Mmm..pesto!

I haven't yet touched upon an mostly-all-absorbing passion - fooood! I'm reeally interested in reading about various cuisines and eating 'em. Cooking..well, occasionally, set to wine and music. The daily grind of cooking isn't for us.
Let's talk about pesto. Aromatic,yummy, cheesy, WONDERFUL pesto. And we make the best pesto ever, right here at home. Really. Whenever we try a new restaurant, we often order their pesto. And then look at each other. No way. Ours is miles better.
The origin of this recipe is a book called 'Pasta, pasta, pasta'(!), edited by Jane Donovan. A good book - recipes are clear and come out tasty.
Whenever we feel pesto-y, we start sourcing parmesan. Not easy in Mysore. Nilgiri's does keep parmesan, but it's expensive and slightly bitter. I prefer the Auroville parmesan, which needs to be sourced in Bangalore. A few times a year we work with parmesan from the UK which my sister sends.
Then - up to the terrace to get frrresssh basil leaves from our plant; grind walnuts, peppercorns, garlic and the parmesan to a crumbly mix; add basil leaves and olive oil and process to a sludgy mix, adding a tad of salt along the way. Ahhhhh. Now bottle it. First, we have it with pasta (pasta!pasta!) with whole grain bread and a salad. Next day, spread over toast as an evening snack. And ever so often, sneak to the kitchen, open the fridge and spread it over Monaco crackers for a quick pop-in-the-mouth-leave-no-evidence mouthful, till it's all gone....then it starts all over again!

Siddamma

This is a small story. Not terribly tragic, not terribly uncommon.
We live in Mysore, having moved here after many years in Bombay. Total city hicks, with idyllic ideas of ‘nature’ and ‘the countryside’.

We go bird watching every weekend, and this weekend we were especially eager with the promise of a new, unexplored lake about 15 km from home. A friend of ours, Prof. D., – a retired Zoology professor from the CFTRI – had told us about this lake, called Mooganahundi, and offered to accompany us there. He used to visit there often, upto five years ago, before osto arthritis made it difficult for him.
We set off, bright and early on a mildly misty, cool, beautiful morning with green, calm, unspoilt vistas around us. Picked up Prof. D., and drove off the outer ring road to progressively smaller winding lanes, leaving behind the sprawl of brand-new ‘development’ abutting the ring road. Many little villages and snoozing-on-the-road dogs and jowar-laid-out-on-the-road-for-threshing later, we reached the village we sought, and asked the school boys outside their school for the river. They looked at each other, mildly puzzled, and then directed us up a small rise. Leaving our car tucked out of way of passing bullock-carts, we looked around us at the quiet, lush countryside and breasted the rise with anticipation. “Where is the lake??! It’s gone!” Spread before us was a large, empty basin with a little puddle at the bottom. End to end it stretched, empty and full of weeds, bordered by an embankment. To the left of the embankment, the villagers’ crops. To the right, this empty expanse. A big, yellow board announced “Mooganahundi lake”. And this, after some of the heaviest rains in the last few decades.

We wandered up and down the embankment, seeing a marsh sandpiper, a solitary little cormorant and a couple of pond herons in the puddle. Prof. D said that the lake used to be full of waterbirds at this time of the year (mid November).
Siddamma is an approximately 45 year old villager, who, hearing that some people in a car were exploring the defunct lake, came hurrying up in the futile hope that we were ‘gormint people’ come to ‘do something’. Some four years ago, she said, the lake started drying up all of a sudden. Before that, it used to be full of birds (she called them ‘ducks’) and fish. The old local zamindar used to shoot the birds, and boys would come from adjoining villages to fish. People came from all over, she said, to see the birds. The ‘gormint’ sank a borewell beside the lake so the visitors could have drinking water. When the lake suddenly started drying up, the villagers organized a ‘puja’ with five married women, a traditional auspicious grouping I have seen in North Karnataka. A little while after the puja, the lake was completely dry. She offered other reasons. The old zamindar died; her children quarreled with her for their share of the land, and threatened to drown themselves in the lake. “Obviously, then, the lake would dry up”.
The borewell saved them, she continued. But of late, the bore too, has been yielding little water. I’d never touched a borewell handle, and now I grasped it and pumped. Some time later, a little trickle. We have asked the gormint for another bore. But there is no help, no response. What do we do?
The conversation then turned to satisfying her curiosity. Was I married? Any children? She has 4. They have x each. And so on. “I would have given you some of our vegetables. But we are totally dependent on the rains now. With the late rains, the crops dried. I planted tomatoes, and now they are growing after these rains. In another week or two, if it rains again, we’ll get our crop. Come back. I’ll give you some.”
With so little, her thought was to give me, a ‘guest’, something. What can I give her? Perhaps, perhaps, some help. I can write about her and her village. And perhaps the local gormint will investigate the causes of the lake drying up. Will sinking another bore help? Perhaps, for now, if it’s sunk deeper, as obviously the water table has dropped. Prof. D. opines that the feeder canals – lots of these lakes are man-made- have got obstructed by encroachments. I am both ashamed for doing so little, and hopeful, that these words will push the gormint to act.
Note: An article in the Hindu published nearly 3 years ago, talks about the drop in no. of waterbirds in lakes such as Mooganahundi. Does that mean Mooganahundi Lake was not dry then? It also mentions that this lake is rain, not canal-fed. Which makes the dryness really puzzling.

Read this article in the local paper, published on 17th November 2005.

White eyed buzzards

We determinedly rose early on Saturday morning and headed to Chamundi Hills, we stop at the base, though. Stepping over a hedge of thorny bushes - never seen so many thorns per square mm - we sat at a vantage point and for an hour gazed hopefully across the plains ahead of us, where last time we'd seen a blue faced malkoha and various other. It was cloudy and dull, so the birds stayed in. A pretty red-collared dove flew around us. After an hour where we enjoyed the mist-wreathed hills around us, we walked back to the car. Sure enough, at that spot we saw a pair of purple sunbirds (male and female), what was possibly a black-headed cuckoo shrike and a little later a white eyed buzzard - cannot not find a clear photo to link -drove back happy :) and fifteen minutes later we were home!

The pleasures of cycling - and spotted owlets

In a while, I'll take my cycle out and go buy cards for my nieces. One of the many pluses of moving to Mysore. It's cool and peaceful enough to cycle around - burn calories AND save petrol, not to mention the fun of cruising down the road. And - ooh- cycling back up.
We see lots of birds around home, which is on a fairly busy road. Last year, when we first moved here, we were startled by loud screeching and other assorted calls, on the two trees outside our home. Peering into the dark with torches accomplished nothing. They used to start around midnight, and I'd wake up bleary eyed from holding a microphone out the window to record their calls at 1 a.m. Then somebody identified the calls as those of the spotted owlets. Excitement! As soon as the calls started, we'd tumble out of bed and grab torches, but the birds remained unspottable. Once, alone at home, I was shining my torch into branches at 2 a.m. when the local beat police appeared. I didn't know the kannada word for owls, and felt unequal to explaining to them why I was doing what I was doing, and retreated hastily to bed.
When we finally spotted the small (~ pigeon sized), really cute owlets, they bobbed and peered at us while we peered back eagerly. Now we're old acquaintances and their screechings leave us unmoved.
More about our local birds, tomorrow.

First Post

Hi, BlogWorld.
Our first post. Our blog will talk about our interests - natural history, food (and drink), cycling, trekking. Not only and not in any particular order.