My Spices

At the age of three, I could not handle the bold, sharp, fiery tastes that are the characteristic features of Indian cooking. I remember how the mixture of haldi, imli, jeera, and adrak would overwhelm my senses and send me running, literally. Oh yes, I was that child.

The child that had to be force-fed at every meal. The one that would take one look at her plate, feel the slow burn in the back of her throat caused by the mere smell of the spices, and flee. I know now that my parents had good intentions - they were trying to prepare me for the spices that my Indian heritage would present to me nearly every day of the rest of my life. But at the time, I could not see past my fear of the spices, and saw hiding as my only viable option. Sometimes I would hide under the dining table itself; other times, I took to the sliver of space behind the bathroom door. Sometimes I would run from one spot to the next, with the false hopes that my parents would never catch me.

But with two of them, and one of me, the night would always end with me being held down in my seat, trying to chew and swallow my food in record time so that my mouth would not have to deal with the spices for so long. My mother would always leave the carton of milk out on the table, right in front of me, because it took about three huge gulps of milk to end the suffering caused by each bite. I used to finish off about a quarter of the gallon in just one sitting.

After I swallowed my last mouthful, and drowned it with a few feverish sips of my milk, my parents would breathe an immense sigh of relief and start the clean-up process. While they busied themselves with loading the dishwasher, I would glare at the disingenuously innocent wooden structure on the counter next to the fridge. My mother called it the “spice rack,” but I fondly referred to it as my “arch enemy.” I was convinced that the differently sized, colorful bottles that had been shipped to my home from around the world housed the greatest malice and hate that a three-year-old could comprehend – they were even worse than Cinderella’s evil stepmother.

Fast-forward ten, maybe twelve, years and “that child” had learned to enjoy the spices that once terrorized her. She was well on her way to becoming her father, whose (possibly excessive) love of spices had caused him to lose taste buds on certain patches of his tongue. I was the girl who proudly added chili powder to almost every dish she cooked; the girl who carried around a bottle of Tabasco in her purse instead of candy-flavored lip gloss like her friends; the girl whose parents had to send her black pepper when she went to sleep-away camp because her tent was not stocked with it and she absolutely could not eat without it.

Somehow, over the years, I had lost my appreciation for the simple and the plain. My every meal was flavored with an assortment of imported spices. Even my ice cream sundaes were topped with a generous spoonful of gur, an unrefined cane sugar imported from India.

Unfortunately for me, the simple and the plain were the defining features of my homeland. While my tongue and soul may have been enamored with the bold tastes of India, my physical body was situated in the heart of New Jersey, a state that organically grows alarmingly few spices. Ask any mother in my town, and she will agree that locally-grown, organic produce is healthier than dried and powdered spices imported from third-world countries. And this view is shared by other groups of experts as well; dietitians, nutritionists, athletic trainers will all give the same advice - eat more locally grown food.

Enter a deceptively simple school project: cook an entire meal from completely locally-grown, organic produce. A team was formed - Courtney, Amy and myself - and a course was charted - our meal would focus on the rich flavors of Italian cooking.

At first we made bold strides, eliminating spaghetti from our menu (because it was made from Semolina flour produced hundreds of miles from our town) and replacing it with locally-grown spaghetti squash from the Farmers’ Market, in a move that we saw as ingenious. But when we undertook the preparation of the meal, we realized that we had forgotten an essential component of our meal. It was a component that I saw as essential, and one that my team saw as insignificant. It was truly the only component of the meal that mattered to me. Yes, we had forgotten to find locally-grown substitutes for our spices.

After two hours of “baking” spaghetti squash in the microwave, scooping out its “goopy” innards with a fork, and sauteing the onions and tomatoes that we planned to serve with it, we had one plate of soft, squishy, imitation-pasta. The Italian-inspired pasta was certainly present, but - as I learned shortly after ingesting my first bite - the robust Italian-inspired tastes were not.

