Adeniums

Today, I woke up at 5:30 am to the sound of rain outside. Not just a drizzle, but an earnest downpour. At first, lying all disoriented and sleep heavy in bed, I thought that it would be okay to skip plant evacuation. Especially for those darn adeniums that always need to be removed from rain and placed under some kind of shelter. But then, mom’s sad little face floated up in front of me. She loves her adeniums. Sometimes all I hear from her is, “Adeniums, adeniums, adeniums.”

She would be crushed if the water got to them. So I dragged myself out of bed before sunrise on a working day for a bunch of spoilt ass plants.

“Where are you going?” my sister’s hoarse voice floated out from the grey-blackness next to me. She was staying with us for a few days so we were bunking together.

“Going to save the plants,” I replied, trying to figure my way out in the dark.

“Need any help?” she mumbled.

I told her to sleep and made my way upto the roof. Despite taking the umbrella, it didn’t help. Because the adenium pots were too heavy to hold with one hand, so in the end I had to keep the umbrella aside and get wet while saving them. Mission completed, I was closing the roof door when Mom came up the stairs exclaiming in surprise.

“I’d decided to let them be in the rain today!” she said making a cute face and then hugging and kissing me. “You’re my angel.”

I hadn’t thought about it that way. But it felt really good being called an angel.

“I didn’t want you to be sad about your adeniums,” I said, and had more love showered on me. Even sleep sozzled I was pleased to be adored thus at 5:30 am.

Back in the room my sister too said nice things to me though she was half asleep. Must admit, if I had to wake up at 5:30 am and run out in the rain for plants, it was great to be appreciated for it even if that wasn’t the intent with which I did it all.

Cocoa Bomb

Recently I came across a famous YouTube channel called Nino’s Home. Cooking and I are like oil and water, we do not mix. See what I did there? Point being I have never liked anything related to cooking except MasterChef Australia Season 1. And that too just to see Matt Preston eat. It was an interesting time but let’s not talk about it too much.

I was scrolling through my YouTube feed when I first came across this ASMR cooking channel. It was a simple recipe to cook rice with some vegetables and sausages. The captions were funny, Nino definitely believed in roasting his audience. It was a bonus point that his chubby cat, whom he called ‘fat catto’, made appearances in the video as well, playing the role of ‘I couldn’t care less’. But it wasn’t until the algorithm served me (see what I did there?) his second video to make chocolate truffles with two ingredients that I hit subscribe. This person also appeared with a teddy bear cardboard cutout as a mask on his face. He was like the Marshmello of cooking, pun intended and not as well.

So today I decided to try out the two ingredient recipe to make cute little chocolate truffles. I’d ordered the cocoa powder and the condensed milk, set up all the utensils and bowls I needed, after a bit of a hunt got the sifter for the cocoa powder. It was time to start.

The time I’d chosen to don on the Chef’s hat was after lunch when Mom would be gone for her afternoon siesta. That way I wouldn’t get to hear “What are you doing?”s and “You’re wasting all the cocoa powder”s and “Oh God, please leave, let me do it.”s. Like the last time I’d tried to bake a chocolate cake and it had turned out as flat as the punchline of a Michael Scott joke (incidentally I’ve been re-watching The Office).

Everything was going great. I’d warmed the condensed milk until it bubbled a little and then poured it into the glass bowl. The next step was to sift the cocoa powder through the sifter and into the condensed milk in three gos.

“Piece of chocolate,” I muttered to myself with a grin, placing the cocoa powder on the sifter and aligning it on the bowl. This is where things started to go wrong.

First, the size of the sifter was the same as the circumference of the bowl, in the video the sifter was smaller than the mouth of the bowl so direct sifting was working well for Nino. Second, the sifter was weird. It was sifting so little at a time that shake as I might, only a small amount of cocoa powder was going through. And out of the small amount going through, fifty percent was falling outside the bowl.

Turns out I didn’t need mom in the kitchen telling me I’d fucked up. Her voice was lodged in my head anyway.

I shook the sifter. Panicked that it wasn’t sifting fast enough, I literally pressed the cocoa powder through the net. Then panicked because the cocoa powder fell outside of the bowl, I vaguely waved the sifter onto the other side of the kitchen, toying with the half-baked (heehee) notion of using a different sifter but then thought against it. Of course that ensured that the cocoa powder left a little trail around the kitchen in case anyone got lost in that space. All in all the kitchen looked like a cocoa bomb had exploded in it.

In the mean time, I stirred whatever cocoa powder had fallen into the bowl of condensed milk with a spatula and finally it began to get thicker and darker (hmm). I wondered if I ought to make it denser but honestly, while watching the video I’d felt that Nino had made the concoction too hard and maybe it’d be okay to keep it softer and let the fridge firm it up just a bit. Also I really didn’t want to deal with cocoa powder and that wretched sifter anymore. So I deemed it soft enough for me. I don’t know why this entire paragraph felt like the opposite of a ‘that’s what she said’ joke.

I placed the mixture into a container lined with cellophane, evened it out as best as I could with the spatula, wrapped it up in the same cellophane, and placed it into the refrigerator to set. However, I should’ve made it thicker. Nino knew better. Because even after two hours it was sticking to the cellophane paper. I tried placing it in the freezer but no dice. Giving up, and enlisting mom’s help, we somehow managed to get the chocolate mass off the cellophane and onto the cocoa powder base we’d set up. How does one fuck up a two ingredient recipe? Mom had a tough time getting it off the cellophane because it was sticking to it. She placed the chocolate mass on the cocoa powder and proceeded to try and cut pieces out of it. Meanwhile I was trying my best to eat the chocolate off the cellophane. Only God can judge me.

The chocolates albeit soft, were delicious. I take that as a win. Plus, I will try it again with a better sifting device, thicker consistency and a winning attitude. I’m also proud of the cooking puns I’ve thrown into this post in case I didn’t make it clear.

First Day Of 2021

So, first day of the year. A lot of pressure to start it right. Except, it’s literally just another day in sub-divisions of time that we ourselves have created to assign meaning and value to the passing of it. But I did wonder what I ought to do on this day. My ankle is still off so I can’t work-out after the vacation. It’s too cold to lounge about anywhere except in the bed so essentially you’d find me somewhere in between the blankets and sweaters, if you dug hard enough.

It’s been a day of meh-ness. You know when you don’t really know what to do with yourself? Like hours slip away but not fast enough, although weirdly, before you know it, it’s night. The mind is in a gelatinous state and surfing on social media makes everything duller than it already is. Everybody is saying the same thing and despite knowing that you’re saying the same thing too, you say it.

It feels purposeless which is funny to think of right now, especially since we recently saw the movie ‘Soul’. A lovely flip on the whole ‘what is your purpose in life?’ and what if you don’t have one? I feel like it could’ve been made clearer, but perhaps it is how it was meant to be.

This blog entry feels like when you force a conversation, so am going to quit at these three paragraphs for my own sake, and yours. But I do hope all of you know that 2021 is going to be better for us by default as we’re finding ways to live with the situation 2020 brought to us. Although like my sister said, the years have nothing to do with it, we did it all. Hope we make a new normal out of it and own it.