so whats in a name...?

So everyone used to ask why the name deostroll? What does it mean?

Frankly it doesn't mean anything per se.

It was back in the second half of the year of 1998, while I was doing my schooling (9th Std) in Hill Top Public School. The movie Titanic was popular then. For some boys Jack Dawson was a character they wanted to be more like...and hence the craze of maintaining long hair ensued. God knows how business fared for the barber shops back then; but I was a pseudo Jack Dawson back at the time. 

My hair was pretty unmanageable to maintain, and more difficult to keep it well kempt. Leonardo Di Caprio's hair was blond; yet it was always smooth. So I had to improvise...

I found a spray can at home I could refill. Filled water into it and took it to school. Whenever head felt dry enough took it our of the bag, and did the required business. And then the whole back benchers I sat with joined the lingo; not that everyone had long hair, but the spraying was fun.

That was also a time I had created my first email id. Was doing a small MS Office course over at NIIT in calicut. The instructor was teaching us how to create one. And when he kind of stressed on the fact that the username should be unique, I kind of pondered for a while. A funny guy like me, who used to walk around with a spray can (much like a deodrant can) to maintain my hairstyle - deostroll!

And thus the name.

So even after 13 years, why did this silly name stick?!

I don't attach so much of significance to what the name means...that time is what I attach significance to...because those were the best days of my life. I can't begin to describe the crazy things we did in our school but I can safely publish the fact that we busted an amplifier system which some famous personality had donated for school assembly use. God how we stood for assembly that day! :)

when sometimes "I make chicken curry"...

Learned the art of making edible and "safe" chicken curry while I was living in Chennai. This was fairly easy due to a very ingenious invention called the pressure cooker. However, I haven't been able to make chicken curry that way for a very long time; ever since I've moved to Bangalore.

But a few weeks back I met a woman; she was someone who has a future plan of being a chef (which I wasn't aware of at the time) asked me if I knew how to cook. And me being modest and all said "I only know how to make chicken curry".

Thus unfolded a whole chain of events...and I ended up explaining her the method anyway. 

Most IT folks would be aware of the term BSOD (aka blue screen of death). Its just a blue screen you get when windows encounters an error. You'd normally see a blue screen with some text which is dumped onto the screen. At a time when Windows 98 was in vogue, everything about that operating system was slow, but this was known to happen super fast. 

My recipe came out even faster than that.

However, how that conversation ensued was even more embarrassing...

To explain I'll need to share a bit of the preparation technique: you saute onions in a kadai, add chopped tomatoes to make it somewhat consistent, then you add your spices, then you add your chicken and other vegetables. After you feel the spices has been absorbed by the mix. You just dump the whole thing into a pressure cooker for one whistle.

I never get it right however. You need to proportion your spices correctly to get the magic, if you know what I mean. 

But most people do it the hard way. They actually use the kadai for the whole preparation. The pressure cooker is faster, and much easier to manage. And I find that the probability of such people (in that particular age group) not knowing that you could use a pressure cooker to cook chicken curry, is very high. The other person. to my surprise, was actually listening...

By all means I wanted to stop the narration, but I just went on...at the end of it was a strange emotion. 

I was thinking to myself, "Hey maybe I'll ask you for my Nobel prize for that narration later... but really?! You never knew you could use the damn pressure cooker!!!"

Then I was feeling a sense of accomplishment: "So I have successfully pressure cookerized another soul"

Then the most awkward thing happens:

She asks: "Why use the kadai?!"

Then I thought, "Yeah sure, the straight answer to that was - to mix the spices. But why couldn't I do it in the pressure cooker before putting all the chicken? The chicken had to go in there anyway..."

The embarrassing bit is...in all my 3+ yrs since I knew how to make...I never asked myself this question!

So naturally where was the answer?! I paused for a while shrugged and said, "I never really had that much of  kitchen sense", and smiled.

Days later I when I started reflecting on myself, who really handed me down the recipe; it turns out that my mother and sister both don't use the kadai for preparation. Now this was getting seriously like WTF.

There is only one person responsible for all this. and I am sure to whack him the next time I meet him. :)

Ps: on a serious note, never ever invite me over to your place for preparing chicken curry. You kitchen is not a lab; and I am not a chef.