Heart attack grill!

Hello folks! Howz everybody doing? I'm doing okay. I must say I really like the travel channel a lot. Why? Because its mainly travel and food! two of my passions! But that being said- some shows really gross me out. Like there was this show about places to pig out in America. One of the places was 'Heart Attack grill' in Chandler Arizona. This place was started by Jon Basso in 2005. He was inspired when he was writing a thesis about fitness training studios where he learnt about clients cheating on their diets. This restaurant was created with the intent of serving 'Nutritional pornography'- food so bad its shocking. Aptly described 'Taste worth dying for' he serves 8000 calorie burgers with 4 burger patties, cheese, onions, no lettuce, buns with lard on them, french fries fried in lard, whole sugar cola. He calls himself 'Dr Jon, chief surgeon', the waitresses are called nurses, folks over 300lbs are given free burgers and fries. Its like 'here you want this? take it! all the stuff you've been craving for! Most of the people in his restaurant were HUGE! the patrons are called patients, the menu is called prescription and people are actually given wrist bands just like in the hospital

Here's a sample of their menu...



Notice the absence of lettuce and veggies..
jeeeez!!!!!

I am nursing my first 'Pink Eye'. Boy its annoying! First I had a sore throat/cold, the next day I see mucous building up on both the ends of my eyes and hazing out. I wipe and its back!!! Golly! I don't wish pink eye on anyone! (except rapists and murderers!)
I listened to 'Walk the line' on radio one day and I liked it so much that I wanted to watch the movie. It was nice for a one time watch..but the song is lovely!
Yesterday was Freddie Mercury's 63rd B'day. I really dunno why I like him so so much but he gets me!
Seems like everyone is having a great time..which is great!
I'll end my post here. Enjoy remaining Sunday and Monday everyone!
Lots of love
Smitha

Early morning muffin fun

Hello my sweeties! how are you all doing? Gosh, I feel like I haven't written in a long while. But I've been working hard at somethings- finding me a job, learning new things, working out, meeting new people. I don't know what's happening to me from the past two days, but I get very tired and go to bed at 11 pm and wake up at 3-4am the next morning. Its slightly uncomfortable, I try to read something but the focus is never complete. So this time, I decided to have some kitchen fun. I made oat bran muffins! Boy they turned out to be good. I had this mix from Kroger where you just mix it with water and bake it. These were too plain for my tastes, I decided to jazz it up by adding grated carrots sunflower seeds, roasted almond pieces and raisins. You can really see the beta carotene on the muffin cups..feels good that you have some nutrition going in..They don't rise much though, but very yummy! I guess toasted coconut would also go well with these.



Crossection....



I found a picture that I'd lost and wanted to post...

Here's Inky sniffing flowers..is that cute or what? I must say I adore the cat. His actions are so utterly innocent and charming! He's outside and doesn't want to come in. Have to figure out a way to get him in..



I made fresh tomato soup with our garden tomatoes. Its sooooo good and soothing and comforting! I dice tomatoes in big chunks, cover it with water and boil it till its soft and the skin comes off easily and tomatoes are cooked well. Peel the skin and make a smooth tomato puree in a blender. I also added a roasted fine chopped onion while blending. Adjust the consistency according to preference and then boil it again. Since I have fresh basil, I added a couple of fresh fine chopped basil too. Season with salt, pepper and a dash of sugar and its done! For variation, you can also add some roasted garlic. You have to be careful while cooking the tomatoes because Jamie liked it so much and wanted to make it again. She took it off heat as soon as the peel started to come off and the resultant puree was very raw. So have to make sure that the its cooked through- otherwise, needless extra time cooking.

I've been reading this book called 'The Biology of Belief' by Bruce Lipton. Its quite interesting. He says we've been led to believe that genes control a large part of our lives, you know, the Central Dogma- DNA---> RNA----> protein. But according to him, its the environment which influences genes. Genes express according to the stimulus they recieve from the environment. I can understand that- just by studying the Krebs cycle how various enzymes are expressed according to the amount of substrate. So his case is we are influencing our own biology physiologically and biochemically by the way we think, eat and live. You know I always felt that intuitively. Apparently when he introduced his idea that environment influences genes, he met with a lot of opposition from the scientific community. I was kinda surprised.

