Molten Chocolate Cake !!

Warm Chocolate Cake with chocolate fudge filling. Topped with Vanilla ice cream under a crunchy chocolate shell !! The perfect combination of (hot) fudge and (cold) vanilla ice cream .. I anyway love chocolate flavour ... but this one, I have no words to explain ! This is the best !!

Its a sin ! Really, it is such a sin to eat this 'Molten Chocolate Cake' @ Chili's !! Every bite just melts in your mouth !! Gives you a heavenly feeling !! Its my most favourite desert ! whenever I am in a sad mood & need to cheer up or I am already cheered up and wanna enjoy more ;), I go to Chillis and just order this desert ! ... The food at chillis is so-so .. I am not a big fan of its food but this desert totally makes it worth the trip !

And its not that costly ! some 5 - 6 bucks including tax and its good enough for two (rather 1.5 ) ppl ...although its impossible to be satisfied with even one cake ! I remember the first time I went to chili's with two of my friends for this desert ... one of my friends had had it before and was going on and on about it ... but he was not sure how many of those cakes would be enough for the three of us ... so we asked the waitress there and she said and I quote, "well ... since you are guys, maybe 2 cakes would be good enough ... but normally I would suggest just one !" ... we thought about it a lot and finally ordered 2 ! When the cake arrived, we just could not believe it ! I mean, its just soooo delicious ... so delicious ... we ordered one more !!! :) .. that waitress gave us that 'have-these-guys-come-from-somalia?' look ? but who cares right ? we finished that third one as well and had to stop ;) unfortunately ... stomach was content but the heart wasnt !! And this has been my feeling everytime I have this chocolate molten cake ...

To wrap it up, all I will say it, if you have not had it, you are missing something in life !!! As far as my thinking goes, I am looking for that (Merovingian) guy who can say 'I wrote it myself' ... (remember matrix reloaded? ;) ) great job Chili's !!

Cooking !

Cooking is one of my passions ... Its not something that I have to be forced into ... In fact, its something I am very very fond of .. Its time well spent for me .. (compared to many other things such as work ;) ) I think, its something I am very good at and proud of ... ;)

I dont remember how it started ... I guess, when my mom was expectant (with me), she must have cooked a lot of dishes and I must have picked it up from her like Abhimanyu :) ! because I have always been fond of cooking (jabse maine hosh sambhala as they say in movies :) )!

I guess, the credit for my love for cooking goes partially to 'my love for food' ... (BTW, my mom is an excellent excellent cook ! She is soo good at cooking, I just cant tell you ! you have to eat it yourself !! Mom, you are the best ! ) so anyway, I love eating !! ;) .. who doesnt, right ? But I mean it .. I love to eat different different varieties of food ... sweet, spicy, salty, sour (sometimes :) ) ... pretty much everything ! And if you like something, you want to be able to make it yourself .. e.g. I love 'pohe' (rice flakes) .. I think I learnt to make them when I was in 12th or 1st year engineering .. I think after chai (tea), Pohe was my first dish to be learnt and then it just continued ... One dish after another ... in fact, I remember during 4th year of engineering (yes, even before coming to US !) when my mom was not feeling well, I had even made rotis alongwith other stuff ... of course they were nowhere close to what my mom makes .. and I dont think I can ever do that ... but I had tried my best ...

After coming to US, it was pretty much on a day-to-day basis that we had to cook (I used to stay with roommates but some of them were horrible at cooking ... roommates is one topic I can keep talking days about but maybe in some other post some other time .. ) .. so that was the time when I got to practice a lot of dishes along with trying a few new ones .. I have been cooking on an average, every alternate day for last 4 years ... and its been wonderful ! now I pretty much leave 1 - 1.5 hrs of my day time specifically for cooking ... I have tried north indian dishes like different (aaloo, muli, onion etc) parathas, chhole, palak paneer, dal makhani etc. also south indian dishes like dosa, idli, puliohara, vada sambar etc ... Mumbai dishes are my favorite though ... Pav Bhaji, Misal, Vada pav, Bhel Poori ... oh I am so hungry !

Believe it or not, I have even made 'Besan Laddoos' here ..starting from scratch as in starting from besan ... I had made 20 laddoos and me & my roommate, we finished them in 2 days !! Again something I like so much that I wanted to learn it ... Of course, I took the recipe from my mom and I guess I spent like 5 hours on it ... but the very joy of it coming out the way you expect is what makes me do it !!

One thing I have not tried is cooking non-veg stuff at home .. I never ate non-veg when I was in India .. I never had anything against non-veg (like some ppl feel that its killling animals etc... I feel its a part of the food chain) but then in India, the places they sell meat are very unclean, filled with flies, bloody etc etc ... so I never felt like it .. but I was always open to the idea .. I started eating it here in US since here its all about sanitation and cleanliness ... now I love all different types of non-veg, seafood and I miss it if I dont have it for a few days .. but I have never ever cooked it at home (except only once when I had cooked frozen shrimp curry .. man ! was it delicious or what !!) and probably will never cook it on a regular basis ... dunno whats with that ...

Another thing is, it is very very very boring to cook for yourself ! I need someone to be with me to eat it ... I will never cook for myself .. I get too bored to do that ... If I have someone to share it with, I am ready to do it .. its like an incentive ...

