Thali, Bread Pudding, and the SAT

I haven't cooked this much for ages! It's kind of nice, especially because I'm not worrying so much about making "healthy" or low-calorie treats. If it's dessert, it's gonna have some calories. And chances are, those calories are gonna taste delicious.

As promised, we went out for thalis after my SAT diagnostic test. I've been doing SAT classes with this notorious SAT coach, MR. KHAN, and he had all his students drag their tired selves to school to take 4-hour diagnostic tests almost every morning during vacation. But as of yesterday at 1:30 PM, I am done with the SAT! Scores come out December 22, so, depending on whether I decide to retake it, I'll know if I'm done forever.

Back to the thalis. They were delicious, as usual, combining all my favorite parts of different thalis into one uber-thali! It didn't hurt that there were FOUR desserts either.

On Thursday, my mom invited her friend's family over for dinner. She cooked up a lovely spread of Indian dishes, pulao (rice with cloves, onions, and some other lovely fragrant things), palak paneer (pureed spinach with cheese curds), bharta (eggplant), and aloo-gobhi (potato-cauliflower). My descriptions don't do the dishes much justice, but I guarantee they all have such great, complex flavors from the spices. Indian spices work magic on food. Someday I'll master them...someday.
The responsibility of desert naturally fell on my shoulders, as I have the biggest sweet tooth in the family. But it's really quite close between me and mom. After seriously deliberating for a while, I decided on bread pudding, which would conveniently utilize the stale bread left on the counter. I was devastated (okay I'm exaggerating), however, to find that a slice of bread was growing a fine colony of mold. I figured it would be best to chuck the rest, then set out to buy some replacement stale-bread and ice cream. In the end, the bread pudding came out wonderfully. It was a bit boozy with whiskey-soaked raisins, but so nice and custardy that I couldn't stop eating it. Everyone else seemed to like it, but I couldn't have cared less. I thought it was great, and nothing else mattered.

Visiting the Temple and Cheap Indian Lunch

Because today is the death-day anniversary of my grandfather (dada-ji in Hindi), we went to the temple to make an offering and receive a blessing of some sort. I don't get really into it because 1) I'm not very religious and 2) I remember very little of my dada-ji, aside from one strangely clear memory of eating kitchari (a sort of Indian comfort food made with yellow lentils) for lunch at his house in India. Anyways, I agreed to go along with Mommy and Daddy because I didn't have any big plans for the day. After finding an open temple in Bur Dubai (think dirty, crowded, with narrow alleys and vendor stalls, yet still lively and exciting), going through the ordeal of walking around the dirty streets barefoot (you cannot wear shoes when entering a temple) before finding the actual temple entrance, and finally making our offering and receiving blessing and parshad (including yummy suji halwa), we decided to grab lunch at one of the many cheap Indian restaurants in the area.

We headed for Karachi Darbar, a North Indian/Pakistani, Muslim-run restaurant with vegetarian and non-veg food. I wanted to avoid eating lots of unhealthy oily food, so I was a bit reluctant, but the food turned out to be pretty healthy and delicious, and I didn't overeat! The three of us shared a stack of tandoori rotis (wonderfully puffy, soft, and HUGE- about 1 foot in diameter!), some kind of vegetable kofta, daal fry, and a paneer dish. Unfortunately I have no photos because our current camera is outdated and chunky, but fear not! After some research and shopping, I'll have a shiny new camera by the end of vacation.