A productive day

My knitting blog would seem to more aptly titled, “What I had for dinner last night blog.” Once again, I have no knitting to show –maybe tomorrow if I can stay up late tonight – but I did have a great dinner last night. I had never cooked an entire Indian dinner and I was always amazed whenever Rebecca did, which was frequently. That was my plan for yesterday, but when I woke up, I had the feeling it was going to be one of those days when one never really gets going. I could visualize myself sitting there, knitting one more row, one more pattern repeat, just finish this finger, and so on till the day was gone, and I felt sure that I would not get beyond it. Then I would be suffused with guilt at not doing what I should be doing, and then later yet, in an agonized frenzy trying to catch up and bitter at my wasted day. I didn’t want to go to the store, and was a bit fearful about my cooking plans, so in order to procrastinate, I did a bunch of nurse “at home learnings.” I had been procrastinating about these for quite a while, and my deadline was approaching, so it seemed a good idea to procrastinate on the immediate thing (dinner) by doing the less immediate thing (nursing educational modules.) I am not sure why I had to do one or the other of these things – was it my Protestant work ethic, or, more likely, my Catholic guilt? Anyhow, the learning modules did not take long, as I had already done the work on them and just had to do them on line to get the certificates, and I felt gratified when I had them done. Then the store --- my sainted aunt was going and took me with her, so was motivation to move. Then to cooking. Actually, none of the dishes I made was difficult; it just seems necessary to have so many of them for an Indian dinner. I used Laxmi’s Vegetarian Kitchen, and what a wonderful cookbook it is! I made a pea and potato dish, and my hand tipped with the hot stuff, so Rachael and I were cautious with it, but Tom liked it a lot. I was more careful with the peppers in the rest of the dinner – tomato and cucumber raita, a cauliflower dish, a red pepper dish, and a spinach rice pilaf. Laxmi gave me her mother’s recipe for masala and it had about 50 spices in it. Naturally, I didn’t have half of them, but the results were satisfactory anyway. I also started a flatbread early on, but realized that my expectations had overshot reality, and so I did not fix it as it had to be done at the last minute. I think this must be the task of the eldest daughter or the daughter-in-law, as I cannot imagine rolling out and frying the bread in addition to finishing up everything else. Rachael and I had it today for lunch, and it was yummy.

Maria is helping with the cleanup.