Aluth Avurudu-2011

So how do you guys feel about Aluth Avurudu? Do you still follow the customs and traditions? Is it a special time for you?

Hey I'm still here, lurking!

It's me again! I'm sorry haven't been able to update my blog. But I still love my blog. I am currently working on some postings! See you guys soon!

Dietary changes in 2010 and revived interest in Cooking

During the latter part of the year 2010, I've done a lot of experimenting with new recipes and I've revived my interest in cooking again. The reason for this has been due to some health problems that I've had to deal with since April 2010. The doctor recommended that I should reduce my salt intake. I looked online for a diet that had reduced salt and found one from the Mayo Clinic.

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Using the Mayo Clinic guidelines I have made some major dietary changes. These included eating less salt, drinking more water and no longer being able to eat bananas and oranges due to their high potassium content. I have also reduced my carbohydrate intake which for me has been mainly rice. I now eat rice and vegetables in equal portions and I measure my food at every meal. I have been eating parboiled rice and brown rice instead of white rice. I have found how to cook brown rice successfully in the rice cooker. I have also been trying to eat some fruit each day. These have included apples, canteloupe and honeydew melon. Ideally I am supposed to eat a cup of fruit at each meal , something that is hard to do as I have always been lazy about eating fruits.

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I have also started eating raw foods from time to time. If I eat sandwiches I always use raw tomato, cucumber, bell peppers and red onion in my sandwiches. I also eat raw carrots. Sometimes its easier to just eat a sandwich than cook a curry! I have begun making fresh salads consisting of diced red onions, carrots,cucumber,green chillis and tomato seasoned with a little salt and pepper.

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According to recommendations from the Mayo Clinic, the overall changes in my diet were to incorporate more vegetables, fruit, beans, lentils and nuts and reduce my rice/ carb intake. The diet is mainly vegetarian but fish was to be eaten about 4 times per week.

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I actually began to use a cup to measure how much rice I ate and also how much vegetables I was eating. After making the changes to my diet it turned out that I was eating equal measures of rice and vegetables at each meal. I also increased the cups of water I was drinking per day and kept track of my meal times and how much fluids I was taking during the day. I have reduced my salt intake, I do not add more than a teaspoon of salt per pot of cooking. I have started squeezing fresh lime juice over each dish I make which makes up somewhat for the reduction in salt.This lead to many complaints from my Mother who said the food had no taste! But she also is now acknowledging that we had been eating too much salt in the past.

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Within a month or so of my new diet I started losing weight.It was quite amazing over a period of 6months I lost a total of 19pounds! I can now say I know the secret to weight loss. I want to lose another 10 pounds and I think I can do that if I incorporate exercise such as walking into my daily regimen.

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The Mayo Clinic had given sample meal plans and recipes for a heart healthy and reduced sodium diet. So I tried some of the recipes they had listed. Also at that time my Mother was away in Sri Lanka and I had to be responsible for all the cooking and packing my own lunches for work. A friend suggested I should try making my own sandwiches. So I went ahead and bought myself a ziploc container with compartments as a lunch box and took a ceramic bowl to work to heat up anything that needed heating like rice. In the past I had been putting plastic lunch boxes in the microwave to heat them. But I was now afraid of the plastics leaching into the food. I had never really experimented with making sandwiches. When I was a school girl my mother used to pack me sandwiches with jam and butter and later luncheon meats. However I no longer could use luncheon meats as I was watching my sodium. So instead I made healthy sandwiches such as tuna sandwich and Vege burger sandwiches. I had been taking the lazy way out by eating Vege delite sandwiches from Subway but that was costing me an arm and a leg each day.

For my own sandwiches I used a the same veges in the Subway Sandwiches: green capsicum, red onion, tomato, lettuce and cucumber. I used a non fat Mayonnaise for the sandwich as I was also watching calories. I should have included lettuce but I found it spoilt very quickly even when kept in the fridge so I omitted it from my sandwiches. I wanted to buy some cheese for the sandwiches that was both low in sodium and low in fat. I found a grated mozzarella cheese that was fat free however it had virtually no taste. The next best alternative was Swiss cheese which had 4g of cheese per slice and was low in sodium. In my new diet I was supposed to drink 3 cups of non fat milk or eat the dairy equivalent per day. I have been managing to drink about a cup of milk per day, better than nothing !

