We celebrated Raksha Bandhan today at my mom’s. It’s one of my favorite Indian holidays/traditions. It’s always meant a lot to me to have a little sister, someone’s gotta go fetch me things right? Hehe. No ok. Seriously, it’s so great to have her out here. There couldn’t be a more fitting holiday to occur right after Sameeta moved here. My whole family is out here in California now and this was just the first of many holidays together. And that’s def something worth celebrating.
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We’ve gone to the Pine Ridge Winery’s Annual Lobster Festival with some good friends for the last 3 years. It’s become an Inkahoots tradition now. A mighty delicious one at that.
We rented a house for the weekend with Chad & Megu and Blake & Jackie and Kristina in downtown Napa this year. It was pretty sweet with lots of room, a great yard, hot tub, and a gazebo where we spent way too much time annoying the neighbors I’m sure. Lots of corn hole, beer, wine, ya know.
Doug & Jasmine came over to pre-game at the house on Saturday. We all met up with Pammy & Nate at the winery for the main event.
Lobster Fest is pretty amazing because not only do you get lobster, some tasty appetizers and some amazing wine (and I dont even like wine). But you get to enjoy all this outside in one of Napa’s loveliest vineyards.Where it’s always sunny and pleasent.
Oh and ya, lobster! A whole lobster for yourself. Plus a bunch of veggies, shrimp, sausage and… Ya. It’s pretty ridiculous. The pictures don’t do it justice but the carnage speaks for itself. Yum.fff
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We just got back from a quick trip to Philly. It’s been a while since we were there. (Actually come to think of it, it was Puja’s first time in Philly.) We went there for Sameeta’s graduation but we were lucky enough to see some friends and family as well. It was a non stop, fun filled, jam packed trip.
Our first day in Philly, I met up with my old friend Leila and her 2 lil girls, Bella & Aliah, who are absolutely adorable. It had been years since Leila & I hung out and it was great to finally see each other again and meet her little girls. We caught up on things and discussed how the next time we meet it may be in Texas. Texas????
Then I took Puja to Jim’s on South Street so she could try her first Philly cheese steak. It was glorious. (My stomach is growling as I type this.)
While we were in the South Street area, we got to meet up with some more of our good friends, the Goodie family.
While visiting the Goodies, I finally got to give Domenica the shoes she gave me to customize. Almost 3 years ago. Better late than never right?
Day 2 was the big event: Sameeta’s graduation from Arcadia University. I can’t tell you how proud I am of my sister and all that she’s accomplished and more importantly, all the things she’s gonna be doing helping and teaching kids. It was great to actually be at one of her graduations.
We couldn’t find any flowers nearby to give her during the ceremony so we settled for a Pirate Pinata instead. Hehe. Ammamma really liked the pirate.
After the graduation party, Puja went to NYC to visit some friends and I went to Scranton/Abington to see the rest of my family. Not sure when I’ll be back there again so we picked up my cousins from school and got ‘Old Forge style’ pizza and Manning’s ice-cream. Then we went and visited our old house in Dalton.
And we celebrated my mom’s birthday while we were in Abington. She was so happy to celebrate it with a bunch of family & old friends.
Then it was back to Philly to do what I’ve been waiting since January to do: meet Aanvi. Sanjay & Neha’s baby girl is amazing. So beautiful with her head full of thick black hair and so wonderful with her constant happy disposition. She is always smiling and happy. But what do you expect with parents like Sanj & Neh?
It was a great trip. Great but def too short. We got to see and hang out with a lot of people (many of whom I didn’t get any pix of or even mention in this post) but there were still so many others we wanted to meet up with and I wish we coulda spent more time with the folks we did see. But that’s always the case isn’t it?
I’ve known Alok for ages. We grew up together in Abington. And now he and his family live in Napa, so we get to see them out here on the west coast. The Bose’s came over last weekend. It was pretty great and weird at the same time.
Alok & Maureen were here with their four awesome kids and my mom and Ammamma were here too. It was like all those Indian parties Alok & I used to get dragged to by our parents when we were young. But now we’re the old Indian uncles & aunties.
None of those boring, old Indian parties were like this though. We made our own pizzas, climbed trees, fed the ducks, played follow the leader. It was lots of fun.
Here’s a really tough game: Guess whose pile is whose.
I know these tacos look like poop on a plate. But let me just tell you this: these tacos made from the chicken chile verde Puja made earlier this week are the bomb.
Yes, they’re so good I just said ‘the bomb.’ Which I never say. They are so good that they make you forget how to speak and resort to stupid things like ‘the bomb’ to describe them.
But OMG! nomNomNomNOMNOMNOM!!!
