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Indian food for older white women Saturday, September 26 2009
A woman was coming over to teach an Indian cooking class to Gretchen and two of her lady friends, so one of my jobs early in the day was to clean the kitchen and adjacent areas so as to lessen fears about E. coli, cholera, hepatitis, and pancreatic stank. We live a life of nature acceptance, leaving our doors wide open during the daylight hours of the warm season and giving spiders license to spin their webs wherever the choose. A consequence of this is that the corpses of insects (ranging from house flies to hornets to dragonflies to many species of moth) accumulate on our window sills. We also have a problem with spots of fly excreta on the windows and white-painted walls. Then there are the hammock-like spider webs, sometimes laden with egg masses, which sometimes erupt with hundreds of tiny spiders. Today I went around the kitchen and dining room sweeping up the dead insects and old cobwebs as well as scrubbing away the fly spots (though this is a difficult job and I didn't really complete it).
Later I went down to the outhouse and installed the last corner pole, the one for the southeast. While I was finishing that up, I could hear Eleanor barking at the arrival of the Indian food cooking class and its teacher. Whenever Gretchen has large groups of women over, particularly when they are significantly older than I am, I always feel like being neither seen nor heard. This is my hangup and has nothing to do with Gretchen's wishes. I think what I'm trying to avoid by being this way is the forced pleasantry typical of civil intergenerational communication. The prospect of being fake-smiled-at by several women at once is enough to keep me lounging around the greenhouse or wandering the nearby forest, hoping I'll outlast the gauntlet that I know lies behind the house's front door.
Eventually, though, Gretchen called me on the greenhouse phone to say that I should come and try one of the parathas that had been cooked. This was all it took to get me past my shyness and into the house; one of the reasons I'd been so reticent to superficially socialize was that I'd been rendered cranky from low blood sugar. The only food I'd had all day was a bowl of Cheerios and unsweetened plain soymilk (and no, I never add sugar).
I disappeared into the laboratory for the rest of the Indian food class, which continued on for over three hours. Eventually I had some of that food and it was good that Gretchen warned me about its blandness. With enough salt and cayenne pepper, it tasted pretty good. But adding such flavors after food is prepared can't completely correct a problem best solved by seasoning the food when it's actually cooking. It seems this particular Indian cooking instructor has become an expert at teaching old white women with high blood pressure how to cook Indian food.
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