Weeknote #13 [W25.52] - Recipes, parties, orange cake, and completing yearly goals

A new recipe section for the blog, to help me from forgetting recipes which I don’t make often enough

I began the week by adding a recipe section to the blog and published the first recipe: onion & tomato uttapam.

This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while. I have no interest in becoming a food blogger as such. But I keep forgetting recipes which I only make once in a while, and then I have to hunt for them all over again online. Writing them down and putting them up on the blog feels like a practical reference for my future self, and also a fun way of documenting bits of my life in the kitchen (which has anyway kept growing larger, into a core part of who I am, over the last few years).

The layout for the recipe page is inspired by Bong Eats. I love their UX. The feature to be able to strike off ingredients and completed steps on the site is extremely satisfying. And it helps a lot when actually cooking. Little things like that, things that add a sense of delight go a long way in making a difficult task feel less daunting.

There are rough edges in the layout still (the fixed header at the top is broken, the layout probaly won’t work on some tablets, and I forgot to add serving quantities). But it’s a start, and that feels good.

What recipes to put up next?

Now I’m thinking about what to document next. The recipes that would probably be most useful (at least to me) are the ones I’ve tweaked over time and might not be available elsewhere, and the ones I keep Googling because I never remember the proportions.

A few candidates might be:

• Rohu in coconut milk curry - Fish with Bengali spices (paanch phoron), but in a Kerala style curry with a coconut milk base.
• Chide’r pulao - Poha the way my mother and grandmother make it at home, and not the usual North-Indian version which is more popular.
• Banana bread - Mostly because I forget the the correct proportion of ingredients every time, and wish I wouldn’t have to do a Google search to look it up.
• Beef porridge - Beef with lentils and spices that go into haleem, but cooked in a style inspired by a Mediterrenean porridge recipe.

Parties are still overwhelming, but they are a good excuse to bake cakes

Tanvi invited me to her Christmas party this week.

I usually find parties overwhelming and tend to avoid them. But this time, I was glad to be invited. It turned out to be quite fun, and I got to meet a lot of very cool people. (Although parties are still not something I’d do very often.)

The party was also an excuse for me bake an orange poppyseed cake, which I’d been meaning to try out, but would have never gotten around to baking just for myself.

While the cake turned out better than I had anticipated, my favourite thing in the party was actually Atharv’s cheese board (the smoked cheddar especially).

Completing yearly reading and film watching goals

Since 2020, I’ve set yearly reading and film-watching goals. This year’s targets were 72 books, and 200 films. As of Sunday (Dec 28), I’ve completed both.

It’s fun tracking these numbers over the years and noticing the ups and downs.

Next year, I want to push up the numbers a bit higher: 80 books, and 250 films. I feel confident I can do 80 books, but less so about the films. But now that I run a film club, I do want to push myself more.