Khana Khajana

Firstly I would like to wish you all a very happy Nepalese New Year 2064. This New Year, I wanted to begin my day by doing something interesting. So I signed up for a cruise in a local Bayou. It was part of ‘Acadiana Migratory Bird Day Celebration’ where a National Park Service ranger and Ornithologist abroad will identify birds by sight and sound in 1.5 hour long boat tour. My only problem was to reach there at 7 AM in a weekend (I don’t like getting up early in weekends). But since I had nothing lined up for Friday night, that was well on the cards. However, I got an unexpected dinner call by a Nepalese family, so by the time we finished our political guffs and ‘Jack Daniel on the rock’, it was way passed the midnight. So, as expected I missed my cruise.

I was also invited by the Nepalese Community in Louisiana State University (LSU) for a potluck that afternoon. It was fun there too, lots of food variety. After family persons departed, the real party started for the Bachelors. For a change, we watched couple of movies while drinking. Finally, when I went to bed it was already 4 AM. I really liked one of the movies that we watched, ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ by Al Pacino. This 1975 movie is real nice, if you haven’t seen it I recommend you to see it.

Sunday morning I woke up at 9 AM, normally I don’t wake up at 9 when I go to bed at 4, but I had to drive back to Lafayette then do the entire regular stuffs: laundry, groceries and cook food for whole week. Yes, I cook food for entire week on Sundays (i.e. for Sunday to Friday). Rice is easy, so is the ‘Daal’ (Lenticels) but the curry is the pain of all. When you live all alone, you don’t feel like cleaning the dishes and cook every other day. For last three weeks I had lamb meat, sounds fascinating, but it’s my coercion. After cooking lamb for the first week it took me something special to discontinue my lamb’s run. Every time I went for grocery I wanted to buy lamb, not because it is tastier but it’s efficient to cook as well. Rice is easily done, so just cook lamb in a pressure cooker like any other meat (I have a default technique for everything I cook) and then add water and press it; now I don’t even require ‘Daal’, one less dish to wash.

Before I got into lamb stint; chicken, cauliflower, cabbage, or pork were my regular curries. If not those, eggs are my obvious choice. In fact, I love making curry out of egg because it’s very convenient and you can make more variety of dishes out of it as well. “Variety out of egg?” Oh yes, if you are lazy and/or incompetent like me eggs can help you lot. My favorite dish using eggs are: eggs with onions, onions in egg, egg with onions and tomatoes, tomatoes and egg, etc. You can do the permutation your self to get as many different dishes using those three ingredients. One might say why bother, why not eat outside. But, always eating outside is not economically viable, and most importantly being a Nepali it’s hard to live without eating ‘Dal, Bhat, Tarkari’ at least once a day.

This week to overcome my lamb stint, I decided to have momo everyday for dinner. I made ‘keema’ (ground meat) ready for the whole week, so all I have to do each day is wrap about 20 momo’s and steam it. The picture is from my dinner yesterday.