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They say that onion is the friend of all vegetables; and tomato their enemy.
Just take an onion, peel it, and cut it into tiny pieces. Fry them in a non-stick pan of sunflower oil till they turn golden brown. Sprinkle a bit of salt and chilli powder. And add this fragrant mixture to any curry. And it will enhance its taste and flavor.
Yummy-yummy, as Ishani puts it.
Do the same thing with a tomato. Phew! It will detract from the taste of whatever vegetable to which it is added. It will overpower the curry with its bloody color, envelop it with its spreading juice, and drain the vegetable of all its innate taste.
What happens if you add deep-fried onion to tomato pieces? Good question! They simply neutralize each other. And lo!...you have an altogether new dish. Just pour this concoction into a vessel of slightly sour curd, mix it, keep it in the fridge for a couple of hours, and eat it with a spoon. It will be heaven-sent bliss for the impending white-hot summer of Hyderabad.
This neutralization reminds me of the famous addition of sodium to chlorine. We didn't have a proper lab in our village school at Muthukur. But, Father, our science teacher, used to make it a point to bring to the lecture class every other week a live demo, like with lenses, mirrors, simple pendulum, and such.
One day he gave us an unforgettable demo of sodium and chlorine. His peon brought a glass jar, beaker, and some chemicals.
The first demo was of sodium. He showed the bottle in which pieces of sodium were stored in kerosine. And with a tongs he gingerly picked up a piece of sodium and placed it in a jar of water. And all of us rustic kids were delighted to see that sodium piece sputter, flutter, and jump and leap like a jittery baby-frog skipping over water. And explodng once in a while.
Father told us that sodium when added to water releases hydrogen which explodes in the heat generated by the reaction...he spared us the jargon, 'exothermic'.
And the next experiment was to pace a couple of potassium permanganate crystals at the bottom of the empty jar and add a few drops of hydrochloric acid. And within a couple of minutes all of us were coughing and wheezing...the few fumes of pungent yellow-green chlorine that were released spread quickly all over the classroom.
No wonder I remember this demo after 60 years although I forgot the proof of the inverse of the Pythagoras theorem...good for me. That is the power of a live demo.
Father desisted from adding a piece of sodium into a jar of chlorine. He knew it would be risky. Just now I saw a cute video of what happens:
As we all know, the final result is neither sputtering nor pungent but the familiar and indispensable common salt...result of an uncommon reaction. Power of chemistry!
Talking of sodium, I can never forget the summer evening when a couple of chemistry profs at IIT KGP ridiculed us physics guys...chee chee chee...
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They say that onion is the friend of all vegetables; and tomato their enemy.
Just take an onion, peel it, and cut it into tiny pieces. Fry them in a non-stick pan of sunflower oil till they turn golden brown. Sprinkle a bit of salt and chilli powder. And add this fragrant mixture to any curry. And it will enhance its taste and flavor.
Yummy-yummy, as Ishani puts it.
Do the same thing with a tomato. Phew! It will detract from the taste of whatever vegetable to which it is added. It will overpower the curry with its bloody color, envelop it with its spreading juice, and drain the vegetable of all its innate taste.
What happens if you add deep-fried onion to tomato pieces? Good question! They simply neutralize each other. And lo!...you have an altogether new dish. Just pour this concoction into a vessel of slightly sour curd, mix it, keep it in the fridge for a couple of hours, and eat it with a spoon. It will be heaven-sent bliss for the impending white-hot summer of Hyderabad.
This neutralization reminds me of the famous addition of sodium to chlorine. We didn't have a proper lab in our village school at Muthukur. But, Father, our science teacher, used to make it a point to bring to the lecture class every other week a live demo, like with lenses, mirrors, simple pendulum, and such.
One day he gave us an unforgettable demo of sodium and chlorine. His peon brought a glass jar, beaker, and some chemicals.
The first demo was of sodium. He showed the bottle in which pieces of sodium were stored in kerosine. And with a tongs he gingerly picked up a piece of sodium and placed it in a jar of water. And all of us rustic kids were delighted to see that sodium piece sputter, flutter, and jump and leap like a jittery baby-frog skipping over water. And explodng once in a while.
Father told us that sodium when added to water releases hydrogen which explodes in the heat generated by the reaction...he spared us the jargon, 'exothermic'.
And the next experiment was to pace a couple of potassium permanganate crystals at the bottom of the empty jar and add a few drops of hydrochloric acid. And within a couple of minutes all of us were coughing and wheezing...the few fumes of pungent yellow-green chlorine that were released spread quickly all over the classroom.
No wonder I remember this demo after 60 years although I forgot the proof of the inverse of the Pythagoras theorem...good for me. That is the power of a live demo.
Father desisted from adding a piece of sodium into a jar of chlorine. He knew it would be risky. Just now I saw a cute video of what happens:
As we all know, the final result is neither sputtering nor pungent but the familiar and indispensable common salt...result of an uncommon reaction. Power of chemistry!
Talking of sodium, I can never forget the summer evening when a couple of chemistry profs at IIT KGP ridiculed us physics guys...chee chee chee...
It was around 5 in the evening and I was lazing in my office reading maybe the copy of Thurber Carnival that Jogia gifted me...I was about to retire in a few months. And a summer Norwester was brewing with growling thunder and streaking lightnings. And I thought I better have a cup of tea in our TOAT canteen before it closes and I get stranded forlorn. And I locked my room and started walking on the first floor towards the staircase at the southern end. But the storm outpaced me and by when I reached the parapet overlooking the lawns between the physics and geology ground floors, it started pouring cats and horses.
And I stood looking at the lightning and quaking in the thunder. All of a sudden, there were loud explosions coming from half a dozen deal-wood boxes dumped on the ground under the sky outside the window of a physics research lab. And fire. And more boom-booms and more fire engulfing the boxes one by one. And there were several onlookers standing in the ground floor physics verandah. And all of us expected that the pouring rain would quench the fires.
But no! The more it rained the more the fires spread with more explosions. And a senior physics professor, given to acrobatics, ran into the rain intrepidly with a tiny hand-held fire extinguisher. And he ran back into the verandah achieving little but getting drenched like a wet hen...a dozen odd times to and fro.
It was then that a couple of chemistry profs, thirsting for tea like me, passed behind me walking and talking whatever chemistry profs talk about. And they stopped and stood by me watching the show declaring:
"These physics guys don't know how to store sodium"
And walked on...by then the fury of the storm, and the explosions in burning boxes, petered out.
You can guess what had happened.
Fifty odd years ago, the lab from which those boxes were thrown out into the lawn that morning, must have stored, one on top of the other, sealed crates of bottles of kerosine in which metallic sodium pieces were floating, for whatever research the then professor may have purchased them. And perhaps he left KGP before he could open them at his leisure. And they stayed there like Pandora's boxes all those decades. And a new professor was allotted the said room for his laser optics research. And he took over and asked his new research scholar-goats to throw those ugly boxes out of the window.
And in the process, the bottles must have broken and kerosine oozed out of them soaking the wood tenderly, while the sodium pieces were left high and dry lying at the bottom of the boxes.
And that very evening there was this storm...the rainwater seeped into the boxes, and the sodium pieces exploded on touching the water drops. And the ensuing li'l li'l fires lit up the kerosine-soaked boxes like Diwali cracker containers.
The rest, as they say, is cute history...
...Posted by Ishani
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