Vegetable Fajitas with Home Made Salsa and Guacamole

And I am back

So finally I got a chance to get some dinner cooking done yesterday evening. For the past few days, it had been either going out of dinner or eating some leftovers from the morning or mom would have already cooked something. I did cook on a couple of days, but was too tired to pen it down during the night. So instead I have decided to do the blogging during the day about last nights menu. I will be writing down about the missing recipes in one of my upcoming posts.

But as for yesterday - it was a Mexican night. There is something about Mexican food which constantly makes me wonder of the ties that India had with South America in ancient times. The similarities between the spices that they use and we use, their tortillas and our rotis/ fulkas , their salsas and our  kachumbers/ chutneys, their beans and our chchole/rajma. I mean I could just go on. Even the utensils they use traditionally are so very similar to our traditional utensils. And this does not stop just at the kitchen and cooking. There are so many similarities between their art and culture and our art and culture, that it is not a co-incident that Mandodari (Ravana's wife) is originally decribed to be from Patal (South America), where Kumbhakarna visits in his plane.

 Actually, this is one of my passions. To read about ancient India and try to find proofs of how the stories we read in Ramayana and Mahabharata are not mere mythology but history which happened thousands of years ago. Same with the ancient scriptures and rituals that we follow. It all has a very deep scientific significance which somehow got lost in time.

It got so lost that sometimes its hard to believe that we belong to the same great civilization which gave us kings like Ram and Krishna, doctors and surgeons like Shushrut and Charaka, mathemeticians like Aryabhatt and Bhaskaracharya, scientists like Vyasa and so many other Rishis who have written on every imaginable science possible. Especially when you read about all the horror stories about things happening in Delhi and elsewhere in India. It makes me wonder, who are these people who could commit such crimes? Where did they come from? Where did they lose all those teachings, all those values, all those morals?  These people cannot be the descendants of the same culture where women are worshipped as goddesses, are respected as mothers and protected as daughters.

And that goes to say even for the mothers and grand-mothers of these men who brought them up. They learnt this behaviour towards women from the same women who brought them up. They were never taught to respect women, and if they would have been, they would have never ever even thought about such a heinous thing, let alone actually committing it.

I think its high time that we as a society should wake up. We should take the responsibility on our shoulders rather than passing and tossing it around. I hear the cry that police should be more vigilant during their patrolling, authorities should have a stricter punishment towards such crimes, buses should not have tinted glasses or curtains. All these measures are fine. But it is more like asking a heart patient to take a pain killer so that he does not feel the pain in the chest rather than tackling the root cause and giving proper treatment. All the above measures will make sense, when we as a society don't tolerate such a behaviour towards our women. We as women teach our sons (and our daughters) how to respect not only other women but also every other individual with whom we interact. Instill in them the right values, the right code of ethics at the right time and the world would be a much better place to live in.

Oh well...give me a pen and a paper and I will never stop writing. It's funny how your train of thoughts will take you from one thought to another, completely un-related one in no time.

So where were we - yes Mexican food. So my menu for last night was "Vegetable Fajitas with Home Made Salsa and Guacamole"

Here is the recipe -

Vegetable Fajitas

Ingredients :

Spinach Tortillas
Red, Yellow and Orange Bell Peppers sliced
Onion sliced
2 tspns Coriander Powder
2 tspns Cumin Powder
11/2 tspn Red Chillie Powder

Directions :

Heat Oil in a pan. Add sliced onions and saute for a few minutes.
Add sliced bell peppers and saute till they are cooked but still crisp
Add all the spices and saute till the spices are cooked which means you see oil oozing through them.
Add salt and turn off the stove

Salsa

Ingredients :

Fresh Tomatoes - chopped
Spring onions - chopped
Green Chillies - chopped finely
Salt
Sugar
Cilantro

Directions :

Mix all the ingredients just before serving. If mixed too much in advance, the salsa would turn watery

Guacamole

Ingredients :

1 ripe Avocado - Flesh seperated from skin and mashed finely
2 garlic cloves - chopped finely
Juice of 1 lime
1 Green Chillie - finely chopped
Cilantro - finely chopped
Salt to taste

Directions :

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl and its ready to serve

Assembly :

Heat the tortilla on a pan so that it becomes pliable. Place it on a plate and place the cooked veges, salsa, guacamole and a dollop of sour cream in the center of the tortilla. Fold the sides and make it into a wrap.