This weekend I learned to cook traditional Indian food with the help of Anurag who hosted a dinner party over at his apartment. We cooked bindi masala and bhaigan bhartha. Both used essentially the same base of oil, cumin seed, tomato and onion. Add vegetable to simmer, add spices - garam masala, pepper, salt, ground chili pepper... I think I'm leaving out one... add chunk masala also in the case of the bindi. The okra should be individually washed and dried and than prepped for cooking. The eggplant is an interesting affair. Anurag had gotten that one started before we arrived - on a metal grill like device that fits over the gas stove burner, place a mid-size/large eggplant over the flame and rotate occasionally turning the stem. If the stem was cut off at the grocery store, stick a spoon thru the eggplant and use as your handle. Cook each surface until the skin starts to peel off. When the whole eggplant is peeling, remove from flame and peel off the blackened skin. Then rinse and mash eggplant interior. It is this mash that goes into making the bhaingan bhartha. Now a days, the eggplant could actually be prepped in the microwave - if you zapped it on baked potato setting, you might get similar results, but something really ritual and enjoyable about doing it the old-fashioned way gets lost. At the same time, open flames and hot metal do create a certain anxiety in me... perhaps I will never be a chef. Pappadam, the lentil wafer, served in Indian restaurants has the consistency of something like a wonton skin before heated over flame and crisped. The heat bubbles quickly come to the surface and the wafers blacken - again this could be done more evenly in the microwave, but what gets compromised is that earthy, smoky taste. Lentils for daal are cooked in a pressure cooker and than mixed with tharka - a blend of onion tomato and spices. Getting just the right amount of water in your daal is crucial - too much and your pressure cooker explodes everywhere!

Over dinner, Amy, Michaela, and I had an interesting conversation about the song "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen. Both Jeff Buckley, then Rufus Wainwright covered this song. When Jeff covered it, he ADDED lyrics that were not in the original. (Michaela grew up in Ireland with parents who made her listen to Leonard Cohen and as a result she knows most of his lyrics..). Than Rufus covered it, and he may have added even more lyrics. To me, the modern versions seem seamless in their lyrics, and I think it would be interesting to keep this song a living tradition, to keep adding lyrics to it in its reinterpretation. Everybody should write a verse!