Neevs Chocolate Straw Berry , not Chocolate Strawberry :-)

 Neevs fun Chocolate Straw Berry

...its not a Chocolate Strawberry :-)

Home Made Pizza (credits to Foods that Cure Disease - Amazon prime/YouTube video)

We usually have a pizza craving every weekend, the craving can hit us either on a Friday or a Saturday night when we usually Netflix and Chill as a family.

Our usual orders are from either Papa Johns, or Dominos, and not the local Pizza place like most others opt for. Neev our son has suddenly taken a detour to the world of pizzas from his busy broccoli streets :-)

During lockdown in early March 2020, outside Pizzas were a total "No" for sometime, thats when we put our baker hats on and decided to take the plunge into the World of Baking.

The below pizza recipe is considered very healthy and it featured in the Foods that Cure Disease documentary on Amazon Prime (now available on YouTube). Off-late the pandemic has made us switch to choices we would have not otherwise made.
....Now take a seat and enjoy the pizza

Oven Baked, Hand Tossed Pizza

What you need?

• 2 1/2 cups of All Purpose Flour
• 1 1/2 tsp of Yeast
• 2 tsp of Nutritional Yeast
• 1 tsp Sugar
• 1 tsp Salt
• 1 tsp Garlic powder
• 3 Cups of Water
• enough to deep dish the pizza Shredded Cheddar Cheese or any Cheese of your choice
• 1/2 cup Alfredo Sauce or Tomato Sauce or Pizza Sauce
• Toppings of your choice
• My funny son Neev :-) by your side, cracking his silly jokes

Process

a) Preparation of the Pizza Base

(1) Heat the water in a Cup to 100 Degrees, mix the yeast into it with the Sugar & set aside for 10-12 min.

(2) In a Bowl mix the Flour with the Salt, Nutritional Yeast, Garlic Powder.

(3) After 10 min have passed, mix the Yeast water mix into the Flour mix and knead until you get a round ball of Dough

(4) Once you finish Kneading the Dough, cover it and rest it for 15-20 min.

b) Setting up the Pizza for the bake

(1) Roll the pizza Dough on a parchment paper on a round pizza base, depending on how thick you want your crust. We prefer between the medium and the thin crust.

(2) First take a fork and poke on the pizza crust so that it avoids bubble formation during baking

3) Spread Shredded Cheese on the base and then arrange the toppings in a way it intrigues you :-).

....and finally -> Baking

c) Baking

1) pre-heat the oven to 475 Degrees

2) Cook the pizza in the oven at 475 Degrees for 20-25 min

....and lastly serve with love
We have been quite sustainably enjoying this pizza, let me be very honest, it can never taste as good as the store ones, but it will definately smell, taste more fresher than the store ones and more importantly you can "BAKE IT TO A HEALTHY PERFECTION THAT FITS YOUR NEED"

Hope you enjoyed this recipe and below are some of the magical moments from our Pizza baking rituals from March 2020 up until last week April 2021

Journal Restart with my son

Its been a while since I blogged on the personal page, my son Neev has started his own blog today and its in Wix.com without a domain, we had to take it down since he has not reached the legal age of posting content online, so he will be a guest blogger on daddy's profile. He induced this new energy back in me with his first post that i will cross reference somewhere on my trackbacks.

Today is Sunday and we are both doing a small fun project on the Diary of the Wimpy Kid. Some doodling some rough art a small cursive article from both Neev and me.

I'm making a doodle of Greg Heffley from the cover of the title Old School that he can use as a book mark for his reads going forward.

Both of us saw the movie together this weekend called "Rodrick Rules" and I loved it. Neev also did some of his own doodling of the school characters that hang around with Greg Heffley, I loved his first stab at it. I want to keep this blog visual and show you the cover flow of today's events in Pictionary.

I really love to thank Neev for getting me re-Started on blogging on my personal blog that was lying rusted while I was Scraping more graffiti on my professional blog.