This diet also recommends eating fish 3 or 4 times per week, small fish like sardines are the best which I sometimes eat. I can no longer eat karawala (salted fish) due to its high sodium.

I also wanted to try making chicken salad sandwiches, so I bought chicken breast which I baked first in the oven and later made into chicken salad with mayonnaise and onion. For the bread I used a multi grain whole wheat bread.

This diet has also lead me to a love affair with beans and lentils. It has been exciting to cook a variety of beans/lentils such as kadala(garbanzo). black eyed beans, red kidney beans, whole green lentils and red lentils.I love my beans & lentils they have so much texture and taste wonderful as curries.

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I have also rediscovered pasta and have started cooking it from time to time. I always cook whole wheat pasta and never add salt to the cooking pot. Almost all of my pasta sauces have been vegetarian.

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Below are some of the new recipes I have tried so far.The majority of the recipes have been from the internet sometimes with modifications to the recipes according to my taste.If I had the time I would have loved to photograph the dishes and to do a separate posting for each of them along with the full recipe.


Wholewheat pasta with asparagus

Oven roasted red potatoes with asparagus

LowFat_Spaghetti_Carbonara

Date_walnut_cake

Cucumber raita

Black eyed peas with mushrooms

Chole Chickpea (kadala) curry

Jamaican-rice-and-peas

Wonton Samosas

Cucumber-sandwiches

Egg and Cress Sandwich

Vegan Steamed Wontons with Tofu, Bean sprouts & Baby bokchoy

Blueberry Muffins from a Betty Crocker Cake Mix

Rajma (Red Kidney bean curry)

Red Split Lentils With Cabbage

Green lentils with spinach and ginger

Aloo Methi (Potatoes with Fenugreek leaves)

On my to do list for the future are more pasta and bean dishes. My goal is to use up all the beans that are stored away in the house.

How I learnt to cook

When I was a student aged 12 in Class 7 back in 1979, we were sent for to a 'Technical school' the girls to learn cooking and house keeping and the boys to learn woodwork. The Class 8 Senior students also joined us for these classes and we all went to the 'Technical school' once a week in a bus. The school if I recall was located close to the Ocean in Laucala Bay, Suva, Fiji.

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I always enjoyed the cooking lessons, it was fun to watch the teacher demonstrate the recipe and for each of us to make it at our own desks. We all had to wear an apron to the class. My mother made me a calico apron with heart shaped pockets made out of a red gingham fabric and matching frilled eding on the bib. I thought the apron was so pretty and liked to wear it. We all wrote down the recipes in our exercise books.

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They also taught us how to clean up and do the washing. First, we had to fill a bowl with warm water and add detergent, then we soaked the dishes in the bowl and scrubbed them with a dishmop.After that we put the dishes on a dish rack and wiped them dry with a dishcloth.We were also taught how to scrub the table with a brush, soap and wipe it dry with a damp tea towel.

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Some of the foods we cooked were chocolate biscuits, cassava cake, rice/potato cakes and Yorkshire tea cake. The rice/potato cakes was made out of cooked potato and rice to which was added shredded carrots and onions and shaped into patties which were pan fried. The variety of Yorkshire tea cake we made was kind of a shortbread with strawberry jam and shredded coconut as a filling.

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This introduction into cooking at the 'Technical' whet my appetite for cooking and I soon began duplicating the recipes I had learnt at home and also trying out new recipes from cookbooks. My mother had bought a very nice British cookbook after arriving in Fiji with beautiful color pictures which I immeditately fell in love with. Some of my favorite foods that I tried out from it were Jam tarts, Asparagus Flan, Queen of puddings, Lemon Meringue pie and Custard Tarts.

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After I moved to Australia in 1985 at the age of 18, I bought some small recipe books from the Thrift shop and became interested in and made main course items such as: Fried Liver and onions,, Grilled Lamb chops, Roast Beef, Roast potato with Yorkshire puddings and Horseraddish Sauce and Southern Fried Chicken.

