Skip to main content

Food Stories

We had a few people over for lunch after a long hiatus. Part of it was pandemic induced but also the issue of getting rusty from lack of social contact. I seem to have forgotten how good it feels to have friends over share a meal, have a good conversation and remember happy memories. But that Friday evening after a day that left a sour taste in mouth, nothing felt better than planning and preparing the meal for the lunch on Saturday. I was on my feet for over five hours in the kitchen and trying to make a healing experience of it. The negativity that came from a toxic interaction at work could be turned into a energy that went into preparing a meal for me friends. It was a great time all around and particularly satisfying to have everyone get second helpings of food I had made. 

I have been known to cook in stress and often much more than is needed and the quality can be questionable. I made a very conscious effort to focus on who I was cooking for and how these folks were good and positive sources of energy in my life unlike the person whom I had a had a contentious time at work. That made it easy to give cooking the love and attention it deserved. I wanted it to be a happy and memorable meal for us all, for the afternoon to make happy memories for all of us. I met C's boyfriend for the first time that day and it seemed like my efforts had worked. He looked genuinely happy to be around us all, be invited to share our meal and the stories that got us together. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

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...

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...