Security...

Security is a double edged sword!

Take for example the full body scanners that are going to be at most major airports in the near future. You pretty much get an x-ray picture of everyone's nakedness (be it man, woman or child) and the airport security people get to watch you and your dear ones naked on the x-ray machine.

1. This is a violation of privacy in the name of security

2. Reminds you of those Holocaust movies where the Jews get paraded naked past a checkpost and they have that bleak resigned look on their faces and their biggest concern is not the nudity but the fear of losing their life. (except the irony here is you are being stripped bare on a machine by the supposed good guys!)

3. Apparently this doesn't work as intended.

4. These machines are made by companies which have a connection to the officials who is responsible for putting these machines in the airports. . . (this is like politicians who are on the boards of weapons manufacturers pushing for the Iraq war). Looks like somethings never change)

Someone posts an inappropriate comment and we think of turning on comment moderation. Then we realize the hazzle it becomes and turn it off. (Wish google would publish stats of how many people turned off comment moderation after turning it on for the first time).

People start violating my openness in facebook and I stop using facebook! There are only so many things where you can go into a shell.. you choose your options based on the bandwidth you have to handle all these security vs. freedom compromises!

Have pretty much stopped using facebook, twitter etc. and this blog is the only online thing I do. So imagine my surprise when I was presented with this security thing to read...

and I failed!

On a sidebar note, why should all these different sites have different logins, userids, passwords etc.

The way the world is going, the best thing would be to ask for the dad and mom to request a userid for the kid the day it is born, along with the birth certificate, social security number etc.

That way the kids birth certificate will arrive in 2 days.

The Social Security number in a week

Passport in 6 weeks

UUID (Universal User ID- I am patenting this concept if it hasn't been patented already) will arrive same day with premade google, yahoo, hotmail, twitter, facebook, myspace, etc. etc. accounts...

The kid will be able to use this ID on his/her 10th birthday?!

In any case, back to the topic of security, I think if we take the first family, and the top 10 Homeland security officials and post their full body scan pictures on the internet, this thing will go away real soon!

What do you think?

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Theratti Paal (Milk Sweet) - தெரட்டி பால் Do it Yourself

Theratti paal, is very popular as a Deepavali milk sweet and is usually made on a large open vessel (Kadai style) where large quantities of milk are slowly stirred and condensed while simultenously adding sugar and ghee (clarified butter) to make a very small volume of this delicacy!

The recipe shown in this videoblog is a quick cheat way that my pittsburg Manni (SIL) taught me some 15 years ago. If I remember right, the original recipe she refined was from Mallika Badrinath who in my opinion should be given an honorary doctorate or Chef title by graduate students trying to satisfy the longing of their taste buds.

Very simple:

- get sweetened condensed milk (Nestle preferred over local brand names) one 14 oz can

- put in large glass bowl (get pyrex or corning lead free microwaveable glass). Do not do this in plastic. Have seen reports of high fat containing substances microwaved in plastic containers forming carcinogenic dioxins.

- soak some saffron in little water

- add 15-20 drops of lemon juice into condensed milk, stir thoroughly and microwave for 5 minutes under constant supervision. If the whole thing overflows, stir and put back in microwave

- then add 3-4 spoons of Ghee, add saffron, a few sprinkles of powdered cardamom for flavoring, stir vigorously , put back in microwave for 2-3 minutes and make sure you don't burn it.

Hope you enjoy making this sweet.

ps. The microwave time will be ~6-7 minutes total if you use only one can. For two cans it might be 11-12 minutes total.

pps. you have to try this a few times to figure out the final total time for a given microwave power and volume of condensed milk. The condensed milk is $2.19 a can. So you can do a few tries with single cans before graduating to volume production!

Just found that they spell it "thirattu paal" (we call it theratti paal!! go figure..)
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Time...the irony

When we see comments like "you have way too much time on your hands" after watching the mysore pak or vadam videos, cannot help but smile.

The whole idea behind doing the videos was to show folks that

a. you do not need a lot of time to make it
b. it is not that difficult to make these things

That is why the time was mentioned in the videos. The mysore pak was done in 1 hour and 4 mins (and if the ghee was premade it could be done in 50 mins.) The time it takes for you to drive around to an Indian Restaurant and find mysore pak(you can find Soan Papdi and Haldiram stuff here in stores but not MysorePak), stay in line, pay, come back home is almost an hour plus.

It will also cost you 1$ per piece + gas for that while it costs you 10 cents to make it at home!

The vadam making started at 12:42 and we were done by 1:08, in under 30 minutes! We got 72 pieces for ~$1.5 total! Your other options are to wait for closest friend or relative to get you some from India or buy 20 pieces for $3.99 from the local Indian store.

It would have taken the same time to make 4 times that quantity of the gel and another 10 minutes to spread it out!

Was telling Sangeetha earlier today "Has cooking ones own specialty items become that unfashionable that only people with time to waste or too much time on their hands can do it?"

Is this a phenomena with the younger generation? Eating fast food or buying your food is somehow supposed to be a "time saver" and therefore a cheaper option?

Just think about it!

We cook every night and we take our lunch with us to work. (San always packs my lunch.. also everyday I do call her at lunchtime to have a chat, if not about the food, at least we have a chat). We cook for the kids anyways, so it is a no brainer to spend the 10 minutes to pack lunch. One can always argue that if you get paid enough, the cost of that 10 minutes is more at an hourly rate and therefore buying food is cheaper.

So many recipes are going to be lost. It has been ages since I even smelled some of those divine smells that would come from the kumuti aduppus (charcoal stoves) when my grandma and her aunt would team up to make sweets for the family on a whim!

Just wish I could replay those smells like we replay youtube videos! It doesn't have to be lost. We don't have to rely on MSG and complicated carbonates and coloring agents to add pep to the food we eat.

On a similar note, when we pulled potatoes grown in our backyard and made a simple curry, the smell and taste were orders of magnitude better. It was like being transported to my 10 year old phase, and I was sitting on the floor and my mom was sliding more curry on to my plate from the "ilupa chatti"!

The potatoes looked ugly and gnarled, but the taste was out of this world. The picture perfect potatoes from the local grocery store are practically bland compared to this. We as a consumer would rather have our food look good than taste good.

A lot of the younger generation prefers to buy food than make food and the convenient excuse becomes "you have way too much time on your hands if you are cooking!"

By the way, bloging and videoblogs are easy, especially if you can type 70+ words a minute and you have been doing this a lot.

We all have 168 hours a week. If you spend 42 hours sleeping, 14 hours driving to and from work and running errands over weekend, that leaves you with 112 hours.

If you work 11 hours a day, 5 days a week and another 10 hours over the weekend that takes out 65 hours and you have 47 hours. You spend ~2.5 hours a weekday with your kids and 12 hours with them over the weekend and that is another 17 hours and you still have 30 hours left for eating breakfast, dinner, watching movies, doing dishes, grocery shopping, making that once a week cooking video,etc. no?

Jr., after watching the "Making of Vadaam" video, decided to make a cooking video earlier today (aka irritating your mother video). I did not know about this till San told me. It was hilarious to hear her commentary and the videography.

She adapts, refines, starts this one at the beginning of the Dosai making cycle..Watching this brings happy tears! My little girl is already an expert videographer and cooking aficionado!

You see how a 7 year old can do this by observation (between watching food network and her dad). Next thing you know she will be collecting advertisement money.

Kids today!

ps. You have to have the audio on high to really hear her comments.

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