Other than this, I've been volunteering in Ouliana Zizouzenkova's lab. I'm doing it because I want to learn some additional techniques like Western blots, cell differentiation, I don't like to be at home during the day and I think I like retinoids. Their metabolism is really interesting. BUT it can be very complex and I didn't understand everything that was discussed during lab meeting. But it was heartening to know that it is hard even for folks who are already in the lab like Rumana, Julie etc. Everybody has a folder on the computer and they have to show what they did over the week. Its intense! I don't know why I'm drawn to difficult things!
Speaking of Rumana, she made such a DELICIOUS caramel custard aka flan for the lab meeting. At the first bite, it was eye popping good!! She put some condensed milk and regular milk in the custard. I will get the recipe from her and let you guys know.
I got the movie 'Bridge on River Kwai' and never ended up seeing it coz the DVD is not that great. I really wanna watch 'Julie and Julia'. I love Julia Child- very interesting character. Today on PBS she was making desserts and a french chef- he's a regular on her show. I've always been curious about those stacks of thin pancakes with some gooey stuff in the middle. She made that. But boy! the amount of butter that went into the pancakes was atrocious! 2 sticks of butter!!!! The gooey stuff in the middle was strawberry jam and roasted almond powder. The whole stack was covered with chocolate sauce. Other than these there were a lot of flambe kinda desserts, you know where they flame the dish with some alcohol. Gosh I was drooling while watching the show and I can feel my mouth water as I'm typing this!!!

I'll end here. Gotta read a retinoid paper.

Ciao folks!

Attack of the tomatoes!

Hello everyone! How are you doing? I'm doing good. A tad tired though but good. The sun has been really hot and its getting to me. Today has been a fun day. I went for a workout at noon, I had a good workout with 10 minutes of elliptical, 30 minutes of treadmill and remaining time I did weights on machines for my quads, hamstrings, triceps, biceps and abs. So it was good. Later, I met up with a friend and we went to 'The corner Deli' in Clintonville. I'd heard about the salads being good and my friend really wanted a salad and soup as she had a head cold. We had a portobello wrap, a salad with sesame dressing and miso soup. It was delicious! Later in the evening, we had a block party. Josh and Dava- our neighbours organized this one- they invited all the neighbours to a potluck party- it was at 5:30 in the evening- so more sun! It was good fun. One of my neighbours has a 10 year old son named Rudy. He's so funny and active. So we played frisbee with him and basically its nice to know who are closeby..
Our tomatoes are really peaking these days. We have quite a lot of them..just have a look..


and these are not all of them..there are plenty on the vine too!
So for the party, we made salsa naturally! It was really good



The party lasted till 9:30 and boy was I sticky after all the loafing, playing frisbee, and sitting out in the shade yet hot outside...I took a nice bath after I got home..
I think post tomatoes, our garden will end for this summer. But, we've had loads of fun with it. We grew cucumbers, marconi peppers, lettuce, raddichio, tomatoes and now 'Baby watermelon'!Look at it..



It was really sweet..

There's another West Indian dish that I really like- its called patra. This is made with taro leaf rolled with spices and tamarind paste. I bought it from the Indian store and I really like it.



Its sweet and sour in flavor....
Midnite snack- blue corn chips and salsa. Phew, I'm really tired. I think I'll end here. Wish you guys a happy week!

Meteor shower fun!

