A valley of Cauvery is turning out to be a trap for trekkers. From almost the very place that a trekker went missing in February 2014, three holidaymakers have now gone missing. The three students left their homes on April 2 for a fun trek. Almost 10 days since, there have been no whereabouts of the trio.

Anil Kumar and Mahadev (final year Bachelor of Business Management students), and Jagadish (a final year Bachelor of Commerce student) from Hanur in Kollegal district ventured into the nearby Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary, a protected area that spreads across Mandya, Chamarjanagar and Ramanagar districts. They have not returned. Worse, nobody has heard from them either.

The three friends headed into the forest wanting to make the most of the extended weekend beginning with Mahaveer Jayanthi. They are supposed to have travelled 30 kilometres before going missing. For their parents waiting at home for their return, anxiety turned to worry when the trio did not turn up even the next day.

Anil’s father Mahadev said, “Initially we thought my son may have gone either to a relative’s or his friend’s home for a stay over. It was only the next day that we got to know that they had gone trekking. Since then we have been going into the forest every day but haven’t met with any success. We have been using services of locals in our search. We spotted my son’s motorcycle in Hukundha forest. It told us which way they had gone. They may have gone by foot from there. We have filed a complaint with the police.”

Anil Kumar’s mother, Shobha Mahadev, is a former president of Hanur Town Panchayat.

Investigations have revealed that the three are good trekkers. The worrying factor, however, is that this stretch of forest area was once rendered infamous by forest brigand Veerappan. The Cauvery Wild-life Sanctuary is spread across 1,027 sq km. The area is also home to several wild animals including elephants, leopards and mountain wolves.

Another angle the police are looking at is if the trekkers got attracted by the pristine beauty of the Cauvery. The stretch of the river between Mekedaatu and Biligundlu are is home to the Mugger crocodile and various species of snakes.

Access to food is also minimal with few villages in the area. Police say search in a forest is a difficult task, despite availing assistance of locals.

Fruits are nature’s wonderful gift to the mankind; indeed, they are life-enhancing medicines packed with vitamins, minerals, anti-oxidants and many phyto-nutrients (Plant derived micronutrients). They are an absolute feast to our sight, not just because of their color and flavor but for their unique nutrition-profile that help human body free from diseases and keep it healthy!

Research has proved that the darker the fruit is in colour the more rich it is in anti-oxidants. Thus, many spas and healthy food joints serve strawberry, blueberry and black grape smoothies under anti-oxidant drinks. Here is a simple smoothie I make often to detox my system and keep my skin glowing!

          Ingredients:

• Water melon slices
• Black Grapes
• Strawberry
• 2 pieces of beetroot
• Honey
• 1/4^th cup water or lime juice

Method:

 Blend all of the above ingredients in a mixer and drink up !

The vollies are upset because they say they were making the food – but it wasn’t always getting to the firefighters stuck in the blaze and unable to return to the operations centre.

They said meals would be sent out hours after being made only to be returned.

In one example, 350 dinner packs went out to the fire ground, and 250 were returned.

On another occasion, 500 meals went out and only about 100 were eaten.

The volunteers said the charity-run service had been pushed to the brink by the Department of Fire and Emergency Services with little resources, funding or coordination.

Volunteer Heather Donaldson, who has worked in the food truck for more than five years, said Boddington had been a disheartening experience.

“They rely on us more and more, and (they’re) not giving us anything to cope with it,” she said.

“We had two crews come in that hadn’t been fed for hours.”

DFES deputy commissioner for capability command, Steve Fewster, said any effort by volunteers was appreciated.

“Knowing the community are behind them gives firefighters a much needed morale boost,” he said.

“The Commissioner was one of the first to thank the communities of Northcliffe and Boddington for their generosity and spirit.

“We are committed to working with the Salvation Army and other catering providers to ensure that the right level of catering is provided.”

Mr Fewster said the Salvation Army was reimbursed “for the meals they prepare”.

