Chicken in White Wine Sauce

Key ingredients

Some of the 1.5 kg of chicken breast and legs in your freezer, leftover on account of enthusiastically over ordering when cooking Chicken Masala for the previous week’s dinner.

White wine – leftover from the bottle your friends got for the previous week’s dinner

Sour cream – substitute with yoghurt

Paprika – substitute with chilli flakes

Parsley – substitute with coriander leaves

Mushrooms – substitute with onions (all the time cursing your grocery store for not stocking mushrooms)

Method

Read your oven guide and familiarize yourself with the controls.

Grease baking pan with butter (substituted with ghee) and place defrosted chicken in it

Put pan in oven and turn it on.

Remove fruit basket, two hand towels, one notepad and one pen from top of oven when you realize oven is glowing red.

Prepare sauce by heating some ghee in your pan, frying the onions, adding curd, adding wine, adding parsley, upturning dish of paprika into sauce, picking out paprika pieces from sauce, giving up on the tiny pieces that have stuck to the other ingredients and finally adding a dash of honey to even out the taste.

Turn off oven. Turn chicken pieces. Add sauce. Turn on oven again.

Watch the oven lovingly as the chicken looks more and more cooked.

Turn off oven, serve chicken on bed of rice and eat.

Wince at slightly watery sauce but feel pleasantly mellow on account of the wine.

Thinking of B-School Days...

The morning began with a nostalgia-inducing newspaper article on going back to campus. Thoughts wandered back to the time when I was a gangly, wide-eyed new student on my B-School campus. While I cannot remember too much of the stuff I crammed into my head during the two years, there are some awesome memories that flash forward in my mind when I think of all good things on campus.

The buildings. Our campus was made of grey stone. Set amidst lots of trees and greenery, just looking at the massive edifice gave you a sense of purpose and history. When I saw the building for the first time during my group discussions and interview, suddenly I so desperately wanted to be a part of the group of people who wandered through these magnificent settings in their shorts and t-shirts, casually owning the place. When it was time to leave at the end of two years, I went around taking snaps of each of those buildings, feeling happy to have just been in such architecture.

The canteen. After eating school and college hostel stuff that qualified as food by a thin margin, food here seemed gloriously rich and tasty. I was shocked when I found out that a batchmate was forced to eat out everyday since he found the food here ‘unpalatable’. Sure the watery Maggie noodles served on Thursdays, may not have been entirely interesting. But boy, Desan, the ex-army canteen manager of ours, ensured that the chicken curries and rawa dosas were scrumptious.

The finance quizzes. No I am not a geek who gets her kicks out of drawing binomial trees. In the first term of corporate finance, we encountered our God-Corp Fin prof who was so funny that all the women had a crush on him and all the men wanted to be as effortlessly witty. His quizzes were full of puns, Bollywood stories and plenty of dry humour, all carefully built around some discounting problem to find IRR and NPV. Half my time used to go in chuckling at the questions, and the rest used to be spent in actually solving the problems. But not all fin quizzes are wired into my mind for pleasant reasons. I remember sitting in an open book, three-question Derivatives final that stretched for four hours. Everybody was watching everyone else watching everyone else. Eventually we all wrote something, submitted our papers and then spent years afterwards recounting our individual traumas.

The admin man. Every institute has a super-efficient admin guy who does work, unhindered by anything as namby-pamby as human emotions or personal biases. During exams, it was his job to ensure we began on time, got the correct quizzes and did not attempt anything as foolhardy as copying from each other. In one of the exams, my batchmate was solving a quiz by the tried and tasted method of tossing a coin. Admin man looked at everyone sternly and said ‘no exchanging of coins’. With a twinkle in his eye. I think that was the only time I saw him say something nearing a joke.

The campus shop. That supplied everything, including very very desi pizzas and tomato ketchup from red, plastic containers that must have had an entire ecosystem thriving on its edges.

