Celebrating Spring with Colors

If you've been reading my blog for a while then you probably know that Holi is not one of my favorite festivals. While I never cared much for celebrating with color and the liberal dousing with water as part of the Rangapanchami or Dhulivandan celebrations, I did enjoy the real Holi a great deal.

Apart from puran poli, masala milk or thandai is a milky treat that is always served on Holi.

I have never attempted making puran poli and when my friend from grad school asked me if I had a recipe for thandai, it occurred to me that I hadn't made that either. My excuse for not making puran poli is that it is daunting, especially the way my mother used to make it. Helping was always easier. As for thandai or masala milk? Well, we are all lactose intolerant. But that also meant that Medha has never had thandai and I felt the need to fix that.

Happy Holi!

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Sunday Snapshots: Cham Towers, Vietnam

I'm very sure that Bay, our driver and guide when we were in Vietnam last Thanksgiving, thought we were curious people. We were not interested in the regular tourist spots and I made him pull over at all kinds of nondescript locations. Like these neglected Cham Towers, for example, that suddenly showed up on the side of the highway when we were on our way to Nha Trang from Phan Rang. He couldn't understand why I wanted to stop here when we were headed to the better-known and better-maintained Po Nagar Towers in Nha Trang. Well, that's just it! I wanted to stop because it was deserted.

At least, I thought it was deserted until I saw a young man walking through the grounds, overgrown with weeds, hand-in-hand with a beautiful girl. I almost believed they were an apparition because, after all, these were ruins from the Cham Dynasty, a Hindu people that once ruled southern and central parts of Vietnam from the 7th century to early 1800s.

Cham Tower

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Mustard oil dilemmas

Soon after I posted my Bengali Dal on Cooking Boulder, I was quickly taken to task for posting a Bengali dish that was not made with mustard oil. My pleas of but that's how I make it and have been making it for what seems like forever did not impress until I remembered why I don't have mustard oil as an essential pantry item. The FDA disapproves. Bottles of mustard oil have warnings that range from "Not for human consumption" to "For external use only" to "For massage only."

In the past, I have tried using mustard-flavored oil, a blend of regular cooking oil and mustard oil. No wonder my mutschgand did not taste anything like hers. I think I poured most of that oil into my used oil container, and it was eventually recycled.

Pure mustard oil can be found on the shelves of Indian grocery stores, rubbing shoulders with peanut oil, coconut oil and cooking oil. But, according to the FDA, you are not supposed to cook with it. Bengalis, however, have been cooking with it for centuries and are still some of the nicest people I know. So it's not doing anything to their charming disposition, nor is it affecting their intelligence or creativity in any way.

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To Bay or Not to Bay

It's taken everything and more to get me to focus on this post. In my mind, it was due two weeks but fate decreed otherwise. I think we are all still in shock, reaching out to one another to seek solace and comfort, hugging our families as much as possible.

Charming Ellen of Helliemaes Salt Caramels put some spunk back in life by sending me a box of her new Chili Palmer Caramels. It served as more than a thoughtful pick-me-up as it ripped through my nasal and sinus congestion to remind me that I still had taste-buds. Whoa! These babies pack a punch! Of course, I promptly brewed a cup of tea to increase the burn.

Thank you, my lovely friend, these hit the spot!

The rest of this post is a PSA. Not a pet peeve, because then you would think of me as only being about pet peeves. I promise you, there is more to me than pet peeves!

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Raji, I will miss you.

Rest in Peace, my beautiful friend

My beautiful friend Raji Shanker passed away early Monday morning. It was news I was hoping I wouldn't hear for a very long time. But she knew. She had told me a couple of weeks ago that it didn't look very good for her, that the prognosis was bleak. But you would never know it — not from her posts or her upbeat and witty comments on all our blogs.

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Handy Tip: Storing Ginger

<pet peeve>

It's Ginger. Not Ginger Root.

Ginger is a rhizome or an underground stem.

That means that it cannot be a root.

</pet peeve>

4 weeks old

I need at least one small knob of ginger in my refrigerator at all times. Over the years, I've tried different methods of getting it to last without turning bluish-green and moldy on me. Freeze it, they said. Make a paste and store it in an air-tight container in your refrigerator, exhorted another. I tried both, even a combination of both, and rued the loss of flavor.

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Sunday Snapshots: Dam Market, Nha Trang, Vietnam

Dam Market in Nha Trang, Vietnam is listed as a must-do on several travel web sites. I was interested in Vietnamese spices but thus far, they had seemed elusive. Snake wine, dried seafood and dried persimmons were more ubiquitous. I found one woman selling spices, buried deep inside the Dam Market. She spoke no English, our guide was no help on the spices front and my pocket English-Vietnamese dictionary was curiously devoid of anything remotely spice-related. She shoved a piece of paper and pen in my hand and motioned me to write what I was looking for. I printed cardamom carefully so that my squiggly unreadable handwriting did not throw her off as it had Medha's elementary school teachers. She stared at it and then her face broke out into one of the widest smiles I have ever seen. She rushed off into a dark alley, only to return with a packet of fragrant smoky Vietnamese cardamom. I bought some cinnamom, too, happy in the knowledge that I was all set to make some authentic aromatic Pho when I got back home.

We had only a few more hours to explore Nha Trang so I did not go deeper into the market. I did get these pictures, though.

Puffer fish

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