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In December 1985 I finished Year 12 and was awarded a T. E. (Tertiary Entrance ) score that enabled me to apply to Universities. I got many offers from out of State but I decided that Kedren Park Campus of the BCAE was best so I wouldn't have to relocate.

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I began my 3 year degree towards a Bachelor of Business (Accounting) in 1986 at Kedren Park. I was still living with my mom and brothers and I didn't have to worry about housekeeping or cooking. In 1987 my mother decided to take my youngest brother and go back and join my father who was working in the Marshall Islands. Before she left she gave me a tips on how to cook and do the banking and groceries. It was pretty easy to cook rice in the rice cooker and some curries on the stove. In fact I have always found that rice and curry is the easiest food for me to cook. I always needed to refer to recipe books whenever I cooked any other kinds of foods.

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I was nostalgic to try out some very traditional Sri Lankan recipes. My sources of recipes for Sri Lankan food that I had never cooked before were Charmaine Solomon's The Complete Asian Cook Book, Chandra Dissanayake's Ceylon Cookery and the Ceylon Daily News Cook book by Hilda Deutrom. All 3 books were owned by my mother, the Ceylon Daily News cook book being particularly ancient with a green cloth cover. I must mention here that Charmaine Solomon's cook book was a coffee table edition and had the most beautiful pictures that made you immediately want to try out the recipes.

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Luckily, there were a lot of Vietnamese shops close to where we lived at Hill End, Brisbane. It was a walk of about 20 minutes down to West End which was a small shopping area. I could also take the bus, but I preferred to walk there. Coming back my load would be so heavy.

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Most of the shops in West End were owned by the Greek community with a new influx of Vietnamese shop owners just coming in. The Greek owned vegetable shop had thampala (amaranth) leaves, which I used to buy. I loved my mallung (greens). At the Vietnemese shops I found kankung, brinjals, thampala (amaranth) and yams and I was able to cook those just like back in Sri Lanka. There was a travelling Sri Lankan salesman who used to come about once in 3mths in his van with Sri Lankan groceries. I always bought from him Sri Lankan spices, karawala ( dried fish), hal masso (sprats), canned foods such as kos ata (jack fruit seeds), breadfruit and delicacies like muscat.

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For my main supermarket groceries I had to walk all the way to the end of West End to Jack the Slasher supermarket, I made the trip every two weeks. Amongst other things I would buy things like frozen meals of turkey and roast beef and apple pie. My day to day cooking was Sri Lankan food which I was good at doing. Now and then I would get a craving for Aussie food and when the craving hit I would get out the frozen dinners and savor them while watching tv.

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I also used to buy frozen stewing hens at the supermarket. I liked to make chicken curry with the tough birds. Since the meat was so lean and muscular the meat was chewy but I preferred my chicken chewy rather than soft. However, my brother always complained about the meat being chewy.

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I bought a whole box of groceries at Jack the Slasher and also a box of fruits and vegetables at the green grocer next door. Both places would deliver the groceries to my door, which made it very convenient.

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SBS TV was a special TV channel in Australia that showed programmes from all over the world and in many languages with subtitles when needed. I was able to see a Sri Lankan Cookery programme conducted by Felicia Wakwella Sorenson brodcast from Hongkong. She made some of the staples of Sri Lankan cookery such as Chicken curry, prawn curry and Cabbage mallung. I was so happy to see Sri Lankan cooking on TV and wrote down all her recipes and tried them out with delicious results.

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In addition to Sri Lankan cooking I also ventured into Indian cooking and my main source for my recipes was the cooking programme by Madhur Jaffrey running on SBS TV at the time. I used to record her programs on the VCR and then write down all the recipes I liked. But soon I bought her cookbook which was part of the TV series and it had the most delectable pictures to accompany her recipes. In no time at all I was making samosas with peas and potato, parathas, and lamb with turnips. I also bought Doris Ady's Asian cookery book. She was a lady of Sri Lankan origin who had immigrated to Australia.From her book I was able to make gulab jamun which was one of my favorite Indian sweets.

