He didn't say anything about the recipe!!! - BEEF TEHARI!

So, Ryan has ADD... or that will probably be his excuse for not including information about the highlight of the night - us cooking beef tehari - a most delicious South Asian dish that infused our common room/ lounge with savory spices aromas (ok, I'm running out of inspiration). And we were supposed to share our tehari cooking process with the posterity...

So here is what was up - we had a big chunk of beef meat - about 2 pounds and we have a 10 pound of basmati rice from the Indian Bazaar, which I bought for obvious reasons (there are 3 South Asians in the house, duh!!!) And we also have a whole lot of spices I acquired over the course of two years in college :) That's why we decided to make Bengali style tehari, which means that we also put potatoes. Technically, if you want to make any South Asian dish specifically Bengali, you just need to put potatoes in it ;)

Let's start with the ingredients: 

• Beef - 2 pounds
• Rice (as good rice as possible) - 1 pound (right about)
• Potatoes - 2-3 
• Onion - 1 
• Ghee/ Butter/ Oil - right about 3 spoons
• Yoghurt - 1 cup
• Bay leaves - 2
• Cumin seeds - 1 tbsp
• Cardamoms - 1-2 black and 3-4 green cardamoms, or about 1 tbsp of powder
• Black pepper - 1 tbsp
• Chili powder - 1 tbsp
• Cloves - 4
• Cinnamon - 2 sticks
• Coriander powder - 1 tbsp and leaves, if you have
• Hot peppers - 2
• Ginger paste - 1-2 tbsp
• Garlic 1-2 tbsp
• Salt

To make it: cut the beef in small cubes and mix all the spices with the yoghurt, the chopped onion, and 2 tbsp of ghee or oil. Then let it marinate in the fridge for about half an hour (you can leave it more - it's ok). 

In the meantime, peel and cut the potatoes in small cubes and wash the rice.

Then put the beef in a pot with as heavy a bottom as possible, add about a cup of water, and start cooking the beef.

In the meantime, bring water to a boil in another pot and add the rice half cook, then drain the water out. Once the beef gets soft, add the rice on top without mixing it. Pour another cup of water, and another spoon of ghee/ oil and cover it. 

At this point, this takes a bit of care... cause we actually burned some of the meat at the bottom. I think the best way to avoid this is to actually put it in the oven. 

Try it out... we'll also put a picture of our food up - once Ryan downloads it! dufffeeer

And, as Indian people like to say: Thank you, come again!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_OVlrZXstk&feature=related

I've had my epiphany - can we eat now

It's dinner time again. It's remarkable how much of our lives revolve around food. There's the old young men need nourishment idea but seriously, it's like we've been eating fat and oil and meat for almost a week now. This stuff is pretty tasty though....shrimp and spaghetti in white wine, vegetables in jaipur style, cumin chicken, mashed potatoes.But sometimes I get the feeling that we're using this heavy food to fill a void in our lives - nafis is filling the void left by his hair, ioana is using the fat as a substitute for scottish people and I'm using the fat to replace the emptiness in my life since Ryan Giggs retired from international soccer.

I never thought I would be cooking this much. Nafis is imparting some of his wisdom to me. And all the food we've made so far has turned out pretty good. But I don't see myself cooking much once the semester starts. I really hope I do but I'm not going to have enough time to do it.

It's at a time like this that I think of all the things I started doing but never bothered to continue with - learning the guitar, debating, creative writing, soccer (not at the kick about level but at the serious competitive level.) I was never forced to do any of these things. I started doing them because I wanted to. I just never had the drive or the ambition to stick with them for a long period of time. This year, I'm really hoping to change that by working with the International Students Association of Lafayette College, Mentoring in Easton middle school, Taekwondo and Alternative School Break.

I'm not going to give you some long winded crap about how I'm going to turn my life around from now on and become a better person coz inspite of this great epiphany, I'm probably still going to be the same asshole who likes insulting my friends by calling them fat and who is lazy and a slob and who will put off a 10 page paper until the night before. But, atleast now I will probably feel some remorse at the fact that I'm still a mean, lazy SOB and hopefully that will make me straighten up a little bit. And probably shave when I decide to straighten up. The beard isn't a sign of rebellion against the established social practices of conformity, its just a sign of laziness. When the beard goes, thats probably when I'll start straightening up.

In the worlds of those famous Bawa philosophers of old - Jamva Chalo Ji