Carrot Bell pepper soup or B for Bell pepper carrot soup

No. I am not going to continue this series till Z. It is just a coincidence that my dish starts with B. After trying low fat Mysore pak(Besan Burfi) which turned out to be a disaster, I lost the mood to make sweets for diwali. Though it was low fat, I felt guilty having them cause it had 2 tbsp of ghee and loads of sugar(yeah I tried making mysore pak with 2 tbsp of ghee and no wonder it became a halwa!). To compensate for the intake of mysore pak, I walked, walked and walked 3 miles and ended up making Carrot bell pepper soup for dinner by following Laavanya's Carrot coriander soup recipe.

I didn't have coriander leaves, so I substituted it with green bell pepper(1/4 cup). I also added little milk in the end to make it extra creamy. Otherwise I followed the same method. I am a soup fan and I liked this one very much!

Note: Adding more than 1/2 tsp of sambar powder will make the soup spicy.

finally - roughing in...

...that is, we finally started. I don't have much advice on roughing in walls (i.e. framing) - ambition overcomes ignorance, right? Describing ambition is something I'll work on later, for now I'll just show a few pictures.

There are nuances to each and every room, especially in these odd and old - I mean unique and character'filled - houses. You should be thinking ahead like Bobby Fisher. Assess the entire room every five minutes and consider what you're working around.

Horizontal:


Vertical:

A little work, a lot of thinking - hopefully the rest of the week is productive as well.

Right now we're enjoying the crap out of this candle - autumn leaves by yankee candle.  It's a bundle of crisp fall leaves, cinnamon and Christmas tucked warmly into a granny-knitted blanket.  

furniture; internet stuff

I've been meaning to post about some furniture we recently got for a steal. A friend was moving to Los Angeles and unloaded just about everything she had. We were among the mob of benefit-reapers. Thanks, Nancy. Project Rowhouse has quite a bit more square footage than the previous house, so we're always on the lookout for random pieces of furniture. One item we were desperately in need of was more couch space for the current living area. The one we've had for the past few years can't get through the stairwell to the basement, but this one did - and we can eventually move it to one of the extra bedrooms where it doubles as a full bed:

Kanga brought out the devil eyes - watch out.

This desk is pretty sweet and fits in this open office area on the third floor.


We planned on having a hammer and nail filled weekend, but in the spirit of learn-as-you-go we realized some of the wall areas we wanted to keep had to be removed and redone. So, we ended up doing a lot more demo and cleanup. Hopefully productivity is in our future and I'll give a better update.

I did get around to organizing the internet router/hub/hard drive to it's hopefully permanent location. It had been resting in a beautiful nest of it's own wires, dust and chunks of drywall in the corner of the future kitchen. To prevent the possibility of something hatching from within we decided to clean it up and mount it: