Hope Springs Eternal

As I continue the venture into cooking in India, the news is not at all bad. First off, there may still be hope for the clay cooker. Everyone keep their fingers crossed here. After he promised to come yesterday and several phone calls later today, the electrician finally arrived. The fan in the bedroom, which would have been my primary defense against the mosquitoes--who were able to eat me alive through two cotton comforters and a sheet last night--,is broken. Now, I know, this mosquito feat seems suspect even to me. I even looked for bed bugs. Nothing. When I went to bed last night, my feet appeared normal. When I woke up this morning, they were totally eaten. These mosquitoes specialize in chomping the tender flesh around the ankles and right above the hardened skin of the sole. Nor are they phased by the very expensive lemon essential oil that I dowsed myself with before going to bed. The poor buggers must be delighted to eat garlic and onion free Western flesh---yum a new flavor--even if it involves a fair bit of cotton and lemon essential oil to get to me.


The electrician, who looked like he was about 15, did bugger all for the fan telling my landlady that she should check the warranty on the fan rather than spend the money on him to fix it. Translation: I’ll have no fan in the bedroom this month.

Then he looked at the clay cooker. Yes, indeed it’s blown (hardly a remarkable observation here). It’s an American cooker i.e. 120V in the land of 240V. I suppose that I thought the $13 transformer and converter that I specifically purchased at JFK was going to take care of this voltage discrepancy. Apparently I was wrong. He said that he will attempt to change out the coil to an Indian coil (whatever that means) and return the machine by Monday, which of course we all know means next Thursday at the earliest. Hope springs eternal, however, and my fingers are crossed that he’ll be able to do something to make the thing work least I starve in this land of white rice, fried food and wheat products.

You see, I had all these grand plans of finally writing down all of my delicious Vita clay (the clay cooker) recipes for a fabulous cookbook that I was going to call “Easy Living”. Instead I’ve already killed one pan. Yup. Burnt to a crisp. Day one. Blackened, I think they call it. Irrevocably so, I’m afraid. A stovetop cooker I am not, though I did manage to eat today. OMG, a mosquito just bit my eyelid! Oh the diversions.

I went to the vegetable market early this morning as they were unloading the produce from the trucks. I bought the usual suspects: carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, sweet potatoes, ginger, green beans, peas, spinach, cilantro, mint. And then I ventured into the land of the unknown: the miscellaneous greens. What the hell life is short and how bad could they be?

As it turns out….pretty bad. For dinner, I sautéed what I discovered to be Fenugreek leaves (this is what the landlady told me anyway) in olive oil with salt. Bitter! Kind of like dandelion greens only with a fenugreek flavor. This combined with the egg omelet I made with the oh-so-delicious “La Vache Quirit” non-refrigerated pasteurized cheese with a red cow head wearing golden earrings dangling below his horns on the cover of the eight individually wrapped slivers in a rounded cardboard container. I’d forgotten how much I missed cheese the last time I was in India. While that parmesan at the Italian restaurant was clearly the real thing (hmm, I wonder if I could get them to tell me where they buy it), cheese aside from paneer is hard to come by. Real cheese, in India, is a specialty item.

So while I ate my bitter greens, processed cheese omelet and brown rice---all the while watching for rocks in the rice---I lamented the premature death of the Vita clay and prayed for its hasty resurrection.

Om Shanti, Shanti, Shant-tih.