Living away from Sri Lanka since I was a young girl of ten, I was always nostalgic for things Sri Lankan and eating our familiar native foods was a nice way to constantly reconnect with the motherland.

The Passing of my Father

(I wrote most of this blog posting in June 2009 after my father died. It is now October 2011, over two years since he passed away. The feelings of hopelessness have now gone away and I have now come to accept the fact that he is now gone.However, whenever I see something that reminds me of my father, like his books, his glasses or his belt, I feel a renowned feeling of sadness about his passing.I used to dream about him a lot in the first few months after he died, he was very much alive in those dreams.Then  I used to wake up and I would realize that it was only a dream and that he was really gone. I still see him in my dreams sometimes and it's as if he was still alive.)

I have  not thought about death so much in my whole life until during the past month we lost our father. Up until now I had never experienced the consequences of death so closely since nobody in my immediate family had passed on before.

My father's passing has had a profound impact on me. It has made me realize how final death is. How my father can never come back to us in this lifetime and we can never turn the clock back or do things a different way. Even in our next births even if we do meet we will be different people and this present life is gone forever. Somehow I can't seem to accept the fact that my father can no longer see us from where he is at now and that he will have no memory of us in his next birth. No matter how much we think of him he will not know how much we miss him and wish that we could turn back the clock. In a way it's good that he is free from the burden of worrying about how we are doing. It's only us that are left behind that are left to cope with the loss of losing a loved one.

Now with the loss of my father, I have come to realize how fragile human life is , it's like a candle flame that maybe extinguished at any moment. I have been searching for articles on how to cope with the loss of a parent and how to cope with death. In my search I found that the Buddha had asked his disciples how often one needs to contemplate dying. They had given various answers, the correct answer being that one needs to think about death on every inhalation and expiration. Only if the in breath comes in do we live, that's how close to death we all are. That is such a remarkable fact that we never think about. It makes sense now why the Anapanasati meditation (concentration on in and out breath) is the most basic meditation used by Buddhists.

While we are alive we never think about death, the mention of death instills fear in us so we avoid thinking about it as much as we can. But since death is an inevitable fact of life we need to contemplate our own impending demise and those of our loved ones and friends.

I see my self going back over the last time I saw my father and even back to the last month of his life. I have this nagging feeling of sadness and guilt within me, for not seeing that he was not well and under a lot of stress. I keep thinking what if I had paid more attention to his health would he still be alive today? I feel like I didn't do enough to help him during his last year in life. He worked so tirelessly this past year and that was because he wanted to pay back some loans that he had taken out from banks in Sri Lanka. If I had known that his health was at such a low state I would have tried to help him more..But for sure none of us had any clue including my father himself. I feel looking back that he was under a lot of stress but I was too tied up in my own problems to tell him to slow down and take things easier.He had just come back to Sri Lanka to take care of some family property matters there . And once he was back in the States his plan was to take it easier job wise. He did complain that he was having some body ailments in the past month but none of us in the family took it to be anything serious and neither did he. We suggested to him that he should see the doctor about it but he didn't think it was important enough to see the doctor about. My father was very independent and therefore he always saw the doctor on his own.So it never occurred to us to take him to the doctor.

When I think back upon how hard he had been working and the fact that we didn't realize it I feel very sad. If I was in a better place myself mentally perhaps I would have seen it, but I was far more worried about my self that I had no time to think about how my father was. I think that is our bad karma that we lost him so soon he was not yet seventy. I see his own brothers and sisters who are a lot older who are still alive and that makes me sad too, I feel he died too young. I feel somehow that he sacrificed his own life because he was so unselfish. He put his family welfare first and never gave much thought to checking up on his own health. I also feel like he didn't want to face the fact that those ailments he was experiencing in the last month were anything serious,

My father was such a devoted family man and he put the needs and wants of his family first before his own. Now that I am an adult myself and when I reflect on the last year of his life I can truly see this to be true. I feel that he must be born into a better life on those merits alone.

