Birds Chirping

Madras Rasam

* 200g tomatoes
* tamarind - lemon sized soaked in hot water
* 20g garlic
* 4 glasses of any dal stock
* 4 green chilies
* 1 bunch of cilantro and curry leaves
* 1/4 tsp turmeric
* Salt to taste

For rasam powder:
* 20g coriander seeds
* 10g pepper corns
* 5g cumin seeds
* 2 red chilies


Mix the tamarind water with crushed tomatoes and garlic, dal stock, green chilies, turmeric, salt and mix well. Keep aside. Roast the ingredients of rasam powder without any oil and blend to a fine powder. Add this powder to the above tamarind water and mix well. Also add curry leaves, cilantro leaves and boil on heat until bubbles form in the mixture. Remove from heat and serve with steamed rice.

A musical mix flutters through my kitchen window while I venture into another day of cooking and job searching. My one bedroom apartment is caddy corner to the forest green and white painted mosque. The owner of my apartment Shagul is also Muslim and fortunately, for my sanity, obsessively compulsive about maintaining the apartment and amenities. I am quite privledged to have a refrigerator, gas stove, television, internet connection, running water, a shower and western style toilet. After persistent searching by my significant other, our rent price is a reasonable $180/month. My stairs are not passable by the new average American waist size, but maybe that is a good thing.
Giant black crows overpopulate my neighborhood mimicking the breeding habits of the local population. Their cawing interrupts the Spanish music playing on my itunes. My doorbell chirps ironically copying with near exactitude the caws of the crows. This is the new place I call home.
From my roof I can see the pool of smooth green water and the interior of the mosque. Devotees pat their hands against the water and cover their face exuding a coolness that opposed the intense heat of the hot, dry summer. A tap at the brown door marking my entrance is always leaky and water rushes in the morning as the neighborhood kids connect plastic tubing to help their mothers with the sunrise chores. The alley is always wet as I see the ground first upon opening the door in the morning yearning and almost praying for rain. Supposedly during this time of year if it does rain it is typically hotter than the climate before the rain, which I think is another great local superstition, but the humidity does make things quite sticky.
This afternoon we will test my Madras Rasam experiment out and see if it tantalizes like the local recipies. Last week I made an interesting Vegetable Jalfreze with ketchup instead of tomato sauce and it was so hot, even for South India standards. I am keeping a nice stock of green and dried red chilis which i am not frugal with. New posts of past recipes to follow.