Placements. The flashpoint to which the two years in campus are pretty much supposed to lead. Finding that your name is not on the list, whereas that of the batchmate ranked 20 places below is there. Hearing ‘November Rain’ blasting out from your friend’s room as she mulled over being rejected in yet another group discussion. Writing pages and pages of Statement of Purposes and polishing up your C.V. It was a stressed out, ugly time. In the course of a few hours, your entire two years on campus got translated into a brand name job and great starting pay. After all these years, most of us have realized perfect jobs do not translate to consulting or investment banking. Each of us has found happiness and/or success in different fields. If only, we had had the wisdom back then…

The B block. Whose 1st and 2nd floors were occupied by the girls. We thought we were too cool. We were sure we were funnier and cleverer than most people and when our juniors came, we passed on this message to them too. We made some of our best friends there and they continue to be so till day.

That feeling. That others gave you when you told them you were a student at a premier institution. People used to read about fancy starting pays on your campus and look at you with pride or envy (depending on whether they liked you or not). When your cousins told their friends where you were studying. When the world seemed to be full of possibilities, most of it involving being the CEO of Lehman Brothers/HLL someday. You were considered as one of the smartest and the best in the whole country.

I was too old by the time I came to B-School to give it the kind of absolute ‘perfection’ certificate that I gave my class twelve days. But it sure had its moments.

Timepass Poll

So the other day I was chatting with a friend about the James Blunt song, You are Beautiful.

(I have never been a fan of James Blunt. I always thought his voice sounded nasal and a bit shrill. Of late, though, I have started liking the You are Beautiful number. For those who have not heard the song, judge for yourself here. And for those who have not heard the song clearly, here are the lyrics. Finally, for those who would like a short synopsis of what this song is about – Male protagonist sees random gorgeous woman in a subway and meets her eye. And moans about how he will never see her again since they both are just strangers who shared a moment in a crowded sub)

I thought that if the random gorgeous woman had indeed turned around and given him her number, he would have just shrugged his shoulders and walked off. After all, men chasing women is a bit like a dog chasing a car. Once you reach the car, you are not entirely sure why you began the activity in the first place.

My friend (at this point I must add he is male) was shocked. He thought Blunt had indeed spotted his soulmate and when men meet their soulmates they just go for it.

And since we were so much at the opposite ends of the spectrum, I decided to conduct an absolutely unscientific poll with a sample of views collected from a cross section of my friends. So I (along with inputs from my friend) created this quick poll:

Do you think if the girl in the James Blunt song ‘You are beautiful’ actually turned around and gave her number, he would call her?

Option A - No way. He would lose interest now that the chase is over
Option B - Of course, today might be his lucky day

The poll was promptly mailed to about 30 friends.

A week later, this is what the responses look like

9 of the 12 women who responded voted for option A
5 of the 7 men who responded voted for option B

I am wondering now if all the women I know (myself included) are really this cynical…

I can only think of two possibilities are

Men are actually nice. Us women have become cynical
Men are deluded. They think they will call but won’t

My friend, on the other hand, thinks that women should be more liberal in giving out their numbers!

p.s. If anyone wants to see/participate in the poll, here are the links for men and women. It is the same question. But since I was too lazy to sign up for a proper free site that let me ask people multiple questions, just created one poll each for the demography I was looking at

Ladakh - Lamayaru, Alchi, Magnetic Hill..The End

Lamayaru is popularly called the Moonland. This is because of the fairly strange appearance of the rocks there. After three hours of travelling by the Indus, and eating fresh juicy apricots, we began to see the difference in the terrain. The rocks were yellowish and looked quite porous (see pic). Whether they resembled the surface of the moon, was a difficult thing to figure out given that none of us had had a chance to go there personally.

The monastery looked nice and again we wandered around blankly trying to make sense of the deities.

