Black cab tour of London - 12/26/2019 Boxing Day

Tour of London

Started late at 10:37
Rode in an all electric taxi
First thing we drove by was Royal Alberta Hall
Then Saw Kensington park, palace,
Bill Wyland's sticky fingers
Jimmy Paige's London Castle home
Street with converted Stable Garages
Drive around Holland Park
Summerkand Hotel Where Jimmy Hendricks died - sept 18th 1970
Next we go to Notting Hill famous for the Movie and Portobella Road Market
George Orwell's home- 1984, Animal Farm
Alice's shop in Paddington movie
Blue door where Hugh Grant lives in movie Notting Hill
West Indian settlement post WWII to help with man power - they still come back every year to organize the Notting Hill a carnival in August
Thomas Hardy's home - came to London to work as an architect in the railways
Paddington Barge in little Venice (called because of canal system)
Abbey Road Studio - Iconic recording studio. We stopped at the shop and bought trinkets
Lord's cricket ground
Drove thru Regents Park
London Zoo - very first scientific zoo. First animals came from Tower of London
Romanesque Architecture Buildings by John Nash
Primrose Hill
Chalcot Square - #32 hi Ouse for Paddington movie
Regent Street - Oxford circus tube station, Bond street station, Piccadilly Circus station on the other end
Picadilly Square
Hatchard Bookstore - oldest library
Westend
Trafalgar Square
The Mall - Buckingham Palace
Great hall of Westminster- built a thousand years ago
London eye, Thames River
Big Ben - all covered up for repairs
Parliament Square
Westminster Abbey - all the coronations in the last 1000 yrs, also more that 3000 famous people buried - Thomas Hardy, Charles dickens, Stephen Hawkins
Buckingham Palace - built in 1706, monarchy bought the house and queen victoria moved in 1837
Knightsbridge - High end shopping

Harrods - biggest department store in Europe. In early 1900s you could even buy lion and tiger cubs at Harrods! Today you can buy just about anything else - including sports car and speed boats. They were first to include escalators in store. Staff would stand at the top of the escalator and hand out glasses of brandy as people felt woozy from the experience!

On Cromwell road ... also have natural history museum, science museum, ...

Back to the hotel.

It rained all the time - good thing this wasn't a walking tour!

Uppiiiii!!!

Long time no cook!

Palak paneer and chicken stew to celebrate surviving first week of school ... including high school for Diya!

2019 China Trip - Favorite Momemts

Some of our favorite things -

Aadi-

1. Chengdu - I really liked the cooking taste testing.

  2.   Beijing - The Great Wall of China was a really fascinating experience.

  3. Shanghai - 1. I liked the mask play in the restaurant. 2. I also liked the mag lev train.

Diya -

1. Xian - food tour
2. Xian - terra cotta warriors
3. Chengdu - cooking class & pandas
4. Chengdu - hotpot
5. Beijing - Great Wall
6. Beijing - all of the temples and palaces
7. Beijing - mask painting & crickets
8. Beijing - Skipping the Mao Zedong memorial bc of the line 
9. Shanghai - meeting the family and the restaurant 
10. Shanghai - Starbucks Roastery 
11. Shanghai - Bookstore
12. Shanghai - weather
13. Shanghai - guide was really nice

 Baba

I liked - 

1. Beijing - The Great Wall
2. Beijing - Mass Painting
3. Beijing - Cricket man
4. Xian - Terracota Army
5. Xian- Tuktuk food tour
6. Chengdu - Hotpot
7. Chrndu - Market tour & cooking class
8. Shanghai - Starbucks refinery
9. Shanghai - Mask dance 
10. Personalized tour guide and car

Mamma-

1. Fact that I can authentically sign this off as "Mamma" .... goal was to enable a life time experience for kids and we did just that.
2. Smooth operation, minimal hiccups... template for all future family adventures. 
3. Meeting some interesting new people on the way and reconnecting with other interesting people I already knew. 
4. Food. Food. Food. Everything from food tour to cooking lessons to hot pot to family style dinner with friends.
5. The Wall. Impressive. 
6. Surviving the crowds. 
7. Not letting minor problems like 'The biggest typhoon in Shanghai in recent times' get in the way of our fun. 
8. All the unplanned things that blew us away - tea house in Beijing; Starbucks Roastery; Maglev. Totally unexpected but that's how it goes!
9. Watching the kids grow as expert glove trotters and avid foodies. 
10. The Olympic village - totally understated stop in the itinerary... have to let its spirit touch your core. 

Aadi's Pictures

Mother’s Day gift from Diya

Mediterranean Chicken by Diya!!

Pasta Puttnesca

Jellyfish - Diya

Kung Pao Chicken

Week -4 Takeout Counts!

Parking Lot! (Jan 2013)

Parking Lot!

Week 3 - Leftovers!

Had a get together with some friends yesterday. Aadi decided the menu - daal makhani, aaloo posto , dimer malai curry, and chicken. 

We were so busy enjoying that we forgot to take a picture of the spread!

Simple Fare

Simple fare for breakfast today with croissants, wild blueberry jam, eggs, and coffee. Foodies are slacking already in week 2. Some teasing and some stirring up of competitive juices led Diya to sign up for making butter paneer today. 

This food blog is going to be a long haul ... and I am so looking forward to it! ;)

Huevos En Curry De Mustaza

Product, process, presentation

Diya’s Fish Tacos!

All aboard with foodie blogging plan. Diya made Fish Tacos! Turned out so good that people started hoarding the next helping, for fear that we might run out! Super fun!

Aadi Makes Luchis (and writes the blog)

The Product

(... with complimentary aloo dum!)

The Process

The Presentation

2019 Resolution - Eat, Eat, Eat!

We are still in the afterglow of our first European Vacation together and can't seem to get out of the food mania it induced. Kids LOVED the food and the trip re-ignited their interest in cooking and exploring new dishes and flavors. So with that, we have made a resolution to make FOOD the focus for this year. Each week we will experiment with a new food - cook a new receipt or find a new restaurant or order something unfamiliar in the menu - and then blog it!

Good luck to us for to keep the commitment through the year. 

With that - the new dish of this week was "apple cinnamon pancakes". Aadi made these and Diya and I added some touches. The recipe was -

Take buttermilk pancakes mix and instead of water (as the default recipe calls for), add milk, egg, butter, finely chopped apples, cinnamon and nutmeg - and cook them on VERY low heat. Enjoy with whipped cream!

As with any good recipe, it took some trial and error. At first we managed to burn these - we had added some ginger syrup to sweeten the batter, but the sugar burnt right away. Another mistake we made was to cook on high heat - this left the batter around the apple pieces to stay uncooked. So basically the pancakes were burnt on the outside and uncooked on the inside. Yuck. But the kids kept experimenting and finally got to success.

It was so much fun to watch them work through this and also resolve conflicts among themselves - the batter is too think, too thin, you need to cook these longer, increase the heat, decrease the heat .... will you let me do what i need to do and stop telling me what to do? Don't give that to Mishti. If I make pancakes, can you make eggs? Should we make bacon with this or sausage? Hey you need to help clean up too ....

Totally loved it!