Yoohoo people! How are you all doing? I'm feeling soo good, I'm in love with the world! I'm having my morning cuppa coffee and just reliving last night's fun in my head. Yesterday, yahoo said there were gonna be meteor showers early August 12th. Obviously, I wanted to see it. So Jamie and me made plans of watching it. She was of the opinion that if we are watching it- then we have to do a thorough job of it! She's from the countryside and knows what a dark sky looks like. She says, you can see a lot more stars in the country, than in the city because of less artificial light around. First we tried our backyard, at midnite. Jamie wasn't happy with the darkness- so off we went in search of closest country we could find. A brief consultation with a friend revealed that Plain City might be a good bet. Our destination was Cosgray Park. 315N, 270 W, 33, on 161. We packed our blankets and pillow and off we went in search of this park at around 1 am. Plain city has a lot of corn fields. Finally, after half an hour of looking, we found a dark safe spot off the road, spread our blankets and lay down under the darker sky, staring at it, looking intently for shooting stars. Romantic as this sounds- clear skies, moonlight, sky filled with stars, there is a tad pesky reality to it- bugs! Buzzing in your ears, over your eyes. Manageable though. We managed to see about 15 of them. I wanted to sleep the entire night under the sky, I was so excited with the idea, but when bugs started getting in our hair- the plan got aborted.

Ideally, this is what I would have loved to see...


Source: http://www.kokeytechnology.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/meteor-shower-photo.png

But what we saw was this..



I get excited about so many things, but I also realize that I am so ignorant about so many things...this event got me thinking- do I really know what are meteor showers? So I did a search and this is what I learnt..
Meteors are bits of rock and dust that plunge into the earth's atmosphere and produce a glowing trail when they excite gas particles. This is from a website. Personally, I think, the flash of light is also because of the friction the rock particles encounter when they enter earth's atmosphere. The Perseid meteors are bits of debris shed from the comet Swift Tuttle which takes 133 years to orbit the sun and last came close to the inner solar system in 1992. Its fragments hit the earth with a speed of 59km/second- causing most to disintegrate far above the earth at altitudes of 80-120km- around the edge of space at 100km. A typical meteor is the size of a pebble or grain, but creates a column of gas that is ten of kilometers long and hundreds of meter wide. Apparently, earth accumulates about 1000 to 10,000 tonnes of materials from meteorites each day. So my children- there's your science lesson for the day!
Yesterday Jamie and me went to the Indian store. We got samosas and Jilebis. Both are deep fried samosas are salty and jilebis are syrupy sweet. I love these things. More on these things post consumption.I gtg to school now to learn gel electrophoresis, work out and come home do job search, future search, ponder on how to make the most of this life...Have a great day!

Ohio State fair recap

Hi Guys! How are you doing? I'm doing great! I've been having so much fun. On Wednesday me and Nancy went to the Ohio State Fair. I loved it! Boy it was a beautiful day neither hot nor cold- just right. We went to the Natural reserves first saw all the butterflies and birds..the owls and bald eagles were really huge! I'd never thought that they'd be that big! I love animals because I think they are innocent, cute and funny..ummm..not all of them but quite a lot of them

Bald eagle...


Butterflies..


I wanted to pet animals because I'd never been to an agricultural fair before. I loved llamas, piglets, and other marsupials from down under



Then we went and checked out the other farm animals. Jamie had mentioned that horses had arrived when she'd gone but she didn't get to see them. So I was really looking forward to see the horses. But meanwhile I had my moment of public attention. We were eating lunch while watching physical comedy..and this guy needed volunteers...so he picks me and asks me to pretend it was a supermarket and I purchased some Kashi crackers and asks me how much it cost, then he wants me to confirm with the audience that we've never met before...and he pulls a barcode from under a trunk..I didn't think it was a cool trick though..but anyways



The second one was funny though. He was gonna do mind reading. So he goes to the audience and puts the mike on people's heads, guessing their thoughts. Two teenage boys- sports in ones head, I'm a little teapot song in the other kids head. Then he finds a couple and there's a squabble going on in their heads. He comes to our row..and I'm like Oh God! please let him not pick me..you know I'm shy...all the time on the stage, my knees were shaking...but he picks me! and places the mike on my head, there's some sweet music going on, then he places the mike on his head- there's a love song going on! It was funny....

But the most gorgeous thing that I saw for the first time in my life were the horses!! Breathtaking! They were show horses and huge! Well groomed, shiny coats, wearing horsesshoes. oooh!



