Melon Baller Magic!

What do you get when you start with some seedless watermelon and a melon baller.

Voila !!!





All I can say is YUM!!!!
Cheers to some easy, healthy deliciousness!!!!

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Choclate Chip Cookies!!!

My kids love CCC (Chocolate Chip Cookies). I guess most kids do. There is always a request for CCC at snack time.

So I usually end up buying the cooking dough and baking them. There are so many choices when it comes to cookie dough these days. They really made it easy to bake cookies with these readily available cookie doughs.

Once my kids tasted these semi homemade cookies, they do not seem to like the store bought ones anymore. The taste is not the same. I'm sure the cookies made from scratch are much more delicious. But for now, I'm happy with the semi homemade version. It saves me a ton of time.

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Happy Ugadi : 2010

Ugadi marks the first day of the Telugu New Year. This year it was on the 16th of March. Every year I try to at least make the ugadi pacchadi (chutney) which includes 5 different flavors. The 5 flavors include, sour, sweet, bitter, spicy and tangy. So we use raw mango for sour, Jaggery (bellam) for sweet, neem flowers for bitter, chili for spicy and tamarind for tangy. This year I managed to get all the ingredients except for the neem flowers, which I usually substitute with neem powder which is easily available in Indian grocery stores. But not this year. This year they sold out all their neem powder, can you believe that?!! I know. So I made mine with four flavors, instead of five.

Anyways the reason I was told we make this special chutney was it represents the different situations we face in real life. Like sweet is supposed to represent happiness, bitter for sadness, spicy for anger. I do not remember what sour and tangy represented. I shall try to find out.

So here's to another fabulous and fun year. Cheers!!!

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The Sun, The Rain And The ....

Today we have seen the weather go from cloudy to sunny to rainy. It was changing all throughout the day. Very unpredictable. But with the unpredictability came a beautiful surprise at the end of the day.See for yourself.

I have been trying to capture the rain for a while on my camera, but didn't know how. Today I finally got the idea, when I saw the rain drops on my french door. It was a perfect shot.

It was a beautiful rainbow. My 2 year was super excited when he saw it. I don't know what it is about the rainbows, but it brings some kind of joy when you spot one, at least for me!! I'm so glad I was able to capture it on my camera.

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Samosas

The other day I had some left over potato curry from lunch. I also happened to have one of those Roti Land roti packs. So I decided to make some samosas.

I took each of those roti land rotis and cut them in half. Then I stuffed it with a few spoonfuls of potato curry and made it into a samosa. I used a fork to seal the edges.

Then I deep fried them all in oil. I just served with the chutney on hand. Samosas seem to go well with ketchup too.

That was one quick and easy way for a home made samosa. Didn't break a sweat.

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Organize: Kitchen

I have been trying to organize my kitchen a little better. So I went looking for some drawer organizers. I finally found the Expandable Bamboo Gadget Tray at Crate and Barrel. It is made of bamboo, looks sleek and it is expandable. It fit my drawer perfectly. What more could I ask for. So I have finally organized my gadget drawer. Here take a look ....

I was told that spices last longer and stay fresher when stored in a refrigerator. I decided to store mine in a refrigerator too. I like the idea of using glass bottles instead of anything plastic for storage. So I ended up using the Starbucks coffee bottles and Classico pasta sauce bottles for storage. It was very easy to peel of the labels off the Starbucks bottles. I just washed all the bottles once in a dishwasher before filling them with my spices. I could fit 4 Classico bottles in the back and 5 Starbucks bottles in the front row perfectly. It looks neat and I didn't have to spend a Penny on these bottles.

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Spring Is In The Air

The colors of spring. Wow what a sight. It's brings so much joy to see the blossoms and bulbs and all the new life that springs from spring. Those beautiful sounds of birds chirping away. Nature at it's finest.

What's not to love about Spring, unless you are an allergy sufferer .......

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Gallery of Birds in Our Backyard

I love birds. So whenever I see any birds in my backyard I try to capture it on my camera. This month I have seen quite a few variety of birds. All the birds were beautiful, but my camera skills do no justice. I need to learn to take better pictures. Also I need to learn to identify the birds.

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Birds In Our Backyard : Videos

Here are some short videos of birds in my backyard. I only wish I could identify the species.

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Food 2009 : A Year End Recap

Just making a simple gallery of all the different food that I made in the year 2009 which was kind of little different from the usual and for which I have pictures taken. A year end recap. Bon Appetit.

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Christmas Wth A Change

This year there are two things that are different on our Christmas tree. One is the kind of lights that we used and the other is the ornaments.

This year we used the new LED lights which we purchased from Costco. These lights have quite a few advantages over the conventional lights. For one they use much less power, which is great. Secondly they are a parallel circuit and not a series circuit. That makes a big difference, because if one of the lights is broken, the rest still work, which is awesome. Also they are far more vibrant.




For ornaments this year we exclusively used shatterproof ones. I got mine from Target. I got the Blue/Silver combination and I absolutely loved the colors. The reason we wanted shatterproof ones was because we have a 2 year old toddler who is running around. This option made it a very safe choice.


Change is GOOD!!!

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Too Cool For California

It has been really cold for the past 2 days. In fact I have some pictures to prove it. The temperature has been in the 40's. Here you can see the local temperature on my yahoo weather widget for Thursday, December 10th.



The water in the birdbath turned into ice overnight. So when I rinsed it off, the ice shattered and the pieces fell down. The white pieces next to the birdbath are all pieces of ice.

There was snow on the hill tops surrounding our home. Snow happens very rarely.

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Home Made Pizza

The other day I bought some pizza dough from Trader Joe's. I wanted to make a pizza.

I used some mozzarella cheese, Roma tomatoes, basil, Italian seasoning and a drizzle of olive oil for topping. Here's the pizza before I baked it.



I just followed the baking directions on the pizza dough package. Here it is after baking.

Looks delicious and tasted even better!! Yum!!!

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Dancing Birds

This morning I was delighted to see 2 birds kind of dancing on the fence in our backyard. They were just moving towards and away from each other in some kind of symphony. So I decided to capture it on my digital camera and here it is ....

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What .... Green Thumb?

We have been living in this house for past 11 years. But when you look at our backyard it seems as though we just moved in. It hardly has any plants. All thanks to my "not so green thumb".

We had this orange tree for so many years now. We only got one edible orange out of it. If we look over our fence our neighbors seem to be growing fruit in abundance. We also planted a lime tree at the same time as orange tree and we are finally seeing some limes. This morning my daughter was so excited to pick out a fully ripened lime. I took a picture, since in our house the home grown lime is kind of like a celebrity.

Then there is this bird of paradise plant. Apparently there are different kinds in that too. When we planted it we thought we got the usual "orange and purple" variety, but no..... ours is a super special "white" bird of paradise. It hardly ever blooms. So far it bloomed only once, a couple of years ago.

Then there are these 2 hibiscus plants (yellow and orange flowers) which I purchased from my local nursery and planted them. One with orange flowers died and the yellow flowering one barely grew in so many years and gives very few flowers. The only plants that keep coming back each year without fail are the bulbs which bloom in spring. We had these for past 6 years and each year from March to April we see them flowering.

My mom on the other hand is a super green thumb. She once got a small branch of a white hibiscus plant (without a single root) from her friend and planted it in our backyard and it grew so well and all through the year it blooms and gives beautiful flowers. How do you explain that. She also planted a small sapling of an avocado plant last year and it grew into this giant tree. You should see it to believe it.

The only flowering plants I'm successful at growing are the "wild flowers". Thank God for the wild flowers, we had some color in our garden, even if it was temporary.

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