Kitchen gardening

Embroidered kurta work in progress.

I was embroidering this design on fabric out of which i am going to make a  kurta for my daughter.This embroidery consists of reverse chain, fly , lazy daisy ,bullion knot and bullion rose stitches and i also embellished  it with kundans and beads to enhance the design . I am  feeling too lazy to complete this one early but i have completed border.  The neck line embroidery is in progress. After completing the work, i will be stitching the kurta.   Until then goodbye . see you again.

Crocheted Vest

This crocheted vest was made by my mother for my daughter.. Beautiful pattern isnt'it? It was a herculean task to get it into shape and perfect fit.... And of-course i helped her al-throughout.. 

the individual flowers that were joined to make this vest -

Spinach - Liver curry

For this curry you will require the following ingredients:

1. Spinach         :         6-7 bundles
2. Tomatoes      :         3
3. Onion            :         3
4. Gram flour     :         4 tablespoons
5. Rice powder  :        3 tablespoons
6. Ginger-Garlic paste
7. Chilli powder
8. Turmeric powder
9. Garam Masala powder
10. Oil
11. Salt to taste


Firstly, cut the spinach leaves (not the stems, branches). Boil them and put into mixer but do not add water. You will get a paste. Now add salt, chilli powder, rice powder and gram flour to this paste. Next you have to steam this paste. After you do this, cut the obtained cake like thing (that you get after steaming the paste, I cudn't get any other proper word, so I used 'cake') in desired shapes (generally they are cut into liver-shaped).

In a pan, fry cut onion slices, tomato pieces, ginger-garlic paste, garam masala powder, chilli powder, turmeric powder and salt. After these have fried very well, add the cut spinach cake pieces. Next add a little water in order to get a gravy like consistency. And there you are! The curry's ready! The taste will remind you of any animal's liver that you might have eaten in one of your non-veg meals.

My Extended Vegetable Garden

In our backyard, we had banana plants. Two inflorescences started coming up few months back. They grew  

 really slow. But we waited and waited. And see what we got. So many bananas! I prepared a tasty mouth-watering curry and we all ate it up! Do you folks know that there's an island in Egypt called 'Banana Island"?

            

Spices form an indispensble part of Indian cooking, especially mustard seeds. so i grew them too. In contrast to the bananas, the mustard plants are quite quick growing. The plant is too gregarious.

 

The yellow flowers against the green leaves, stems and pods makes a good color combination, pleasant to the eyes.

Here, in India, especially the Punjabis (in the north) prepare a curry out of mustard leaves, popularly called 'Sarson (mustard) ka Saag'.

 Fields of mustard over large areas of land give the impression of a yellow mattress and its simply awesome to watch one.

DIY magazines stands

We usually try to sell magazines after use instead we can use them in  a different way. These stands present one way. You can see in the picture that i made one stand for my cute teddy bear and  the other one  for my Lord Ganesha.

To make the teddy bear stand. 

Get  the magazine you want to work with. First  open a page and  fold it like a triangle both sides as i have done in picture 1 and 2. You have to make sure that the lower edges of the triangles form a straight line so as to get a perfect shape.

picture 1

picture 2

You  have to fold the remaining  pages as you did  with the  first page. see  picture 3.

picture 3

After folding all the pages, remove the cover pages and staple the first and the last folded pages.

Finally the stand is ready. 

To make the stand on which i have placed Lord Ganesha.

You have to fold  all the pages half length wise.

Remove the cover pages like before and attach the first and the last pages.

That's all! You are done with the stand.

 

Awesome and still simple, isn't it? Why don't you go and make one right now?

My Grown-up Kitchen Garden

Hello Everyone. Its been a long time since I blogged. The last time I told you about a recycled garden adjacent to my kitchen. There had been some growth (obviously!) in my plants. Let me first tell you about the tomato plants. The first 3 pics here was on shot in the third week of Jan. You can see the plant has started flowering. bright yellow flowers and tiny tomatoes growing up... The next one with strawberry-sized tomatoes, light green and hard, was shot just 10 days later. Growing really fast, indeed.

With the potatoes, I had been a little unlucky. Actually I cudn't resist myself from uprooting the two potato plants. I was anxious to see really big ones but I was expecting too much, too early. So I ended up with these cute little ones. But its okay 'coz small things are beautiful. I decided not to cook these and but just enjoy their cuteness.

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Clusters of white flowers had appeared on the coriander plants. Few corianders had also appeared but I forget to click them.





I had sprinkled mustard seeds just like that, not with the motive of actually sowing them. All of them growing together have created a mess here, you see.

Ah! I forgot the beans! But, you see, the beans appear sort of malnourished. No, they aren't diseased or something like that. What happened was that in the pot in which I had grown beans, I unknowingly dropped a corn seed probably. Aand maize plants, you know, absorb a lot of water and hence, my beans were deprived of water. So, they showed slow and stunted growth.






We got shifted to this new place, where we are presently, about 2 months ago in Febraury. Something really disappointing happened. We were waiting anxiously for the tomatoes to get ripened. We were about to pluck these but probably they were not destined to be ours. One fine morning, I wake up and what I see is all my tomatoes are gone! and I looked around to check who the thief was. and this was most surprising. On the neem tree nearby there were some monkeys. If you have watched the program 'Monkey Thieves'