Here is an event for all moms, out there. Anything particular your child enjoyed eating as a baby? Please share it with us!

Guidelines for participating :

• Write a blog post giving us the recipe of a dish your child liked as a baby.
• Preferably, the post should have a picture of the dish.
• Link your blog post back to http://babyfoodrecipes.in/event. Submit your entry using the form on the baby food recipes website.

You can submit old blog posts too, if you like. 3 lucky people will be gifted my e-book, 60 Great Baby Food Recipes. This book is currently being sold on Amazon. You can also send me a picture of the baby who liked this baby food recipe you are sending. I will include him in the hall of fame on this site

So get creative and send in your entries on or before June 15th, 2012.

Dear All,

I have been blessed with a baby girl one week ago. My 3-year old daughter is really excited about the new arrival. We have named her Trisha (meaning: desiring)

I know some of you must be wondering where I’ve disappeared these last few months. My pregnancy had made me weak and completely cut off from any kind of kitchen work. I couldnt tolerate smells or cook with ease. Thats the reason behind my fairly blank and un-updated blog. Hopefully in few months from now I will be back with more recipes which I will be trying out for  my baby girl. For now, its months of nappy changing and lullaby singing. See you at the other end of it… cheers!

It was a usual morning. We didnt realize that people in Bangalore were reading about Mayank’s smsTweet application in the DNA paper today. It was just after lunch that Mayank noticed people mentioning him on Twitter. Thats when we realized that his application smsTweet was featured in the DNA paper. He ran out to get a copy while I eagerly waited. Yes, there it was on Page 7!

smsTweet is an application that Mayank created about 3 months ago. It allows users to sms their twitter messages from their mobile phones to the Twitter website. This application was launched just before Airtel came out with a similar offer. However, to use smsTweet you need not be an Airtel customer. Moreover, the tweets can be sent out at regular sms cost.

Twitter was always meant to be used via the mobile phone. However, in India it started off primarily using internet. Mayank wanted to provide the simple facility of updating Twitter messages directly using a mobile . He got an API from smsgupshup and implemented smsTweet.

The first one month or so there was not much activity on the site. Then a few Tech sites started writing about this application. Thats when news spread quickly. More than 200 people have now registered. A journalist from DNA got in touch with Mayank last week. He wanted to write about the application in the paper. Mayank and I were thrilled at the idea. We eagerly waited all week to see when it would be out. So today is the day. Didnt know that when we woke up

If you are in India and would like to update your tweets using your cell phone please register at smsTweet.

The lighting was poor so the video didnt turn out that great. A big thanks to Anu for patiently choreographing and conducting rehearsals for two weeks.

On 21st Sep we left for Bombay by train. The Pune-Bombay stretch is really awesome!!

Udyaan Express

Lonavala Station

Finally we reached home at Kalyan and witnessed a heavy down pour which lasted nearly 24 hours.

A Train in our garden at Kalyan

During our stay we had a chance to visit Matheran – a small hill station, near Kalyan. It was about 40 mins by local to a station called Neral. From there a 30 min cab ride up the hill and then another 2 kms by a hand-driven cart. Matheran has a small and pretty reasonably priced market. After Bangalore I find all places reasonable, really! Especially if we are talking about clothes or footwear.

I tried taking a horse to visit the view points but got really scared so we went sight seeing in a hand driven cart again. Its feudal. I really wish they would make provisions for vehicles to drive inside someday. Anyway, the view points were awesome, I specially liked the lake that was flanked on both sides by mountains. There was a bed of yellow flowers on one side with a house. A Lucky chap lives there.

Lake at Matheran

Flanked by Yellow flowers

Louis Point - Matheran

Railway Colony - Kalyan (Mumbai)

We returned from Matheran in about two days just before our festival of Naumi. We had a nice puja and delicious prasad on Naumi – kheer, puri, vada and sweets. Above is the picture I took of the railway quarters near our house (just one evening before we left). I simply love the rustic look they wear.

We took the early morning flight back to Bangalore yesterday. Saw plenty of news channel vans on Mumbai air port covering the Air India Strike that was on. Now we are back home running around doing the usual. This festive season was so action packed and memorable.

Town Square is a feed Aggregator launched on 1st July ’09 with the intention of getting bloggers together. I wanted a place where any kind of blog could join- whether cookery or business, photography or personal. A place where I could easily find posts on a given tag or topic across blogs and preferably with a preview of each post along with it. With those many thoughts in my head I started off the ground work on Town Square.

