Janaki's Blog

“Do you know Vineet Bhatia is opening his restaurant in Riyadh?” Mom asked.  I was standing with her in the kitchen. “He is opening ‘ Maharaja ’ in September. It is beside Chilis.”  “Who is Vineet Bhatia?” I asked. “He is a famous chef of India. His cookery show comes on Travel and Living channel.” Mom loves watching Travel and Living.  They show a variety of places, steaks, ice-creams, sandwiches etc. But she does not want to experiment any type of different food. I would have protested against that but then I realized I probably would lose my love for those foods ;-)  Google is going to release self driving cars . Dad showed me this on Larry Page’s Google+. The bright side is that it would be really useful for old people and kids. The day when there will be only self-driving cars will be a great day. We will just have to ask parent’s permission and then we can go by ourselves to Baskin Robbins for ice-cream, or to a friend’s house or to the park or anything. An

Since today is the weekend, we have a couple of restaurants to try out in our mind and one of them is the ‘Red Lobster’. I don’t know if it’s good or not but my father had his heart set on eating big, fat lobsters so he seems very enthusiastic on going there. You see, Dad would be non- vegetarian the first 6 months and be vegetarian the other 6 months. Which is also one of the reasons I call him an omnivore. He loves eating salads a lot. But, in the very rare times we would buy ice-cream or if I would be having any fruit, he would request for a ‘small bite’, but by the time the ‘small bite’ would be taken, the fruit would not be seen. I saw the movie ‘Frozen’ a few days back and I really liked it. My favorite character was definitely Anna, and she looked very cute when she was young. There is a metro coming in Kochi, so according to the video, it is fun, you can save 20 to 50 per cent of your normal travelling time and more. The metro's starting point is at Pet

I can’t believe this! Only 9 days left for my vacation to end. I am so angry! I don’t know why the days of vacation have to whiz by and the school days go so, so slowly. My family loves trying out various restaurants, so just yesterday, we went to Backyard Grill because whenever we passed it, we would say ‘Hey! Why haven’t we tried that out yet?!’ When we entered the restaurant, we felt the ambiance was not as good as compared with Apple Bees and Steak House. It seemed a little dull. There weren’t many options in desserts either. But the food was just great. I had a Silverado burger, and I could not stop eating the minute I took the first bite. I would have chewed my fingers too if I hadn’t got a grip on myself. My Mom was going to order chicken teriyaki, but it hit her that whenever we would order the chicken teriyaki, it would always be sweet. We aren’t exactly fans of sweet chicken so she skipped it and ordered a sizzling fajita combo meal. We checked

SLURP! SLURP! These were the noises my Mom’s straw was making as she drank the ‘Ultimate Gold Medalist’ that my Dad had ordered for himself. The cocktail had looked very nice and my Mom just did not seem able to tear her eyes from it, even though I waved my hand in front of her eyes. She saw right through it as if it was invisible. Apparently, my mother had fallen in love with that special cocktail.    I did not see anything too special about it since it looked like a regular cocktail. But when I had a sip, my heart melted for it, and I was drinking just as merrily. We were at the restaurant T.G.I. Friday’s . When we went to London, we had tried out this restaurant with uncle Sujesh and we had instantly liked it. We got the main course we had ordered and wow, were it delicious. My Garlic chicken pasta magically disappeared after a few minutes. As the cocktail was originally for Dad, me and Mom ordered a ‘Friday’s Sundae.’ The name was kind of funny, because it ca

Just yesterday we had our class party. Officially we have completed 7 th grade and on our way to 8 th . The results were distributed. You could judge everyone’s marks by their faces. Some were looking at the ceiling predicting their situation when they got home.  So to stop thinking about the sadness and suffering we were going to endure, we tried to focus on the food. But there were a few problems as well. When Anne opened the lids of the ice-cream cans, we found out that the ice-cream had nearly become soup. I was like “Uh-Oh”. But the taste remained so it was okay. On the other hand, Alaina had forgotten to bring the knife to cut the cake she had bought so she had to make do with a plastic spoon, which was not exactly the best option but we didn’t have any other choice. She had a hard time cutting the cake but it turned out all right at the end. Cutting the cake was as hard as cutting a tree. There were samosas, cookies, pedas, cake, ice-creams, marshmallows, cheetos, c

