Dariya’s father bought us a very nice breadmaker and I am pretty sure if it wasn’t for that I wouldn’t even bother to talk to you about bread. The best french toast I have ever had was at Rudy’s Can’t Fail Cafe in Emeryville, it was with challah bread, and when I found a very simple challah recipe in the breadmaker booklet I knew what I had to do.
With a breadmaker, challah bread is moronically easy. However you do need a loaf prepared the night before, and set to cool overnight, if you want to make french toast with it in the morning. For 2 thick slices of french toast, you’ll need 2 eggs, 1/4 cup milk, and 1/2 tspn of salt. This makes french toast the easiest to make in the morning (20 minutes for 2), provided you have bread on hand. This scales down to 1 egg, so it really can be a speed breakfast.
Beat 2 eggs in a deep dish
Add in 1/2 tspn salt. This is Dariya’s magic.
Add 1/4 cup milk and mix well.
Slice bread on the thick side, let sit in dish on each side for 30 seconds or so. Lightly wipe off excess egg.
Fry bread in pan with a light layer of oil, roughly 4 minutes per side on low heat.
Sprinkle cinnamon and powdered sugar, serve with maple syrup.
Serve with fresh fruit and if you’re hungry, with some bacon or homefries.
At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have . . . Enough.”
My first realization that breakfast could be more than just cereal or a bagel came with an old box of Bisquick we inherited and quested to finish. The obvious use of Bisquick gave rise to many mornings improved with pancakes. When the box was done, I sought a cheaper and healthier alternative. Turns out Bisquick is just flour and baking powder (and maybe some salt and powdered milk/egg, I don’t remember and who really cares?), and it is quite easy to sub in whole wheat flour and preserve a delicious pancake.
Making a massive batch of pancakes is easy but time-consuming. I would recommend a minimum of four unless you like wasting eggs. Making 4 is easy to do in the morning in 30 minutes with minimal cleanup, but you have to move quickly. For any more I would recommend setting aside at least 90 minutes to mix, cook, eat, and clean. The recipe is easily scalable, I have made up to a dozen at once by tripling the recipe. You’ll need to be patient while cooking all 12! The payoff is having many leftover pancakes that reheat very nicely in a toaster. Makes for an easy breakfast the next day!
Ingredients:
1.25 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup milk
1 egg
2 tspn baking powder
1/2 tspn salt
1 Tbsp sugar
opt: 1/4 tspn vanilla extract
Your favorite topping. Don’t be stingy!
And real maple syrup (pricey but worth it), not maple-flavored corn syrup. Down with Big Corn!
Process:
Beat the egg in a large bowl.
Add salt and sugar, mix well.
Add milk and vanilla, mix well.
In a separate* bowl, mix flour and baking powder.
Mix all contents together until resulting batter is uniform.
Heat and lightly oil a frying pan.
Pour a quantity of batter onto the pan and sprinkle in your favorite topping. Push in your toppings to the middle of the batter, so when you flip them they won’t burn on the pan surface.
Fry until batter begins to slowly bubble, then flip.
Fry until done.
*If you don’t want to cleanup another bowl you can throw these in the same bowl. Mix well!
As you can see my favorite topping is blueberries. The whole wheat pancakes tend to be a little drier than Bisquick or all-purpose pancakes, so adding juicy blueberries really helps. (You can also con yourself into skipping the fruit bowl this way. Add pecans instead.) Don’t forget the maple syrup! The whole wheat absorbs the maple syrup well but don’t be fooled by its disappearance – when you bite in the sweetness will still be there.
Serve with a fruit bowl and if you’re hungry, with some bacon or homefries.
“The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.”
- Dorothy Nevill
01: Bonobo – Black Sands
02: Four Tet – There is Love in You
03: Caribou – Swim
04: Sigur Ros – Takk
05: The Album Leaf – In a Safe Place
06: Rodrigo y Gabriela – 11:11
07: Fat Freddy’s Drop – Dr Boondigga and the Big BW
08: RJD2 – The Colossus
09: Cyne – Evolution Fight
10: Radiohead – In Rainbows
No old holdovers this time around at all! I didn’t expect this but these are the 10 albums I’ve played most frequently in the past while. I am not entirely sure how to feel about this, but the top five are definite – my heart won’t let me displace them with any of the classics. In Rainbows barely scratches in at #10!
