Musings of a runner: Alu-gobi-mutter

Intro

This blog as might be apparent from the title has to do with running, biking and basically other outdoor individualistic sports, sometimes extreme, such as rock climbing . But don't be surprised if you find articles on work, personal life, music and even philosophy, this blog is an exception in this aspect in the blogosphere of running blogs and I am trying to revamp the blog to make it more runner friendly. You might want to look at the sidebar titled 'categorised', which as is obvious, categorizes my posts into different areas of interest.
The other thing that might interest many people is a section on 'running videos' and 'general videos' on the side bar, which I keep updating now and then.
I plan to bring in more posts on running and biking, with some added colour, so as to make them 'complete'. That's about it for now.
As a post-note, I have run a half-marathon, but I am yet to attempt a marathon, which through some concerted effort and time should happen in the future, but that ofcourse is not the culmination of this blog, it would on the contrary be something to jumpstart this blog onto new vistas.

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Alu-gobi-mutter

Alu-gobi-mutter (potato-cauliflower(broccoli) and peas) is one of my favourite curries. I haven't really had it in a long time...probably years. I am right now transitioning from eating crappy food to 'decent' food. A week back my stomach took a lot of beating with all the noodles I was having for my main course and it refused to accept it any further. So I was forced to start cooking rice, curry, etc..something I have feared since I landed here. I mean I haven't tried cooking food ever before, all I had was my mom's recipies for it. But wonders of wonders, alu curry (dry) turned out just ok on the first day of cooking and alu-gobi (dry), yesterday, along with curd rice was just short of being lip-smacking. Now, all I need to complete the circle is either of rasam or sambar. The past 5 years, I have hardly hard any proper south indian meal, relying heavily on chappatis and dal. Why? Because the mess food sucked big time. And even the restaurants outside the campus, only a few of them knew how to make good sambar or rasam or a good meal for that matter.

What I am arriving at here is, the north indian food that's served at the restaurants in india are state-of-the-art in terms of making the dishes(naan, rumali roti, paneer makhani, etc) as they should be, but the same is not the case with the south indian meal. To make a good south indian meal, every single disaggregate component of the meal (rasam, curry(dry), rice, koot,koyambu, etc) should be up to the mark. Even if one of them is done badly(its easy to mess them up), the overall taste goes for a toss. If you want to have a good south indian meal, it invariably has to be a home made one. And if restaurants do prepare them well, there are very few of them(saravana bhavan, etc) and pretty costly(2-2.5 times) relative to most south indian restaurants. This only means that the south indian restaurants have pandered to attract more customers by underpricing the meals and consequently 'averaging out' the quality of the meals or maybe that just is the attitude adopted by these restaurants and no one's looked to change the same. Well, this is ofcourse just my opinion based on my experiences and should be taken in with a pinch of salt and pepper ;)