While we ultimately prided ourselves in creating a meal completely from scratch, a meal that could represent the natural vegetables grown near our town, our spaghetti squash was bland, flavorless and dull. After struggling to down mouthful after mouthful of the tasteless squash, my stomach surely felt satisfied, and my body surely felt fortified with squash’s natural, organic goodness. But though my stomach was not aching, my tongue still was; it was yearning for the foreign, imported zing that I had taken advantage of for all of the seventeen years of my life.

My teammates would have taken one look at the “Imported from India” labels on all of my spice bottles and deemed them “illegal,” since Indian tastes are as exotic and far from home as it gets, for them. But, honestly, the spices were never imported or foreign to me – they represented my home just as well as the spaghetti squash. I had been eating these so-called “exotic” ingredients for my entire life, and I had no plan to stop eating them at any time in the near future.

Organic, locally-grown food may have countless benefits for my physical body, but my soul needs my spices. For me, food has never been simply about physical nourishment; it has always been, at least in part, nourishment for my soul. And while my health may suffer from the additives, growth hormones, and preservatives in my food, my soul will thrive on the spices that have inexplicably become an integral part of who I am.

It is nice to think that my food community includes only the purest food, grown right near my hometown, but I have come to the realization that it actually stretches across the world and includes ingredients that have very negative connotations. A perfect food community seems to be the unreachable ideal, too far from attainable practicalities to actually be implemented in my life. After all, food without my spices, is hardly food at all.

Nitrites, sulfites, and BHT, you are welcome here.

"Italian Style Spaghetti Squash" from Phase 2 of the South Beach Diet:

2 lbs of Spaghetti Squash, halved lengthwise and seeded

2 T olive oil

1 medium white onion, thinly sliced

4 medium tomatoes, diced

1/4 t salt

1/4 t coarsely ground pepper

1. Place the squash halves, cut side down, in a glass baking dish. Add 1/4 cup water and cover with plastic wrap. Microwave on high for 8-10 minutes until tender; cool slightly.


2. Meanwhile, in a large skillet, heat 1 T of the oil. Add the onion and cook over medium-high heat for 3 minutes until the onion is translucent. Add tomatoes, salt and pepper. Reduce heat and simmer gently for 10 minutes.


3. Using a fork, scrape the squash strands into a bowl. Toss with the remaining tablespoon of oil. Mound the squash in the center of 4 serving bowls and spoon the vegetable mixture around the mound.

Semiotic Analysis: Giving Up in College

When I walked into my first class at Fairleigh Dickinson University, I was ready to be dazzled. I knew that FDU was not the best college around, and that it was particularly weak in the math and science areas, but I assumed that my Calculus III class would be reasonably motivated - they had, after all, stuck with calculus for 3 semesters. Unfortunately, my first class did not quite live up to my expectations.

When I entered the classroom at 9:25 AM, 5 minutes before the class was scheduled to start, the room was completely empty. I chose a desk in the front, right-hand corner of the room and prayed that I was in the right classroom. After a few agonizingly long minutes of solitude, my classmates began to enter the room.

The college boys, though reasonably attractive, wore the typical White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant (WASP) look that boys in my school wear. The girls, on the other hand, were remarkably different. Unlike girls at Chatham High, who spend long hours perfecting every aspect of their outfit, these girls looked practically disheveled. All of them had their hair pulled back into a messy ponytail or bun (except for one girl whose hair was too short to tie up), were above average in terms of weight, and each and every girl was wearing track pants or sweat pants.

I did not want to judge them by their outward appearance, but their levels of motivation meshed perfectly with their looks. Their entire outward aura could be summarized in three words: bored to death. While I did not realize it then, they were merely following a larger trend that pervaded the entire campus. Almost every girl in FDU wore track pants or sweat pants and did not seem to care about their outward appearance.

I saw this lack of interest in both appearance and schoolwork as the physical manifestation of the change in their ideology from high school to college. It was a symbol of the students simply "letting go."

Students who were forced to go to a school such as FDU, especially for math or science, seemed to give up when they got to college. They realized that they no longer needed to try for that A because future employers would only see their final degree, not the grades they received in individual classes. In my eyes, it seemed that once these students saw that they were not good enough to get into a top college, they let go of some of their perfectionism, at least for their freshman year.

