Bonding over Indian Food

(Pre-Valentine’s Day treat: I’ve posted three new entries below).

Happy Birthday Mom!

On Saturday my señora went to check the mail, and what did she find but two cards addressed to me. Turns out Mom, Papa and Neeraj sent me Valentine’s Day cards – how sweet!

Tucked into the cards, Mom enclosed some Indian recipes. You see, many of the meals Señora Flora makes have Indian undertones, and I’ve told her this many times. A few weeks ago, she asked me if Mom could send some Indian recipes for her to try out. Imagine that, an 80-year-old woman eager to learn a new style of cooking. Last week Mom e-mailed me a lentil stew recipe that Señora and I decided to try. So there I was, in the kitchen yesterday afternoon cooking Indian food with my Spanish host mother. I don’t think my real mother and I have even ever done that yet!

On Saturday while shopping, I finally found an Indian cookbook in Spanish. I bought it for Señora and gave it to her while we were waiting for the food to cook. It had all kinds of recipes, from the basics like pakoras, chaat and samosas to my favorites like saag paneer, kaali dal, gobi aloo, and south Indian dosa, sambhar and rasam recipes as well. She absolutely loved it and spent quite a while flipping through and absorbing the new flavors and techniques. I think she’s already selected another recipe to try out.

We had the lentil stew for dinner with rice and chicken, and even though the chicken was her own recipe, it too had some kind of Indian flavor. The stew itself was absolutely delicious, and its hearty, rich flavor was slightly surprising, seeing as there really wasn’t much seasoning in it at all. Mom, you’re going to have to make this a lot more often when I come home! (I have an idea though – we should try serving it on top of a slice of bread).

Before we ate, Señora told me more about her family. Her mother had seven children, but all but two died after only a few months. She was the youngest and has one older brother, who doesn’t have any children. She herself has eight children: Maria Angela (the oldest), Flori, Rosa, Maria Carmen, Maria Isabel, Felipe, Alejandro and Tomas. I’ve met three of them: Maria Angela, who was there the day I arrived, Rosa and Maria Isabel.

Maria Carmen is an opera singer who has performed all over the world and has sung with the likes of Placido Domingo. Señora showed me an album full of photos of Carmen’s performances. We looked through another album with pictures of all her children and her 11 grandchildren with they were little. (I was trying to find more recent pictures of her grandsons, since they’re all pretty much around my age, but no such luck ;-P).

I really could not have asked for a better host mother than my Señora Flora.