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.

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.

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.