

I'm hoping that the Deus Ex mobile game comes to the system.  I'd get that in a snap.

Next Gen Gaming Bonanza at E3

This year's E3 can be described in many words, the ones I choose to use are confusing, drama filled,  and distracting.  We watched as Microsoft put out a barrage of hard hitting titles and other titles that looked good but will probably disappoint (I don't think Ryse will be that good).  They were the masters of ceremony and what they successfully did, at least for a day, was pull the wool over people's heads.  Their rapid fire blast of exclusives hit hard and trumped up a ton of excitement.

I think their smartest move was grabbing up that super polished looking Dead Rising 3 as an exclusive.  Dead Rising as many of you know is a game that I have a mostly hate filled relationship with and one that I am currently analyzing to see why people like it so much.  This new Dead Rising actually got me excited to play with it's overhauled game engine, one that looks very similar to my beloved Resident Evil 6 I might add.  It looks like it might be the systems killer app to me.  Everyone's on a zombie kick and this looks like it'll be in many a household by the time it comes out.

My friends and I were bad mouthing the Xbox One for several days before Microsoft's press event but you wouldn't have known that by the way my friends were talking about Dead Rising and buying a One just for it.  This, along with the rest of the high octane trailers and the excitement on social media sites like Facebook got me thinking.  Did Microsoft just successfully distract people from their horrid gaming model (which from what I'm hearing may not even be that bad but more on that later.)  I certainly wasn't "duped."  I was as salty as ever.  From what I was hearing Sony would adopt a similar strategy for used games and so I felt like I was overall done with console gaming.  This and the Kinect and 24 hour internet check-in debacle on Microsoft's end made me want nothing to do with this "next generation" of gaming.  I felt that they had already started a slippery slope of gamer abuse with our current generation of Downloadable Content in games that weren't finished from the get go and DLC that was already on the disk that you still had to pay for.

I feel that when something gets too big that it never fails to start overreaching and that's what I felt and still feel about console gaming.  To be a console gamer (which I've always solely been) it requires a lot of dedication.  You buy a system that's expensive as hell and you shell out a quarter of your paycheck on new games for it.  Now we all pay an additional $50 or so to join or respective system's online service.  If you have both PS Plus and Xbox Gold yearly memberships then you are shelling out roughly that much for both depending on whatever hookups you may have.  You also pay for your own internet and the additional electricity that these consoles drain.  That's a lot of money.  That's a lot of money to pay for someone else to still have control over what you can do with your product.  I don't believe in that.  I also don't believe that these games that are coming out are worth all this money and effort.  I've been having more fun lately playing my PS2 than I have playing my Xbox 360, that I just got mind you.  I just don't see anything out there on the market that's worth all this hassle and hubbub.  I've preordered the Ouya and am hoping that they do something interesting with that.  The fact that it's so indie friendly and cheap makes me confident that I made the right purchase.

This article has trailed on a bit so I'll write a follow up to this in the coming days.  I need to investigate this whole Xbox debacle anyway but from what I'm hearing the Xbox One's "bad" features are not nearly as bad as we thought, there may even be a way to turn them off but I'll go into that and Sony's funny jabs at the competition and break down their statements.  Like always thanks for the browse!

My plan might actually work.

After spending a day looking at so many maps of Ann Arbor that I feel like I already live there I can honestly day that I am about halfway prepared for my little excursion there in the coming days.  Why am I looking at maps of Ann Arbor you ask?  Well I'm looking to move there soon and it looks like I finally caught a lucky break.  Today I was called up for a job interview there at Briarwood Mall.  Very excited about that and I have been preparing for it all day since its such short notice.

At the start of the year I had planned to move there but couldn't find work or apartments in my price range.  Hopefully it all works out now and I can finally get some alone time to write all these great novels that I've been planning and maybe get to know a few local writers and artists.  Wish me luck!  I think I'll do some fun stuff while I'm there too and write about it.