Pressure: the good and the bad...

Yep, you guessed it. It is a pressure cooker. Once you have stopped screaming, read on. I know that Boston bombing was a terrible terrible thing. It just crushed me when I heard about it. And myself currently working in the health care field with my employer based just out of Boston, it was a deeper cut. Even though I did not realize at that time, I now remember seeing a sudden rise in patient admission across the hospitals across Boston. It was terrible.

But I just saw another news, which made me sad and angry at the same time. A passenger was arrested as he was flying with a pressure cooker and he made it inside the US border (you can see the story here: http://news.yahoo.com/saudi-man-traveling-pressure-cooker-arrested-180030697.html). May be he was an innocent guy who was bringing a pressure cooker for cooking purposes. Or he may be the dumbest terrorist yet. Hell, he may even be making a dry run.

But all I know is this. Even though I am part of an active, tax-paying workforce now, I came here as a student. And I remember all of us student diligently packing our pressure cooker on our very first trip across the oceans to the Land of Dreams. People from Asia use pressure cooker for everything, from something as simple as cooking rice to preparing elaborate meals. Well, I can hear many of you saying, 'Why do you have to travel with one? You can buy anything in USA. You get everything here..'. Yes, I can buy them here but I will not. You want to know why? It is because:
 1. We use the pressure cooker to cook most of the dishes we make (and rice being our staple food)
 2.  It is so damn costly here
 3. And the quality of the pressure cookers sold here are very bad (we will get a much better quality cooker in our country for less than half the price we pay here)

Ofcourse, we do not travel with it to every damn domestic destination once we bring it to our permanent residence. But we do have to bring it in in the first place. I personally own a pressure cooker and I use it every week to cook anything and everything I need for the week. I am not asking you to go out and buy a pressure cooker but remember, just because 2 dimwit haters used pressure cookers for cruel purposes, it does not mean that all the pressure cookers are used for cruel purposes. I will leave you with that.

The THIN line between Food and Poison...

Well, this post is not about me getting poisoned nor me poisoning someone. It is rather my antics after coming to America without knowing the 'English' translation for the grains, veggies and fruits we use almost everyday in India.

This incident happened when I was working in the University Library. The people I worked with were such a loving bunch (yep, still in touch with them) and when the in-house Librarian was retiring, we decided to give her a send-off party. It was decided that each of us will cook/buy a dish or two that comes from our country/culture. As myself being a broke-back student, I settled for cooking. Since my cooking skills had highly developed after I had come to the Land of Dreams, I set to work. My plan was to cook a sweet and a dish made of rice. I settled for Sooji Halwa and Lemon Rice as they were the easiest and will not have a huge issue with allergies (curd rice, even though easier than Lemon, I have to deal with it if people are Lactose Intolerant).

And I prepared the dishes with relative ease (having made them almost every other week) and they were ready to be taken in for the party. Now came the bigger task of explaining what is what to them. Lemon Rice is easy as they know what is rice, lemon, chilli (PEPPERS!) and lentils are. But Sooji..? Not so much. A quick Google search said that the name was Semolina, also known as Cream of Wheat, but hey, I googled this just before I left the house and I did not have these fancy data plans at that time, so Semolina it was. All went well with Lemon Rice. Everyone literally loved it and I was explaining the goodness of Turmeric for the 'n'th time (they were intrigued by the yellow color of the rice), when the time for dessert started. As they were all impressed by the Lemon Rice, everyone took a huge helping of the Halwa and were digging into it contentedly when one of them said, 'Gosh! It is so yummy, what is it?'. It was for this exact moment, I had looked up the English name for Sooji. I proudly stated, 'Salmonella'. Everyone just froze; with spoons full of halwa hanging mid-air and with a terrifying looks in their face. And i was like, 'Hey guys, chill. What happened..?'. My dear old pal, lets call him X, realized I might have gotten the name wrong (after my famous stunt where I told everyone that I was going to Newark (little did I know that it was pronounced 'New-erk') and everyone thought I was flying out of the country), and tried to lighten up the situation by saying, 'Well Shai, don't you think that it might be kind of late for this kind of information?'. I still did not understand why everyone around me was hastily putting their bowls and spoons down and started searching for water, when my Supervisor (lets call her Y) understood what might have happened and said, 'Shai, you just said that you served us Salmonella.. It is a deadly bacteria'. That is when it dawned on me and I hastily said, 'No no, it is Semolina. I got the name mixed up'.

I dont have to tell you that it was only X, Y and the regular staffs who finished my Halwa and it took a whole month until some of the seasonal staff of the library started to trust me food again. For what it is worth, I made Paal Khoa (a sweet dish made by condensing the milk until it becomes solid) for my colleagues and saw it disappearing in a jiffy to my satisfaction (it took me a whole week of cleaning to get the vessel in which I made the khoa clean is another story)...