Terrace Gardening / Garlic

It's quite easy to grow garlic in your backyard / terrace garden in a pot or in the soil. You can use the garlic cloves from the garlic pod you buy for cooking, for this purpose. Make sure you choose the big and healthy cloves.

I have garlic growing in a tray on my terrace. To plant,prepare the place where you want to grow garlic. Take some lose soil mix it with a little manure making sure that the manure you use is not very strong.You could ask at your local plant nursery as to the suitability of the manure for use at the time of sowing. Sow the garlic cloves two inches deep in the soil. Sprinkle some water on the sowed soil and keep the tray in a place that does not receive direct sunlight. When the shoots begin to appear you can keep them in sunlight. Mind the garden pests like squirrels, crows, pigeons that might destroy the tender shoots before you know it.

I am a beginner at gardening though have been a keen observer of the process since childhood by having some really amazing gardening people around me with their beautiful flowers and vegetable patches for inspiration.

Well,every day there is something new to learn. There are disappointments and there are joys. Disappointments when the seeds die in the soil and all the hard work and patience remains unrewarded. Joys when you get to see the seeds maturing into young healthy plants which at times are laden with flowers while at others with fruity showers!

The Monkees - I'm a Believer [official music video]

I have been a Neil Diamond fan since school days. We didn't have as easy access to music then as we do now.

During one summer vacation at my grandparents' place I happened to  visit a music shop which was a stone's throw away from our place and it was here that I was introduced to Neil Diamond as well as Don Williams. I bought several cassettes of these two and made it a point to listen to at least a few of their songs every morning before leaving for school.The love affair that started  with their music back then continues to this day.

This particular song was comsposed and sung by Neil Diamond.Today morning they had the Monkees version playing on the radio which sounds good too .It made me all nostalgic and delighted. So thought why not put it out here!

Lemon drizzle cake!

Last when I accompanied Mum to the local vegetable market I found some really enticing lemons, both in colour and content. They looked very juicy. So I bought double the quantity we usually buy hoping to use them liberally in some drink / dish or the other.

Later at home while browsing the net, I came across this lemon drizzle cake recipe by Jamie Oliver and one by Tana Ramsay.Immediately my mind went to those lemons that I had bought that evening and I thought ok, so here we have an idea on how to use a lemon or two from the purchased lot. I browsed a few more recipes and ultimately decided to sort of combine the above two recipes.

It turned out heavenly , lemony, and deliciously moist.You could vary the number of lemons used depending upon how lemony you would like your lemon cake to be as well as on the size of lemons you have.


Here's the how to:

Zest of 2 lemons ( I had those smaller ones so had to use two)
1 and a half cups caster sugar
1 and a half cups flour
1 and a half cups butter
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp lemon essence
Half cup almonds ground in a mixer / food processor
3 eggs


Beat the butter and caster sugar. Add the eggs one at a time. Beat till the mixture is nice and fluffy.Add the flour.Beat some more. Add the essence and baking powder.Beat again. Add the ground almonds to the mixture and beat one last time for a minute.Fold in the lemon zest.Pour the mixture into a lightly greased baking tin.

In an oven preheated to 180C bake the cake batter for an hour or till a tester comes out clean when inserted into the cake.

For the drizzle:
Half cup caster sugar
Juice of 2 lemons

Blend the caster sugar and lemon juice. Keep aside

Take out the cake from the oven . Prick the cake with a fork to make small holes. Pour the lemon drizzle over the cake. Let cool for sometime before serving.

Terrace Gardening / Spinach

I have managed to create a small and an amateurish terrace garden over a period of some months with painstaking effort and tons of patience given the extreme climate of the place we live in. But after a nice flowering winter I can say I am more than ready to face whatever the summer has to offer both in terms of hard labour or it's fruits.For it is indeed a joy to see the seeds blossoming into young shoots and the young tender shoots becoming stronger before they are ready to bear the fruits! Oh, only a gardener would know such a joy, truly! :)

Now,coming to what I had in mind to discuss in this post.Spinach! It's something that finds favour in our family on most days so I thought why not grow them in my own backyard to pluck for a taste of freshness whenever I fancy.

But then I realised, darn its summer and not the best time to grow spinach. Well something had to be done. Okay, maybe not something as drastic as praying for a change of season for summer has it's own charm, never mind the scorching heat.So with a quiet determination I set out to lay a pot with soil and manure , cut open the seed packet that I had earlier bought and got down to the business of laying the seeds. Not too deep and not too shallow. Two inches deep into the soil the seeds went.

Now, to wait till the greens appeared.This is tricky. You may be hoping that in a few weeks the leaves would appear but unknown to you the seeds may already have been preyed on by the pigeons, squirrels and other unwelcome visitors. So be watchful, maybe put up a scarecrow surround the seed pot with thorny bushes or throw a net guard over the pot.

The picture here shows spinach after a month of sowing.

'Moistest' chocolate cake that I have ever baked! :)

I have been wanting to bake a chocolate cake that is both moist and chocolatey. My previous attempts at chocolate cake have been anything but satisfactory and I have forever been on a mission to find The recipe for the most perfect chocolate cake.

All my efforts seem to have been rewarded well when I came across Angela Nilsen's chocolate cake recipe on bbc good food http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/3092/ultimate-chocolate-cake .

I varied the quantity of chocolate a bit and used light chocolate alongwith the dark as I had quite a few slabs of the same which I didnt want to see going waste .The result was super and my day was more than made when Mom gave an approving look... :)

There was some freshly grated coconut and I kind of like its taste with chocolate so sprinkled some on the cake as an afterthought.