Tulika, Author at Obsessivemom

03/02/201215/04/2017

Breakfast like a king

Friends bear with me this month. I am going to sound like an obsessive fat fighter rather than an obsessivemom.. just for these four weeks. I need those two kgs off.
Exercise has always been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Whenever I’ve stopped I’ve faced bad bad consequences like oodles of weight gain or high cholesterol. So since exercising is a given, it’s the food I’m focusing on. While dinner is mostly soups.. check out today’s yummy low fat breakfast.

1. Whole masoor dal cutlets with coriander and mint chutney (which turned out hot enough to blow your brains away).

2. A slice of brown bread

3. Carrot, cucumber and beetroot slices on the side.

All made by moi.

Now for the recipes.

Caution: If you’re not the cooking type you might find this mind-numbingly boring.

The cutlets are a hand-me-down recipe from my mum, who has struggled harder than me to keep me slim. Here it is for those who are interested. Do remember I’m NOT a good cook and bear with my hit and trial ways.

1. Soak whole masoor dal overnight.

2. Crush to a powder whole garam masala – Green cardamoms, large cardamoms, cloves, peppercorns, cinnamon.

3. Boil the dal with the crushed spices and salt. You can add in a bay leaf too. The water should be just enough to cook the dal. Don’t add too little or you’ll burn it, which I’ve done often enough. If you add too much, simply let it boil away. You can also add bread crumbs to dry it up. Mash the dal to get a dough-like consistency. Mum used to grind it in the mixer but I’m too lazy to do that. Mashing it in the pressure pan works well enough.

4. Add chopped onions, green coriander, green chillies and you have a nice batter for your cutlets. Make balls and fry. It can also be used as a sandwich filling… any day healthier than those potatoes. FYI: It’s totally awesome if fried properly in oil.. but if you’re on a weightloss trip a tiny bit of oil is not bad either.

The chutney is another staple these days. It replaces sweet ketchup at breakfast and oily pickles at lunch. You can even add it to curd to give it flavour. I put in coriander leaves, mint leaves, a bit of garlic and loads of chillies. Then I realised I’d forgotten the sour factor.. so added some amchur (dry mango powder), tasted it, then squeezed in half a lemon too. It ended up fine.

That was the breakfast.

Before I forget…

Weight as on 3.2.12 – 70.6 kgs.. Down 500 gms. Yay! Yay! The weekend’s here and I’m in a state of high alert. I don’t want the weighing scales tipping the wrong way on Monday.

02/02/201215/04/2017

Souper time

What with weightloss being the flavour of the month it’s soup-time. The Husband has been on a bread-soup diet almost whole of this week. Since I’m not much of a cook I made do with the Knorr ones for a few days. Now, however, I’m trying homemade ones.

I have one simple recipe that goes for all my soups… boil, blend, add salt, pepper, cumin powder, season with butter and cumin seeds and done. Any inputs to this basic recipe will be very welcome. The Husband would sure be grateful. Yesterday it was carrots and tomatoes, which the kids loved but The Husband found ‘too sweet’. Today I tried tomatoes with a bit of beetroot. Doesn’t it look great? The Husband liked it but the kids didn’t. Sigh.. It’s so difficult to please everyone.
Any ideas on other vegetable combinations I could try?

Carrot, beetroot soup

For the record: Current weight as on 2.2.12 — 71.1kgs There I’ve let out the biggest secret of my life. Shocked you, did I? Well let me tell you it’s the bones. When I’m 60 kgs I’m like thin. So 65 would be super. For this month I’m looking forward to entering the 60s.