The FedEx feel good factor #Littlethingsthatmatter

This blog is about barritoning the love for my FedEx experience. Whenever I visit a FedEx office i am always thinking should I have been a grad student when I was doing my Supply Chain operations case study, this place was like mine of information for someone like me that loved to do some research around the way FedEx was crafted. Someone's hobby project becoming one of the most prestigious brand in the Logistics business, people talk about the Supply Chain execution process, they live it in flesh. 

They are a tad bit expensive when it comes to choosing them over the other cheaper options, but I would never go elsewhere to drop ship something, as I reckon that putting a shipment with FedEx is definitely getting me sound sleep and my package in safe hands

Its my suggestion to folks that are looking to specialize in their MBA in the operations front to look for any project that is thrown or made available from FedEx, it can supersede any business case thats on the lookout for challenging Supply Chain projects, not to forget that the Dabbawalas story is a rather more inspiring one to quality as the best supply chain in-flesh example around, but FedEx is my bet, if I ever get to go back to school again and do some fancy project I'll choose FedEx or the DHL story

Cast away survival mocked to a FedEx real life story is a remember forever....Wilson...am sorry !!!!!

FedEx Office my last minute print and ship rescue bot...I can keep flaunting with no end....That being said, what makes me so inclined towards FedEx that I want to pen down more than 2000 words in their favor....it's the simple FedEx experience that most of you have lived in their tag line The World On Time

We are not alone, soon we will be visited again: #AliensExist

I was always fascinated about aliens & it goes without saying that we are not alone, it definitely did not take mankind all the trouble to develop all the technology that was provided to us by the folks that came from billions of light years from outer space...maybe through that wormhole. Most movies give a lame representation... Something like this

some people even laugh at me when i talk about stuff like wormholes, space fabric, time travel, time machine and all the plethora of things that are in a dimension that the human eye cannot see and the mind cannot bend to believe.

Think about the fact that  science can be applied and implied enough to the amount you let your mind accept it.

If I were to put you to sleep in the 18th century and woke you up when Steve Jobs released the facetime app on the iPhone, the moment you saw that you can talk with someone somewhere seeing them in the face and at the same time without wire or a camera blah blah technology that you can touch and feel..

data communicated via waves we cannot see, that person would have thought this is sci fi, alien shit....
Seeing is believing for a human ....and not seeing and believing is Alien, that's the thin line difference, why they travelled and came to us, than us finding them in the cosmos..

Where do you think SciFi enthusiasts get their ideas from, its obviously AncientAlien technology that they have read somewhere or tried to digest, believe and then chatter about
Its so difficult to even build a small spaceship structure for a Set, that we have to go and rely on Digital tools to come up with the structure, think about the technology that went into making these things that were used to fly in and out into our atmosphere...I want to leave you with some graphics that will bend your imagination to a dimension you must let your imaginations travel....

Examples

Ramayana: Remember Ravana abducting Seetha nd flying over the Indian ocean from India to Srilanka, i dont thinkt that was Lankan Airlines or some other Airline company extending services at that point, it was the science of  something called Vimanika shastra that our ancient pilots used

Vimanika shastra states ...mercury was the fuel that a specific wave length of the brain could control and moderate.... If you don't have the appetite to digest this ...go back to my Face time in the 18th century example..

Christopher Nolan's Interstellar concepts of embracing the facts around wormholes, space time and fabric equations

Area 51 : they say this is where THEY landed first and until date we experiment in encapsulation..in Nevada desert blurred on Google Mapz

"Contact" another awesome movie where we are constantly trying not to ignore any signal that's trying to make a reconnect with the human race.

StarTrek, Ancient Aliens, UFOs, these are all not myths just because you can't see another dimension being human
Can you see bacteria with your naked eye? You can't right
If your shades had Hubble capability you'd be star and cosmos gazing... So stop speculation.... Give your imagination an opportunity to travel beyond the 
edge of space...you'd experience what I am :)
.....keep reading...keep an eye out in the sky looking for them just like Jodie Foster did ...there will be CONTACT sooner or later

Downtown or Downgrade?

