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Luxury of a loaf

With the mushrooming of cafes, bakeries and confectioneries in the city, the customer is certainly spoilt for choice. For one, the product is far superior in quality, it is mostly healthy and, the rest is packaged so invitingly, I’d buy it anyways. Be that as it may, we finally have available a doughnut, light and airy enough to be dunked in a steaming mug of black coffee. What’s more, it is spongy enough to soak in the hot liquid without leaving traces akin to an oil spill in the mug.

Also, the variety of breads is mind boggling. No longer do you have to make do with the customary milk or caramelised brown bread, nor the special sandwich loaf from the neighbourhood bakery. No longer do you juggle the garlic baguette and the cheesy one for your ‘continental‘ evenings; you can now experiment with loaves garnished with olives and oregano. As for the ingredients, ‘you have a choice of breads prepared with atta, bran, soya, whole wheat, wholemeal, wholegrain; multi-grain, seeded… the list is endless.

As a result, the once lowly sandwich, has suddenly acquired a certain air about itself. Given that it is essentially made up of leftovers disguised as exotica, it is quite the fashionable option to be caught eating with your cappuccino. Toasted, grilled or otherwise; hot or cold; open or layered, the fillings are as many (oftentimes as desi) as the toppings being offered by pizza companies. Depending on where you are eating, these carb-laden delights are served with good, bad or sour coleslaw. Potato crisps, tomato ketchup and mustard (or is it?) make up the rear end, unfailingly.

Even as I fall victim to this food fashion, I am reminded of the ones my cousins, siblings and I created during our midnight feasts many summer vacations ago. Since this activity required utmost stealth, we could not rummage through the larder and had to make the most of easily available ammunition. Invariably, that comprised tough bread curling at the edges left out for feeding birds the following day!

The fillings consisted of unbelievable (sometimes unidentifiable) material. Still, they were our mainstay when hunger pangs struck the instant the domestic help retired for the night.

I’m not so sure how my insides would react to a banana, cheese and walnut sandwich today, or, apple and ginger on a layer of cream and sugar. While great pleasure was derived from biting hard into a chocolate slab on bread and butter, the real desperate attempt had to be the one with plain sugar between the same dry slices mentioned earlier.

It required artful manoeuvring to ensure the crystals stayed between the slices and not gather at our feet…

Shredded pineapple with cream, coffee essence with cream and sugar, molten marshmallows with lemon juice and sugar were some of the other flavours that our insides resolutely, and routinely, digested. One thing is certain, though. My childhood was made up of plenty of fruits, cream and sugar, but the bread, now that left a lot to be desired!

A Consommé & The Minestrone.

Come monsoons and a bowl of soup is one thing, other than piping cuppa tea, one can never say no to. In India soups have come a long way: from the doctor advising you to have soup to recuperate and mom putting all the bountiful ingredients, chosen with care, in a pot boiled for hours to the lamb knuckle soup that keeps you warm in winters.

 Nowadays, while some people prefer soup as a starter to meals, others, especially on a diet, take soups as a whole nourishing meal with no calories at all. Here are a few of my favourite soups.

Clear soup: the most famous and the basic of soups, clear soup has its origin in the delicate French cookery and is very nutritious and nourishing. Very delicately flavoured, it is called Consommé. It can be served with different kinds of garnishes and hence gets its different names.

A consommé should be crystal clear. The clarity comes from the albumen of the egg white and the coagulation of the meat and clearing quality of the egg shell.

Basic recipe of a consommé:

• 200 gm minced lamb
• 1 litre stock or water (cold)
• 1 bay leaf,
•  1 clove
• 3-4 pepper corn
• 100gm mixed vegetables, finely chopped (onion, carrots, turnips, coriander left over, and ginger trimmings)
• 1 egg white with the egg shell crushed into it,
• Salt and white pepper powder to taste Method:

Thoroughly mix all the ingredients together in cold water (or stock) in a thick bottom pan. Place on boil on high heat and bring to boil stirring only once. As soon as it comes to boil stir slightly once and reduce heat to gentle. Cook for an hour on very low heat without stirring. Strain carefully using a muslin cloth in a clean pot. Serve in a warm soup tureen after correcting seasoning.

The next soup I am going to talk about is the world-famous soup form Italy called Minestrone. This is tomato based garlic flavoured soup with pasta and vegetables and cheese.