Most people who know me know how much I love to eat. And more than how much I love to eat, how much I love to cook. One of my favorite hobbies is eating something delicious and then trying (sometimes for weeks) to recreate it. Okay, so maybe its more of an addiction than a hobby.
For a few years D has been pretty much obsessed with Trader Joe’s Chile Verde chicken burritos. I buy, oh, about 3 packs of them every week or two and they dissapear pretty much as quickly as I buy them.
So a couple weeks ago when we had the honor of tasting our friend Jose’s homemade tomatillo salsa I got inspired to try and make my own chicken chile verde. I spaced on taking pictures of the process of making the tomatillo salsa (which essentially consisted of me roasting tomatillos, onions, a LOT of garlic and some jalepenos for an hour) but managed to document the rest of the process.
I pressure cooked a pound and a half of chicken breasts with the tomatillo salso for almost 2 hours until it fell apart at touch.
The beauty of chilaquiles is that its basically a Mexican casserole. I love casseroles. I mean I really really love casseroles. I make mac and cheese at least a few times a month and its what D asks for as his birthday meal every year. As as I’m typing this I’m realizing that what would be incredibly delicious would be a chilaquiles mac and cheese. But I digress.
Chilaquiles essentially consists of fried tortilla wedges (I skipped a step and just used blue tortilla chips), some sort of salsa, meat (optional), and cheese baked. I assembled all those delicious ingredients and came up with this:
10 minutes at 450 yielded a delicious gooey mess that we enjoyed with tortilla chips, a crisp Sauvignon Blanc (for me) and iced tea (for D) while we watched Empire Records.
I didn’t exactly recreate D’s favorite chicken chile verde burritos but we found a delicious alternative and who says there won’t be a remake of the burritos with the leftovers later this week?!
Christina posted some pix from Lupiter on Facebook. I had to gank them for our own site. While I went snowboarding with Ryan & Steve, Puja went out with Courtney, Jose & Christina to play at Squaw. They seem to have fun there too.
What’s ‘Lupiter’ you ask? Well it’s a long silly story that involves Scattergories & a lot of tequila but let’s just say it’s a nickname for our friend Courtney’s cabin in Lake Tahoe. And she’s nice enough to invite us & some other friends to hang out with her in the snow.
This was our third year at Lupiter and while we were missing some people (Nic & Gloria) it was still a blast. Lots of board games, alcohol, beer, snacks and what not.
Chef mcgeerz had to lay down after all the chili he made & ate. We all had to actually.
The breathe right thugs.
I get to kiss the chef. And eat all the delicious pizzas she makes.
Ryan really loves his new game Wits & Wagers. Too bad he kept losing.
But he did win at the shotgun beer circle.
Hitting the slopes with Ryan & Steve.
It wasn’t too cold. But man, there sure was a lot of snow up on the mountain. And in my beard.
The Lupiter crew. Ryan, Courtney, Jose, D, Puja (Steve & Christina not pictured cause they were in a hurry to go home.)
Thanks again Court. We had a blast. Can’t wait till next year.
We had been wanting to redo our guest room for a while now. But there was never enough time and/or money to do all the things we wanted, so it just kinda stayed how it was since we moved in. It’s nice but it’s just white walls, white blinds, boring old furniture, etc. Just not our style. But since Valentine’s was a long weekend this year, we decided to redo the guest room instead of going away or giving gifts.
We tossed around a couple ideas. Some were cool. Most were not. We wanted something that both of us related to, liked and our guests could feel comfortable in. We finally agreed to make it an ‘Indian’ themed room. But we didn’t to do anything boring, cheesy or cliche. Puja also wanted to include her wedding mendhi into the design somehow which I thought would be a cool way to make the room interesting.
Puja got to work taping & spackling up the walls. She also picked the color scheme that worked great for the look we were going for. Mustard, brown & dark red. (I never thought I’d see the day where Puja wanted dark red for a room in our house but here we are.)
We got the base colors up pretty quickly. I spent the next couple hours waiting for the paint to dry and drawing up some ideas on how to incorporate the mendhi designs into our room. We tried a number of different ideas because we wanted the design to stand out but not be too busy or overpower the room. We settled on just using one of the peacocks from the mendhi as the center piece of the room.
After I had some ideas sketched out, the real fun began. I got to start drawing on the walls. The initial chalk sketch went up pretty easily.
But the paint did not want to cooperate with me. It was pretty thick and would not go on smoothly. It took waaay longer than anticipated to get the peacock outline on the wall. The ‘fun’ part of the remodel was starting to not be so fun. But after some sleep, some paint thinner & new brushes, things started to go a lot smoother.
The room isn’t completely finished yet (still needs some new curtains and some pictures on the walls) but we’re pretty happy with how the room turned out.
Let us know what you think. We can’t wait for you to visit.