We were really lucky because the horse show was about to start in 5 minutes and we were at the right place at the right time. We took our seats and out came the first set of horses....they were jaw dropping, breath suckingly gorgeous!! Their manes were nicely held together by what seemed like clips and they were covered in leather belts and buckles. They were walk, trot, change directions and reverse. Pure beauty! pure grace!



Later we went to see some arts and crafts. Some really beautiful artwork by the high schoolers. Finally, some food in this blog!

A carved watermelon!



Ain't it nice?

Another thing I saw.beef cattle.I've wondered what sort of cows ended up on tables..



Have you guys seen the original pink panther movies with Peter Sellers as the bumbling Chief inspector Clouseau? Me and Jamie had seen one recently and we saw a pink panther at the fair. I wanted a picture with it..



Here's our dear friend, the gorgeous Nancy!



Foodwise, I haven't made anything worth talking about. At the fair, Nancy had a pulled pork sandwich, I had a vegetable stromboli- this was filled with broccoli- pretty good! We had fresh fried donuts with powdered sugar...they were sooo good..Nancy mentioned in the end that all the food was American street food..why yes!it was!

All in all it was a fun day! How have you guys been having fun?

.

My mom is in US of A!

Yohoo people! how are you all doing? Its 10:30 right now. My mom was supposed to land at 10:00 pm. I'm so excited she's here! It's been 5 years since I last saw her. Excited as she is to see us- she's also apprehensive about how I'll see her. She's in her mid 60's and says she looks older now and not like I last saw her in person. I tell her that I've grown older too and she'd have to tell me how I have changed. She lives alone in Southern India in Mysore with my brother just a few blocks away from her. When I was a kid, my dad was the dominant personality and he pretty much took care of everything outside the house. My mom was a stay at home mom taking care of us. She didn't know much how to operate in the outside world. So to be like my dad was to be smarter, dynamic, energetic, funny and we did not want to be like our mom. But after dad died, I'm impressed with the way mom has taken care of things. He was heavy into the stock market with such complex dealings which was hard and very time consuming. Mom learnt all that she had to do to unlock our money without any help from us and did it. Talking to her on the phone every week I've got to know my mom. She is smart and funny too and not as naive as she appears sometimes. She does a great job of taking care of her health which is a huge comfort to us. All of us kids have always felt very protective towards her. My mom is gentle and has sensitivity. She introduced me to a lot of good literature, movies and music and I really appreciate that. I want to cook for her because other than accessory help I've never cooked major meals for her. I have a feeling she will like where I live because she loves nature. I want to show her the OSU campus, Columbus Metropolitan library, RPAC, Franklin park conservatory and other places depending on her inclination. Moms are moms- you get made at them, irritated at them, fight with them, but in the end they're there for you.
Events after the last blog post: I had a potluck at my house on Saturday with my African friends. This was really a bad day for me because the potluck got decided very fast and I wasn't ready for it. Originally I had planned for just 3 people, but it turned out to be 5 and I simply was not in the mood for it as it was the first day of my period and I was in huge pain. But I had committed to it so I pulled myself together and decided to give them a taste of South India. I made rasam, cooked beans and rice. Rasam is a sweet, sour and tangy pulses soup made of split pigeon peas. This is a pretty common lunch/dinner and its comfort food for South Indians. Since it was a potluck, somebody bought a pizza so people loaded up on that and did not have much of an apetite for my food and from what little they ate of what I'd made, I'm not sure if they liked it. I have noticed it though- most people outside India prefer North Indian food over South Indian food. South Indian food has less fat, more rice and vegetables, more coconut, different spices, breads made of different kinds of healthy grains whereas North Indian food is richer. People eat more wheat, meat, tomato onion ginger garlic based curries, more kidney beans, chick peas. Personally, I think my taste buds have become international. I can eat tasty vegetarian food and a little bit of chicken from any country. Rice is not a daily need for me anymore, nor is roti or our lentil soup for that matter. I was a little disappointed though because in my opinion everything was tasty and they did not seem to like it. Oh well!

