We were in the mood for some fruity scones, and I recalled a recipe I came across a while ago entitled Company Scones. I had made it before and we had loved the results, so off I went to ask Google to help me find the recipe. And there it was, on the first page of results, at cooks.com.

The method is fairly simple and traditional: cutting in butter into flour, mixing in the liquid, forming the dough, cutting the shapes and baking. It calls for orange zest and almonds; I left out the latter (I'm ambivalent to nuts in my baked goods) and substituted lemon zest for orange, because I didn't have any oranges on hand.

The real difference though appears in my preparation. An old trick my mother taught me, is to roll or press out the dough into roughly the desired thickness, sprinkling the surface with flour, then folding the dough in half. Now the two layers are separated by the dusting of flour, and after it had been rolled again to the desired thickness, the scones have been cut and backed, they separate easily into two halves along the line that had been sprinkled with flour; no need for a knife.

We serve it warm from the oven with butter.

Variation: Orange zest and dried cranberries make for a wonderful festive season flavor. Poppy seed and a little lemon essence along with the lemon zest results in a fresh taste.

There had been a power outage in the night, so the heat went off and the alarms did not. Not that I am complaining, since there are many people in this region who had lost power for several days as a result of storms but still, we do feel those little inconveniences.

Of a more serious nature is the spotty performance of the server on which this blog is hosted. We are a little perplexed, and have been trying to troubleshoot the issue which is basically that roughly once a day the computer either shuts down entirely or hangs.

We are trying to figure out conclusively whether there is a problem with the computer hardware, the operating system, or the software running on the system, but we have been baffled. Our short term plan is to switch the system to a different (older, slower) computer and make sure that that will stay up - thereby pointing to hardware issues on the actual server. Then the next step would be to decide whether to attempt to fix the server or whether to get a new one.

Tough decisions.

To make up for my absence, I am jumping right back in with a scrumptious recipe.

"But what happened to you?" you might still be inclined to ask.

Well, there is always work of course, but this time I got a sudden big load on my shoulders with a significant deadline attached, so that ate up some time and energy. Then there is family and home life in general; we have each of us (except my husband) taken turns to be laid low with this nasty cold that is going around. Then of course there is my role as conference organizer for a volunteer organization (what was I thinking?!), with its continuous demands. But by far the most significant thing that kept me from posting has been stacks of homework and preparation for the final exams for the coursework for my masters.

That is now behind me, and so I can breathe again. In the meantime, a couple of my friends have just had babies, with several more soon to come between January and April, so I have taken up knitting again. I've just completed one little cardigan (I promise I'll put up pictures) and am about a third of the way through another little sweater; right now I am all excited about wools and patterns - i.e. when I am not totally shocked by the cost of yarn!

But to get to the recipe: this is a really easy and protein-rich version of a masala vada-type snack. Note, I said "type" - this is not the real thing, but it is delicious and easy.

The basics: grind soaked chana dhal along with onion, green chillies and spices. Make a flavorful tempering and mix this with the batter along with chopped onion, chillies and cilantro. Fry, drain and serve.

See, how much easier can it get?

I take a tablespoonful of the batter and smooth the top, then slide it into the oil. This means the batter can be a little thinner than for traditional masala vada, and you don't have to stand and shape each one by hand.

Note: After you have fried the first vada, taste it before you fry any more, and check for salt and spice. At this time you can add salt and chilli powder or other spices to the batter if required.
A neat trick is to put the additional salt and/or spices in a little bowl/katori and take a little oil and mix them up. Then stir it into the batter; this way the spices will evenly disperse throughout without clumping.

We have been seeing typical Pacific Northwest winter weather here for the past week or so; mostly overcast skies with rain, drizzle, showers and spitting most of the time. Lucky for me, I love the rain, although the gloomy skies can sometimes be a bit depressing.

But the grey skies are also responsible for the fact that we appreciate the sun breaks so much; the contrast makes you want to dance for joy when the rays gild the edges of everything outside.

Yesterday afternoon around four o' clock, one of my colleagues suddenly shouted my name from two aisles away. Startled, I got up to find him running towards me. "Look outside!" he called, and I stood on tiptoe to see over the cube walls to the wall of windows running the length of the building. The first thing that struck me was the unusually golden color of the bright sunlight (and that too after there had been only dull grey gloom a moment earlier). Then, almost obscured by a pillar, I saw the rainbow. Well, a little portion of it anyway. I couldn't believe my eyes because it was so bright, so big, so close.

I ran (well, shambled) outside to the car to get my camera. All the while of course the brightness was busy fading as the sun started moving out of the gap in the clouds that allowed this wonder. By the time I got into position, the rainbows (the second, inverted rainbow was also visible although more like a pale shadow) had lost some of its impact, but even then it was the brightest and biggest rainbow I had ever seen.

Enjoy!

Ours is a Telugu household; in short, that means that you cannot speak of a "proper" meal if there is not some rice and some kandi pappu (toor dhal) on the table. There's more to it than that, of course, but those two are a staple requirement.

This version is a very common one, a firm favorite with us, and fortunately extremely easy to make. The short version of the recipe is: Put the dhal and the vegetables in the pressure cooker. Make a tempering. Combine and eat.

There, that wasn't so difficult, was it? As always though there is some art in the composition of the tempering, the detail of the method. That is the piece that is so hard to capture when you are trying to write down the recipe that an experienced cook is demonstrating for you.