He said the agreement between DFES and The Salvation Army required renewal this year and

“DFES is currently progressing with this process”.

Emergency Services Minister Joe Francis said “there were always lessons to be learned” from fires, even those where property losses were minimal.

“As is standard practice, there will be a major incident review of the Boddington bushfire which will cover all aspects of the firefighting operation,” he said.

“I’d encourage those who attended the fire to provide feedback if they identified areas for improvement. If changes and improvements are recommended, they will be considered.”

Opposition emergency services spokeswoman Margaret Quirk said she had heard of several welfare concerns from the Boddington fire and hoped it would all come out during the review.

“Salvation Army volunteers shouldn’t be exploited, it really is testing their good will,” she said.

BY THE NUMBERS: INCREASED PRESSURE ON SALVOS CATERING

February 2014

Hours 795

Volunteers 150

Drinks 6850

Meals 440

February 2015

Hours 1978.5

Volunteers 308

Drinks 46,900

Meals 9917

However, Bipasha who was last seen in erotic thriller, ‘Alone’, shared a picture of herself looking smoking hot in a halter-neck bikini with a sarong tied over her. The actress is on a holiday in Goa nowadays.

Looking beautiful and confident, the actress is seen sporting a pair of cool shades in the picture.

The actress later decided to go cycling at her resort.

Many celebs including Sonakshi Sinha, Huma Qureshi and Saqib Saleem have been on holidays. Sonaksahi has just returned from Maldives while Huma and family were in Turkey.

Ingredients:

Egg:4-5 Boiled

Onion:2 Medium

Tomato:2 Medium

Ginger:1 ” inch Piece

Garlic:6-7 Cloves

Dry Red chilly:5-6

Coriander Seeds:3/4 Tsp

Black Pepper Corns:1 Tsp

Copra:2 Tbsp

Kuskus/Gasgase/ Poppy Seeds:1/2 Tsp

Turmeric:1/4 Tsp

Garam Masala:1/2 Tsp

Oil:2 Tbsp

Ghee:1 Tsp

Water:3/4 – 1 Cup

Coriander Leaves:2 Tbsp for garnishing

Salt to Taste.

Method:

In a NonStick Pan,heat 2 Tbsp oil,add dry red chilly,coriander seeds,black peppercorns, onions,ginger,garlic and fry till onion turns brown.Add copra,Poppy seeds and fry till fragrant Add  turmeric and garam masala saute and add tomatoes,little salt and fry tomato cooked completely.

Once its cooled,grind into a smooth paste.

Boil egg ,remove shell and slice into 2 halves and keep it aside.

Once it starts to boil,add boiled eggs and sim for 5-8 minutes.Finally garnish with coriander leaves.

Serve hot with Roti,Paratha.

Now, look at it again closely. There are a total of six people in the picture. I know you will see a woman taking bath with her kids in the river but don’t be shocked if you get to see a baby ghost too.

Well, a woman from Australia was terrified after finding out that someone else was taking bath with them. She was told by someone that a baby had died after drowning at the same spot 100 years ago.

The image was shared on Facebook by Kim Davison who hails from Australia. It can be seen in ‘Toowoomba Ghost Chasers’ Facebook page too.

The picture of the baby ghost is white and blurred and looks like as someone is drowning.

The picture was taken at Murphy’s Hole in Lockyer River, south-east Queensland.

‘I’m holding the little girl and that white head next to me with horns is not human, I can promise you that,’ Ms Davison was quoted by Mail Online.

According to Mail Online, a girl called Doreen O’Sullivan had died in 1913 at the same spot.

RIBS & Burgers is offering Perth meat lovers a year’s supply of burgers if they can be one of its first 100 customers.

Located at 140 William Street, the slow cooked ribs specialist will open its first WA flame grill on May 1.

Ribs & Burgers cooks its meats using traditional South African barbecuing, called ‘braaing’.

This technique uses an open flame chargrilling process that gives a signature char or burn on the meat.

