I can't bake to save my life because following any recipe requires more discipline than I have. Improvisation, short-cuts and baking I have found do not go together unless perhaps if you are a professional. This recipe for a making a cake in a mug looks very promising even with my non-existent baking talents. For one thing, there is no oven involved in the "baking" which in itself is a huge reduction in complexity. When you add to that the ability to stir together everything in a coffee mug, you figure your problem has been greatly reduced in size as well. Most importantly though, throwing out a mug-full of chocolaty goo from a failed baking experiment beats having to do the same with a baking tray full of charred brownies with a baleful J looking on.
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
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