I DID IT!

FOR quite a long time I had been visualising a food blog of my own. With the vast possibilities thrown up by the Internet, it seemed quite the thing to do - to own a bit of space in cyberworld and treat it as a playground of sorts...

It was to be a diary of all my culinary adventures and misadventures in the hotspot of my home - the veritable kitchen, and other food experiences. It began in fits and starts a couple of years ago with the help of a kindly friend and was called Ice and Spice. But somewhere along the way it got stuck and like a stubborn mule refused to move ahead. But when I did try to revive it - the blog, I mean - it seemed like I'd forgotten to do a Ctrl+S with the password...no matter how hard I tried to coax and cajole my fading memory into retrieval mode, it simply would not budge. Like the stubborn mule. Sigh! Should have kept it sweet and simple. Something like Open Sesame or Khul Ja Sim Sim would have done the trick. It felt terrible, like being locked out of one's own house after losing the house key.

Then again, it was the movie Julie & Julia that rekindled my interest as also Chitti's Kitchen, the food blog of my friend, Chitra Shastry.

But it is to Sunder, another friend of mine in distant NYC, that I owe its name. At a mere mention, he pulled off an endlessly colourful list of them, like ribbons out of a magician's hat. Now I was faced with a problem of plenty. So difficult to choose. Like choosing a name for a baby, an exercise I had last indulged in nearly 16 years ago when my daughter was born. Never one to fry my brains, I almost did a tic tac toe, before zeroeing in on Mimosas & Samosas...it signifies liquid and solid to me. I think it also sounds nice, with a little bit of rhyme and rhythm to it.

I'm going to fix myself a mimosa one of these days. As for the samosas, well, laborious as the procedure may sound, I've promised myself to make them some day, but in the meanwhile, I think they're best picked up from Kanti's or KC Das. Not so much for the samosas, as for the tongue-tickling chutneys that accompany it. Such a deadly combo of spicy pudina and sour-sweet imli. Yummmm. The better half, who I now suspect spent the better part of his student days checking out all those food joints, if not the cool chicks in and around his college on Brigade Road, recently vouched that those chutneys are still tasting the same...

May they continue to do so forever and forever. Amen.