A salt and battery story

McDrive

For those unaccustomed to my rabid sense of humor, I thrive on bad puns, use lots of homophones and am always on the lookout for phonetic humor. But then anyone reading these posts in sequence would have discovered it by now. With that priming in place, it won't be hard to guess the title has anything but to do with physical violence.

I'm surprised at the number of people who ask me the same question as soon as they discover that my wife is away for a month. "What do you do for dinner ?" I find this amusing or annoying depending on my hunger level then. The feeling has nothing to do with Amudha's culinary skills which mercifully are more than sufficient.

Instead, its the tacit suggestion that when in town she is or ought to be the one taking care of alimentary needs at home. Without getting into my views on equal rights and giving the benefit of doubt to the innocent enquirer's sympathetic query, I can safely state that we both are perfectly happy with our dinner plans. We eat in, out or pack food as we please depending on the mood and time.

One of the things that I pester Amudha to make at home is dosa. We get the batter readymade and all it takes is to add some salt and get going ... or so I thought all this while. The other day on my way back from office, I bought the batter and set about making them. Almost immediately I realized I had no clue how much salt to add or even how or where to make them.

So using the age old trial and error method, I managed to blend the batter in salt (in retrospect that's how it felt) and made shapeless blobs in the pan. In the mêlée I neglected tiny details like spreading the batter or using oil to smoothen the edges and ended up with burnt salty yellow lumps sticking to my non-stick pan. That was when I drove over to McDonald's.