Saturday, June 20, 2009

written the following morning

Back at George Fox, in their library is a cookbook I’ve checked out numerous times. It’s one I love, and I’m not really sure why I haven’t simply just bought it. I was thinking about it a few weeks ago and thought I might check it out again. Unfortunately, Asbury doesn’t have quite the state-of-the-art library system like the Summit system Fox is hooked into and so I had to do an Inter Library Loan search and hope for luck. About a week later A Taste of Madras (Indian food) arrived on campus and I was able to pick it up and flip through the familiar pages. It’s amazing how familiar things, even silly things like library books, can be comforting.

Last night, I hung out with some of my Asbury friends at my friend Heather’s apartment. We gathered to watch Amazing Grace, because Heather’s never seen it, but before that we made Indian food. Indian food is not always the easiest to make because some of the ingredients call for a special trip to the nearest Indian store which for us is a good thirty minutes away. But a trip to an Indian store is always a good day. Of the most important things to pick up was the key ingredient to making good chapatis. Chapati is an Indian flat bread that, unlike naan, is cooked on a frying pan and not baked in an oven. I first had chapati in Uganda and loved it so much that the family I was with began making it nearly every day, and they taught me how to make it. But upon arrival back to the states I discovered we did not have the right kind of flour for them, and so I did the best I could with the flour we have, but they were always second best to what I’d had in Africa. What I’d never noticed in all the times I’d flipped through this cook book was that the recipe (there are actually many) for chapatis was in there and a note was attached to the strange kind of flour it called for stating that this special flour for chapatis can easily be obtained from an Indian grocery store. This may have been one of my most exciting discoveries and it was the first thing I looked for when I arrived at the store.

Amidst three different dishes of Indian food, I mixed up, rolled out, and fried (well, Mallary fried them) the chapatis and when I took my first bite, it was as if God had said to me, “I know you’re having a hard time, so here’s something I know you will like,” and it was just like Africa. I was excited, very excited. Perhaps today I just might make some more. The taste of memories and familiarity should never be underestimated. Never.