When you wear that 400$ Downtown overcoat or jacket and walk up the streets of Manhattan ....a job that everyone dreams of, what are the strings attached to that ? Is it really that lucrative like the way it really sounds or is there a hidden caveat.

I can vouch for both the sides of the discussion not just because this is my content or playing devils advocate

One needs to understand the culture shift in mindset to analyze what really happens

The suburb story and the strong downtown comparison

You wake up at ease 

Walk upto your patio and slide the rails and sip a cup of beverage and look at gods creatures that trail 

You take a long walk upto your car parking spot and have a good feeling when you turn on the ignition and drive away

You park in a wide open parking lot for free ... I mean free !!!

Your kid gets a feeling that life is more than just concrete structures fancy mentioned as the stare able skyline.... Really !!!!

Though it wasn't a job on the Wall Street it still had solace and the word piece stuck to it

With downtown you just coin the word space crunch , shoulder to shoulder traffic, long wait queues to grab a decent bite and adding to that pay twice as more rent to make a living on the harbor or sometimes no harbor facing Highrise

It's upgrading status quo on the job or may be fancy footprints of Wall Street for me .....but the truth of the pudding is there starring at your tough decision

However over a period of time you get used to rearranging your life the fast paced time .....but how long

Life's decisions of sustaining such an arrangement of a MilkRun downtown life makes you insensitive to everything else but time ...TIME 

All you care is run take the train , speed walk and go gate crash your own house to catch up on an early dinner and early to bed

Sometimes feel like Akshay Kumars life :)

So Downtown or downgrade is a perception and not something that's true for everyone 

.....I hear ducks quacking on my patio ...Shit !!!! Am still dreaming

2014 : For Health it is

The physical and the blood tests did not reveal the great set of results that I always expected them to... 

Reason being : "everyone in India is a doctor and all time is tea time " most of us think that if we don't huff and puff when we do chore cardio , the heart is in good shape and all the other suspects are doing a great job keeping you firm on the feet.

Then came the most sarcastic but dark humor statement from the primary care physician "son: looks like you are running into your grave, with those sneakers on" you better watch it...else can get you really fast, I mean 30 is the new 40 in our times" 

I also asked the Doc, why do I feel tired ...though the amount that I walk and chore all day long has to spit the happy hormone anyways...

He says " think of yourself carrying a backpack of 30 pounds doing your routines, think of getting that back pack off yourself and do it again, you'd feel on cloud 9. I hope I answered your melodramatic doubts...now kill the jokes and come back for the next bio physical shedding at least 5 pounds "

We'll ....the wife is looking even more aggressive after the doctors visit.... I can already see the sprouts and veggies in her eyes :) what we far people call the #JLo diet :)....if you give a cow that diet, it would promise an extra 2 liters of milk/day :)

This info graphic (courtesy some great cartoonist who cares the obese on the www) popped my mind for sure even when the Dressed Angel was meaning serious business...also my friend Kay aka Kaustubh mujumdar once told me that if you are in the US there is only a 6-7% chance that you might not make it as long as you are able to dial 911  :-)

To add to that it's pretty obvious messaging from the almighty to mankind that everything that god has created and made tasty is blessed proportionately with Calories....phew...for a foodie like me that loves to cook and eat ...it's a tough CATCH 22

WELL .....in short

-Health is the only priority for 2014

- no bacon for me

- no Mc Donald's 

- no BeerZ

Image courtesy : http://wakeup-world.com/2011/11/18/12-top-nutrients-for-a-healthy-heart/

....however suggestions are always welcome

Can already feel the first 2 packs showing up 4 more to go:-)

Happy HolidayZ and hereZ wishing all a Healthy 2014

The 3 Week Consulting gig embeds the Corporate Iron Chef contest, great friends + client accolades

