My Smoothie Looked Like Wet Cement and I Drank It Anyway
The Week My Kitchen Turned Into a Seed Warehouse (And My Wife Had Opinions)
Right. So.
I made the ugliest smoothie in the history of smoothies last month. I’m not exaggerating. Banana, dahi, two big spoons of chia seeds, all thrown into the mixer at 7:45 AM because my daughter had hidden my left shoe behind the TV cabinet and I had exactly zero time to make anything proper. The thing that came out of that mixer — grey, thick, wobbly like kheer gone wrong — looked like something you’d use to patch a wall in Lajpat Nagar.
My wife walked in. Stared. “Yeh kya hai?”
I told her it was a smoothie. She did not look convinced. Fair enough. I wouldn’t have been convinced either.
But I drank it. Stubbornness, mostly. And also because I was genuinely starving and the only alternative was dry rusk from the back of the shelf.
Here’s what happened next. Nothing. For hours. I sat at my desk, worked through two calls, answered maybe forty emails, and only realized at 1 PM that I hadn’t once thought about food. Not once. Me. The guy who keeps emergency Parle-G in his desk drawer. The guy whose 10:30 AM chai always comes with “just one biscuit” that becomes six.
Five hours of not being hungry. From grey cement.
That’s when I accepted that chia seeds might actually be doing something real. Not because some Instagram influencer told me to eat them. Because my own stomach — my perpetually unsatisfied, always-complaining stomach — was quiet for once.
We’re All Terrible at the Bits Between Meals (Admit It)
I’ve been thinking about this. Like, properly thinking.
The meals aren’t the problem. Most of us cook decent food — dal, sabzi, roti, whatever your house runs on. The problem is everything else. The 4 PM Kurkure from the canteen. The “just checking what’s in the fridge” at 11 PM that somehow turns into a full cheese toast situation. The office birthday cake you didn’t even want but ate two slices of because Sharma ji from accounts was watching.
That’s where it all falls apart. Every single time.
Someone at my gym — I go irregularly, let me be honest about that — mentioned that she’d replaced her afternoon snacking with a handful of mixed seeds. Pumpkin, sunflower, some flax thrown in. I remember thinking that sounded absolutely miserable. Seeds? As a snack? I pictured myself becoming one of those people who brings quinoa to potlucks and judges everyone’s butter chicken.
But here’s the embarrassing part. I tried it. Quietly. Didn’t tell anyone. Kept a small dabba of healthy seeds in my office bag like some kind of secret. And it worked. Not dramatically. Not some life-changing-montage-with-background-music kind of thing. Just… I stopped being hungry at weird times. My energy at 3 PM didn’t crash the way it used to. I stopped buying chips from the vending machine near the lift.
Small stuff. But it added up.
The Thing About Chia Seeds That Should Probably Come With a Warning Sticker
Nobody. Nobody told me they expand.
I put a tablespoon in a glass of water. Went to hang laundry. Came back ten minutes later. The glass was full of what I can only describe as — okay this is gross but it’s accurate — frog eggs. Tiny translucent globes suspended in goo. If I’d shown it to my mother she would’ve thrown it out and called a priest.
Twelve times their own weight. That’s how much liquid chia seeds absorb. Twelve times. I looked it up afterwards because I needed to understand why my water had turned into a science experiment.
The taste though? Almost nothing. Slightly nutty. A tiny crunch if you eat them dry, which I did on the first day before discovering that’s apparently not what most people do. My mother-in-law phoned that same week — she has a sixth sense for when I’m doing something she can comment on — and told me dalia exists and I don’t need to be eating “foreign seeds.” She’s not entirely wrong. But the dalia doesn’t keep me full until lunch. Chia seeds do. So. Yeah.
I order the organic ones now because I bought a cheap packet once from god-knows-where and they tasted gritty. Like someone had mixed sand in. Never again.
Cashews Online — or, The Three Stages of Realising You’ve Been Eating Bad Nuts Your Whole Life
Stage one. You buy cashews from the local shop. They taste fine. You’ve always bought them from the local shop. Your parents bought them from the local shop. This is just what cashews taste like. Moving on.
Stage two. Someone gives you actually good cashews — maybe from a gift hamper during Diwali, maybe your NRI cousin brought them — and suddenly something shifts. These ones snap when you bite them. Clean break. Slightly sweet. No weird stale aftertaste that sits on your tongue for twenty minutes after.
You look at your local shop cashews differently now. They seem… soft? Almost chewy? That’s not right. Cashews shouldn’t be chewy. That’s a red flag you’ve been ignoring for years.
Stage three. You go online. You read reviews like a suspicious aunty. You order one packet. They arrive sealed, with an actual expiry date printed on them — not scrawled in marker on the back — and they taste like stage two. Clean. Crunchy. The kind your grandmother would’ve locked in a steel dabba during festival season because she knew their value and didn’t trust anyone in the house.
That’s my cashews online journey. Three stages. No regrets. I literally cannot go back to the local shop ones now. My mouth won’t accept them. It’s become a snob and I have to live with that.
The Seed Drawer (Naam Meri Biwi Ka Diya Hai)
It started with chia. Just chia. One packet.
Then I ordered pumpkin seeds because a YouTube video told me they’re good for sleep. Then sunflower seeds because they were in the “frequently bought together” section and I have the willpower of a wet paper bag when it comes to online shopping at midnight. Then flax seeds. Then a roasted seed mix that I didn’t even know I wanted until I saw it existed.
My wife opened the second kitchen drawer last Tuesday, looked inside, closed it slowly, looked at me, and said: “You’ve turned our kitchen into a birdfeeder.”
She’s calling it the seed drawer now. This is my life.
But — and I say this at the genuine risk of sounding like a boring person — I haven’t bought a packet of chips in over a month. Not one. Not because I made some grand decision. There’s just always a jar of something on the counter now. Grab a handful of pumpkin seeds while waiting for chai to boil. Throw some sunflower seeds on your salad if you’re feeling fancy. Chia in the morning dahi. The habits snuck in like a cat through an open window. Quiet. Gradual. Impossible to undo once they’re settled.
Where I Actually Order All This From (Since Three People Asked Me Last Week)
My brother-in-law messaged me on WhatsApp. Then Pooja from my team at work. Then Mrs. Kapoor from 4B, our neighbour, who I’m fairly sure was being nosy rather than genuinely curious but I told her anyway.
The Altitude Store. That’s it. That’s the whole answer.
They’ve been around ten-plus years, the stuff is organic and natural, and they’ve got this whole healthy seeds section that is frankly dangerous for people with no impulse control. Chia seeds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower, flax, even those roasted seed mixes that taste like movie-night snacks but are somehow not terrible for you. The cashews come from their dry fruits range and they’re consistently the crunchiest I’ve found without spending some insane amount.
If you’re the type who likes to touch and see things before buying — which, fair — they have two actual shops in Delhi. One sits at Shop №1A, Khanna Market on Lodhi Road, New Delhi 110003. The other one is Shop №17 in Shanti Niketan Market, New Delhi 110021. I went to the Lodhi Road one once. Tiny. Packed to the ceiling. The uncle behind the counter told me the difference between white and black chia seeds without me asking. Knew his stuff. I appreciated that.
But mostly I order from my phone. Usually around midnight. Usually in pyjamas. Usually adding three things I didn’t plan on buying. The seed drawer is never getting smaller and my wife has accepted this.
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