Ribs & Burgers food analyst Wayne Solomon said there was an art to chargrilling.

“Timing is key, you need to know when to turn the meat and also when the right time to baste is,” he said.

“The bastings we use are 40-year-old family recipes that have been passed down from generation to generation.

“Our bastings are what give us that taste you can only find at Ribs & Burgers.”

The organically conscious restaurant uses free-range chicken, grass-fed beef, and is hormone, antibiotic and steroid free.

“The result is slow cooked, melt-in-your-mouth ribs and succulent burgers with a signature pink sauce,” Mr Solomon said.

“The back-to-basic feel extends to a casual, nostalgic dining atmosphere, with the interior of Ribs & Burgers modelled on a classic butcher.”

Ribs & Burgers has two restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne.

But behind the appeal of Indian food — what makes it so novel and so delicious — is also a stranger and subtler truth. In a large new analysis of more than 2,000 popular recipes, data scientists have discovered perhaps the key reason why Indian food tastes so unique: It does something radical with flavors, something very different from what we tend to do in the United States and the rest of Western culture. And it does it at the molecular level.

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Before we go further, let’s take a step back and consider what flavors are and how they interact. If you were to hold a microscope to most Western dishes, you would find an interesting but not all-too-surprising trend. Popular food pairings in this part of the world combine ingredients that share like flavors, which food chemists have broken down into their molecular parts — precise chemical compounds that, when combined, give off a distinct taste.

Most of the compounds have scientific names, though one of the simpler compounds is acetal, which, as the food chemist George Burdock has written, is “refreshing, pleasant, and [has a] fruity-green odor,” and can be found in whiskey, apple juice, orange juice and raw beets. On average, there are just over 50 flavor compounds in each food ingredient.

A nifty chart shared by Scientific American in 2013 shows which foods share the most flavor compounds with others and which food pairings have the most flavor compounds in common. Peanut butter and roasted peanuts have one of the most significant overlaps (no surprise there). But there are connections that are more difficult to predict: strawberries, for instance, have more in common with white wine than they do with apples, oranges or honey.

Data crunching Indian recipes

Chefs in the West like to make dishes with ingredients that have overlapping flavors. But not all cuisines adhere to the same rule. Many Asian cuisines have been shown to belie the trend by favoring dishes with ingredients that don’t overlap in flavor. And Indian food, in particular, is one of the most powerful counterexamples.

[Asian food: The fastest growing food in the world]

Researchers at the Indian Institute for Technology in Jodhpur crunched data on several thousand recipes from a popular online recipe site called TarlaDalal.com. They broke each dish down to its ingredients, and then compared how often and heavily ingredients share flavor compounds.

The answer? Not too often.

Here’s an easy way to make sense of what they did, through the lens of a single, theoretical dish.

Each one of those ingredients has its own list of flavor compounds. And any two of those ingredients’ lists might have some overlap. Take the coconut and onion, for instance. We can all agree that these two things are pretty different, but we can also see (in the Venn diagram below) that there’s some overlap in their flavor make-up.

The researchers did this for each of the several thousand recipes, which used a total of 200 ingredients.  They examined how much the underlying flavor compounds overlapped in single dishes and discovered something very different from Western cuisines. Indian cuisine tended to mix ingredients whose flavors don’t overlap at all.

“We found that average flavor sharing in Indian cuisine was significantly lesser than expected,” the researchers wrote.

In other words, the more overlap two ingredients have in flavor, the less likely they are to appear in the same Indian dish.

[It’s official: Americans should drink more coffee]

The unique makeup of Indian cuisine can be seen in some dishes more than others, and it seems to be tied to the use of specific ingredients. Spices usually indicate dishes with flavors that have no chemical common ground.

More specifically, many Indian recipes  contain cayenne, the basis of curry powder that is in dishes like red curry, green curry, or massaman curry. And when a dish contains cayenne, the researchers found, it’s unlikely to have other ingredients that share similar flavors. The same can be said of green bell pepper, coriander and garam masala, which are nearly as ubiquitous in Indian cuisine.

