This Horiatiki, a classic Greek salad is crisp, zesty, and absolutely delicious with a very quick and easy olive oil based vinaigrette. We adapted this recipe from one we were shown during our Greek cooking class at Ethos restaurant in New York City….
Closure At A Cost?
Yesterday, Navdeep and I grabbed dinner in Chinatown and decided to take the World Trade Center Path back to Jersey City. It was about 11 p.m., and the place was as crowded as it always was with tourists and travelers…
Video: Ice Mountain Climbing in the Catskills, New York!
Neither of us have ever claimed to be coordinated, and as the video above will prove to you (beyond a doubt), we are not liars. What possessed us to go Ice Mountain Climbing in the catskills of New York, we have no idea. The actual ice-climbing was a lot of fun. Slushing up the mountain, however. . . not so much.
Photo Gallery: Ice Climbing in the Catskills, New York!
Check out the photo gallery of our adventures and misadventures as we attempt to go ice-mountain climbing in the catskills of new york!
Musings: The Six Coolest Places We Slept in India
Traveling in India for six months, we had our fair share of odd experiences — but the most interesting seemed to be when it was time to rest our weary heads. From bumpy buses and crowded trains to a thatched…
Photo of the Week: Fortune Cookie Factory in San Francisco, California
Who knew making something as fun as fortune cookies could entail so much stress? If those flat mini-pancakes on the right are allowed to cool for even a second, they become too hard and can’t be folded. We tried them and they are delicious. Round, crunchy, fortune cookie . . . with no place to put the fortune though!
Travelogue California: The World’s Largest Gingerbread House in San Francisco?
We had all of two days to spend in San Francisco with my parents-in-law, and for some reason, I was stuck on seeing this two-story gingerbread house — made of real gingerbread, of course — at the Fairmont Hotel. So…
Eat this Page: Aloo Paratha (whole wheat Indian flatbread)
Parathas are whole-wheat Indian flatbread that can be as healthy as you want them to be. You ca eat them plain, or stuffed, for breakfast or lunch. This recipe uses our favorite filling – aloo (potato) – with a much healthier adaptation from expert paratha maker, Binder Bhua, Navdeep’s aunt. She is very Punjabi, so doesn’t understand the concept of “no ghee” and finds the idea of a dry paratha unfathomable, hence the glistening parantha in the photo above.
India Travelogue: Reality Bites
When Navdeep dropped me off at the airport on at 1 a.m. on February 6th, I couldn’t help but be a bit teary. Not only was our trip over, but we weren’t even on the same flight back. And as much as I missed everyone, I really didn’t want to head back to reality.India was definitely an adventure for us. We got to see and experience some of the most beautiful – and chaotic – places on the planet. We also got to spend more time with each other than we ever had before, nearly 24 hours a day. And surprisingly, that turned out to be a great thing. So to get on the plane and spend 18-hours alone, thinking about it all, it was like jumping into the deep end when you haven’t been swimming in years.
Travelogue India: It’s Almost that Time!
Sona’s list of places she’d like to see in three months, in addition to seeing her family and my family, is getting more erratic and more in lala land. And her reasons for wanting to go to places is getting more amusing. Last night, she decided she wanted to go to Dareeling because it had tea plantations and a toy train, but wanted to skip Calcutta. The spot directly before reaching this hill station is Amritsar, all the way in the North, a good 80 hour train journey. And then there’s the slight transportation issue of getting to Darjeeling directly from Amristar! Then from Darjeeling, we’re shooting off like a bullet to a houseboat in Kashmir. My hair is standing on end just thinking about it.
I’m looking forward to the trip, but there are loads of things to think about. The first and foremost is certainly where we go, and the second is how we end up traveling. I’m a true believer in the spirit of independent travel, where the mere act of being in a place does not constitute having been there. To truly experience a place involves chilling out and taking walks that can’t be included in any itinerary. But I also realize that we do have to make some form of an itinerary, or we’ll really frighten all of our family. “We’re off then. We don’t know where exactly, but we’re going to catch a train somewhere.” That would instill a lot of confidence in my qualifications as a husband!
But putting that aside, there’s also the hectic-ness of wrapping up classes and making sure there aren’t any loose ends while we’re on the road. Little things give me the biggest headaches. Each thing would take probably five minutes or so to get sorted but when there’s a billion of them to do, eating potato chips and watching Dr. Phil sound like an easier alternative. I do need to sort out things like paying my credit cards, sorting out school loans and recurring bills, deciding on some kind of a route to take, and stopping Sona from packing everything in sight.
