Cooking up a storm

It's a stormy winter weekend here in the upper mid-west. And it's Stupor Bowl this Sunday, and little but college basketball otherwise. Neither one generates any interest, and if you don't know, dumping on basketball in the heartland of the USA is a sacreligous in the minds of many. Sorry, but us hockey guys never understood how a game without sticks where hitting is against the rules could be called a sport. So what do gardeners do? Well, you cook up a storm. A dinner party for 6 close friends had the Phactors roasting a marinated leg of lamb (raan) with a potato-cauliflower stir-fry, a cucumber raita (yogurt), flatbreads (naan), a vegetable (kohlrabi, carrot, parsnip) mulligatawny soup (dynamite!), some spicy shrimp in coconut milk sauce, and a passion fruit mousse (neither of us like Indian desserts) to finish things off. Today TPP made a roasted potato soup for Mrs. Phactor's womens' group coming for din-dins tomorrow and pizza dough and sauce for our own dinner tonight (saving the left over lamb later in the week). Wow, how did so many pots, pans, and dishes manage to get dirty?  How did so many bottle of win manage to get empty? OK, if you knew our friends you could answer that one. Needless to say, the Phactors spend a great deal of time in their kitchen, which is also the room in our house with the best view of out gardens, now re-cloked in white as this storm moves through. A cold blast will follow this front, so that potato soup will be darned comforting 24 hrs from now.  

When you can't afford onions

People can put up with quite a bit, and while annoying, if some non-necessity or luxury item is beyond your means, well, you wait or change your mind and generally endure.  But when you cannot afford the staples of life, you get really, really upset.  Many of my readers may not be as familiar with India and Indian food as TPP, but right now India is having some problems because one of their food staples is undergoing rapid inflationary pricing.  Onions.  Other than maybe some desserts, every Indian recipe begin with cooking onions and spices in oil.  Generally you think of onions as one of those pretty reasonable commodities that's always available.  When the price of onions goes up 5-fold from 20 rupees a kilo to 100 rupees a kilo, people get really upset.  Imagine a truck hijacking for 20 tons of onions?  How are you supposed to eat?  Indeed!  Let them eat pizza? Today the rupee hit an all time low against the dollar (approx. 1.5 cents/rupee), so imported onions would be expensive too.  And you know it's not the farmers who are reaping the benefits of the price increase.