Of pakoras and 24 hr rozas...

When you're living on your own, waking up at 3:30 using a mere alarm clock seems impossible. At home, I always had mom or dad nagging and screaming and literally pulling my duvet off of me to wake me up. So, there was no way I would miss sehri. However, here its just so easy to keep snoozing the alarm and waking up to a bright sunny morning realizing that you haven't eaten anything since iftari. So yea, as Homer Simpson puts it eloquently: Dope!

When you're THAT hungry, studying seems a lost cause, so you sleep more but halfway through the day you realize that perhaps hunger has started consuming one of your internal organs. So, you keep walking to the digital scale to weigh yourself in the hope that perhaps the involuntary starvation would burn a few pounds. The funny thing is that without doing anything, without eating/drinking anything your weight sometimes increases and then falls all of a sudden. I can explain the fall in weight (farts), but what about the increase. Oh well, with three hours to fasting, the craving for eating pakoras, something I haven't made myself EVER became irresistible. A little scavenging through the masala cabinet and I manage to get hold of our very favourite "Shan Pakora Mix". A moment of Eureka, followed by chopping, cutting, crying (coz of cutting onions) and I have the whole pakora mix paste ready only to realize that it requires a frying full of deep oil to fry. Ha! I'm too deep into the craving for pakoras to stop at this point, so I just walk to the tesco, get oil and start frying the pakoras. Why didn't someone ever tell me that the oil has to be at a certain veryyy high temprature for the pakoras to cement together. As it transpired, as soon as I put the pakora batter into the frying pan, it broke into a million tiny minuscule pieces :S. Anyhow, quickly called my sister up, and made the corrections (i.e. thickening the pakora batter and heating the oil till its white hot or literally spewing hot oil drops at you). Its scary when you have to put the pakoras into such a oil spewing mad frying pan. I said my prayers and literally threw the pakora into the fying pan from a distance hoping I wouldnt get second degree burns. This further worsened the situation coz even if I was back, oil was spewing onto the stove. I guess I'm too amateurish when it comes to deep frying. Anyhow, after the first awful batch, I kinda sorta got the hang of it and then gradually and surely, my pakora babies started to look like real pakoras:





It is truly a sence of accomplishment and a treat after a 24 hour roza to have pakoras made from your own sweat and toil :D. For those of you who're wondering how they tasted, I can assure you they were absolutely scrumptious, however the first batch (buried deep in the plate below was slightly less edible :D