This ties together perfectly with the idea that they simply did not want to deal with the effects of the freshman fifteen. Getting back into shape and shedding those extra pounds is very challenging, both physically and mentally. These students found it easier to simply accept that they were larger now, than to fight to fit into their jeans from high school. They chose to take the easier route and wear track pants and sweat pants all the time instead.

Alright, so students who do not get into the top colleges are a little lazy during their freshman year. Why is this so important? Perhaps because it clarifies a little something about human nature: when we try hard to realize a dream or accomplish a lofty goal and fail horribly, we do not immediately want to move on to the next opportunity. Our first tendency is to simply give up and tell the world that we only really wanted to be average, so our failure really is not bothering us.

There are only a few students who will bounce back from their failure quickly, and these are the students who will succeed later in life. These are the students who are involved in their classes, in sports, in clubs, in candle-light vigils, in parades, and in a variety of other extracurriculars. The students who refuse to give up are the ones who will "go places."

As our application deadlines approach and we begin to wait for the admission decisions, I have one piece of advice for myself and my fellow students. If you do not get into your top college, do not give up. What you do in college is far more important. So when you begin freshman year, and start to pack on those pounds, skip the track pants and find the closest gym.

A Recipe for Curry Sauce

Since my blog is, after all, entitled "Curry Sauce and Mango Juice," I thought it would be fitting to post a recipe for curry sauce. Being the "coconut" (a brown-skinned Indian on the outside, but a white American on the inside) I am, I did not know this recipe off the top of my head. So I turned to cooking.com, my personal Sous Chef.

I typed the words "curry sauce" into the search bar, and was presented with a number of options. There were curry sauces, curry pastes, curry with honey sauce, cream curry sauce and a host of other varieties. Then, of course, came the geographical variations: East-Indian Curry Sauce, West-Indian Oxtail Sauce, Thai Curry-Paste and the very relevant Indian Melon Salad.

Instinct told me to click on recipes with the word "Indian" in them, since that is generally what curry is associated with. Even narrowing down my choices like this, however, left me with a multitude of choices. If I were to post a West-Indian recipe on my blog, would that make me seem sophisticated, because it would appear that I could distinguish West-Indian curry from East-Indian curry, or would it simply make me look idiotic, because there really is no difference between the two curries?

Logic told me to combine the two recipes, and simply post it as a "Multicultural Indian Curry," but the perfectionist within me refused to comply. Perhaps some of the ingredients in the West-Indian Curry would clash terribly with those from the East-Indian curry. How should I know which ingredients go together if I cannot even pronounce the vast majority of them?

With combination out, I was brought back to my intial Rebecca Black-style decision: which curry do I choose? I, for one, chose to be unlike Rebecca Black and did not enter the car driven by a thirteen-year-old. I went with the safest recipe of them all: The Indian Melon Salad. I recommend serving it with a tall glass of mango juice.


INDIAN MELON SALAD

2 c. chicken breasts, poached and cut into 1/2 x 1/2 inch pieces
1 c. canned water chestnuts, cut into pieces
1 1/2 c. fresh green grapes, halved
1/2 c. celery, diced
1/2 c. (7 oz.) slivered almonds, toasted
4 honeydew melon "rings"

1. Place chicken breasts, a couple slices of onion, a carrot and a stalk of celery in a fry pan barely covered with cold water. Cover with a lid and simmer very slowly until tender. Drain, discard vegetables and cut up chicken and chill.
2. Toast almonds by putting in a single layer on a pan and putting them under the broiler until lightly toasted (golden brown). Cool.
3. For melon rings: cut about 2 inches off the end of the melon. Scoop out the seeds. Cut four, 1 inch slices into "rings"; cut off rind with a sharp knife. Chill.
4. Cut up the water chestnuts, grapes and celery and combine with the chicken. Add almonds just before serving.
5. Toss with a dressing of:
2/3 c. mayonnaise
1/2 tsp. curry powder
1 tsp. soy sauce
1/4 tsp. salt

To assemble: put a melon ring on each plate and fill the center of the rings with the chicken mixture. Garnish with a cluster of grapes dipped in sugar.

