Gratefulness on a sunny morning with a cup of chai

For a couple of weeks now, I've been thinking of this quote from Donna Farhi that I heard from my amazing yoga teacher:

We establish a calm abiding center, not to fortify ourselves against the chaos of life, but to help us become resilient, tolerant, and accepting of the inevitable, perplexing, and often agonizing losses we all go through.

I was thinking of this quote when I started this post three weeks ago, sitting in an almost-packed-up house, taking stock.
The starting of that old post read:

After a year in Cornfield University in a Midwestern Town, I'm moving back South. (When I say it that way -when I say 'moving back' - there is a finality and irreversiblity to the move that I haven't been admitting aloud). In the last two something weeks, I've nursed a persistent cold, submitted papers, graded, dealt with belligerent, entitled, spring-fevered students, and planned my move. Along the way, I've come so close to giving up and running away, changing my name and getting a fake passport.
That I'm sitting down in a nearly empty kitchen this morning, baking these delicious End of Semester Scones and sipping a chai in a dixie cup merits much patting-on-the-back and many congratulations, yeah?
And especially given that this comes in the wake of a personally and professionally horrifying year, I'm glad that I'm still here*.

And in three weeks (which, admittedly, is a small speck of time in the cosmic scheme of things), I'm still thinking of the idea of a calm, abiding center. This time, I'm sitting in a nearly-unpacked house.


This has been a year of great loss and large dollops of change.
But, it has also been a year for learning - learning my own needs and limitations, learning to let go and to ask for help**.


And so, I'm taking this moment to be (somewhat publicly) thankful for friends (old and new - some of you are reading this, even***) who've been wonderful teachers. For you, I'm very, very grateful.

I plan on spending the next two months unwinding and continuing some of this practice.
I'll be around, I'm sure. So, until I get back to my next post - may you find your own center and may you receive the kind of nurturing support that I have in this past year.

*I know, it's only mid-year. And that makes this an awkward time for end-of-year reflections. But, I'm clocking May-to-May, here.
**Seriously, there's no way, that I could have gone through this past year alone.
***Poor Baker, Witches - I'm looking at y'all. DH, I'm also looking at you. 

Sniffles, papers, soup

Sniffles and the end-of-the-semester seem inevitably to go hand-in-hand.
I know, from conversations with other peoples, that I'm not the only person that falls ill during the last two weeks of the semester.

The system is designed in a way that the world starts to weigh heavily down in those last two weeks of the semester - between teaching, grading, writing papers, reading for classes, attending classes when you'd rather be writing those damned papers, we're doing fifty hours of work a day. Hells-bells, I'm not surprised that we're constantly fighting off flu-like symptoms at the end of every single semester.

My cure for today: Rasam / Chaaru. 

Food, Empty Pantries and The-End-of-The-Semester (Or, Making Dal without a pressure cooker)

I woke up this morning craving the Poor Baker's End of Semester Scones.
And, I had every intention of making them.

But, as with all of those weekend mornings when I wake up at 10.00 am and loiter in bed until 11.30 a.m., the immediacy of hunger beat my good intentions and stole their lunch money. I settled instead for ginger chai, bourbon biscuits and a warm bowl of cereal.

I find that the closer I get to the end of the semester, the more I want to cook* and the more elaborately I want to cook. For today's lunch, I'm craving some good ole' Telugu fare.
I'd like to make rice and sweet pappu pulusu. And for the side, I'd like me some brinjal curry**.
A quick survey of my pantry and fridge tells me that I have just enough to make all of these my two-week-old  purchase of brinjals has, uh, gone bad. Bummer.

On the plus side, I've discovered remnants of mango pickle and kandi podi. Ooh Yum!

And while I make these nommies for my lunch, I'm going to try grading on the side. Because this is the only way to grade without losing your mind.

Watch this space, my recipes will (magically) appear after the jump.

*Normally, as you've heard, I rather detest cooking an elaborate mean unless I'm having company. I find it quite boring to cook for myself. (There, wrangle yourself an invite.)
**Think stir-fry, not thai curry.