“Each of the spices is uniquely placed in its recipe to shape the flavor sharing pattern with rest of the ingredients,” the researchers noted.

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Milk, butter, bread, and rice, meanwhile—all of which are hallmarks of Western cuisine—were found to be associated with just the opposite: flavor pairings that match. When any of those ingredients appeared in an Indian dish, there was a good chance there would be a lot of flavor overlap.

A lesson for all chefs

The takeaway is that part of what makes Indian food so appealing is the way flavors rub up against each other. The cuisine is complicated, no doubt: the average Indian dish, after all, contains at least 7 ingredients, and the total number of ingredients observed by the researchers amounted to almost 200 out of the roughly 381 observed around the world. But all those ingredients — and the spices especially — are all uniquely important because in any single dish, each one brings a unique flavor.

[Why Chipotle’s pork problem is a bad sign for its future]

But the upshot should also be a thought that we might be approaching food from the wrong angle. Combining ingredients with like flavors is a useful (and often delicious) strategy, but it might be a somewhat misleading rule of thumb. Indian cuisine, after all, is cherished globally, and yet hinges on a decidedly different ingredient pairing logic.

Over recent months as many as 50-60 campervans have been staying at a car park off The Crescent in Annandale.

The spot adjoins Federal Park where toilets and fresh water is readily available.

Backpackers are reporting that local businesses are shining security lights on the campervans and sounding alarms to try to disturb the backpackers from their sleep.

“The business right behind us is actually putting big spotlights on and he’s also putting on sounds like whistle sounds to bother us at night,” said Parisian backpacker Stella who has been sleeping in her van at the site for the last couple of nights.

Travellers say too hard to find places to park campervans

Backpackers say the city’s restrictive parking regulations mean finding a place to park their vans can be extremely difficult.

Stella said her first night sleeping in her van in Sydney resulted in a parking fine.

“We were woken up at 6am by a ranger, she gave us a fine for sleeping in a place where we were not supposed to,” she said.

“That was in Watson’s Bay but I wasn’t aware that I wasn’t supposed to sleep there.”

Stella then moved to the car park adjoining Federal Park in Annandale.

She said she can understand the problem locals and businesses have with travellers sleeping in the car park.

“Look at the place, it’s like a big mess and everybody’s sleeping here,” she said.

“Everybody’s leaving clothes around.”

Parking is currently unrestricted in the area but local business owner Mark Webber wants that to change.

“Customers don’t have anywhere to park,” he said.

“We don’t have a drama with them being down here if it’s dark, it’s only the parking that’s our problem.”

After spending $6,000 on an old campervan, Stella said she believed she had accommodation covered for her Australian holiday.

“The problem is that there is not enough free spots to sleep for backpackers around Australia so it’s very hard, especially when you’re going to big cities,” she said.

“You’ve already paid for your van so you don’t want to pay for a hotel or a campsite.”

In a statement to the ABC, the City of Sydney said two-hour parking restrictions in the area will come into effect in early April.

Market stall proved such a success he moved business to the internet

Dad-of-two was turned down for cash injection by TV show Dragons’ Den

They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure and that has certainly proved to be the case for entrepreneur Dan Cluderay.

While supermarkets regularly throw away food that has gone past its ‘best before’ date, Mr Cluderay, from Worksop, Nottinghamshire, is now a millionaire after setting up an online business selling out-of-date food to busy mums and bargain hunters.

The 40-year-old says the secret to his success is that his business, Approved Food, provides just what the savvy shopper is looking for – quality food at prices which save mums around £60 off their weekly bill compared to a similar shop at one of the big supermarkets.

However, while Approved Food has been a hit online, it was given a resounding thumbs down by the gurus on the BBC TV show Dragons’ Den.

In May last year, Mr Cluderay, together with his 50-year-old business partner Andy Needham, had asked the Dragons’ Den panel for a £150,000 cash injection offering a ten per cent share in Approved Food.

