Bengali Recipe - Aloo Posto

ALOO POSTO

Aloo Posto is one of the popular recipes of Bengal. Bengalis love aloo posto. It goes well with rice and roti or parathas.

Ingredients:

• Five to six medium size potatoes
• Two green chillies
• 1 table spoon of pure ghee
• ½ table spoon of sugar
• Salt to taste
• ½ table spoon of onion seeds or kalonji
• Two table spoon of poppy seeds of khuskhus
• 2 table spoon of mustard oil.

Preparation:

• Peel off the potatoes first and cut them into 1 inch or sized pieces
• Now keep them in a bowl of water.
• Soak poppy seeds in 1 cup of luke warm water for about 15 or twenty minutes.
• Now remove and grind them to fine paste
• Once you bring the poppy seeds into fine paste, heat up a pot of mustard oil till it reaches the smoking point Now remove and cool and heat up the oil once again on a medium heat.
• Mix in the kalonji and then stir fry briefly
• Mix in the potato pieces and then stir fry on the medium heat for up to five minutes, stirring quite frequently. Mix in poppy seeds paste and stir mix in half cup of water, cover and then stir fry on the low heat up till the potatoes are almost completed.
• Take off the lid and then mix in sugar, salt and slit green chillies.
• Continue to stir fry for about a minute more or till the potatoes are fully cooked and stir in desi ghee and serve hot.

Beautiful places in Kolkata

I have been staying in this nice city 'Kolkata' since last five years. Though due to my busy professional life I get hardly enough time to roam around the city but still then I managed to visit some wonderful places in this 'City of Joy' in my spare time.

Dakshineswar Kali Temple

Dakshineswar Kali Temple is situated in Dakshineswar close to Kolkata, the capital city of West Bengal. It’s a Hindu place of worship located on the eastern bank of River Hooghly. Bhavatarini is the presiding deity of this temple. Bhavatarin is an aspect of Kali. Constructed by Rani Rashmoni, a devotee of Goddess Kali and a philanthropist in the year 1855, the temple is popular for its association with Ramakrishna, a mystic of the 19th century Bengal.

The compound of Dakshineswar temple consists of a huge courtyard which surrounds the temple with rooms along with the boundary walls. Together with the 9-spired main temple, there 12 shrines dedicated to Shiva located along the river front, a temple dedicated to Radha and Krishna, a bathing ghat on the river and a shrine dedicated to Rani Rashmoni. A chamber located in the north-western corner beyond the Shiva temple is said to be the place where Ramakrishna spent a significant part of his life.

Birla Mandir

Birla Mandir is a Hindu Temple constructed by the distinguished industrialist family- the Birla. The temple is located on Asutosh Chowdhury Avenue, Ballygunge and is one of the most visited tourist attraction of Kolkata. Every day the temple remains open from 5.30 am to 11 am in the morning and then 4.30 Pm to 9 PM in the evening. Every Janmashtami, on the birthday of Lord Krishna, many devotees comes to visit the temple from different places to pay their tribute and respect to the deities.

The construction work started in the year 1970. It took about twenty six years to complete this entire structure. Finally on February 21, 1996, Swami Chidanandaji Maharaj did the Pran Prathistha in the morning. Dr. Karan Sigh inaugurated the Birla Mandir on the same day.

Victoria Memorial

Officially known as Victoria Memorial Hall, is a memorial building constructed in memory of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. This memorial building is located in Kolkata, India which is the capital of the state of West Bengal. At present, Victoria Memorial Hall serves as a museum and is ranked amongst the most popular tourist attractions of the city.

Sir William Emerson who was the then President of the British Institute of Architects had drew up and designed the plan of this memorial. The whole construction work was delegated to Messrs. Martin & Co of Calcutta. The superintending architect in charge was Vincent J Esch.

History:

In January 1901 after the death of Queen Victoria, the then Victoria of India, Lord Curzon suggested the setting up of an appropriate and fitting monument which would be colossal, airy, splendid and grand bounded by gorgeous garden.

Lord Curzon suggested it would be a ‘historical museum’ where public would see before them the statues and pictures of great men who played an important role in this country, especially the history of Calcutta. People of India and the princes responded bigheartedly to the appeal made by Lord Curzon and the cost in constructing this monument which amounted to 1 crore and 5 lakhs of rupees was wholly derived from the voluntary contributions.

On January 4, 1906, King George V, who was the then Prince of Wales laid the foundation stone. However, it was officially opened to the public in the year 1921.

Birla Planetarium

Birla Planetarium is one of the biggest museums in Asia. This museum is a prominent attraction of Kolkata, the “City of Joy“. It was in the year 1962 when Birla Planetarium came into existence. All credit to Birla Education Trust for constructing this beautiful center of communication, science, and environment.

Birla Planetarium is located at the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass of the city of Kolkata. It offers a platform where various astronomical presentations take place. It offers valuable piece of information about the galaxies, solar system, life span of the star, planets and the other heavenly bodies in the most interactive manner via the use of audio-video aids.

Alipore Zoo

Alipore Zoo, also known as Alipore Zoological Gardens is one of the oldest zoological parks of India. This is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Kolkata, West Bengal. The zoo was opened on May 6 in the year 1876 and it covers about 46.5 acres of land. It is best known as home to few captive breeding projects including the Manipur Brow-antlered Deer.

Alipore Zoo is a popular tourist attraction not only of Kolkata but of the state of West Bengal. You can find a great variety of animals like Jaguar, African lion, Royal Bengal Tiger, One horned Rhinoceros, Hippopotamus, Giraffe, zebra, dromedary camel, elephant, African Lion, jaguar that has been recently taken from Australia. There is a collection of some rare species of birds like Macaw, parrots, touracos, Swinhoe’s Pheasant, Amherst’s Pheasant, hornbills and some of the largest flightless birds like Ostrich, Cassowary and Emu etc.