01/02/201215/04/2017

More sweat

Been a week since I last got here… my reading list is full of interesting sounding posts but before I get distracted I just have to get this one done.
The gym’s holding a contest and I’m too much excited :-). Obviously it’s got to do with weightloss. There are three categories.. maximum weightloss, maximum fatloss and maximum muscle gain. The last one’s of course, for the men.. none of the women want to end up with muscles, though a muscular Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 looked pretty wow. Anyway why worry about the unachievable? I have to remember I’m 40 years old (more actually but one is allowed to let a few years slip what with old age memory loss). And so I registered for the weightloss category.. actually everyone is expected to.
It’s been a while since I obsessed about my weightloss. Not achieving my year-end target kind of took the edge off things. That pizza never did happen… sigh.
I was not really kicked about the contest initially.. me not being the winning type. Mum tells me when I was a kid and, the perfectionist that she is, when she would try to motivate me saying, ‘Beta run fast you have to come first’… the only thing I’d ask was ‘Can I please come second?’ Nothing much has changed over the years.
However today at the gym, the trainer was so excited he got me all charged up. ‘We’ll kick 5 kgs maam.. this month.” he told me. Oops.. that was my annual target, man. He proceeded to hand me some quick weightloss tips. “Boiled food, warm lemon water in the gym, no sweets and no bakery products other than brown bread.” What no biscuits with the morning tea.. Marie, rusks.. gosh those are my true blue pals.
Seeing my rather lost expression he made a concession, “Okay one week you eat what you’re eating.. but the last three weeks we’ll go all out.”
So what say people? I should go all out na? My target.. not winning the contest but losing just two kgs. And then ….pizzzzzzzaaaa.
Anyone joining me??.. in the weightloss plan not the pizza.

23/01/201215/04/2017

Preventing Child abuse

I’ve often wondered how to introduce the whole idea of child abuse to the twins. As they grow up they’re learning to play on their own and there are times I’m not with them… at playdates, birthday parties or even somedays when they’re playing down with their friends. I am no longer around ‘all the time’ like I used to be. And so they need to be taught to look out for themselves.

Here’s a video a friend put up on FB. Thought I should share it.

21/01/201215/04/2017

If you have a son…

.. you might find this useful. Mum to mum — a list of skills you need to master. Oh I’m not talking about stuff like patience and endurance, you’ll never have enough of those anyway. I’m talking of real, practical things. Read on..

1. Learn to fill air in cycle tyres. It’s a backbreaking task and the air refuses to stay inside whizzing out as soon as you remove the wretched pump.

2. Learn to assemble a thousand tiny pieces to make a robot/train/building. Or else you can hide away such toys as soon as they’re discovered under that innocent-looking wrapping paper.

3. Learn to get comfortable with transformers (car to robot, robot to car, car to robot, robot to car… over and over and over again) and beyblades (you’ll be made to fix the darned thing again and again and will be dragged into matches till you’re feeling like a spinning beyblade yourself).

4. Learn to differentiate between a Saurapod and a Tyranosaurus and make up stories about them.

5. Learn to take complaints in your stride..
– From the security guard: Your son was racing the lift.
– From the neighbour: Your son broke my potted plant.
– From the other neighbour: Your son messed up my rangoli.
– From the aunty in the next building: I got hit by your son’s football.
– At a birthday party: Your son tripped the girls, burst the balloons, brought down the streamers, licked the cake.

6. Detach yourself from worldly goods. You really don’t know how long that gorgeous clock you got for the kids’ room will last or how long the pelmets will hold or when the sofa will breathe its last.

7. Enroll in a gymnastics class so you can balance on that tiny stool on a table on the bed to get down the clothes he tossed up on the fan/cupboard.

8. Get earplugs. Whether he’s playing computer games, watching television or out in the playground he’ll give out periodic war cries that can be pretty unsettling for the unsuspecting mum.

9. Get a laptop. You already have one? Well get another one unless you’re fond of endless tussles over computer time for sooner rather than later the brat will get hooked onto those games.

And finally the biggest, toughest one..

10. Have another son because boys play with boys…ONLY.

Edited to add: A word of caution — if you do risk point No 10, you’ll have twice as much of 1-9. That’s FYI.