I have had my share of disasters and failures ... I have even had public failures ... I remember this one time when I was with my friends' family ... They are Punjabis and wanted to know how to make authentic Maharashtrian Pohe .. so bhabhi asked me to make them one day and I happily agreed ... The 'thick poha' they had was very very different and it would not become soft even after soaking it in water ... Pohe I made, were a big big disaster that day ... what an embarassing moment ... bhabhi hadnt made any breakfast thinking that I am making pohe and I ruined it all !! so yeah I have had such embarassing situations .. but thats part of the game ..

Anyway, here are a few things that are troublesome when cooking:

1. Cutting Onions !! - We recently had a potluck sort of get-together .. I had to cook for 10 + ppl .. I almost cried for my life cutting 5 -6 biggg onions !!

2. Washing utensils : I think thats one thing my mom never did when I was to be born ... so obviously that has not come to me ;) .. its such a pain to wash all utensils ... I would never do it if I had a choice ...

3. Cleaning : I want everything to be clean around me and so though this is a painful step, I do pretty honestly .. but nevertheless it counts in troubles of cooking

4. Grocery shopping : You need to buy groceries before hand if you want to cook .. so planning necessary !

5. Marination / Soaking : Things like Chhole, Rajma etc need at least overnight soaking ... all those ppl who cook chicken know that it needs marinating .. so again cooking needs lot of planning sometimes ...

Anyway, these troubles are very small in front of the joy of cooking ...

Project open-the-tight-lid !

Well, day before yesterday I bought this 'Gorkari' pickle from 'Mayuri' - Indian grocery store. (SImilar to the one shown in the image) I really really like this achar ... its perfect ! As the name suggests its from Kairi (Raw Mango) and its Gor (sweet)... Just the right one for me !

So anyway, last two days, I was struggling to open the lid of the bottle. Every meal, I would try to open it for a couple of minutes and afterwards feel too hungry to try further .. but tonight I came home and decided that whatever happens, I am gonna open this damn lid today ! I think I started working on this open-the-tight-lid project at night around 9-ish. Tried it every possible way - with hands, with knife, with spoon ... everything ! But by 9.30 all I had was a few red-ish marks on my hands .. nothing else ! Ok, so the software engineer in me woke up and he thought that many people must have had this problem before and a few might have put up a better solution online ! who knows ! So he went and looked up on google, 'open a tight lid' and guess what ... as usual a few hits showed up ! a few suggested that you need to tie a rubber band around it and give yourself better grip and hence friction ! Well, I didnt have rubber but I had tried similar ways and they had not worked ... so I ignored that one ! The other remedy was to use a nutcracker ! Well, I didnt have that one either ! Apart from these two things, basically there werent any releavent results ! ... My roommate said, lets take the bottle to the same Indian store and get it opened from them ! But I was not ready to accept defeat just like that ... defeated by a lid ??? shame on you I said to myself !

So the frurstrated software engineer gave one last push on the lid with all the strength and this time it opened !! Around 10 O'clock ... it opened !! Can you imagine ? 1 hr wasted on opening one damn lid !!! But I was sooo damn happy, as if I had climbed mount everest !! I jumped in joy ... did bhangda !! what not ... it was my victory !! yes ! victory over a stubborn non-opening lid !! It meant more than anything at that point ...

Setting goals for yourself and achieving them gives hell lot of pleasure ... hai na ?

Order a pizza at half price & get 2nd free !!

This is one of the amazing experiences I have ever had ...

Here is what happened. I did my schooling in Pullman, a very small town near Seattle. One night, it was kinda late like 10 or so and we were bored to cook anything. So, me and my friend, we both decided to go to the Pizza Hut (the only place open after 10 pm, it closes at 11) nearby & decided to dine-in for a change . So we reached there at like 10.15 pm and ordered a large 3 topping pizza. I specifically asked for a pan pizza since that was (and still is) my favourite. During the conversation we mentioned that both of us are really hungry so would like it ASAP...

So, in about 20 minutes, waiter came with the order. I looked at the pizza and was very sure that it was not a pan pizza and looked more like a thin crust pizza. So I called the waiter again and asked him if that was a pan pizza as I had asked for. He confirmed that by looking at the order and felt so sorry. It was a thin crust one ... He did not know what to do ... It was his mistake ... so in a flash, he was like, " I can take that pizza back but its already too late, so we probably will have to throw it. And I know u guys r hungry and all .. so if you dont mind, u can start on this one. I will make one more pizza for you and give that to you for free. you might want to pack it & take it with u" ...

Great ! works for me !! We agreed for that & started munching on the pizza. Within 20 minutes, he got another pizza to go and gave it us. We thanked him and asked for the check. He brought the check, again said sorry & handed it to me. Guess what, that guy had also applied some 1/2 price coupon on the price of the single pizza. so basically what that meant was we had 2 large pizzas, at the price of 1/2 pizza !! I was stunned !!! The bill also had a little sorry note on it saying it wont happen again ! (I know this is cheap to say but a thought did come to my mind; why not ? please do make mistakes like this over and over ! )

I mean, I would have been ok even with the option that I had to eat thin crust pizza only & just forget about the pan pizza. Mistakes happen ! But what this guy had done was remarkable .. I hadnt seen or heard of anything like this ...

I gave him heavy tip and left fully satisfied ...