The sun got a little higher as we moved on to Alchi and reached just before lunchtime. Alchi’s monastery turned out to be a pleasant surprise. It is an excellent example of a Buddhist temple built under the Kashmiri influence. The people in various murals did not have slanting eyes but the full, popping-out Indian version. There was a small picture of the king and queen who had funded the construction. There was a lovely statue of the four Buddha Dhyanis, each facing a different direction and painted in a different colour. The murals, statues, architecture, all of them seemed considerably richer than that of any other monastery. We sat and just breathed in the air for a while.

Lunch involved eating well and watching a gang of five young, Punjabi couples who sat around a table and had nothing to say to each other. Eventually one of them played music from his mobile, filling up the silence at their table and breaking the harmony in others. We quickly got out of our stupor and pushed off to our next destination.

Magnetic Hill is a bit of a science project. For some strange reason, cars on that road can move uphill when the ignition is off. We reached the spot and watched with wonder as Stanzin switched off the engine, put the car on neutral and the car began to move uphill. There is a scientific explanation attached to this but I must say the whole uphill movement seemed pretty convincing.

The spots for the day had been done quite early and there was enough time to check out a local museum called Hall of Fame. It had been funded by the airforce and contained a lot of information on the Kargill war and the Siachen glacier. In addition, it also had a general overview of local culture, fauna and flora. Despite being a time filler for us, it turned out to be a very worthwhile visit. Especially for people like me who had clearly skipped out on a lot of history. Catching up on how India began to fight the world’s highest battle at Siachen was in equal parts fascinating and depressing.

Our last day had zoomed by and in no time we were having one last Ladakh meal at Pumpernickel. The next morning we would all be off to our respective homes. Most of which involved landing bang in the midst of civilisation, noise and pollution.

And would be left with memories of random things. Like the day Sandeep emerged into the bright sunlight from his tent in Tso Moriri to walk towards the washrooms. And announced to the world ‘Gosh, I never thought I would go to the loo someday with my sun glasses’

As usual, we had laughed ourselves silly. And would probably continue to do so for a few days to come.

Ladakh - Hundar to Leh

Another early start for the day. We woke up, packed, drank our tea and paced around waiting for Stanzin to show up. Meanwhile, the guruji of the camp was awake. What is it about foreigners, especially women, who can get conned by any Indian guy in traditional clothes and with longish, graying hair? The previous evening, at dinner, we had noticed him sitting at a table with three wide-eyed women. I overhead some bits of the conversation. The stressed out Handyman had already begun to draw up his schedule for the morning. He checked with the guruji and the foreigners what time they would like their tea to be served. Guruji had assumed a wise smile and intoned ‘What do we know what time we would like the tea’. In a voice reserved to say things like ‘What time do we know when death approaches’. Surely, morning tea requires a little less pomp and more planning.

Waving bye to Nubra felt a little sad. I had really enjoyed everything – the walk, the monastery, the stay and the overall relaxed pace of that segment. The journey back did not take too long. Khardung La was a brief halt. Everyone tried walking up to a small temple there and felt completely out of breath.

We were well in time for lunch at Pumpernickel. Contrary to what we had been told earlier, Pumpernickel had existed and we had found out serendipitously. There was no electricity as we sat in the dim room, lit by small bulbs run on a generator. The menu, however, had me salivating. Between us, we ordered enough continental and Middle Eastern food to qualify as foreigners. Silence followed, as we dug into the Schnitzels and Shakshukas.

Sandeep had decided to watch a documentary on Ladakh at the Women’s Alliance Centre. I decided to go along. It turned out to be a dated one, made in the early 90s, urging Ladakhis to be mindful of losing their precious culture to the western influence. A viewpoint, that I have always found slightly unrealistic and biased. How do you convince a poor man wanting to move beyond butter tea that aspiring for a Mars bar will prove to be worthless in the long run?

We walked back to our guesthouse, debating on this topic and taking in the view in those parts of town. Evening brought more walking, as we explored some more streets. Dinner was to be at Pumpernickel again, but in a spirit of inquiry, I convinced everyone to try out the much recommended Ibex restaurant. A disasterous choice as it turned out. Oh well, one lives and learns.