I think the biggest tip I can give here is to assemble the bits and pieces for the tempering first, before you even start heating the ghee. I measure out the seeds and the dhals together in a small bowl, and in another I put the broken red chilli and the stripped curry leaves. Then, when I turn on the heat for the ghee, I measure the methi and stand with it in a spoon, waiting for the ghee to reach the right temperature.

Once I start making the tempering, it is only a life-threatening situation that would interrupt me, and then only after I had placed the whole vessel in the sink; I would rather start over than burn the house down!

I reckon that I am about two weeks behind in most things in this stage. Well, I am basically up to date at work, and as they are paying my salary, that is as it should be. But in everything else ... oh boy!

The picture should demonstrate just how far I am lagging. On Halloween Nini and Angel Face were invited to a friend's house so the pipsqueak and their kids could go Trick-or-Treating together, and the grown-ups could socialize. When they reached there, the friend had just taken a batch of cupcakes from the oven, and they were invited to help decorate them.

These are Nini's invention: candy corn for the nose and two Reese's Pieces for the eyes topped with a little piped decoration for the pupils. I just thought that might make you smile, and keep my seat warm until I pull together some recipes and pictures.

I hope all of you are enjoying a better work/life balance for the moment.

With all the talk about Angel Face recently, I thought I would just share a quick little story with you.

When kids are little, they hear things and if they don't immediately make sense, they try to make it fit in their world, and translate the words to something meaningful to them. (Actually, I don't think that is limited to kids only).

A couple of years ago, when she was around four or five, I got home one day and she ran to the door to hug me. As I was taking off my shoes, putting down my bags and taking off my ID tag, I asked "Where is peddananna?"

AF: "In the family room, watching April-May."

I was a little perplexed, wondering what this new show was, until I reached the family room; on the tv was 30 Minute Meals with - you guessed it - Rachael Ray!

::

You might ask why I suddenly thought of that story? Well, today I was sitting in one of those meetings full of corporate-speak, when somebody spoke of something to happen in the "April-May time frame."

Everybody wondered why I suddenly had such a big smile!

My husband has strong opinions about okra (lady's fingers): it should never have the slightest hint of sliminess. I can understand that, and I agree, but he is ever so slightly fanatic about it. He is very - shall we say "careful" - about eating any dishes with this in it. His favorite way (read "just about the only way he likes it") is sliced thinly and dry fried.

So, when about ten years ago I decided to try this recipe from Premila Lal's "Indian Cooking" he was really hesitant, but he wanted to be supportive of my early cooking experiments. Then, about halfway through this recipe it looks as if it is never going to work, and you start wondering whether you should order pizza delivery instead.

But then, all of a sudden, everything just comes together, and you realize that you have an exceptional dish here. Here's the basic concept: you make a rich gravy from ground onions and yogurt, to which you add fried whole young lady's fingers. If you follow the steps carefully in the right sequence, you will end with a delectable meal that will have everyone asking you for the recipe!

First, a happy deepavali to you and your families from all of us. Instead of posting a traditional light, I thought I would give you light of a different kind: the light from the face of a child.

Sandeepa stumbled across a page with very old pictures of Angel Face, which has started the requests to see her. I suppose she features frequently in my posts, and we love her very dearly, so the curiosity is understandable.

She just turned seven about a month ago, and she is growing so fast we can hardly keep up with clothes for her. Angel Face is my niece, Nini's daughter, but as we are an extended family living in one house, she is like the daughter I don't have. Sometimes she slips up and calls me amma instead of doddamma and, even though I laugh, it makes my heart feel warm inside.

She loves reading (which she must have gotten from me) and clothes (which she got entirely from her mother); all her dolls seem to have two names: Emily Elizabeth and Lila Laxmi and Natalie Jean; her favorite stuffed animals are unicorns (Paisley and Wysteria).

She loves homemade foods: macaroni and cheese, and broccoli cheese soup and rice; boy, does she ever like rice. If we give her a whole plate full of just plain rice, she would finish it and ask for more.

When we eat out, she astounds the servers by begging for broccoli or spinach; if we are having a Thai curry for instance, she would keep asking us to pick out all the broccoli from the curry for her. The servers are so used to children making a fuss because they do not want the broccoli that they actually call others over to come and see this unusual event.

Food bloggers are wonderful people; everyone always seem so willing to help. I was looking for more Gujurati chana-bateta recipes after posting a modified concoction I made a while ago. And people very helpfully suggested that I look at the recipe posted by Trupti from The Spice Who Loved Me.

Now, for those of you with young children at home, this will be a familiar scene. Sitting down at dinner table, Angel Face usually will not eat much of the "proper" food, but instead will load up on the rice, or the bread or pasta or potatoes... you get the idea. To counteract this, we had instituted the "one-bite/one-bite" policy, which says she can have a bite of carbs only after she's had a mouthful of "real food." Sound familiar?

Well, it turns out she loves senagalu and what's more, she lo-o-o-oves them Gujurati style. Well, when you find something that the kid will eat without complaint that happens actually to be good for her with lots of protein (always a concern for us vegies), and that the adults also happen to like, you go for it!

So I tried Trupti's recipe, and it was another winner; I will keep it with the previous recipe, and we will probably alternate them, making one this time, and the other one the next time. As for Angel Face? Like last time, she took a spoon to the katori with the chana-bateta nu shaak in it and finished it off that way before even touching the bhatura. For her second helping, I filled it only halfway, thinking she won't finish it, but she did and asked for more even after that. Now what better endorsement than that do you want for a recipe?

Note: I've made only a few small changes to Trupti's recipe: left out the besan because we like it liquidy and when some of the potato is broken up a little bit it thickens the gravy quite well, and didn't put the jaggery.