­­Sorry, I  haven't  blogged in a while. I got stuck with so much of work and studies. We had our FA-4 in January and our SA-2 finished just yesterday. A small calculation: (FA-1 + FA-2+FA-3+ FA-4) + (SA-1+SA-2) =  Promotion to next grade, good results & FREEDOM!!! Tons of studying Anyway, I feel like a lot of pressure has just been removed from my shoulders. It’s kind of like the feeling a donkey has when 4 tons of load are removed from its back.    This morning, to celebrate my independence, we went to McDonalds and had breakfast from there. We ordered pancakes, an Egg Mcmuffin meal and two Sausage McMuffins. Then we went to LuLu, did some shopping and came home. We have a class party tomorrow and instead of uniform we are allowed to wear colour dress. Our results of our SA-2 will also be shown. My cousin Savithri’s cat gave birth to 2 more kittens when the previous 2 died a few months back. The mother cat’s name

There was deep rumbling from somewhere. Unfortunately that was not thunder, but my stomach growling. We were on our way from the badminton class. I was getting hungrier by the minute. I was given 2 options - Asraya Turkish restaurant or some other Arabic place. I did not have any interest in either of them but I saved when Dad pointed at DQ Grill & Chill , which we hadn’t tried till now, we could have our food from there. We loved trying out new restaurants. This place was called Dairy Queen (DQ) though I had no idea why it was called that. As long as I was concerned, it seemed to have burgers and the usual stuff and I didn’t think it to have any dairy items. We ordered onion rings, quesadillas, 2 grilled chicken burgers, large grilled chicken salad for my Dad and 2 sandwiches.  The place was a bit crowded, but still there was not much noise and we found a table. The onion rings were delicious and the quesadillas were to die for. Everything was yummy and the growli

I picked up a slice of yummy pepperoni pizza, cheese trailing after it. It looked and smelled delicious. In less than 4 seconds my slice was gone. Dad was looking at me, astonished. “Nobody is going to steal your slice.” I gave him a suspicious look. If Dad requested for a small bite of anything I was having, from guavas to ice creams, pretty much half of it would be gone. Go figure. We were at l’OLIMPO , an Italian restaurant. For me, dessert is more important when we go to restaurants like these, and I would always go to dessert section first, whether we bought any or not. For Mom, the place looked like a ‘wonderland’, for me it looked a little like ‘ Steak House ’, only little more stylish. I like Steak House, but now whenever I think of it I always remember the ‘great zucchini’ incident . We had chicken Caesar salad first. Dad love salad a lot, which is why I called him a ‘herbivore’. I poked my fork and attacked the lettuce since I found it difficult to stab it.

Last night, for dinner, we had an Egyptian dish. Can you guess which?  (Hint- It starts with “Ko” and ends with “shari” ) Of course! It was koshari ! It consisted of rice, macaroni, noodles, chick peas and lentils topped with small chicken pieces. The noodles were cut into pieces (some people might think this is a weird combination but it is not. ) It was delicious but kind of heavy and was a beautiful combination with a sauce like salsa. Some of Dad’s colleagues are Egyptians and sometimes they buy koshari , that is how we came to know about it. We had it from a restaurant called “ Koshari Express ”. We gobbled all of it up and washed it down with a bottle of ‘Mirinda’. I remember that 2 years back in 5 th grade, one of our teacher’s told us that Pepsi and other fizzy drinks were very harmful for us and they could cut our intestine. Well, that did the trick. Whenever we had Pepsi, I always gave it the evil eye and refused to drink it. My parents assure

Thursday was a busy day for us, but busy in a good way. We had two occasions to attend, one was a 25th wedding anniversary and the other was a marriage. It was the first time we were going to a marriage in Saudi Arabia but all of us were happy, especially Mom since she loves occasions just like me.   Since we mostly get invited to marriages in India, I and Mom can only attend ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­one or two and we only stay for a couple of months in India. Wedding anniversaries are also a lot of fun.   The wedding anniversary was held at a restaurant called Al Nouras. They had delicious buffet.  What I loved especially was the chicken fried rice. Yum!!!  Too bad we could not eat a lot because we knew there was a marriage also waiting for us. Mom and Dad also thought that the food was awesome and they are thinking to go back to the restaurant again during a weekend. The marriage was held at a school auditorium. It was an interesting occasio