Spinach Pakora

With less preparation time, it's a simple snack to munch on along with your piping hot tea on a chilly day.  

Ingredients:

Gram Flour/Chickpea flour - 1.5 cup
Spinach (nicely chopped) - 2 cup

Rice flour - 2 tsp
Red chilli powder -  a pinch
Green Chillies - 1 (finely chopped)
Ginger garlic paste - 1/2 tsp
Salt - 1/2 tsp 


Preparation time: 15 minutes

Procedure:
1.  Mix all the ingredients together with little bit of water.  The batter you make should not be watery, but stiff and thick. 
2. Heat up oil in a deep frying pan.  Once it's heated up, take a little amount of batter and make fritters. 
3.  Let the fritters deep fry.  Once you see them turn brownish, them them off the pan.
4.  enjoy the hot spinach pakora with a sip of chai and get immersed in your favourite book.  
Note:  You can also add onion or a few mint leaves into the batter to add different taste and flavor.  

Molecular Man

These are the 30 metres tall molecular man structures built by an American artist Jonathan Borofsky.  This picture above is captured in Berlin, Germany.  There's also another similar structure in Iowa state, USA.   The sculpture has 3 humans leaning towards each other, with their body having numerous holes which represents molecules.  

Mr.Borofsky explains them -"the molecules of all human being coming together to create our existence".   

Click here to see how  they were constructing this structure.  

This structure sit on the River Spree, in Berlin.  It's a nice place particularly during the sunrise or sunset, when you can take lovely pictures of these molecular man. 

Jonathan has worked on many creative sculptures of human beings which are displayed in various cities in the world.  His creations look amazing and awe inspiring.  If you are interested, visit them at http://www.borofsky.com/

Hair dare and a short vacation...

I never had any hairdresser, coz I hardly needed them!  I never dared to go for any hair styling.  All I do is just go for a hair cut, which would be for 1 or 2 cms - that too once in 4-5 months- that's it!  But 2 days back, I dared to make a hair do.  I had my hair cut short- really short - to just till it touches the shoulder.  This is the first time ever in my life that I've cut it to this size.  Although I decided, I felt bad when the hairdresser's sharp knife chiseled through my hair.  My hair is long, but they are never thick as to Indian standards.  But still I loved my straight, silky long hair.  When I saw 3-4 inch hair deserted on the floor, I did felt bad for them. And I don't know what my mom will say when she see me like this!  


Today when I took shower (hair bath), I realised how easy they were.  For a shower that normally takes 30-40 minutes, today I completed them in few minutes. Glad here!
And now with a new look, I'm off on a short vacation for few days.  I've been waiting to take some time-off for myself - sans (work +blog + flickr + cooking + cleaning).


Hey, but that doesn't stop you from visiting my blog, because I've scheduled posts for next 5 days.  Do visit my blog in my absence, otherwise she will be feeling so isolated and left out!  
I will come back and catch up with my unread posts!  See you all soon!  

A story of a swan

There's a nice lake some time back I visited, and there's so much of swans,ducks and birds around.  That's when I started to admire a swan and just looked at it for about 20 minutes. And that's when I was animated by the way it turn its rubber-type neck! Heck!  Animal watching is so much fun...

posing !

And then she turned away from me!

  

  

And this is the best pose !

Wordless Wednesday - 5

Yeh Dil Maange More!

Yeh Dil Mange more..not the gifts, but love! Not just me, every soul on earth do yearn for love, a cuddle, a smile, little conversation, some attention, a lifetime camaraderie!

IS there anything beautiful/satisfying than sharing the love with the one who loves you so much? If you do think sharing love is THE MOST beautiful thing, then why do we have to wait for a year till this valentine's day to do that? Do we see auspicious time for sharing love?

Many of them (read media) have adulterated the meaning of Love and Valentine's Day. It's not just the day meant for 2 people (a couple who's in love or married). There can't be any discrimination made on this. It's a right to love and to be loved! It's for every single living thing - from animals to birds or insects, to people who live in the streets, to people who work hard to earn the bread, to the one who's been neglected in life, to the one's who've been asked to stay in old age home..I could just go on adding so many! But the point is to share and give love! So give them all the love generously, endlessly!

The world should never be in deficit of love! If that happens, that's the end of world! Long live love!!!

Happy Valentine's Day to you all!!

A walk to remember!

Dear S, 
I promise to you
when we grow old and
reminisce about our days of togetherness
the journey we take through 
our memory lane will be 
the best walk to remember!   


