Pesto control

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Twitter has given me the opportunity to interact with people from all walks of life. It's interesting - and inspiring - to see how some people have been able to pursue their passions with so much enthusiasm. For instance, food blogger Kalyan Karmakar. I don't recall when I first started following him on the 140-character platform, but I'm pretty sure his food tweets and pictures that got retweeted were enough to make me want to. 

One of my most memorable interactions with him was when I went to Dhaka on work. A packed 4-day trip, and I was super stressed out with everything going on. Everyone around me was excited that I was in another country, and more so for the fact that I was going to watch the first World Cup match live (It's a different matter altogether that I hardly watched any cricket). There I was, probably moping on Twitter because of the stress one late night in Bangla land, and Kalyan asked if I had tried any local food favourites. Obviously not. So he referred me to another tweeter (who had lived in Dhaka) who very kindly suggested a few places that I could try. Armed with that information, I did manage Star Kababs and American Burger - two places that served the best beef seekh kebabs with oh-so-beautifully-flaky parathas and the best beef cheeseburger (respectively) I've had in my life. 

Happy me!

Much later, I started perusing Kalyan's food blog on and off and quite liked his style of writing. Everything sounded simple, and delicious. And then I came across his post on pesto, and I knew I just had to try it, and got crazy enough at 2 AM sometime last month to make it. Refrigerated the mix and woke up next morning to boil spaghetti for the same. That went into my lunch dabba (minus the mushrooms). Unfortunately, I felt it lacked something in flavour. And I'm no expert, so don't know what it was. Disappointed, I took back most of the dabba home that evening... when I thought of adding canned tuna to it. Apologies, if that was a kitchen no-no, but I quite enjoyed the taste of what it ultimately turned out to be. [It's only a little later that I saw this post about a pasta-pesto-tuna combination :)]
Clockwise from Top Left: the pesto (with extra oil); boiled spaghetti; Final dish in my dabba.

The photos above are from my own experiment.

Thanks to Kalyan for inspiring. I'm not much of a cook but his blog certainly makes me believe I can try once in a while.

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