Lemon Bars

I’ve always been a big fan of lemon tarts, lemon cakes, lemon sherbet, lemon souffle…you get the trend. So when I discovered that there exists a previously-unknown-to-me, easy-to-bake lemon dessert called “lemon bars”, it was a pretty easy decision to try to bake them. And it gave me one more productive thing to do during my free time, which, these days, is quite in abundance.

FOR THE LEMON BARS

Quantity: This recipe makes 24 lemon bars in an 8×6 inch tray

Ingredients for the crust:

• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 1/4 cup white sugar
• 5/6 (1/2+1/3) cup all-purpose flour
• Pinch of salt

Ingredients for the lemon filling:

• 4 eggs
• 1.5 cups white sugar
• 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 2/3 cup lemon juice
• Lemon zest of 4 lemons

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
• In a medium bowl, blend together softened butter, flour and sugar for the crust. Press into the bottom of an ungreased 8×6 inch pan.
• Bake for 15 to 20 minutes in the preheated oven, or until firm and golden. Let the crust cool.
• In another bowl, prepare the lemon filling. Whisk together the sugar and flour. Whisk in the eggs, lemon juice and zest.
• Pour over the baked crust. Bake for an additional 20 minutes in the preheated oven.
• The bars will firm up as they cool. Keep the bars in a freezer for 1 hour, since they are much easier to cut once they are cold. Cut into neat squares of 2×1 each.

Additional tips:

• You can sprinkle the bars with confectioners sugar for a decorative look (and if you have a sweet tooth!)
• Layer the base of the tray with parchment paper that overlaps over two opposite sides. This will make the bars much easier to remove once cold, and then they can be cut easily.

These lemon bars hardly take any time to make and require only simple ingredients available in every home. This recipe has just the perfect balance of tartness and sweetness for my taste. They are an incredible treat – the only trouble everyone at home faced was resisting the urge to pop one in their mouth every once in a while!

Nightfall

I’m sitting in a dimly lit team room on the 21st floor in an almost empty office, with a glass of warm cranberry juice and delicious jam-centre biscuits by my side, next to a window which looks out on the sea or rather the dark stretches of nothingness dotted with yellow fairy lights. The only sound in the room is the lovely melody playing on my ThinkPad in one corner, interspersed with the soft thk-thk-ing of plastic keys and the clicks of a mouse in the other corner. It’s one of those rare times in the last 2 months that I have worked this intensely till this hour, and surprisingly I quite enjoyed it. Dinner at Ziya, in the romantically elegant-but-not-obscene gold setting, might be perfect to end the night.

It’s been a while…

It’s been a while since I’ve been wide awake at 1 am and listened to some soul music on iTunes to drive away the loneliness of a silent night.

Time has flown and life has taken so many turns and twists in this time, that I struggle to remember where I began. An attempt to create a collage in my mind of the time gone by, yields some superb images in high definition, which could have almost been captured with a Canon 1D – from a paradise like valley of flowers to a set of seemingly insignificant journeys that meant everything. Each raw image in the collage is a snapshot of an exquisite story that would require more dedication to narrate than I possess at this hour. Yes, each story is worth narrating and will be told in due course of time.

Oh yes, it has been a very long while since I’ve written, and felt the emerging smile broaden with the increase in the word count

Protected: Dear Diary: Tears in Heaven

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Darwin Awards: for the Ultimate Sacrifice

My first impression when I heard “Darwin Awards” was that they would be given for some extraordinary contribution to improving the gene pool. They are, for people who improve the gene pool…by removing themselves from it in an unbelievably idiotic manner therefore improving our species’ chances of long term survival

This could be either by killing themselves, or by losing the ability to reproduce. Some of the stories are quite funny* and deserve a special mention here.

Darwin Awards

The Terrorists Who Couldn’t Tell Time (1999 Award Winner)

The Palestinian Territories operate on “Palestinian Standard Time”, which observes Daylight Savings Time(DST) at slightly different times from Israel.

A group of Palestinian terrorists prepared bombs in a Palestinian-controlled area set on DST. They overlooked the small but very important fact that Israel had already switched from DST to standard time in 1999 because of some religious holiday.

Once inside Israel, the drivers were working on standard time. So the cars were still en-route when the explosives detonated, killing only the terrorists but no one else!

A Lesson In Timekeeping

The Journalists Who Thought A Press Pass Grants Immunity, Even From Elephants (2007 Award Winner)

Increased mining and rains in southeast India unsettle the wildife. In 2007, migrating elephants killed eleven people in the region. A team of four journalists decided to interview this herd of rogue elephants.They went into the forest in search of the rogues – on foot.

Elephants are big, and elephants are fast. As the deaths of the locals, history and common sense all illustrate, a person can’t out-run an elephant. But these journalists apparently assumed that a press pass grants immunity everywhere, even from animals.

Once these brave journalists sniffed out the herd, it was only natural to capture the photogenic animals on film. Unfortunately, the elephants were camera shy. Angered by the flash, the irritated herd charged the paparazzi, miraculously killing only one of the four.

