May 22 - India!

Adventures in India - the menu for tonight was Chickpea Salad with Ginger, Mulligatawny, Subz Miloni, Choonth Wangan, Naan, and Kingfisher beer. For those of you who have no idea what any of that is, here goes: Chickpea Salad, well that's pretty self-explanatory; Mulligatawny is a soup made out of celery, carrots, turnips, vegetable broth, some spices, and a few other ingredients escaping my mind right now; Subz Miloni is a creamy vegetable curry; Choonth Wangan is a stewed eggplant and apple mixture; Naan is a flatbread; and Kingfisher beer is cerveza, straight up. Cooking for India was a bit of a challenge for me because for some unknown reason, I completely neglected to plan for anything. All of the sudden it was 6:00 and I'm still standing there in la-la-land. Needless to say, with tremendous assistance from Mike I managed to pull things together, although dinner was about half an hour late getting to the table. Hmmm - this thing won't let me make paragraphs - please bear with my stream of consciousness. So, some foodie details before I get to the guests of the evening. First, the Choonth Wangan required tamarind paste. I didn't think it would be that difficult to find such a product - being as I am, an American, I was thinking tamarind paste should be as plentiful as tomato paste. If it is, I don't know where to look in the farmer's market. I had to resort to making it from scratch with a somewhat vague recipe. I had never used tamarind before (the cookbook, however, described it as "universal" - just not in my universe, I guess...) and I had no idea what I was doing. I was pleased with the end product though - all's well that ends well. Another item I was particularly happy about was the Naan. I'm a fan of eating bread - I'll admit it. But I'm terrible at making it. I took on the challenge, however, and attempted to not only cook bread, but to cook a type of bread that required a 500-degree oven. I am happy to go on record stating that I did not burn a single piece of Naan. It was scrumptious!

Now to the guests of the evening - your hosts were graced with the lovely Abi (Smith) and Anthony Williams. Abi is a graduate student and assistant debate coach at GSU. Anthony works in security, and either currently or recently was on the security team at the High Museum of Art. Just thinking about his job kinda makes me want to pull an art heist - something very Thomas Crown Affair-ish. Anthony said he won't help me out, though, so there goes that dream. We had a great time hanging out with the Williams's, as usual. I would share some of our conversations here, but this is a family venue and Abi is a bit of a potty mouth. I am kidding*, we were very composed all evening. Dessert was Hershey's chocolate chunk brownies - yummy.
That's it until tomorrow night - we're off to Italy! (I didn't mean to make the menu alphabetical, in case you're wondering.)

* Not kidding. ;)