The Gujarati alphabet is purely phonetic. If you can pronounce a word correctly, you can spell it correctly. The rules are fairly simple. Unique letters exist for consonant sounds, and are accented in several ways (or not accented at all) depending on the vowel sound that follows. Hybrid consonant sounds are formed by literally mashing together the consonants. Special symbols for hybrid ‘r’ and nasal ‘n’ sounds exist. Standalone vowels also have their own unique letters, and can be accented like consonants as well. Littered throughout the city are signs written in English and Gujarati, and these are a good first step for the curious linguist to peek into the workings of the Gujarati alphabet.
I was going to give more examples but drawing these lines is a pain in the ass. Learn the rest yourself!
Defenders of a free market would do well to visit India. While technically actions in the country are subject to regulation, lax enforcement and a thriving black market allow one to observe a much closer approximation to a free market than anywhere else.
If I had to pick one word to describe the pace and flow of Indian cities it would be “chaotic”. Traffic is most definitely chaotic – motorcycles and rickshaws drive on the wrong side of the road and stop lights are disobeyed en masse. The flow of goods is chaotic – medicine is easily sold without a prescription, vegetables are sold on the street or at a market, unlicensed, food safety be damned. The hallmark of Western order, the queue, is completely absent from the Indian consciousness. If you can get to the front, you’re next.
It is this lack of order, this chaos, that I think marks a free market, what humans would do if left completely unregulated. The question is hypothetical, but I think a good approximation to the answer would be what you see in an Indian city. The motorcyclist goes the wrong way on the road because its easier for him. One woman buys vegetables from the street vendor because he comes through her neighborhood; another buys goes to the market for wider selection. The two vendors coexist in this case, catering to customers with different priorities. (And they don’t need business licenses.) Everyone litters because the individual doesn’t imagine his empty water bottle or plastic wrapper affecting the environment. We’ve only recently come to terms here with that not being the case. It seems the free market is more concretely comprehensible to the individual at the cost of collective concerns such as the environment.
If you accept India as a free market in practice you can make some interesting observations. The sum of individual traffic decisions lead to more congestion and slower average speed through the city. People tend to assemble into larger societies instead of remaining as isolated individuals or small families. Cash is the primary transfer of wealth; lack of large institutions that depend on regulations such as credit cards or insurers aren’t as omnipresent. Business and other interactions depend more on trust than on regulation. (And at least in Ahmedabad the trust is rewarded more often than not.)
It also raises some interesting questions that I can only ponder and never completely answer. What is the optimal level of regulation? Third party certification? How much can people be trusted in everyday interactions? What is the true value of media? (Pirating Bollywood music and movies is a national pastime.)
And the biggest one – can an unregulated free market ever adequately address collective concerns? Is it even theoretically possible and if so, what assumptions about human nature do we need to make? How do those assumptions compare to reality? And what does that say about our species?
Undoubtedly the best way to see Ahmedabad is with a personal driver and tour guide, which will run you no more than $100 for a single day. I strongly recommend getting in touch with the following people.
Tour Guide: Mr. Jamshed Turner
Jamshed gives guided tours in English and French for visitors to Ahmedabad. There is no corner of this massive city that he doesn’t know about. He can explain history both fact and legend behind the temples and mosques of the city, the construction details of the Adalaj Stepwell, He can suggest places for you to visit based on your interests or work with your list of things to do, and he can work with your driver to get from A to B quickly. This is a video of Jamshed in action, explaining the legend of Mahmud Shah.
Driver: Mr. Firoz (Pintoo) Khan
phone: +91-095-3726-6414
manager: kirtibhai shah (also works freelance)
Pintoo is a driver currently under the employ of a travel agency. He is based in Ahmedabad and he was our driver for our three day excursion to Gir and Somnath. Pintoo also has extensive knowledge about the tourist attractions in Ahmedabad and the rest of the state. He also knows the ins and outs of getting screwed over in India and will fight for you to keep that from happening, doing everything from buying medicine to yelling at incompetent tourism managers. Pintoo also has no issues driving safely and comfortably if you have a weak stomach for Indian driving. He may be freelancing by the time you read this.