The making of Town Square -

1) March ’09 I decided to create the site. At that point of time I did not really know any language or platform using which I could make such a site. All I knew was that I was going to call it Town Square I had tried my hand at Google’s App engine earlier and remember going completely blank on seeing the tutorial video. I dropped the idea for sometime but found myself thinking a lot about it. Soon I got back to App engine and decided to create a small application which would do no harm to anyone. I wrote a sample application which would just repeat whatever you typed in.

2) Mayank got me a book on HTML and CSS. Being the supportive hubby and an excellent mentor he would always know how to motivate me. I read the fat book called ‘HTML & CSS- Head First’. It was an amazing book, very useful for beginners. (It also has the perfect pillow height if you fall asleep over it )

3) After having written my first dummy application on Google’s app engine framework I felt sorted. I thought that I just needed to learn a bit of python, html, css and I can past the test. However there was a little bit of knowledge required in other fields too – like Django, ajax, java scripts and jQuery. The funny part was that sometimes while coding I would forget exactly which of these languages I was writing in. Thats when Hubby dear would walk in with his stick and wacked me so I remembered

4) Town Square code evolved gradually. Initially it was a site that just had a form for registration and un-registration. If I remember right, form validation was the toughest part of the coding. I was stuck for days on the topic. What if the member enters his home url and it fails? What if the Feed URL also fails? What if ? What if ? Seriously I was sobbing my the head over it, wishing I never got on this ride.

5) There is a little picture of Ganeshji whom I look at for help when I’m really stuck. Also, there is Mayank who jumps in to help when I’m struggling too much. With everyone’s help the form section was done. People could automatically be registered and unregistered with no intervention from me. I had a home, contact and about page. I was happy. Thats when Mayank pointed out that everything was done except for the most important part- the Feed Aggregation! Oops! I almost forgot

6) I picked up a few feed links and started working on the parser. The feed aggregator was not such a difficult part. The universal feed parser was readily available and I just had to put it to good use. The back end work however was of database management. There was also certain information that was unavailable in the feed parser output and needed to be located using local search functions. Soon the feed aggregation started working on my development environment and I was ready to deploy it on the server.

7) By June ’09 end Town Square was ready. Thats when I started decorating the site a bit. I sat down with some snaps that best fit each page and edited them to go with the overall look of the site. Most of the photographs used were the ones I shot while I was in San Diego. It took me nearly two days to shortlist, edit and upload the snaps. The whole site was ready and now I didnt want to go ahead. Again – what if it didnt work when people joined ?

8 ) Final push came from Mayank. He told me that I could continue adding features even after I deployed Town Square and took up registrations. I chose the date of July 1st for the launch and thankfully by 10pm we made it happen- Town Square was on!

Srivalli Jetli was the first member to join Town Square, she also helped me spread awareness on the site. When I woke up on 2nd morning I was thrilled as 8 people had joined Town Square overnight. Happiness lies in these small things.

The few weeks right after the site was launched were full of fire fighting. Basically all my testing was done on the local development setup so I was unaware of the problems that could crop up once the application was deployed on the server. Also, the testing was done with a handful of feed files and the application was not prepared for different types of feed files that started pouring in suddenly. With some amount of bug fixing the code was stabilized in a couple of weeks.

Town Square has completed two months and has already registered 100 members. This was the membership count I was expecting after one year of launch. Thank you all for being supportive and encouraging towards the endeavor. Thanks Mayank for being such an excellent tech lead right through the development of the project. I’m grateful to Google App Engine for providing an awesome framework for developers like me.

We had the most memorable Ganesh Chaturti this year. Preparations started nearly 3 days in advance. Shubhada (my neighbor) and I went to Gandhi Bazaar on Friday to do some street photography as the festive time makes the market place really colorful. As expected Gandhi Bazaar was in full bloom. I took snaps of vendors selling idols, flowers, mango/ plantain leaves, bangles, etc; soon they were all smiling at us and wondering if I was going to buy anything after all. I felt like a tourist in my own city.

