Chennai Traffic

Lately, I feel like we've been doing nothing but sitting in traffic. The road that leads away from our house is under construction, so going almost anywhere takes us through detours on jam-packed roads, too small to handle the increased traffic. Trips now are much longer, and trips were already long before. Pre-construction, it took just under an hour to get downtown. Now, we need about an hour and 30 minutes. And we're talking about distances maybe slightly over ten miles. Can you believe that? It used to take me less than an hour and a half to get home from college. Door to door.

But such is life when you share the road with 1.2 billion people.

I've been managing the frustration of sitting in traffic by taking pictures. I like how this camera setting makes things look like a watercolor. Peaceful, right?

In this first one you can see that the lady in the back is riding her motorcycle side-saddle, with a stocking-capped baby in her arms. 

Pongal

Over the weekend the people of Tamil Nadu celebrated Pongal, a harvest festival.  On Saturday our friend Padma took us to a village two hours outside of Chennai for a Pongal celebration.  There we visited her farmer friend and got a little taste of village life. 

This was the Pongal celebration in front of our house.  The main dish of Pongal is a sweet rice/lentil mixture, that's what they're cooking here. 

This guy is selling decorations for the cow Pongal, done one day after the human Pongal.  Farmers decorate their cows to thank them for helping with the harvest. 

 Village homes. 

 Here's our Pongal feast.

The farmer is on the left.  Padma is in the middle.  And yes, that's a loincloth, it went right up his butt!

bon appetit: chicken makhani

I've spent a lot of time here griping about the difficulty of finding certain foods.  Most imported goods (cheese, any pork product, green, leafy vegetables, Cheerios, berries, good coffee, the list goes on) are either entirely unavailable, really expensive or located in stores that can take over an hour to get to.

So, one of my New Year's resolutions was to learn to cook Indian food.  There are a few reasons why I haven't done this yet.  I'll give them to you, even though I admit, they're all pretty lame.
1. I can cheaply and easily BUY prepared Indian food.  And that's usually what we do on nights when I don't feel like cooking.
2. For some reason I thought I'd actually have to have a person teach me, or find a cooking class
and
3. If we eat too much Indian food, we sort of start to smell funky.

Eventually, I realized that a cooking class wouldn't be unnecessary.  And that maybe we already smell funky. So I followed this recipe, with a few adjustments from the comments section.  Shopping for ingredients was a breeze.  I didn't even have to cross the street.  Cooking wasn't hard either, and the results were, I must say, even better than our neighborhood restaurant (pat, pat, pat on my own back).  Brad thought it was good too, almost scarfed the whole thing.

I did experience a complete failure, and that was in trying to make Indian bread.  I blame the yeast.  Fortunately, I planned for failure and bought a package of pre-made chapati. 

 I used crushed cashews instead of cornstarch because lord knows where I'd find cornstarch.  And when does it ever hurt to add cashews? 

 Pretty fancy setup, huh? 

If you can't find chapati, use tortillas.  When I can't find tortillas, I use chapati.   

I need to work on this food photography business.  Also, the yellow plates were provided to us, not intentionally purchased.  Yuck. 

All this cooking inspiration has been great.  Not buying imported food will definitely cut down on the grocery bills, and I love learning new things.  Also, I've been getting cooking tips from the neighborhood food vendors who used to mostly just eye me with suspicion.  Problem is, cooking inspiration may be coming at the cost of grad-school-essay inspiration, something I am completely lacking.  I haven't written a single word.

But at least now I have a plan B.  If grad-school-essay inspiration never comes, I will work toward my other goal: becoming the Julia Child of Indian food.

sorry

for my loooong absence. I've spent the last month visiting babies, family and friends and eating everything in sight.  I was just much, much too happy to blog.  You would have been sickened by it.  

But of course, it wasn't all good.  Getting home and back was tortuous.  I know that sitting on a plane with hours and hours of free time might sound like a luxury, but when the hours of sitting stretch beyond the 20s, things get a little rough.  Especially because we spent some of that time on American Airlines, which is a disgrace to its namesake.  Truly, utterly, a disgusting and disreputable airline, put to shame by every other airline I've ever flown, including Air India.  And that's saying something!

Anyway, it was all worth it to see the family and friends we've been missing for a year.  We also enjoyed the novelties of: driving our cars, walking places, alcohol in restaurants and fungus-free skin, brought to us by cold weather.   

We also spent some time preparing for our new life back in Iowa.  Things seem to be falling in place with just a few small details still to work out, such as: I still need to get accepted into grad school and Brad still needs to find a job...but those are tiny, tiny details, nothing at all to worry about.

Between now and back to Iowa, Brad and I will be here, doing our honest best to enjoy our last months of this crazy lifestyle.  So, please, dear readers, re-tune your computers here.  I promise it will be interesting.