Wordpress :: different files of a theme folder and their uses

Template system is a great feature which is associated with wordpress. Users may have their multiple themes stored inside 'wordpress/wp-content/themes/' folder so that they can select and activate one of them at a time.
Wordpress package comes up with two in-built themes ( twentyten & twentyeleven). Beside these two theme folders if users need more then they may download free themes from websites like simplewpthemes.com, freewpthemes.net etc and upload those themes to this path 'wordpress/wp-content/themes/'. As soon as they will activate one of these folders through admin panel they will get a new look & feel for their website. However users with having bit knowledge in html/css may also build their custom theme. PHP knowledge will be an added advantage in this regard.

Before building their custom theme they should know about the different files of one of the in-built theme folders (twentyten or twentyelven) and their uses. Those files consists of both html and php codes where php codes are responsible for functionalities, html codes are responsible for providing the required format. Below are the list of some files with their uses in wordpress:

header.php : This file contains the content of header section of the web pages. It is included into page.php, index.php etc. Generally the link to css file, javascript file(s) are added in this file. In most cases top menu bar, website logo, home page banner etc are defined in this file.
footer.php : This file contains the content of footer section of the web pages. Generally copy right information and footer links are defined in this file.
sidebar.php : Optionally this file is used when there is a need to display content in either left sidebar or right sidebar of the web pages. Generally left menu or right menu is defined in this file.
index.php : This file is responsible for showing posts which are created by admin through backend. So in wordpress blog is generated though this file.
page.php : This file is responsible for showing the content of pages which are created by admin through backend. It is also a template file as it provides a ceratin look and feel to the pages which are created by admin dynamically.
single.php : This file is responsible for showing individual post on a separate page apart from blog page.
category.php : This page shows all the posts of a particualar category.
404.php : This file shows the error message when a page is not found which is searched by a website visitor. Users can modify the content of this file to show their custom messages to the website visitors.
search.php : This file shows the link of posts and pages as search result when website visitors use different keywords in the searchbox to get their desired result.
comments.php : This file is responsible for showing different comments made by website visitors on different posts along with the comment form which let visitors to post their comments.
archive.php : This file is responsible to show all the posts on the basis of created years and months.

The best ever Champions League final

Wordpress :: build your custom theme

In my previous post I have explained how to install wordpress and it’s basic use. I have given an initial idea about plug-in and template system of wordpress.

Now I am going to explain you how one can build his/her own custom theme and install it through admin panel of wordress provided he/she must have basic knowledge in html/css.  If he/she is completely new to HTML/CSS I would like to him/her to go through this tutorial to have some knowledge on HTML/CSS .

Wordpress theme is nothing but a bunch of PHP files, CSS files, images and optionally javascript files which are bundled together inside a folder. Each php file may consist php code (server side scripting which are responsible for functionalities) along with html code (html is the markup language which is responsible for creating place holder for content, image etc). Similarly each css file consists style definition for html elements like paragraph i.e. p, heading i.e. h1, h2 etc. So all these files & images work together to provide a certain look & feel to the front-end of the website.

By default wordpress comes up with two default themes i.e. ‘twentyten’ & ‘twentyeleven’ respectively. One needs to go through these folders thoroughly before going for creating his/her own custom theme.

Below are some tips which may help you in creating your own custom theme:

• You must keep your template (html/css) ready which you are going to integrate into your custom theme.
• Copy one of the default themes for ex. ‘twentyten’ from themes folder of wordpress package (path wordpress/wp-content/themes )  and paste it in some local place of your computer and rename it like ‘mynewtheme’.
• Replace the css file i.e. style.css within your theme folder ‘mynewtheme’ with the css file of your template and images folder with the images folder of your template respectively. This means now in your theme folder ‘mynewtheme’ you have your css file and images folder as of your new template.
• You notice there are some files like header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php, index.php, page.php within ‘mynewtheme’ folder and those are the files which are mostly required to build your custom theme. Open all these mentioned files in an html editor like DreamWeaver.
• Copy the html of header section from the template (which you want to be in header section of your web page) and put it into header.php file. This means replace the code of header.php with the copied code from the template which is meant for header section. Within head tag you will find elements like link, script etc where you need to do some adjustment. Basically link element is used to link to an external style sheet i.e. link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" /. Here what you have to do is to append a php snippet with the path of css file so that it will point to the absolute path of the css file of the theme. So replace the link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" / with link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="bloginfo(‘template_url’); /style.css" /. Do the similar changes with the element of script. If your script element is something like script type="text/javascript" src=”example.js”  then change it to script type="text/javascript" src=”bloginfo(‘template_url’); /example.js” . Before the /head add this piece of php snippet i.e. wp_head();  . This is all about tweaking of header.php file. Now save this file.
• Copy the code of footer section from template and put it into footer.php within theme folder ‘mynewtheme’.
• Similarly copy the code of sidebar section (if there is any for sidebar of the webpage ) and put it into the footer.php file within new theme folder ‘mynewtheme’.
• In index.php file you will notice such code snippets like get_header();  , get_footer();  etc. Here get_header() is the function which includes header.php file into index.php file. Similarly get_footer() includes the footer.php and get_sidebar() includes the sidebar.php . You need to place those code snippets as per you need your code for header , footer & sidebar segments should be included to index.php file.

I think this is all about working with your custom theme folder. Now upload the entire folder into the themes folder of wordpress, activate it through admin panel and enjoy the theming.