Much love,
A

L-O-V-E

Love...in simple...makes life worthwhile!  

Portrait speaks

Another (boring) Saturday browsing through hard-disk photos!  I would soon be able to publish a future international best seller titled "100 things to do when husbands work on a weekend". I'm the queen of sarcasm today!


Came across a beautiful street painter's photo and realised how many such street painters I've seen in my European travel.  The answer is plenty!  
In a continent that always had great artists and painters in abundance, it is not unusual.  I've enjoyed the paintings of these street painters as much as I adored the Vincent Van Gogh or Picasso or anyone!  
Albeit having such a great talent, the street painter's life isn't a piece of cake.  They have to compete everyday with 100 other artists who sit on the same street and who is equally talented as him.  They totally rely on the tourists. And how much they earn or is that sufficient for their day-to-day living or what will they do during winter months are still questions for which I don't know the answer.  
But I must say, I've always stunned at the quickness and the precise with which these painters work.  In 10 minutes your beautiful caricature or pencil portrait gets done!    


In this picture the girl who poses looks more beautiful in the painting isn't it?  

Portrait painting and caricatures 

Here's one more live portrait painting captured!  

These are just a few of the 100's of pictures I took in each town/city or village!  I and S got one painted together in Paris.   It's a nice souvenir to carry with you along with the lovely memories you had in that particular city.  

Photography Gyan # 6 (Long Exposure)

I know this is the 100th time I am saying this, but can't stop myself without any inkling!  If you are using a slow shutter speed you definitely need to use a tripod. And the previous gyan's last picture is taken with slow shutter speed (1 sec).
Learning slow shutter speed (long exposure) is so much fun.  And learning them with not-so-great photos is even more fun.  To me, learning is at its best - only when we learn from our mistakes and not from what makes us proud.
Do you know how to make jelabi, sev etc. Why am I jumping from photography to food topic?  Confused??  See the below pictures.
Here's the Jelabi!  (Shutter speed used is 4 secs)

Here's some Sev! (1/2 sec)

And some Thenkuzhal (2 sec exposure)

 

How relishing are they!  I'm talking about these photos.  I don't know how many budding photographers have liked slow shutter speed Light trials and experimentation, but I simply loved them.  Isn't it so much fun to make all kinds of Indian snacks and sweets using your camera?


These are some of the myriad scrap photos that I had.  They are definitely not the best ones, but they are mine - still precious to me.  So I am using them here to explain slow shutter speed.
Setting low shutter speed means increasing the time.  Refer here.

If you are using point and shoot (Henceforth called as P&S), set the camera to night shot mode. It will automatically chooses a slow shutter speed depending on the light conditions.  When you press the shutter button, move around the camera in any desired direction and make your own Jelabi, jangri,thenkuzhal and murukku!
If you are using a SLR, set to S mode, increase the shutter speed to 4 or more sec and rotate, tilt or zigzag your camera, and you can see these light trials (perfect lines that are formed due to long exposure).

These can be done handheld.  But if you want these light trials to be perfectly lined, you need tripod.  Take a look at this picture here.  It's taken with 8 sec exposure.  Aren't these traffic light trials awesome.  I haven't tried my hands on them yet, because I don't get to travel a lot in the night time with a tripod.
A long exposure will increase the clarity of the picture if it is positioned in tripod.


Some examples of how a picture looks if they are handheld with long exposure.   This one's taken with just 1 sec exposure.  Keeping your camera standstill for 1 sec is very difficult - try it out and you will realize yourself!

And this one's taken with 1/2 sec exposure.  Taken during diwali in our very own Chennai. 

And this one below is even less - 1/3 sec. 

You now realize the importance of tripod?  

Now it totally puts me in shame to even publish above shown pictures in my so-called-beautiful-blog that has some nice pictures.  Even worse are to watermark them with my name! As if there are 1000s of people to steal and misuse these pictures!
Below is one of that million dollar picture I have (badly framed though), taken with a proper tripod stand and set at 8 sec exposure.  This is the image of Sri Parthasarathy temple Gopuram, as seen from my in-laws' terrace. 

So it's time for you to try out your favorite snack or sweet in your camera!


PS: I've just past 10th Feb by 26 minutes. I spent around 2 hours researching my archives to pick right pictures and realised just now that I'am already on 11th Feb. So I'm taking the liberty of post dating the post to 11.45pm on 10th Feb.