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Whatever happened to the world’s collective Harry Potter obsession? Forget collective, what happened to my obsession with Potter? From picking up Deathly Hallows at 7 in the morning (after having booked it two months earlier) to reading it while still on the bike (which Siddharth, as amused and stoic as ever, drove steadily), reading it standing bang in the middle of Shanti Sagar’s darshini hustle (like they show in bad Telugu movies, when the hero first spots the heroine, the rest of the crowd is fuzzy...I felt exactly like that on that July 21 morning and well, felt so fuzzy that while walking back to the bike from the restaurant, while still reading of course, I bumped into a stray stone lump and my glasses fell. My pretend nonchalance reached absurd peaks at that point as I picked it up and continued to read. And continued reading the entire day till I turned the last page late evening, while it rained heavily outside and my back almost broke with the effort. And my bewildered parents wondered and siddharth sat waiting, the am-amused-but-am-resigned-to-my-fate smirk intact. Somewhere in the middle, I remember weeping when Harry buries, without using magic, what’s-his-name..sheee I have even forgotten names!
Reading the ‘Tales of the Beedle the Bard’ recently did nothing to excite my Potter instincts again. If anything, I was getting slightly irritated with the typical Rowling digressions and long un-contextual sentences (basically where she assumes that everybody remembers every character and every event in all the seven books). I still remember so many enjoyable re-read sessions with a big fruit n nut in hand, sitting curved on our divan and watching TV sideways at the same time. And joyful night shifts spent answering Harry Potter quizzes, downloading the Harry Potter countdown clock, walking and walking in London keeping my eyes open for any little Potterish thing I can spot...
Today, I don’t even feel like looking at my collection, forget picking up the books for the next re-read. Is this just fatigue? Or horror, horror! had I plain succumbed to the publicity machine? Are muggles around the world feeling like me? Perhaps it was magic enough for a lifetime...my instincts are warning me to leave it unvisited. Thanks Wordsworth. When in doubt, turn to Yarrow Unvisited. Works for me every time.
But, but, I want my Potter addiction back. I have lost an escape route, perhaps for ever.

Two days of homage. Yesterday, I ate my last omelette perhaps at Coffee House and day before yesterday, I ate scrambled eggs on toast. Alone and happy as I like it.  I love eating alone. At home or in restaurants. Nothing really should come between you and food. Not love, not romance, not angst.  Over-the-table conversations and dinner romances are uh-uh duh and duh.Thanks Cheryl for telling me about the no-frills scrambled.  A next-door marvel that took me eight years to discover.

I loved this piece on cooking onions and patience by that cutie Nigel Slater. So here goes.


And not before time

There are plenty of short cuts worth taking in the kitchen (really, who wants to spend their life making croissants?), but more importantly there are the things we often skip or hurry or gloss over that it might be wiser not to. By which I mean the nuts and bolts of the cooking process that while tempting to rush through would, if we were to take a bit more time over them, make cooking and eating even more of a pleasure.

Cooking onions is a task worth taking your time over - 10 minutes just isn't long enough to get their crisp, watery flesh to break down into layers of honey-toned sweetness. Onions, whether small and whole or large and sliced, need a low temperature if they are not to burn and blacken, and plenty of stirring to prevent them colouring unevenly. The warmest of gold, evenly spread throughout, will take a good 25 minutes of an onion's time.

We like onion tarts in our house, both the thick, quivering quiche variety and those that are more like a pizza but without the cheese and tomato glop. Any onion that is to go inside a tart case needs cooking first, and cooking slowly, too. Then there are the dishes where you need the onion softened but not coloured. I'm thinking of that soup here, the one that looks creamy and tasteless, yet is, at first slurp, the very essence of gentle onion. I tend to cut a circular piece of greaseproof paper for this one, laying loosely over the top of the roughly chopped onions, so that they steam rather than brown. It works, too, if you keep a lid on and don't have the heat too high.

My favourite way to cut an onion is in to segments: so, in half from root to tip then each half into thick segments, like an orange. This way, they may take a long while to cook, but when they do finally soften you get thick nuggets of golden, melting onion flesh, somehow more satisfying than those skinny rings that get into a tangle and make your tart crumble to pieces as you slice.

It's the same with roast onions, baked onions, call them what you will. They take an age to soften right through to the core. But to try to undercut the required time is to end up with something quite unpleasant, if not inedible. You can get round this by boiling them for 20 minutes or so before draining them and returning the partially softened onions to the oven. If you toss them in a little sizzling butter first, they will cook all the quicker, but you must still have your patient hat on. Time alone will render a hard, winter onion as soft as butter and no amount of tinkering can really speed up the process.

For the record, an onion, thickly sliced or roughly chopped, with a little butter in a heavy pot, will take a good 30 minutes to soften over a low heat. I'm not sure even I give it that long, which is a shame, because the benefits are extraordinarily sweet and satisfying.

I always feel very comforted when I read this poem. How nice to feel nice about being a nobody and how snug it feels to know that Emily Dickinson thought so too, at least she wrote so too.
Though Ii wonder. Is it dreary to be somebody? Isn’t it drearier to be nobody? I don’t really want to deconstruct this poem but well, it does say somewhere there that being a somebody is being a nobody. When i wonder like this for more than two minutes, my crabby shell rears up, behind which it is so easy to hide. And back to being snug about being a nobody and gazing at somebodies.
And here’s the poem.

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us--don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Yesterday I realised I like maintenance-work related long power shutdowns. Prior knowledge of no noise and so all your inner noise kinda starts strumming. The afternoon light was blue-tinged because of our blue curtains. The laptop had not been charged and my phone was gasping. So all sources of music had gone phut. And hence I could let my voice out and my dreams travelled. One after the other, I sang songs — clearly and with what thehrav I could manage and the living room echoed back. All this while I was alone, surrounded by the blue, crying inside (for unbloggable reasons). And I was shredding radish. Ah. what therapy that is. The spell broke after I finished singing the Rajasthani maand. And if you have heard it ever when there’s blue inside and around you, especially if it has been rendered edgily, raspily, our common recall is enough to make us soulmates.