Minestrone Ingredients:

• 300gm mixed vegetable (onion, carrots, turnips, cabbage) cut in small dices
• 50gm Butter
• 25gm French beans cut diagonally into diamond shape,
• 1 litre Stock, with 1 clove of crushed garlic, salt,
• 1 clove,
• 1 bay leaf,
• 3 peppers corns.
• Pinch of nutmeg ,
• 25gm Peas,
• 200gm Tomatoes (de-skinned, de-seeded and finely chopped),
• 25gm Spaghetti or any pasta,
• 20gm Grated cheese and chopped garlic mixed together to form small pea-shaped palettes

 Method:   .Cook vegetables without butter or and tomatoes on gentle heat for 10 minutes with stock. Add the butter, peas and beans and cook for 10 minutes. Add the spaghetti (1-inch length) and the tomatoes and simmer gently till the vegetables and the pasta are cooked. Remove the bay leaf and add the cheese and garlic. Serve hot, garnished with Parmesan cheese (optional).

Working without setting foot in office

Solutions for the highway blues come in a dozen different flavours.
But none of them sounds quite as tasty as telecommuting - that wonderful piece of business jargon that conjures up thoughts of lounging by the pool with a glass of iced tea in one hand and a laptop propped on your, well, lap. No bosses hovering over your shoulder. And no reason to remember where, exactly, you parked your car before coming into the office. Of course there’s more to it than that. And that’s what companies are learning as they look to telecommuting as a tool to counter traffic nightmares.

Creating the ability to work without ever setting foot in office brings with it advantages and disadvantages for both the employer and the employee. For some, telecommuting has been a way of life for several years for the company’s army of accountants, who often find themselves working in the field. The company is pushing to free up even more of its employees. More functions and data are being moved onto network servers that can be accessed by employees from their home computers.

Before, all you could do was log on and check your email now you’ll be able to do just about anything you could do at your desk. That’s the goal. Therein lies one of the challenges for companies looking to add or expand their telecommuting ability: they have to decide exactly what they want from it.

You say telecommuting, and I think each person has a different idea of exactly what that means. One of the first things that have to be decided is how much access to grant employees. Do they simply need to download and upload files? Or do they need full-time access similar to what· they’d have if they were sitting in the office? If the answer is the latter, that creates additional security issues and the need for encryption technology. And will the company provide the equipment? Or is that the employee’s responsibility? There is a distinct advantage for companies that own the computers in their employees’ homes, since they can control what is and isn’t put on the computer.

I can put on anti-virus software. I know its running. I know it’s been updated. I know the subscription hasn’t expired. Moving away from the purely technical issues, things can ge more complicated. Particularly when companies have to decide which employees get to do it? Just because someone’s job lends itself to telecommuting doesn’t necessarily mean they should be doing it.

There are personality types that tend to thrive when allowed to work away from the office, while others are better suited for a more formal work environment, said Francie Dalton, a workplace behavioral expert based in Columbia, Md.

Analytical types, for example, may find it easier to do their number crunching once they get away from the constant interruptions "phone calls and bickering co-workers for example" typical of most offices. And there are the highly creative employees who enjoy working in odd places, sitting in a coffee shop, by the pool, or maybe a park bench.
Who cares, as long as they· get the work done?

On the flip side, those workers in need of praise, the high maintenance folks may not fare so well if they venture too far from the bosses who dole out the commendation. Likewise, people who enjoy socialising or organising are more likely to thrive in the office, surrounded by co-workers.

Realising that not everyone will be able to handle the responsibility and freedom of telecommuting, Commerce Bank in Clayton, Mo., is taking a measured approach to its programme. The bank hopes to have a pilot programme up by September. "I think a majority of employees would like’ to think they could do it," said Diane Kroner, the bank’s Employee Relations Manager. "But it really doesn’t work for every job. And it’s not an entitlement." The bank wants to offer a programme that gives select employees the opportunity to telecommute. The idea isn’t to send them out of the office permanently, but rather to offer more flexibility. One day they might work from home; on another, ‘they’ll start from home and then come to the office once traffic clears.

In the end, those telecommuting employees will have to prove their ability to work in the system. Doing that requires a different way of approaching the job, said Joe Calloway, author of the book, "Work Like You’re Showing Off!" Telecommuting employees need to think of the results they are producing, he said. And they need to make sure their employers are aware of those results. It’s not enough for the employee to say he worked on a report today. He needs to say exactly what he did on that report. "When you are not there, and they can’t physically see you work, you really have to go out of your way to assure your employer that they’re getting what they’re paying for," Calloway said.