My father in Fiji- around 1980  (double click to enlarge photo)

 

 

My father (holding my brother)  and me sitting at a fountain at UCLA, CA, USA- around 1969

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My father  while staying at a friend's house in Los Angeles, CA in 1974 when he was  finishing his PhD at UCLA.  (double click to enlarge photo)

What's been happening in my life while I've been away from my blog...

It's good to be back at my blog. I have been caught up with life that I haven't had the time to sit down and pen my thoughts in my blog. But I don't want to give up on my blog. It is part of me, it is an outlet of expression and a source of satisfaction for me.

In the past few months, I had a work assignment of a few months duration. It has been good to get out of the house like normal people every day. I was back to the early morning rises, rushing to catch the Commuter Express which would take me to the bustling financial district of Downtown Los Angeles. I was always a few minutes late which meant that I had to run/walk/run in order to make sure to catch the Commuter Express bus which only came every half hour. Somehow I always managed to get to the bus stop before the bus arrived. It was partly thanks to my trusty old walking shoes and partly due to my determination to catch that bus.

The office was an exciting place mainly due to the people who worked there. The work in itself was not too difficult once I became familiar with my daily tasks. The duties of my job brought me in contact with every member of the department on a daily basis. There were certain people that I liked to see more than others. I looked forward for an excuse to talk to some people. Actually there was one person in particular that I liked to talk to. Incidentally he was a man, you could say he was my secret crush. I actually didn't notice him so much at first.

Then all of a sudden it hit me. It happened because one day he came over to my cubicle to ask me a question about work and then and he asked me where I was from. I said I'm from Sri Lanka and then we had a long chat about Sri Lanka, about it's languages, races and religion. He is East Asian and he said he was raised as a Christian but his ancestors had been Buddhist. As we talked I began to like him more and more and I hoped he liked me the same way.

Anyway to cut a long story short I used to see him now and then at various places at work i.e. in the lunch room, break room or at his desk for work related matters. Each time I saw him we used to talk, it was easy to talk to him as he was so outgoing. I am a shy person but with an outgoing person I find it easy to talk. Everytime we talked I kept wondering 'does he like me?'

There was no doubt that I liked him and I wanted him to like me as more than a friend. However, with him the reason that he talked to me was I think, due to his personality, he was a naturally friendly person and liked to talk. When I went to his desk to give him a document he used to greet me smilingly and ask how I was, how my work was , how my day was. Each time, I was very happy to talk to him, be in his company and share some conversation. I wanted to go upto his desk just to say hi but refrained from doing so as I didn't want people to think that I was just going there to talk to him.

Then finally I knew my time there was ending and in the final two weeks I used to go upto talk to him just for the sake of talking. I no longer cared what people thought as I would not be there much longer. I told him that I would be leaving and he began to discuss with me what my plans were next in my career path and give me some advise. I did invite him out for lunch just before I left and he took me to a nice restaurant, but he didn't try to learn more about me all he did was give me more advise on my next career move. During our prior conversations, he had asked me if I was single or married and I had told him I was single. He had also told me that he was single. I really wanted to ask him what type of woman he was looking for. But I felt awkward and afraid of what he might think if I asked him that question. Our lunch was so nice, it felt so special to share his company but the time was too short.

I have his contact number and email and he has mine. In fact we spoke once after I left as he wanted to see how I was doing. But, I feel he only likes me as a friend and he enjoyed our conversations but that was that. In anycase I am glad to have met him, I enjoyed our moments together as friends although I wished for more. I feel like I met a good person. When you meet good people that you like, it inspires you also to emulate them and try to improve your own life. He is a member of a strict Christian denomination whose Church he recommended that I attend not only for the religon but also for fellowship with good people. Although I am interested in learning about other faiths, at this stage in my life I have come to a point in my beliefs where I feel like I cannot abandon Buddhism for another faith.

I want to go and meet him again for a lunch in the future and I will try my best to ask him what he wants in his mate, so at least I have an idea whether or not I meet his ideal.

I'm sorry I have been away from my blog

Hello, how is everyone out there? I am sorry I still haven't had the time to do a proper blog posting. I really hope to do a post during August. Hope everyone is well and happy!