..... I was blessed anyways with great parents, family, adding on ....Amazing eye for detail / crafty / talented wife Mrs Latha Chakraborthy aka Latsy who made my life complete by bringing naughty Rock Hairdo Neev and elevated me to an all new level up on the face of the earth

.... In addition after I quit Infosys in 2010 I followed my boss over to Cognizant further blessed w/ a long term project for almost 4 years getting so attached to Washington DC and Gaithersburg Maryland .... Extremely seldom in the consulting world where my close pal Mitesh hopped 3 successful gigs and 3 locations ever since he landed in the US

I was on bench for 8 weeks once my project ended ....tried like crazy to hold myself down in DC but the ask here is GC or the Citizenship .....bad place for H1B puppies :).....tried to fit in a start up but the time in hand and the situation for survival deemed tyranny....

The Fkn Government shutdown screwed me further as my LCA with Bloomberg was in the hands of Obama and the FedZ ...bench situation pushing me to a real time consulting gig that I love but tried to avoid....hopping MD-WhitePlains NY- St Louis-MD for 3 weeks terminal to terminal

My Boss Kaustubh knew what I was signing up for and all the hush that will come my way when I wipe the slate clean with a near death like experience when I abruptly exit the project....but staying closer and with the family was period ....

Enjoyed the gig, made great friends Kirk , Sandeep Jain & Marcelo ...Won the Corporate Iron Chef Contest with Marcelo on my team making the Steak and Me doing the Pasta and the Desi Style Chicken cutlets ....all this in record 30-45 min serving 20+ people

Graphic above is a fond memory

Though my client boss Meghna was upset with my exit...she left me with these lines that made me proud of being able to Vest trust and roadmap and deliver a hybrid future state solution encompassing the best from the SAP and the Ariba world

Clients parting email

But I am here now and that's what's important ...mixed feelings of working in Downtown Manhattan NYC....always loved working countryside but I guess NY bolsters and fast paces you

...more on NYC life and Bloomberg jumpstart in my next post

Happy New Year 2014 folks...be safe...be healthy

Bengali Mutton curry - ready for it anytime aka Mangsho Jhol

Have cooked this at ease

Have cooked it for my pregnant wife when her hormones called for this ....every Sunday 

....cooked on demand for other people ...bachelor parties... A perfect act almost every time with every target audience

The recipe is easy..but the patience and the slow cooking is the secret

....every Bengali family has this delicacy almost every Sunday and I remember running over to Maa from the time since I was 5 until 25 and more to get the first grabs

So today with a lot of public demand putting out my version of the Bengali Mangsho jhol aka Mutton curry or stew

Goes with Rice, dosa, appam  , idli, Phulkas and even parantha

Use lamb when no goats are on vicinity

For 2-3 pounds of mutton

Ingredients that go into the mixi raw

RAW Mixture - for Mixi

1 big onion

2 tsp coriander seeds or coriander powder

2 big garlic peeled

one small piece ginger

8 green chillies

1 tsp turmeric powder

2 tsp of pepper

2 big tomatoes

2 Cloves

2 sticks of cinnamon or Chaka 

For Sauté 

3 cardamoms

3 tej patta

1/2 onion finely chopped

Process

1) Wash the mutton with turmeric and salt thoroughly

2) Put the mutton and 1 tsp of turmeric in the cooker with 5 whistles

3) let it cool down to room temperature, separate the mutton stew from cooker

4) Grind the RAW mixture in the mixi and keep it ready

5) Heat the cooking pan and 5 tsp of oil, put the tej patta, cardamoms and finely chopped onion and fry until onions lightly brown

6) Put the cooker mutton without the mutton stew water, strain the water, fry the mutton with the tej patta, onion and cardamoms for 5-7 min

7) Put the mixi raw paste into this and fry thoroughly for 8-10 min

6) Put the mutton stew water into this mixture, put an additional 2 tsp coriander powder, fresh coriander and one potato and 1 tomato sliced into the gravy

7) Cook in low flame until the entire curry turns into red / brown, in low flame for 45 min covering the cooking pan

8) Put some fresh coriander on top before serving

All the best, burppppp....ensure to get a good evening walk or couple Rantac  pills to prepare you for the next meal...this is what most Bongs do :)

Starbucks and I - a relationship

Life is about little experiences with the smallest of all things, for me its food, music, Booz, my iOS devices and to fuel them -> COFFFEE 
though I got cursed a zillion times for taking an apartment that faced the street, I still absorbed it for the love of the look of the Starbucks logo as soon as I rolled-up the blinds.


