I love soup. One of my favourite folk tales is Stone Soup, where the travellers trick a whole community into donating ingredients for soup which they all share. Anyway, it’s been raining incessantly and I’ve been thinking about the soup place on Degraves St in Melbourne with the giant vats of the best soups. Anyone who has visited me in my new home knows all I do these days is stay indoors, wear (ugly) floral maxi dresses and cook. I love making things that require only a handful of ingredients, so anything on Martha Stewart is out. I’ve been making up all the recipes. Cooking by intuition. Farfalle with coriander and walnuts, salami sandwiches with avocado and pesto, tumeric and cumin roasted cauliflower. Yesterday I listened to Manu Chao, thought of Rushad and made potato soup. It was pouring outside and my house was so lovely and breezy, that it just seemed apt. I simmered it for a good hour or so but it was so melty and delicious and worth it. It was also really filling. I made up the recipe so I thought I’d type it out so I could remember it for the future. I miss this boy with all my heart.
(Garlicky-buttery) Potato soup
Serves 2
Ingredients:
5 floury large potatoes
half a cube of chicken or vegetable stock (or make your own)
3 onions
4 garlic cloves
butter or olive oil
cracked pepper
Wash, peel, dice and bring the potatoes to boil covering them with enough water. Peel and add the cloves of garlic.
Saute the onions in butter or oil over medium heat until they soften slightly and even char a wee bit. Add it to the pot and simmer. Add more water if levels get too low. Stir occasionally.
It’s done when it has a creamy consistency. Mash with a fork or potato masher until the soup is as smooth as you’d like. Taste and season.
Stir through more butter, or a spoonful of wasabi, or add tobasco if you’d like. Serve with some crusty bread.
Feel free to bypass this self absorbed update on my life and the indulgent things that make me happy. Mostly my new(er) apartment and my newly stocked (STOCKED!!) kitchen. Food and sunshine, who would have thunk it? I’m smitten with the world and Bombay again.
Twilight from my bedroom. And no, I haven’t seen any of the movies, ergo I am cooler than you. I love the light in my house. Sluuuurp.
My spice boxes (there was a bit of a mixup though), inventing recipes, planning ahead and making meals from scratch. French toast for breakfast tomorrow.
Pretty reflections in giant monsoon pools.
And for the few times I actually leave the house – wine, goats cheese pizza and sweet potato gnocchi at the sprawling Pali Village Cafe. Long boozy Sunday brunches at Olive, Mahalaxmi. High tea (they have DIY pani puri and the cutest sammies) at Sea Lounge at the beautiful Taj Mahal Hotel watching the boats. Note: These will leave you as poor as happy and also drunk and unable to take good photos.
Or better yet, get on a boat. I want a yacht. Argh!
On set chai. This is the best thing about the film industry. Beats egos, delays and odious little cunts hands down.
and lastly, going home to Pune to see my friends and the adorable olds. My grandparents are Goan and so kitsch, I did a photostory on them but I’m reluctant to share it just yet.
Also making plans for Europe – I’m going to Edinburgh, London and Paris next month and I’ve been scouring the internet for advice like a madhatter, trying to figure out how to bake a cake in my convection oven (I have to show you what kind of cake!), working for some amazing clients and sale season. I am but a girl after all.
I don’t know how but in the span of a month, I found myself at two completely separate black light shoots. One was fun because I got to finger paint fluorescent tribal designs on some traditional feather and hide masks, the other because the dancers we dressed were fucking fantastic. Both were splendid, both I photographed. These pictures are from a song sequence in a Bollywood film that I worked on as wardrobe assistant.
I didn’t think I could write too much about Varanasi. I was petrified when we got off that train. It was midnight, there were bodies laid flat all over railway station platform and we were inundated with requests from rickshaw drivers. They’re very in your face and they thought we were foreigners until I ruined it for them with my awesome Hindi. But I was very overwhelmed and frightened. I spent all night looking through Varanasi photoblogs with our overpriced hotel’s wifi trying to make sense of the place. But the next morning, everything changed and I did. And Varanasi ended up being one of my favourite places.
