Skip to main content

Spices, Baking and Dreams

Was browsing through a really nice baking blog when I spotted this quote by Erma Bombeck

"Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices. The Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which one I'm taking with me when I go."

I have spices from ten years ago still sitting in my kitchen waiting to be used. Every once in a while I will rearrange the order of the spice jars in my cabinets so I can reach the ones I have not used in a while more easily. As it turns out this strategy does not work - I will gravitate toward the familiar despite the obstacles placed along the way. I had always thought not having the heart to throw my decade old spices away is one among my many other oddities. I am relieved to learn that this is common affliction that many women suffer.

As for the baking lovely baking blog itself, I am in complete awe of the baking prowess of the blogger, Deeba Rajpal. I guess it takes some special kind of wiring in the brain to be a good baker - one that the Maker in his/her infinite wisdom did not choose to give me. I would be quite okay with that omission if I had likewise not been given this incurable yen to be a good baker. Why give people desires when you won't give them the wherewithal to fulfill them ?

What applies for baking is true for many other aspects of life as well. Maybe it is what keeps us striving to achieve Quioxtic goals and for our efforts we are sometimes rewarded with an unexpected surprise.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

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
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more