RASAM AND PRELUDE IN C MINOR

I finally did it. I have had some really close shaves but yesterday was the day it was meant to happen and it did. I would have rather that it hadn’t, but then you can’t avoid the long hands of fate forever right?

It all began with my roommates’ plea for an Indian dinner. And the horrible cook that I am, I settled for rasam and rice. Simple fare, but perfect for a cold, rainy evening with the added advantage that no matter how hard I tried, nothing could possibly go wrong.

So there I was, standing by the stove, languidly stirring the rasam and loving the hot peppery scent of it. This scent unfailingly brings to mind other rainy evenings, and mom’s panacea for a thorough drenching in the rain.

C was playing the piano and the warm cozy ambience, with the rain falling outside was the perfect backdrop for one of my day dreams. That’s when it happened. Three short bursts of a siren going off. I had set off the smoke detector.!!!! I looked down at the stove in horror. How could that have happened? I hadn’t let the pot boil over so where was the smoke coming from? Surely the steam could not have set the alarm off??

Poor C jumped up from her piano stool, rushed to open all the doors and windows and got the fan going to disperse the smoke. We did investigate and discovered that the smoke was coming from the leftover food that had fallen into the stove after somebody else’s culinary adventures.

I fervently thanked all the gods I could think of, when I realized that the fire engine was not going to come clanging up to our doorstep. The fire station is right down the street where I live and I was particularly glad it did not have any overzealous fire fighters.

Needless to say, it was a rather quiet dinner last night.

ON TOP OF THE WORLD

I saw snow for the first time. Not mounds and mounds of it or a blanket of white covering everything in sight like in one of those pretty Christmas cards, but more like bits and pieces of it, clinging on to some really tall mountains, and parts of it trampled and dirty instead of pristine white. But that did not make it any less beautiful. There is something to be said about holding snow in your hands and feeling your fingers slowly go numb.

There definitely is something to be said about sitting on a log in the midst of a green cathedral and being thankful that all this beauty exists and that you were blessed enough to be able to drink it all in. Trees that seem to touch the sky and a silence that speaks to you. A sense of timelessness and the feeling that there is a God, whether you choose to believe in him or not.

Walking around, there are spectacular views of mountains, golf courses, Palm Springs downtown and wind mill farms. Each windmill costs anywhere from a half a million to a million dollars and there were hundreds of them visible from the top. This is definitely not a poor country.

The aerial tramway at Palm Springs is what brings you to this little piece of heaven, and that is a marvel by itself. The cable car is round and the floor keeps moving, so everyone is afforded a different view of the gorgeous mountains. Of course, you better not gawk too much at the views or you’d fall right over someone’s big feet!!!

High up (about 8000+ feet) and you come to realize how insignificant you are in the larger scheme of things. All the cares of the world drop away and you live, live just for the moment.

WALK LIKE AN ETHIOPIAN

Another Friday. Time for another culinary adventure. This time the vote was for Ethiopian food and we made a beeline for the restaurant called the Red Sea. It is situated in a not-so-nice part of town on University Avenue. The people in our group, specially the ones with the nice cars, were a bit jittery about parking in the dark by lanes, so we ended up making at least four trips around the restaurant just to find parking that met with everyone’s approval.

The restaurant itself had a very homey feel. The art and the pictures on the wall were all done on leather which gives the illusion of being inside a tent. Our waitress was a work of art herself. She was tiny, slim with an exquisite face that seemed to have been carved out of ebony. She reminded me of all the long-necked busts that people bring back from trips to Africa. The service was pretty slow, but then I don’t think anyone minded.

Ethiopian food is eaten with the hands, so I felt right at home. We started off with what seemed like samosas, just a flattened version. It was listed as a sambusa or was it listed as sammossa with a lot of extra ss and mms thrown in for effect?

The staple dish is “injera” which closely resembles a large dosa. The food is served on huge platters and the injera lines the inside of the platter. The side dishes are served on top of the injera. The side dishes, which can range from lentils to dishes of lamb and beef, have a lot of similarities to Indian cuisine. They could easily be mistaken for home- made Indian curries.

The Ethiopians also eat a spicy “hot sauce” with their meals to add an extra zing. It reminded me of garlic pickle minus the scent of garlic.

But the most interesting part of the food is the way some of their traditions are linked to it. Ethiopians chew a portion of the food and then gently pass it into the mouth of their loved one. This is generally practiced amongst spouses. Any takers?

I DON'T LIKE VALENTINE'S DAY!!

Topic in our lunchroom today: Valentine’s Day. Not surprising, since we just survived another one yesterday. I was eavesdropping on a conversation between two co-workers. Well, to ease my conscience, I wasn’t doing it on purpose. I was sitting there reading my book and eating at the same time, so it wasn’t like they couldn’t see me.

