Sunday, July 10, 2016

High Winds and Indian Cuisine

The heat here is, as usual for summer, intense.  Heat and intermittent showers push everything into the tropical zone.  When the rains lift, hot steams rise off the pavement in rolling ghostly waves.

Storm winds rock the trees, which squeak and groan in my backyard, and weaker branches give up their hold and crash, sometimes to the ground, and sometimes just into other branches.  I've seen a fresh lightening scar on a big pine near my house.  A pine will often endure these strikes; one in my yard has stood for years.  The wind can bring a whole tree down.  Oh the trouble of building a city in the woods! A tree crushed an acquaintance's house just last week.  A few years ago, a tree smashed through a good friend of mine's house, leaving the door to her daughter's bedroom opening into the out-of-doors--beyond scary these incidents!  (Luckily no one was home in either instance.)  A big wind can fell enough trees to cut off roadways and power lines for a couple of days.




A few nights ago, I got into the cupboards and decided to cook some of the things that have been sitting around too long--namely beans.  Summer is not really a dried beans kind of cooking time, but I seemed to have a few little collections of beans, and cooking them up in the pressure cooker at night didn't heat up the house too much.

I pulled out some of my favorite Indian recipes which I haven't used for quite awhile.  I have found that I don't really cook Indian food that much anymore.  My Indian cuisine seems totally lackluster in comparison to what I can easily find nearby.  It is also work, compared to just zipping over to one of the many, many Indian eateries five minutes from my house.  A few years ago, what was a mostly defunct and largely squalid shopping area metamorphosed into an Indian marketplace.  I was thrilled when I saw the onion domes going up.

It is a great place to buy whatever supplies we might need to make a fantastic Indian meal, but it is also a great place to by-pass the making, and just buy a meal!  That is, if I make it to the shopping area before stopping in a church that is now an Indian restaurant or several fast food places that have converted to being Indian take-out.


Our meal turned out quite nice though.  In fact, there was enough for three meals or so and it all got scarfed up quickly.  No left-overs sitting around growing mysteriously in the fridge.

Our poor dal ended up looking like oatmeal because I was out of turmeric!



Meanwhile it rains.  And heats up.  And then rains some more.

1 comment:

  1. Those downed tress look very scary, the wind must have been so strong to do all of that damage. Your Indian food looks delicious.
    Meredith

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