Kitchen Detour

It started with me picking up some ripe looking mangoes for really cheap. They were only tentatively sweet and positively tart around the seed. Seeing that they were quite useless as fruit, I put a couple of them into the pressure cooker along with some celery that was lying around the fridge, added an over-sized pinch of turmeric and dash of salt and let it steam. I had no idea where this was heading when I left for work.

Upon returning in the evening, I found myself craving for something devilishly spicy - must have been wearying of my bland everyday fare. The celery, mango and turmeric combination had turned into a bright yellow, pulpy mass - quite a promising candidate for gravy. My thoughts turned to a tray of mixed seafood that I was going to make a paella with and the red Thai curry paste bought a few weeks ago. Soon the seafood was sautéed with curry paste, grated coconut and then cooked in the gravy. In the middle of my clockwork existence, this was a total surprise of a dinner and a very satisfying one at that.

How a bunch of unrelated ingredients found their way together to make a meal was much like the way random and apparently unconnected incidents and people come into my life to fulfill a purpose that is much larger than any one of them. If I had the wisdom to understand how they played together, I would be able to orchestrate a beautiful life for myself. Unfortunately my talent for finding plausible connections and improvizing is limited only to cooking.