I started shopping for the pooja along side. Soon I was clicking photographs along with balancing kilos of fruits and tall plantain leaves (which I was sure I would forget somewhere in the bazaar). Finally I bought flowers, mango leaves, plantain leaves, apples, bananas, chaklis- all at reasonable prices. I found a way to preserve these for 2 days. Plantain leaves (ones that we get for decoration, along with stems) can be placed in water. Mango leaves can be preserved by immersing them in a tub of water. Flowers can be kept fresh in tupperware dubbas. What a way to beat the inflation during festive times : )

Saturday I cleaned the house to set it up for the upcoming pooja and made laddus. I was very confused as to what laddus I should make. So I decided to come up with my own recipe. Thankfully, they came out well. I’ll blog about the recipe another time. A big thanks to Mayank for creating a suspension that served as the basic structure for the mantap. It was creatively done using table mats and baby’s building blocks. Next year we can use baby’s tent house I guess

Sunday- the day of Ganesh Chaturti, started with my baby singing ‘Happy Birthday to you’ to Ganeshji. It was the sweetest thing, I dont think I can ever forget it. Soon after that I started running about making Prasad and getting the pooja thali ready. Mayank and baby were making the mango leaves and rose strings to decorate the entrance of the house and the mantap. In an hour’s time our pooja was over and we all had prasad for breakfast. By then I was hungry enough to savor every bit of it.

In the evening we had family and friends over to our place for prasad. We had people come over from 4pm to nearly 9.30 pm making our evening really fun filled. I was so happy that almost everyone could make it. Festivals are really about spending this quality time with each other that you otherwise can not find.

Towards evening we noticed a pretty rainbow outside our terrace. One of the brightest I have ever seen. Wonder if there was actually a pot of gold at the end of it.

These last three days have been so action packed. Friday we had our Janmashtmi puja. I managed to fast all day with Mayank. When I woke up in the morning I didnt have an intention to but I thought it will be ok if I ate some fruits and had juice every 2 hrs. I remember last Janmashtmi I over slept in the afternoon and my empty stomach made me pay a price. I was throwing up till the puja actually began. Thankfully this time it was a piece of cake (?) ohh! I mean this time it was relatively simpler. I had a big glass of lassi along with Makhane(Lotus seeds) and groundnuts for lunch. Very filling indeed! We did puja and broke our fast around 9.30 pm ! (the longest time I have ever taken to break my fast)Turn Up the Volume & Enjoy the Video

In the afternoon we had a Rangoli competition in our apartment to kick start the Independence day celebrations. I was there trying to catch all the action as it happens. What can be more delightful than to shoot vibrant colors and artistic patterns. The Ladies of our apartment used a variety of ingredients for their rangoli: salt, grated vegetables, rice flour, rice soaked overnight and ground into a paste. Lots of variety from dry rangoli to liquid alpana from stencil-based ones to edible rangolis Well, I had a fine time capturing their concentration thru my lens although I think I distracted them a li’l bit in the process.

Please Note :

Flickr now has Pictures of the Independence Day Celebrations at my apartment.

Jihva for Ingredients or JFI was started 3 years ago by Indira of Mahanandi. She needs no introduction, she has inspired many bloggers like me to actually start a blog of our own. JFI was primarily started so foodies could share their culinary expertise on a monthly basis. Today it has become one of the most awaited events of the month. Thanks Indira, for providing us with this platform.

Thanks Mayank for automating the Round-up process.  As and when I received the entries I stored it in a specific format and just ran a python application to upload the entries as a batch process.  I will blog about it shortly, so we can all use the application whenever required.

Ok Friends, I am going on a 10 day break! Off to my Grandmother’s house in Dehra Dun. In case I have missed your entry out or made any other mistake please do mail me – romaspace(at)gmail(dot)com. I will fix the issue after the 12th of April, 2009.

I have received a whooping 90 entries for JFI-Wheat!  Thanks to all once again for for making this event a huge success. Presenting to you the Round up for JFI-Wheat April ’09

Biscuits n Gravy by A&N	Whole Wheat Focaccia by AJ
Quick Bread by Aparna	Cracked Wheat & Mint Salad by Archana
Dill and Dabeli masala Parathas by Asha	Oatmeal Wheat Bread by Divya Vikram
Eggless Savory cheese muffins by Cham	Chunky Veg and Pasta Soup by Deepika
Cucumber Pepper Idli by Deepika	Aloo Paratha by Divya Kudua
Dill Roti by DK	Barley Roti by DK
Sweet Potato Roti by DK	Oats Roti by DK
Persimmon walnut bread by DK	Wholegrain milk and cheese bread by DK
Wholemeal banana walnut muffins by DK	wheat berries by DK
Wholemeal Cranberry and Almond Bread by DK	Broken wheat bisibela bhath by EC
Eggless Orange Almond Cake by Gopi Shah	Godhumai Pradhaman by Jayasree
Whole Wheat Quick bread by Jayasree Satish	Creamy wheat berry and honey dessert by Katie Northcutt
Cracked Wheat Kesari by Lakshmi AP	Broken wheat with lentils & vegetables by Lakshmi
Wheat halwa by Madhu	Cracked-wheat Idlies by Madhu S
Aloo Paratha by Manjusha	Broken Wheat Idli by Meera
Atta Mathri by Meeta Madan	Paneer Wrap by Nalapaka
CrackedWheat and Rice Khichdi by Pallavi	Godhuma Rawa Halwa by Pavani
Cracked wheat upma by Phanita	Coriander Paratha by PJ
Wheat rava idli by PJ	Wheat-Jowar Salad by prathibha garre
Ukadpendi by Preeti	Gavhacha Cheek by Preeti
Kakdi Thalpith by Preeti Nilesh Biniwale	Besan N Methi Paratha by Priya Suresh
Soya Flour Paratha by Priya Suresh	Beets N Broken Wheat Kheer by Priya Suresh
Ragi N Wheat Coconut Noodles by Priya Suresh	Wheat Dosa with Sambar by Priya Sriram
Urad Kachodi by Priyanka	Chapathi by Priyanka Srivastava
crispy urad dal paratha by Priyanka Srivastava	Lilva Kachori by Purva Desai
Roasted Bell Pepper & Egg Tarts by Raaga	Cracked Wheat with Tomato by Rajee
Stuffed Paratha by Renuka	Cracked Wheat Pongal by Sangeetha Vasudevan
Vadai Curry & Chapathi by Sanghi	Wheat Dosai by Sanghi
http://swap-swapi.blogspot.com/2008/05/khaproili-wheat-flour-jaggary-pancakes.html by Sanika N	http://swap-swapi.blogspot.com/2008/12/simple-sultana-muffins.html by Sanika N
http://swap-swapi.blogspot.com/2008/12/atte-ka-sheera-wheatflour-sheera.html by Sanika N	http://swap-swapi.blogspot.com/2009/03/methi-poori.html by Sanika N
Dal Greens Wheat Dosa by shama nagarajan	Roomali Roti by Shama Nagarajan
Soft Pooris by Shoba Shrinivasan	Tortilla Rolls by Shree Rao
Wheat Dosa by Shri	Pumpkin Puris by Shubhada
Paneer-Matar Paratha by Sia	Vegan Banana Orange Nut Loaf by Soma Rathore
Whole wheat eggless dates cake by SpicesEtc	Wheat Naan & Matar Methi by Shree Rao
Wheat Puran Poli by Sukanya	Spice Pumpkin Chocolate Bread by Sweatha
Cucumber Wheat Dosa by Trupti Pawar	Wheat Dosa by Uma
Eggless Cardamom flavored Banana Oat Wheat bread by Usha	Rye Dosai / Crepes by Usha
Pesto Pizza with Oat Wheat Crust by Usha	Eggless date Wheat cake by Varuna Sai
Tofu Paratha and Sandwich by Vibaas	Potato Parathas with a Healthy Twist by Vibaas
Aloo Paratha by Vidhas	Poori Masala by Vidhas
Wheat Veg Mamoos by Vidhas	Broken Wheat Pulao by Vidhas
Chickpea Paratha by Vidhas	Paneer Paratha by Vidhas
Mix Vegetable paratha by Vidhas	Broken Wheat Porridge by Vidhas
Godhumai Ravai Pongal by Vidya	Eggless Bottlegourd Chocolate Cake by Madhuram
Chana dal and bulgur sundal by Madhuram	Bulgur Upma by Madhuram
Wheat flour laddus by Maya Shanbhag	Wheat Dosa by Pranella

Ugadi Special Lunch '09

Happy Ugadi to you all! Just finished a sumptuous lunch. I am so stuffed and sleepy. Although Ugadi is not a part of the festivals we celebrate we manage to have a feast just to catch up with the festive spirit around us. I saw lots of little girls today wearing their traditional langa-blouse making the environment so colorful. Mayank took half a day off so he could be with us for lunch. Our lunch comprised of :

Radish Sambar, Bhindi Sabzi, tamarind rice, kosumbari, papad, payasam and vobattu.

(vobattu was not made at home. the Hot Chips guy owed me some money from last month,  I settled it today. Rest of the food is home-made guys, I didnt make him work all the way)

You can check out last years Ugadi Special Lunch here : Ugadi Lunch ’08