The guy was talking about how his girlfriend claimed that she didn’t like Valentine’s
Day but had still gone ahead and bought him lots of stuff. He had bought her her favorite cookies, her favorite candy and a flower anyways, since he believed that no girl should be without presents on Valentine’s Day. Now this guy definitely had a very happy girlfriend.

The lady he was talking to had her own views on the subject. She felt that every girl claimed not to like Valentine’s Day, quoting commercialism as a romance killer. But then, every girl does this so that she is not too disappointed when the expected romantic gestures do not materialize.

Set me thinking, is this really true? Most of the men I know wouldn’t be caught dead with any form of plant life, let alone roses. But then there are the ones who are perfectly comfortable with the idea too. Why is it that people are not willing to make that effort to make the other person feel cherished? And this by the way, should work both ways.

I agree that one day should not be held up as the epitome of love, but then, I see nothing wrong with having a day to remind you that you’re really lucky to have a special person in your life and to never take that for granted, coz who knows what life might bring?

KNIGHT RIDER

Blame it on silly girlhood fantasies. But who could forget the TV serial of the same name with a black leather clad, helmeted David Hasselhoff and his lean, mean man-machine? I had gone to the extent of recording the title music on my rickety old tape-recorder (this was the pre i-pod era by the way) so I could play the music over and over and be lost in a fantasy world populated with cute men and their cuter rides.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered one of my friends here in California owned what is called a "sports bike". True blue bikers would consider it sheer sacrilege if anyone called these crotch rockets "bikes". Did I dare ask him for a ride? Would he refuse point blank and give me a set of 10 logical reasons why he could not take "the thing" (his nickname for the feminine gender) on his all-male bike? Screwing up all my courage I did ask. I got a blank stare in response. The lift of his eyebrows indicated that he thought this was a huge joke.

But gentleman that he was, he did not squash me point blank and pointed out that if I wanted a ride, I had to have a jacket and more importantly a helmet. If I did manage to procure both of these, he would take me for a ride.

Miracles do happen in this world. Proof of that is the fact that I got to go on my bike ride. All the way upto Malibu. Of course for the first few miles I felt like the top of my head was going to be ripped from my shoulders and I was pretty sure, at the very least, that the helmet would fly off and hit some poor unsuspecting motorist.

Later, when I did get used to it, it did give me high to be moving at incredible speeds with the wind rushing past my face, overtaking most other vehicles. What a royal pity I couldn't ride it myself.

Stopover at beautiful Malibu for lunch and the trip back made in really cold weather.

Inspite of not being able to sit down properly for a week, this is a ride that I don't intend to forget in a hurry!

MONGOLIAN MYSTERY

Friday evenings tend to be the most wonderful part of a week. The whole weekend stretches tantalizingly ahead of you and you have time to lick your lips in anticipation. In this case, quite literally. This weekend was one of gastronomic delights.

All I know about Mongols is the fact that Gengis Khan was one of them and that some babies are born with a congenital condition called “mongolism”. Not very good analogies I agree.

Since we were feeling particularly adventurous, we walked into the Mongolian Grill in San Bernardino. It was a very pleasant place with comfortable seats, and with a huge tava- like contraption holding the place of honor.

There was a huge buffet table set up in the middle with all the ingredients for a meal. Now this is how you do it. You take a small bowl from the corner of the buffet and walk down the buffet choosing between meat, veggies or fish. The last counter has noodles that you place on top of everything else you’ve chosen. Then you pour on a vast variety of sauces depending on how spicy you want your food to be. You then take the bowl to the two chefs manning the “tava”. The tava rather looks like the ones our chatwallahs use back home, just that this tava is huge. The cooks then walk all round it pushing the food with their spatulas. This is done because (as one of my co-diners informed me with a sufficiently supercilious air) different parts of the tava are heated to different degrees. Once the food is cooked, the chefs put it on to a dinner plate and present it to you with a flourish.

Did you think this was simple? Let me hasten to put that notion to rest. There is a technique to it all, as one school kid demonstrated to his girlfriend. To ensure that you stuff the maximum amount of food into your bowl, you pick up another bowl and use the bottom of the first to stuff food into the first. He nonchalantly told his girlfriend that he was just doing this to show her how to do this right, not that he wanted to eat quite that much. To which the PYT replied, “Oh, I have been to dinner at your house, and you all eat like pigs.”

In case you are wondering how the food tasted, it tasted just great, though my first bowl had an overpowering taste of garlic, and I had no one to blame for it but myself. But by my second bowl, I had it down pat, and so now I have some good food to associate with this mysterious place called Mongolia.