Here's a picture of rasam courtesy pachakam.com



This is how split pigeon peas look like



Sunday, I spent my day sketching the creative genius Freddie Mercury! here it is



This was very hard for me before because I was never able to align the eyes and I got angry and gave up. But I had drawn one eye and still kept it open on my bedroom floor hoping someday I'd get around to it. Then this sunday, it ocurred to me that the eyeballs should be in alignment and slightly slanted coz his face is slightly tilted. So using a scale, I got an estimate of where the eyeball should be and then drew the eye around it. I'm not superpleased with it because eyes are still not perfectly aligned and Freddie has attitude in that picture which I haven't captured. His eyes are darker too. I need to get blacker pencils. But I'm happy with the nose, lips and chin. I posted it on my facebook in case anybody had any new input for me which I hadn't noticed. I'm glad I got at least this far with it. Maybe it will be good when I draw it a second time.

Sunday Nancy dropped by to pick up the books she'd left behind. I love Nancy. She's so interesting with a wide variety of interests. She had attended an 'Art of living' workshop. Since the organization was started by an Indian guy, she wanted to know what I thought of it. Personally, I'm not very comfortable with any organized groups. To me, each person has a different way of dealing with stress and anxiety and it has a lot to do with being able to handle ones emotions. For some its journaling, working out, talking to friends and for some the techniques taught by the organization might work too. I don't have anything against them as long as they don't push it down my throat. I gave Nancy an Indian dessert called Kheer which is rice pudding. It's so supereasy to make! I boiled milk (approx half gallon) threw in a handful of rice and sugar to taste and let it thicken on low heat. Keep stirring it every few minutes so that the milk doesn't burn. The milk did get burnt a bit but the burn added a nice caramelized flavor to it. So it was really good.
Nancy got us some crossiants from Whole Foods. They were so buttery and chewy! awesome! Today we made crossiant sandwiches.



We cut a crossiant in half, slathered mustard on one end, placed some spinach, sliced tomatoes, golden browned zucchini slices, cheddar cheese slices and on the other end of the crossiant we slathered basil flavored mayo. It was really good!

Tomorrow I'm going to the Ohio State Fair for the first time with Nancy. I'm guessing its gonna be a lot of animal petting and I'm really curious about the butter sculpture and the machine which gives my percent body fat and of course food!

So long folks and good nite, sweet dreams!

Love from Smita

Garden fresh

Hello people! Thank you for your words of encouragement. I really appreciate it. I just realized only thing I have in my hands is to try my best. I really have to learn to calm down and not worry so much. As Oscar Wilde said,'The secret to a good life is to never have an emotion that is unbecoming' and I intend to practise just that. Yes m'am!
Our garden is really giving us the fruits of our planting these days. There is a distinct pleasure in eating homegrown vegetables. Everything seems tastier. The other day we had a spinach salad with marconi peppers. These are long tapered sweet peppers. We didn't know about these until we planted them. They taste very good when they are green and are super sweet when they are red. We haven't waited till they turned red but green ones are really yummy!



Our tomato plants have been quite prolific, but the tomatoes are still green. One of my friends told me to pluck the really huge greeen ones and let them turn red inside the house by letting them absorb the sun by the window. Otherwise they bruise because of insects and animals on the plant. We experimented this with a couple of tomatoes and it indeed turned red! Jamie says she likes a tomato when its all red from the inside and it was. So today was a tomato rich dinner. Jamie made bruschetta and I made tomato basil pasta with linguini noodles. I think linguini is my favorite noodle.
We had brought nice thyme bread from the farmer's market. Slice em and toast em and when hot rub some garlic on it. The aroma is simply amazing! Then place fine chopped tomato and basil, parmesan cheese on top and melt the cheese. This is simple and quite tasty. I think my next topping for bruschetta would be red marconi peppers. I have a feeling that will taste great too.