His remains could not be retrieved.

Don't think they ever saw this!

The Three Little Farmers and The Pig (2001 Award Winner)

In Hungary, two farmers were killed and a third was hospitalized with serious injuries after the men attempted to kill a pig with a homemade stun gun during a traditional Hungarian pre-Christmas slaughter.

One farmer electrocuted himself with the device during an unsuccessful attempt to knock out the pig. The elderly owner of the pig was so alarmed at the tragedy unfolding before his eyes that he suffered a heart attack and died. The third farmer tried to come to the rescue of the first farmer by pulling the plug out of the socket. He was shocked, but survived.

The pig came to no harm that day.

Presumably, this is how the pig felt

How Macho Are You? (1996 Award Winner)

Men will got to extraordinary lengths to prove how macho they are. Frenchman Pierre Pumpille shunted a stationary car two feet by headbutting it. “Women thought I was a god,” he explained from his hospital bed. Some other men try to accomplish this by saying they have “The maximum number of fans on Orkut” or “The most popular guitar video on Youtube”.

Everything pales when compared to Polish farmer Krystof Azninski, who staked a strong claim to being Europe’s most macho man by cutting off his own head in 1995.

Azninski, 30, was drinking with friends when they decided to strip naked and play some “men’s games”. Initially they hit each other with frozen turnips, but then one man upped the ante by seizing a chainsaw and cutting off the end of his foot. Not to be outdone, Azninski grabbed the saw, swung at his own head and chopped it off. “Watch this then,” were his last famous words.

“It’s funny,” said one companion, “when he was young he put on his sister’s underwear. But he died like a man.”

Check out the Darwin Awards website by clicking here

To read about some more of the strangest deaths, click here

*Heartfelt condolences to the victims and their families

HBS 2+2 Essay 1: What are your three most substantial accomplishments and why do you view them as such? (600 words)

My compiled analysis for Essay 1:

This is Harvard’s signature question. It has been around for years. Try to showcase different dimensions of yourself within the three subsections of this essay. You can select from professional, community, personal, academic (must be truly outstanding), athletic, interpersonal, experiential and entrepreneurial accomplishments, but no formula for the right mix of stories exists. While you are obviously younger than the typical applicant, HBS still expects to see several separate, concrete examples of how you made a positive impact on the organization, community, or people around you.

You can treat this essay as three mini essays. Constructing individual stories within 200-word subsets is quite challenging. The experiences described are crucial, but two elements need to be addressed—the story of your accomplishment and an analytical reflection on that story (“why do you view them as such?”). The second half of this question should not be ignored; your personal thoughts and reflections are yours alone and will differentiate you.

Try to ensure that incidents/skills already highlighted elsewhere aren’t repeated. Since this is Harvard and an MBA application, the only exception to that rule is leadership and teamwork, and atleast one incident in this essay should focus on them.

Make an accomplishments table as shown below to help you decide.

The final choice can be made based on the general importance of the achievements, the extent of your contribution to its success and what the stories tell about you. Decide if the qualities that are highlighted are the traits that you want the Harvard ad-com to remember about you.

Accomplishments Table

(Click on image to enlarge)

Disclaimer: The above information includes information collaborated from other admissions consultants websites, personal blogs, etc from last year as well as my point of views on the essays. Apply what you think is useful, but don’t rely solely on it. Please rely on your own judgment and better sense in the end.

Banana-Nutella French Crepes

Yesterday, I discovered a bottle of Nutella in my refrigerator, which had an expiry date of May 2010. Wasting Nutella is nothing short of a crime, as those of you who have tasted it would know, so I decided that it must be put to good use. And what better way to do so than to make some delicious Nutella crepes! I’d anyway been longing for them since my Europe trip, when I discovered that multitudes of crepe vendors dotted the streets, serving delicious and fresh multi-flavored crepes to hungry passersby.

FOR THE CREPES

Ingredients:

• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour (maida)
• Unsalted butter
• 2 bananas, sliced
• Nutella

Directions:

• In a medium bowl, whisk together the eggs and milk. Whisk in the salt, granulated sugar, and flour, till the mixture is uniform.
• Set aside for 20 minutes, if you have got the time.
• In a nonstick 8 to 10-inch omelet/dosa pan, melt about 1/2 teaspoon butter over medium heat. When it foams, pour or ladle in about 1/8 cup (2 tablespoons) batter.
• Lift and swirl the pan very quickly so the batter coats the bottom. Replace the pan on the burner and cook just until set and the underside is lightly browned.
• Using a wooden spatula, flip the crepe and cook until the other side is lightly browned. Transfer to a platter.
• Spread the crepe with a thin layer of the chocolate hazelnut spread, then some banana slices, and roll up like a cigar or fold into quarters.
• Repeat until the batter is used up.

These dessert crepes hardly take any time to make and require only simple ingredients available in every home.

My crepes turned out to be fairly tasty! With a little practice I hope I will be able to make them much finer. Next time, I would also like to experiment with maple syrup, honey, ice-cream and other such toppings.