Lunch is served...


Ãœber-tasty cauliflower stew:

• Season olive oil with mustard seeds, urad dal, karuveppelai, coriander seeds, cardamom, dried red chillies and cumin.
• Add finely chopped garlic, ginger, jalapeños and sauté for a bit.
• Add salt and roughly chopped tomatoes and green peppers. Sauté till tomato is mostly cooked and its juices come out.
• Add uniformly chopped cauliflower. Sauté till tender yet crunchy
• Garnish generously with chopped coriander leaves.
• Serve and devour on a rainy day like today!

I really enjoyed Anne Bass's wonderful documentary, "Dancing Across Borders".


In particular, I loved this sequence from the documentary.


It showcases an intense ballet lesson that Sokvannara "Sy" Sar, a Cambodian who came to NYC to learn ballet, takes with Olga Kostritzky, simply the best beginner ballet teacher there can be.
Notice Sy's perfect form and the controlled leg lifts. I wonder if I will ever get there.

I had no idea Google put whole documentaries online on Youtube. You can watch the entire film here:

After pining for yoga class for a month, I finally made it yesterday. Thanks mainly to a strategically timed phone call from (e:Paul), just as I was getting ready to spend the evening in the office.

In class, Erin gave us the option of trying the Parivrtta Surya Yantrasana (compass or sundial pose) or leg splits. I was secretly interested in going the splits way because of my not-so-secret obsession with ballet. But the sundial/compass pose looked pretty cool so most of the class that had an opinion at that point voted in favour of trying it out. I decided to abandon my secret agenda and went with the class.

And, wow! The Parivrtta Surya Yantrasana was totally worth going with the class chorus.



That doesn't mean I reached the full expression of the pose. Far from it. But I ALMOST got there with a yogi's choice scaled-down version. (e:Paul)-Super-Yogi later told me that this pose was tough, even for him. He has a theory that he is only good at asanas that involve upper body strength (but we all know it's just a theory and a flawed one at that, because I did watch him out of the corner of my eyes, and he totally reached the asana!)

After yoga, (e:Paul) and I hung out for dinner. We cooked palak paneer (which, I thought was a slight disaster because our most-probable guess purchase of a "paneer"-like-Italian-basket cheese pulled a meltdown in the frying pan). I should have known better than to have trusted an Italian cheese to behave like paneer or at least have tested it before throwing it all in or just used the most-probably-fry-able Goya Queso Blanco, instead. But I didn't do any of these things.

I guess there is always next time but If you will excuse me, I need to go and bask in my yoga mediocrity and palak-paneer miscalculation now.

According to wikipedia, the US was the world's top producer of cheese in 2006, making about 4,275 metric tonnes of cheese every year. However, the US didn't quite make it to the top ten cheese consumers or the top ten cheese exporters.

Where is all the extra cheese going? Cosmetics? Bricks for cheese houses?