Dishing it out OR a sinking feeling

To celebrate the fact that I have an oven and finally have time to kick back and enjoy life a little bit, I decided to throw a dinner party last night.  I invited the professor that I'm housesitting with (Richard), a friend from soccer (Tawsif), a BRAC intern (Susmita), my music buddy (Showvik), my first friend in Bangladesh (Farhan), my fellow Harvard alum (Hezzy), and a guy who works on North End (Monir).  Hezzy and Monir respectfully declined.  I was having trouble extricating myself from the office (my boss insisted that I join him and Richard for free lunch when I was planning to go to the produce market), so I invited him and his son, who live around the corner, to come as well.

As many of you know I've had a fair number of dinner parties in my time.  Eight people is a perfectly reasonable number.  I had a menu planned:

Chips and mango salsa

Gazpacho

Mac n cheese (Grandmama May's recipe)

Sweet potato casserole (minus marshmallows and pecans)

Okra

BBQ chicken

Biscuits

Pineapple upside down cake (no cherries)

Most of these things I got at the upscale grocery store (cheddar cheese was definitely the most expensive item), though Tawsif offered to take me to the produce market which was a lot of fun!  I wasn't allowed to talk because that would make the prices higher, so instead I just walked around touching and smelling all the cool fruits and vegetables I'd never seen before (i bought something that smells like a peach even if it's the wrong size and color, just to see).  The entire trip was maybe USD 12, so I think I did a good job of keeping my mouth shut.

I came home and whipped up the gazpacho since it had to chill.  Then I took a break to go look at Farhan's apartment (his roommate is moving out and I'm thinking about moving in), lead a conference call with Boston, and then around 6:30 got back to cooking (folks are due to arrive at 8).  I start peeling the mishti aloo (literally, sweet potatoes) and am in for a surprise when they are white inside.  But smell the same.....and have about the same consistency once they are boiled.

8:30PM rolls around and no one is yet there to witness my mess making, which is good because I'm way behind.  Converting everything into grams and Celsius is a pain, and for someone who is not particularly inclined towards measuring, it takes a lot of effort.  I'm also not inclined to do dishes, so love the fact that I have two kitchens--I can hide dirty dishes in the secret one behind the main one, creating infinitely more counter space.

Around 9 everyone trickles in.  As I go to set the table, I realize that the power is not working that room--the circuit breaker must have flipped.  I wander around looking for it for a while, and then set the coffee table in the living room.  We put the senior guys on the couch and the rest of us sit on the floor--ironically traditional.  Farhan got stuck in traffic at the mall and can't find transport, so we are seven.  Which is good because I definitely underestimated how much gazpacho I needed (made up for it on my estimates for the mac n cheese).  We talk about a lot of interesting things--whether East and West Bengal will unite, how Pakistan felt about Bangladesh's Independence.....it's an eclectic group of people with a range of first hand, familial, and academic knowledge about the region and I learn a lot.  Even though I'm consumed with running back and forth to the kitchen to check on biscuits and pineapple upside down cake.  The mac n cheese is just right--the Australian cheddar cheese is worth every penny.  Everything else is solid; the biscuits could have been better if I'd measured things a bit better or paid attention to the temperature of the oven (I decided that biscuits were more durable than cake).  My friends were surprised that I was cooking the food myself (don't I have a cook who would do the work?  So not the point!), and even more surprised that it didn't make them gag.  It's nice to demonstrate that I do have a few areas of competence even if they are largely not useful most of the time here.  Bengalis eat late and talk a lot, so it was midnight before everyone was leaving, including my boss!  Different concept of work night, I guess!

I also never thought I'd get excited about having two sinks, but there was something very satisfying about doing dishes last night.  Rarely do I do a mindless, repetitive task in quiet privacy.  I forgot how easy it was to think in that environment.  Though I have to admit, I did one full load in each sink, and then left the rest soaking hoping that the staff would appear the next morning (they did!) and the rest of the dishes would magically disappear. Best of both worlds.

Richard wandered back downstairs around 12:30 as I was just drying my hands, and we ended up talking about global health, literature, and all sorts of other things for a while longer.  I catch myself thinking that when I eventually write a book about the interesting characters that I've gotten to know over the years, he certainly merits a chapter, and I should be taking some notes about the various stories(rafting in Zimbabwe, treating abused women at Bellevue in NYC) and global health ideas and theories so that I can capture them accurately.

Just got to North End (transport becomes more interesting when I'm traveling with Richard; today we took multiple rickshaws to get over here--lots of opportunities for bargaining in Bangla!) with a tupperware of mac n cheese in hand for my buddies here.  This is a thinly veiled attempt to get them to invite me over to their place for kitchuri sometime :)  There's no such thing as a free lunch (or katal).