Jul 6, 2012

One more birthday and some culinary explorations

Anikkuttan turned 4 this week...



Yep, that's the birthday boy. He's into funny faces now when I ask him to pose for the camera. This year has been pretty momentous for him. He was toilet-trained (yep, I finally bit the bullet and was rewarded for my wait, he picked it up within a week!). Then he started school and fell ill with all sorts of infections - and had to quit school after going for a month at the beginning of 2012. Now he's started LKG and is pretty happy and healthy, and has started a very HUGE part of schooling.... HOMEWORK!!!!




These days he has taken up a serious hobby - cooking. Last week he tried a variation on our favorite breakfast food - the humble dosa. He felt it needed a little zing (must be watching Masterchef Australia), so added some fresh used tea leaves to the batter that I had left for a moment on the kitchen counter. He did not forget to give it a good stir so that the tea leaves were very evenly distributed in the batter and his momma didn't have a prayer at scooping it out.

I vainly hoped that the tea leaves would settle at the bottom overnight, but learned some important physics lessons the next morning when the tea leaves remained suspended in their dispersed state at even intervals in the interstitial spaces of  the dosa matrix  (yeah, totally made that up!). I made the dosas. Apart from the fact that our dosas turned out slightly yellower than usual, they tasted fine and the tea leaves were pretty unobtrusive, I must say!

This week, he tried a new experiment by trying to put the string back into the stringed and chopped beans I had left for a moment (you would think I had learned my lesson by now!?!). Not one to do things halfheartedly, he emptied all the strings into the finely chopped beans and tried the tested and true method of stirring things up. But this time it didn't work and for all his pains he received a pretty prolonged tweak of the ear from his exasperated mother who had to pick out the strings for the next ten minutes.

Ani is also at that precious age at which kids have enough verbal ability to give clear accounts of what is happening in their imaginative world and I have droll comments to share almost daily with DH when he gets back from office. Last week, we watched from our porch as a crew of workers hurried about pouring concrete into the basement for a new house.

After a day's frenzied activity, they left the concrete to set and all that was left at ground level were some bunches of metal bars sticking up. Two or three days passed and we realized that our little guy had been watching the place when he said, "Those uncles don't know how to build a house, do they? They tried hard one day and have given up. I think they know only how to dig wells."  I did try to explain, but then left the workers prove themselves capable through their work....

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