Happy New Year!

I am usually not too stressed about January 1st as I sort of grew up celebrating New Year on Vishu per a different calendar that my family follows: the Malayalam/Tamil calendar.

This calendar is based on the sidereal year - i.e. the time taken for one revolution of the Earth around the sun - and is derived from an ancient form of solar calendar. My dad and mom know more about this than I do, so, I'll just leave it at that.

The Vishu, new year's day, usually falls in mid-April and the calendar consists of twelve months. Unlike the Gregorian calendar, the number of days in a given month can vary from year to year. Plus, some months may even have 32 days.

So, till mid-April, around Tax time, I don't have to stress about New Year resolutions! Yay!

D and I decided to take it easy today. We just played a game of Scrabble. He won. As usual. He always gets the X,J,V,Z,F and K. I am not sure how he manages that. Well, I am usually not terribly competitive when I play against him - I just play for fun.

Today it was particularly fun because this is the first time we played since our wee tot started recognizing some letters of the alphabet.

There she was sitting on her dad's lap and blurting out 'OO','A', 'SSS' and such, it was pretty cute. Not that it helped me much in taking advantage of the information she was passing along with such flourish...

Oh, and, we have tons of berries we picked over summer from local farms, frozen and waiting to be enjoyed in winter. So, we decided to make Strawberry Ice Cream at home with the Ice Cream/Sorbet/Yogurt maker my brother gifted us for Christmas.

Very simple wholesome recipe, but, we substituted heavy cream with half-and-half, and whole milk with 2%, and cut back on the sugar a bit, added a lot of strawberries. This sort of compromised the texture, but not the taste. Yummmm!

The little one couldn't have enough of it even after two helpings in her little baby bowl! Even though it is sort of "healthy" ice cream, we had to say "Bye Bye Ice Cream" as that sort of gets through to her these days: no more ice cream; it is gone for a while and won't be back until Amma (c'est moi) says so :-)