seebavinoy.blogspot.com

                                                             Air frying chicken These days, people are very health-conscious. An air fryer helps in cooking food healthily and quickly. Here I am showing how to cook chicken pieces in an air fryer.

                           The unsung heroes of life: Farmers and scientists  I was brought up in a village where I had the chance to interact with farmers. Many people in our neighbourhood were farmers. The items cultivated were mainly paddy, coconut, arecanut, and tapioca. I participated in paddy cultivation by planting rice saplings. We also had paddy fields where we grew paddy. When the paddy season ended, we switched to tapioca, long beans, etc. At harvest time, everything was in plenty, and we celebrated the harvest festival, Onam. I had seen the hardships behind these cultivations. At that time, machinery was scarce, and mostly manual labour was used. Right from sowing to harvesting, there are various processes involved that require a lot of physical labour, which was not adequately paid. Poor farmers get only very little profit. We are ignoring the fact that we will starve without them. Gradually, the mea...

The above picture is of my grandmother. She was married at the young age of 9, which was the norm at that time. One surprising feature is that she gave birth to 13 children, of whom only the last child survived. She gave birth to eight sons and five girls. Among the sons, only the eighth one survived to the age of two. The other twelve children died of various reasons at the time of birth itself. At that time, medical knowledge was limited, and the reasons for those deaths remained unknown. My grandmother got psychic issues because of this and had to be locked in a room due to depression. The thirteenth child was my mother, and she survived. The photo below is of my mother with her parents. My mother grew into a beautiful girl. She had long, curly hair under which she used to hide her friends, and her lips were fully rose-colored; those were her identities.  She excelled in her studies and went to Trivandrum Medical College to study nursing. She became a qualified nurse. By th...

  "Randu naalu dinam kondorutthaney Thandiletti nadathunnathum bhavaan Maalika mukaleriya mannante Tholil maaraappu kettunnathum bhavaan" The above lines are excerpts taken from Jnanapana, a poem written by a revered philosophical poet,Poonthanam Namboothiri, depicting the transient nature of life.The meaning of this short poem is within two to four days God can make a person rich, and sametime god can pull down a person from their ivory tower to shelter home. As we age, life teaches us many lessons, and this was one among them for me. I have read about the plight of the famous yesteryear actress Savitri of the Tamil cinema industry. She was a person who earned a lot during her peak years as an actress and used to ride and travel in the luxury cars of her time. But in the later years of her life, she had to face setbacks, lost everything she had earned, and finally she was pulled in a cart drawn by a horse and died a pauper. This is known to many of us. When the Oscar-winning...

                                            Water plants are my favourites. While gardening, I learned a lot about lilies. I was surprised to learn that a few varieties of lilies propagate through leaves. Preparation of pond First, we have to prepare the pond where we are growing plants. Drain the water completely, and we can keep a few pots with already grown plants as shown in the figure below. Then fill the pond with water. This method is ideal for easy maintenance. In the other method, we have to fill half of the pond with manure, mud, clay, and sand, which is cumbersome in cities where it is difficult to get mud, sand, etc. Also, weeds will grow along with lilies in such ponds where water snakes will be hiding, and it will be difficult to remove weeds and maintain such ponds. The above picture is of a mature leaf with saplings on its surface. This leaf is of pink coloured w...

 Like any other beauty-conscious lady, I was also concerned when I saw the wrinkles on my forehead increasing with every birthday. I started searching and trying various moisturisers and serums claiming to give a smooth finish. Buying, trying, and throwing became the norm for a few years. Finally, one day, when I opened Facebook, I saw a lady showing images of her face before and after applying coconut oil. Being from the land of coconut oil, this idea never came to my mind. In my teenage years, it was considered to be comedogenic. Anyway, I just decided to give it a try, as I had tried other moisturisers. To my surprise, my wrinkles smoothed out within one week. Now I apply a generous dab of coconut oil on my face every night before going to sleep, as it also hastens sleep. Before applying on your face, just check out your skin type also. For dry skin, it may work wonders, as it did for my skin, but it may give comodogenic effect on oily skin. Since skin type of each person varies...

 I am a veterinary doctor by profession. But I am a poor practitioner. After marriage, family, kid, and deteriorating health compelled me onto a career break. I waited for everything to stabilize, which never happened.  But the urge to do something productive went on to nag my mind. So I zeroed in on copy editing and chose medical editing as my niche, as I thought it would align with my knowledge of medical terms and love for language. My husband is a professor at the Indian Institute of Science, and I started by editing his research articles. I was happy doing this because it increased my knowledge base and put to use the knowledge I gained through a professional degree, which I hardly fought to achieve. When I dived into this profession, there were very few people in the industry. So, I thought of giving it a try and took a professional course in copy editing. It was only a four-day-long course. I wrote many tests, but couldn't qualify. Many companies require experience, but...