My dish- pasta- it was okay because we were impatient for the sauce to be done. So the sauce was a bit raw tomatoey. I think I would want to cook it more. I put 3 tbsp of olive oil, 4 cloves of garlic, tomatoes- a can of crushed tomatoes and one large diced tomato and towards the end a handful of basil. We grew basil too this time. One of these days maybe we'll make a basil pesto. Pour over al dente linguini pasta and, some moz cheese and voila!



For quite sometime, Jamie had been craving zucchini bread. We decided to make some and got a humungous zucchini from the farmer's market. It was a good size for 2 dollars. We wanted to make it healthy because this bread was gonna be our breakfast. So to lower the fat content, we used homemade applesauce and instead of all purpose flour we mixed one cup of wheat flour with half a cup of flaxseed powder. It's quite easy to make-

1 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup flaxseed powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 egg
1/3 cup canola oil
1/3 cup unsweetened applesauce
2 tbsp plain non fat yoghurt
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup grated zucchini
1/3 cup fine chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 325 degrees farenheit. Mix the dry ingredients (flour, flaxseed, spices, baking soda and powder, cinnamon) and wet ingredients (applesauce, yoghurt, oil, egg, vanilla, sugar) separately. Mix both wet and dry ingredients and finally fold in the zucchini and walnuts. Bake for 50-60 minutes.

We made homemade applesauce. It was really really sweet- we didn't add any sugar
Peel and dice two apples (we used gala apples), cover it with water and cook covered. Remove when apples are soft. Mash.



Here's the finished product.



Quite moist and tasty. But I have to admit, I did not taste the zucchini flavor. Next time, I'll add more than a cup.

Jamie also wanted to make granola. She mixed 3 cups of rolled oats with half a cup of maple syrup, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, 1/4 tsp salt, 2 tbsp canola oil, and 1 cup nuts (peanuts and almonds). Mix and place in a preheated oven at 325 F and cook for 30-45 minutes. This was the base. After this was done, she divided it into 3 and first third with raisins, second with chocolate chips and third with both. Very nicely toasted oats and nuts. Mighty good it turned out to be!





I remember I told you about a garden burger from the farmers market. This had interesting ingredients like spelt berries, kale, balsamic vinegar, thyme, ginger, apples, carrots, garlic, onion, black beans oats, salt and pepper (writing this is like a memory test for me- how many ingredients can I remember? umm...I remember half and remaining I cheated). We had this with green beans and bread with sweet mustard salsa



Interesting cancer facts for the day: I met a cancer researcher at RPAC. He told me that within the digestive tract, previously like in 1930's-70's the predominant cancer used to be stomach cancer, but now it has shifted to colon cancer. I asked why? He said because the chemicals we are using these days in foods are different. I never noticed this trend, so it was interesting for me.
Then I'd read about how some cancer researchers believe that there will never be a cure for cancer. He said he was one of those folks and explained why. This is what I understand. At the most basic level, cancer is a disease when cells divide and multiply but do not die. For this to happen mutations need to accumulate (~15-20). For instance, take apoptosis, there are multiple gene products in the pathway of apoptosis. Mutation in one or more than one gene can impair the process and the cell does not die. For two people with the same cancer, the mutations can be in totally different genes. So, in majority of cases, no two people have the same cancer. A question occurred to me as I was typing this, can apoptosis be impaired and oncogenes be activated at the same time? I guess that will be a really rapid spread of cancer. I hope I am clear in my explantion. I really try hard to have clarity in my explanations. Feel free to ask any questions and I can bug this guy.
Researchers/professors I have noticed are very precise and accurate in their conversation. I like this. This guy is a freak though. He has run 20 marathons, broken his knee ligaments thrice, ankle ligament once and got them repaired and still keeps running. He said I should run outside too. I think I have a block against running on a hard surface like roads bacause the impact from it is hard. He said one of his favorite surfaces was snow. I said aha! he is one of the persons whom one sees running in winter and thinks 'what a jerk!'Golly! the things that pop out of my mouth!
I'll end here. Have a great day!