Panfusine

This weeks post was supposed to deal with a dessert made with Toddy palm Jaggery, but Murphy's Law  kind of kicked in, the one that goes on the lines of .. If you're desperately looking for something, You'll rarely find it, never mind if it stares at you in the face at all other times' . Yep.. spent an annoyingly frustrating afternoon turning the kitchen & the pantry upside down, only to discover that sometime during the past couple of months, the big bag had somehow been stuffed in the freezer, right next to the Flax oil.. so that will be a post of the next week.

It was around this time 16 years ago that I had my most memorable swig of Amarula ever. I'd just obtained my F-1 Student visa from the American consulate at Cape Town. It was such a contrast to the marathon queue  sessions at the Mumbai consulate. I breezed in, handed my papers and was asked to come and collect the passport 3 days later. That night, It was a well deserved break from my crazy thesis work that I was trying to race against time to complete. A shot of ice cold Amarula Liqueuer and being toasted by friends at the Medical Residence to the tune of  Stings 'I'm a legal alien' playing on the radio (How perfectly apt was that, considering that I was headed to NYU a month later)

Hysteresis - is the dependence of a system not only on its current environment but also on its past environment.  Turns out that the term does apply outside of physics. I like to define it as the intense craving that exists as long as two weeks after sampling a dish. You crave it so much that you simply must have more. Deep inside the  gyri that run though the cerebral cortex, are taste notes perfectly embedded and making connections to other memory cells to recreate the flavors & textures.

The Year: 1999, October. I'd just been set up with this handsome Mathematician from Bell Labs and by all accounts hit off wonderfully (set-ups in the South Indian lingo is ALWAYS keeping the long term prognosis , i.e Marriage, in mind). So here I was like a typical Indian girl, taking the BIG step of inviting the guy home for Lunch. Ringing up a huge bill calling my mother back in India about what I should make.