However, the Dragons’ Den team, which consisted of Duncan Bannatyne, Kelly Hoppen, Deborah Meaden, Piers Linney and Peter Jones, unanimously turned them down.

Not to be thwarted, Mr Cluderay and Mr Needham managed to source £400,000 through loans and investments from elsewhere which has seen Approved Food achieve a £4million turnover.

‘It’s all very exciting and we have lots of plans to take the business further,’ said father-of-two Mr Cluderay.

He said his journey to success began when he was forced to have a career rethink after being made redundant from his job at an IT firm in 2001.

Together with his wife, Nichola, the pair set up market stalls in Hull, Leeds and Doncaster selling branded chocolate, fizzy drinks and crisps which had been shunned by a range of supermarkets as they were either fast approaching or past their ‘best before’ date.

For six years, come rain or shine, the couple, who hail from Worksop, sourced and sold the goods to a loyal band of shoppers.

However, it was after taking delivery of a crate of Twinings nettle tea that Mr Cluderay said he had his ‘eureka moment’.

‘I suddenly realised that while there might not be the demand for nettle tea in Doncaster, if I could match the goods with customers looking to buy, I’d be on to a winner,’ said Mr Cluderay, who has two sons, nine-year-old Rudi and Jay, five.

While still working seven days a week on the market stalls, he utilised all his computer skills to start forming a plan to launch his business, Approved Food.

‘I was working on my idea wherever I could,’ said Mr Cluderay. ‘Even in my son’s playroom I’d be beavering away.’

It was on 14 August 2008, that Mr Cluderay received his very first order, the day after his website went live.

‘I’d collected the names and address of 300 people who I thought would be interested in buying products which are perfectly fine but have have just gone past their sell by date,’ he said.

‘I was excited sending out the list but even more excited when someone bought something the next day!’

Since then, Approved Food has gone from strength to strength as thrifty mothers and other savvy shoppers make the most of items such as loo roll, dog food, sweets and sauces.

‘There are only two dates people really need to know about,’ explained Mr Cluderay.

‘The “best before” date which means that the food will be at its optimum before that date and acts as a guide to the quality, and then there’s the “use by” date which is concerned with the safety aspect.

‘It’s only the “use by” date that means food has to be eaten by then or it could make you ill, which is the case with fish and meat, for example.

‘Food is perfectly fine to be eaten way past its “best before” date, as people know, but the large supermarkets won’t do that and that’s where we come in.

‘We sell food, such as cans of baked beans, pasta sauce, tins of tuna, which may have gone past their “best before” date by a few weeks, but everyone knows they will taste just the same as the products which have weeks left to run.’

Mr Cluderay said they dispatch around 600 orders a day with his average shopper spending around £40 a week buying cupboard staples such as pasta, pasta sauce, flour and  toilet rolls.

‘By comparison, they’d be spending around £100 at one of the major supermarkets so they’re actually saving around £60 which they can then spend on something else.

‘We don’t touch food that has a limited shelf life such as fresh chicken and fresh fish, but we do sell hardy vegetables.’

Currently operating from a huge warehouse in Sheffield and employing 50 full-time staff, he says he can imagine a time when they have bases around the world.

‘I can imagine warehouses in many countries. The Germans in particular are very savvy shoppers and love branded goods, they also love English chocolate, so we get a lot of orders,’ he said.

‘We also sell huge Polish chocolate bars, which cost around ten pence each to buy from us which is also extremely popular.

‘Our biggest customers are by far and away mothers as they’re the ones usually in charge of the purse strings and are always thinking how to feed their families. If they’re happy, then so are we.’

Mr Cluderay and Approved Food will be featured on the television programme Bargain Fever Britain tonight on ITV at 8pm.

The show takes a look at the UK’s insatiable appetite for deals and discounts and will also go behind the scenes at American wholesale giant Costco, car supermarket Motorpoint and the shoe chain Shoe Zone.