Serve with hot rolls, iced tea and lemon sherbet with tea cookies for dessert.

How to Get to the Middle School

My sister, on a whim, decided to walk the 1.9 miles to the middle school tomorrow morning. Since she has never done this before (and has a sense of direction that far less accurate than mine), she discussed the entire route through with my mother.

While I was brushing my teeth, I heard a few snippets of their conversation. I heard them talking through lunch, friends, swimming and finally my mother had one piece of advice. She said, "Nishita, go through the light, past the graveyard, and when the road ends turn right on the new one."

In context, my mother was simply telling my sister that she had to walk straight down Noe and turn right on Woodland, but out of context, she could be giving us advice about death.

What, you may ask, is advice useful for when you are dead? Death is supposed to be a passive process, like falling asleep. But I think my mother, either unintentionally or on purpose, went against that idea with her comment.

First, you have to get through the light, or the bright light at the end of the tunnel. Nearly everyone who has had a near death experience talks about this light, but none of them have crossed it, so they are still alive. The first step of dying is getting through that light, and leaving your home, family, friends and mortal possessions behind you.

Death is not about simply lying in a graveyard and waiting for some mystical force to pull you up to heaven. After you get through the light you are not done. You cannot simply wait in a graveyard while your flesh rots off your bones and your clothes become as delicate is tissue paper. You have to do something - anything - to get past the graveyard. You cannot simply give up there, or you will never get to heaven.

Once you get past the graveyard, you must follow the road until it ends, and when it does, turn right on the new road leading to heaven. Then your journey to the afterlife will be complete It is a journey, after all, so you should not expect it to be passive.

But my mother's advice is applicable even while we are alive. When things do not go our way, when our brightest ideas shatter into a million sharp daggers of light and tear us apart, we are tempted to stay in our own graveyards of broken dreams, surrounded by our failures and free to wallow in our misery. But if we are to get anywhere in our lives - be it a middle school or a dream job - we must go past the graveyard.

If we go into the graveyard, curl up into a cold, bony ball of sadness, and cry tears for every failure, past, present and future, we will never get out. We will forever be stuck in that "inbetween." To everyone around us, we will be a failure, but we ourselves will never be sure. We will be stuck between failure and success because we cannot let go of what happened and what it done and what is over.

If we are to get anywhere in life, we must go past the graveyard, or we will be hopelessly lost. We must go past the graveyard, turn right on the new road, and start a new journey.

My Keyboard Taught Me a Life Lesson

Copy, paste, save and print are the four shortcuts of word-processing programs that are most linked to plagiarism and the host of negative connotations that come with this word. This is because they make copying information found on the internet far too easy. At least before the invention of computers people had to slowly copy one word at a time from books and other sources, but now the crime can be committed in record time.

You can link this to the postmodern belief that nothing we create today is truly original, and that the computer is merely the physical manifestation of this idea, but you are missing the core concepts. While it is true that the copy, paste, save and print shortcuts are relatively easy to learn (simply the "Ctrl" key and a letter), the more advanced shortcuts which would really save time and effort are not as well-known. Thus, in order to rake in the real benefits of using shortcuts, you must put in a considerable amount of work to memorize sequences of numbers or letters.

Take, for example, the commonly used accented spanish vowels. In order to insert an á, you must open up the symbols browser, locate the desired letter, and insert it into your document. This seems like far too much time spent for a simple letter, and you probably think shortcut for it would be very useful. Manufacturers of PC's were one step ahead of you - they already have the shortcut built in. Unfortunately, the shortcut itself is quite hard to remember: "Alt" + "0225." This itself is not very hard to remember, but it is easy to confuse with the shortcut for é ("Alt" + "0233") or í ("Alt" + "0237").

These shortcuts are essentially a representation of the old idea that you must work hard to get a break. If you want the easy life (i.e. you do not want to spend 2 or 3 minutes to insert a single letter), you have to work for it. You have to go through the trouble of memorizing the specific sequences of numbers, or you will have to use the long method.

It seems that the world of computer shortcuts has always had a secret life-lesson hidden beneath the keys: if you want an easy life later, you must work hard now.