I decided to make bread today. I found a recipe for oat and cheese bread which looked interesting. But I had chosen one of those days -- increasingly frequent -- of power outages. The power went out FOUR TIMES, each time for more than 20 minutes, and I just couldn't get the bread into my electric oven. The fourth time, I decided to run the generator, just to get the bread baked. Then it conked -- because the repairmen, who had been working on it yesterday AGAIN, had screwed up the settings so that it couldn't take the load of the oven.
Finally, I tore off hunks of the bread dough, rolled them out like parathas / pitas, and cooked them on a dry griddle. They were pretty good, too.
The generator people are coming tomorrow morning AGAIN, and the washing-machine guy is coming in the afternoon AGAIN. This is one of the real Third World things about living in Chennai: the power supply is just not reliable. We've replaced every appliance at least twice, because of extreme fluctuations. We've spent a fortune on stabilisers, UPS's, better versions of both... The state of Tamil Nadu is trying hard to attract IT and manufacturing industries, and with some success. But without steady power -- never mind water, and a few other problems -- I wonder how far they will be able to succeed.
Anyway, if you haven't tried oat and cheese parathas, I commend them to you.
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