Tiny alleyways through which no vehicles could fit led us at sunrise to the ghats, to the most stunning, surreal and unexpected view. We spent the morning walking the ghats, watching the babas pray and smoke chillums, people wash themselves and their clothes in the Holy Ganges completely unfazed by the tourist filled boats that sailed past. On the main ghat Dasashwamedh, we bought bracelets with the pictures of Gods, brass agarbati stands and lamps, and the best T-shirt ever which reads – No rickshaw. No hashish. No silk. No change money. No boat. No problem! which are all the things we got asked if we wanted. Countless times over. People kept taking our hands in theirs and demanding money for services like blessing us. Oh, we’ll pass thanks.
The whole place and experience was moving and enticing and raucous, dirty and imperfect and spiritual, and commercial and chaotic and colourful all at once. I spotted a super cool baba I imagined was once an art director fed up with city life and asked to take his picture and he grinned. The Ganga Aarti every evening is very special. It’s beautiful and hard to describe, feverish and fragrant with smoke.We prayed and released our little flower lamps into the Ganga which is something I’d always wanted to do.
I loved the magical light filtering through the claustrophobic alleys.It was nothing short of unsettling though. You can never know when you’ll cross paths with a moody cow or a (covered) corpse will suddenly appear behind you, mourners chanting ‘Bhagwan satya hai’ as they carry it down to the river to the two burning ghats.
We found the German Bakery there to be our favourite spot of solace, where we met lovely travellers and ate delicious organic food while listening to some live classical santoor and tabla.We moved to a guesthouse on the ghats so we could be closer to everything and at night it was especially eerie but wonderful, the sunrise even more so. We took a boatride at dawn to see everything from a different perspective which I recommend everybody does. We spent almost two hours on the water, witnessing some incredible things – from swimming schools to burning corpses. With a little more exploration, and a lot more cycle rickshaw rides (I loved!) to buy stunning silk scarves, and a lazy lunch at El Parador, an absolute gem of a restaurant with delightful service and delicious food; we bade goodbye to Benaras.
Also without sounding like too much of a pimp, I’ve created a little group on Bacefook for my work and I’d love if you joined. Spankies muchly.
Some favourite pictures from the Maasai village in Amboseli we spent almost five days filming at. These are just candid shots from when we first visited (aka not from during the show). The Maasais performed a little welcome dance for us and then introduced themselves and taught me the traditional Maasai greetings – Sopa to which one responds Ipa, and Taqwenya (for females) to which the response is Iko. They were very friendly and spoke fluent English, all the men were educated and some had even been abroad to study yet there they chose to return and live in mud huts (built by their wives) without electricity and herd animals while earning an extra income by selling their handicrafts or performing in the nearby lodges. I think I must have asked them a trillion questions but then, so did they. I was obviously completely enamoured with their vibrant clothing and jewellery, the colours! Oh and they were trendy too, they had wacky belt buckles with anything from drumkits to pictures of Obama on them. The mind boggles!
On our last day there, they set up a market for us and displayed all their fantastic, colourful wares. I lost my mind when I saw some incredible, intricately beaded Bata shoes that I could never wear but I settled for some ginormous earrings, kind of like the ones below and a leather/bead arm band to make up for it. Okay, enough talk.
Neville, a fantastic photographer, my oldest friend and first mentor and myself have been taking to the streets at night with our 50 mm arsenal, his with a very low 1.4 F-stop, mine not as fancy. Bastard. We’re shooting a series of Bandra’s old Portuguese fishing villages and started with Chuim Village earlier this week. Last night we shot the areas around Chapel and Varoda Rd. It’s nice, because although we’re often shooting the same subjects, Neville loves geometry and shadows while I seek out pretty things – like shrines and furry animals. Many of the street lights weren’t working though, but since I’m head over heels about the architecture in the villages, I’ll do a Bandra by day in time. Here are some of our pictures.
Flash back a few years when bangs, blonde highlights, black and white, napping between lectures, Scrumpy cuddles, One Tree Hill marathons and afternoons baking with Hayley and Soheil were de rigueur. We (They) made babaghanoush and brownies that day also, and also marshmallows I think. Whatever, I made us endless cups of tea and pored over David LaChapelle’s Artists and Prostitutes. Pretty sure we ate half the nougat before it set even. You know what they say about too many cooks.
I’ve been shooting a few portfolios lately. Natural light, no war paint, the stuff casting agents ask for these days. This is Shruti. She was hanging out at the Axe Effect IPL promos we styled a couple of weekends ago and we decided to make an afternoon of it in the marquee we were sitting in. No makeup, no meters, nothing. She’s a pretty one.