Three months does sound like a long time but when tackling something as gigantic as India, you don’t even scratch the surface with three months. Especially with Sona’s erratic list of places she’d like to see: Kashmir all the way in the North, Kerala and Kunyakumari on the Southern tip of India, Punjab and Delhi are givens but within the three months, there are tonnes of family to meet. And we can’t just pop in for tea and be on our way. We have to go visit everyone. Even though Sona has quite a massive family, they’re all in Delhi. I have no idea how big Delhi is, but it doesn’t seem like it would take more than an hour or two to shuttle between the different areas. Punjab, on the other hand, is going to take a bit of time. My family is scattered all over Punjab. We also have a farm in U.P. and a chacha (my dad’s brother) who lives in Dehra Dun, Uttaranchal. So no, we can’t pop in for lunch and be on our way!
Travelogue India: The Countdown Begins, So Much to Do and Only Three Weeks to Go!
When we booked our tickets, way back in June, this trip seemed ages away. And now, there’s less than a month left. It seems surreal to think that in three short weeks my life as I know it will end—at least for a short while. Right now, to me, the daily grind is pitching stories and interviewing the random celebrity, pretending to work on my writing, endless loads of laundry, the occasional episode of House Hunters on HGTV and making often-elaborate meals for my husband, who’s been working his ass off teaching endless English classes to make up for our time off.
In the meantime, we’ve also been doing the things that make this trip seem a bit more real. Tickets. Check. Camera. Check. Backpacks. They’ll be here any second now. And we finally ordered the sleeping bag, too. But really, it’s the slow build of this website, Navdeep painstakingly learning Dreamweaver and Flash, me dictating design and writing content, that’s making it seem real. Slowly but surely, we’re getting closer. And as we add pages, we mark off another day—or four—on the calendar. And now it’s almost time to flip the page.
For three months, it’ll be just be me and Navdeep, on the road, a different city every week, lots of new tastes, people, places to explore and absorb. It’s exhilarating, but at the moment, it still seems unreal. And though I’m really excited, it’s also kind of scary.
I keep second-guessing other goals. What if this is the right time to get that script out, as studios stockpile under the threat of a long, grueling writers’ strike? What if I should have taken that job opportunity in New York a little more seriously? What about the fact that I’m going to miss several birthdays, or a big reason to celebrate that we’ve all been waiting for? I’m stepping out of my life, but it will go charging full speed ahead without me. Britney will lose custody. Lindsay will end up in prison. (Hey, these things are breaking news when you’re in the celeb content trade.) But it’s also that Meena will move to L.A., my cousin Arun will start college (oh my God!) and my brother will get a new (fulltime, with benefits!) job. Those are the things I’ll really be missing.
Sona’s Take: Deciding to Go
Just a little over three years ago, I was chained to my desk at People magazine, working sixty-plus hour weeks. Yeah, I got to interview celebs and blah blah blah, but to me it was all just a day job. I was too wimpy to quit to pursue my real dream, filmmaking. And then I met Navdeep. A hardcore traveler who’d lived in China and backpacked overland through Tibet into India. An adventurer who scoffed at the idea of staying in one of the fancy pant palaces converted into hotels in Rajasthan (as my sister and I did on our trip there). He thought nothing of sleeping alone in a tent in the middle of God-knows-where in Mongolia. I didn’t know it then, but his free spirit (and indie travel bug) were about to rub off on me, big time. Now, at 30, I’m a fulltime freelance writer with all the instability that implies. Journalism, unfinished novels, screenplays gathering dust in a pile on my bookshelf.
I’m not sure exactly when the idea of a three-month long honeymoon jaunt in India started to percolate between us, but for the longest time I didn’t take it seriously. We both had strong roots in the country, but for me, a trip to India simply meant being shuffled from one relative’s house to the next in Delhi. Besides, who really quits their dayjob to pursue something as amorphous and unstable as writing fulltime—let alone pursuing the fantasy of filmmaking? Even with the clips from those glossy magazines everyone picks up at the newsstand, the decision was impractical at best. Besides, shouldn’t we be thinking about serious married-people things like health insurance and 401Ks?
But the idea just wouldn’t die.