Step 1: Take the Stairs
Step 2: Cross the street
Step 3: Order the fresh brew: mah pick was the "Venti Fresh Ground Bold black coffee"

PIck the "Bold Pick of the day" 

Step 4: Turn on the Macintosh and do your stuff

Approx 3$ for a Venti and 2 bucks for the Grande...never got the Tall, never satisfied with the Tall Bold.

...jump start the day with this, until you had to drag that forced bachelorhood arse back to the corporate world.

I call this love at first brew :)

Starbucks: Something that has become a part of me, a relationship with caffeine from the hills of columbia, fresh ground coffee, or as we call it kaapi.visit visit http://www.starbucks.com/

I got all the possible merchandise from the shelf, all un-accounted from Latsy.
the best pick of the merchandise was the signature series crucible cup, got 2, broke 1 and was able to retain 1 that i use until now when am drafting this post, sipping a non-Starbucks beverage out of it

3 things that I love and would remember of Starbucks denting my life in may ways:

1) The Brand, the vibe about sitting inside the Starbucks Coffee Shop is like a stress buster for me
2) Have written the best of the blogs and waited in the streets of NewYork / Targets with a Starbucks Cafe embed... waiting for Latha to show-up to take the metro or even drive back from New Jersey to Maryland.
3) Never miss a chance, if I have to step in there time and again...Got my self a card and refill that time to time.

Goes without saying that I can flaunt Starbucks over and over and over again, just as I upsell-cross sell every iOS device and its creator.
..Just as I loved the CAFE COFFEE DAY (CCD) back home..am sure that the transition from Starbucks back to CCD would be seamless..

Here's a look at the Merchandise and my Starbucks card's, I have a Twilight retreat and also a Starbucks RED CARD that helps do that little bit for society.

Also a little towards paying it forward to the society with the Starbucks RED CARD

Every time you pay with your (STARBUCKS)^RED Card*, we make a contribution to the Global Fund to help people living with HIV/AIDS in Africa. With your help, we’ve already generated contributions equaling more than 18 million daily doses of medicine. 

I think...u got the reason, why I call this a RELATIONSHIP and not mere COFFEE

Am back: after a paradigm shift :)

After a long break, am opening my blog doors again for my much awaited followers. Its been a while, life was tipsy for sometime with a lot of ups and downs, pre-pregnancy -> Neev -> Post pregnancy, not me but the better half...but in the shades of the USA, it doesn't matter who is pregnant, its a mutual chase to be there, being your own relative 360 degrees. 

But yeah, keeping that aside, the Facebook time-line was the typical broadcast of the events that clustered 2011 and 2012 until now.
Food, Shopping, BooZ, recipe's, recommendations from folks on Camera's, Camcorders and what not, it was fun.

...I have been letting it out on Facebook many times that I'd restart blogging, as I love to do it, but kept procrastinating..
...

What's going to be the fun part?

1) Recipes from "Joyee's Kitchen: Cooking an F5 on your brain"
2) Chatter about the Buzz, sarcasm in the metro-sexual life
3) Experiments with the Nikon DSLR - the bumpy ride
4) Trivia from the rock'n roll gods of the 70's, 80's and the 90's
5) Bitching generally about the dark side of consulting- this one is to watch out for
....and more jamming of the Heavy Riffs

So watch out for grafitti that flavors this poster and keep rocking and smilin...u need that the most and even if green tea sucks, shove it down that throat :)
...cheers and join the Buzz'n chatter