Coming up for air!!

So my summer, into fall actually, was so full of activity and visitors that I have not had the time to post much and funnily I noticed, I do not miss it -don't get me wrong, I love my blog but I think, sometimes a certain frame of mind is needed to be able to share one's thoughts on paper-ooops-on  ....what?
Anyway, that aside, I had a change of residence and all its attendant issues, and I had a kid go back to school after two years of homeschooling-I think those two things were momentous enough to throw my equilibrium off for a while.
But I also participated in this huge undertaking in church, which, for better or worse, needed a good dose of my organizational,management(joint!),and diplomatic skills to be used in conjunction with my culinary capabilities. We had to cook for 350 people at the Fall Festival in church and we were just three ladies who spearheaded the whole enterprise.
The process was pretty enjoyable,  but also frustrating and nerve wracking at times.  We started almost a month before the event by deciding the menu and then experimenting with the actual items-butter chicken with a zing to the mouth is amazing, but try selling that to the milder stomached Americans and you will have them run for the gallon jug of milk-you know what I mean. So we tweaked and tweaked and actually that process vastly improved(read, toned the spice down) of the food and also our friendship!
We were not super close to each other until then-not that we are in each other's houses now-but we have reached a certain comfort level in our friendship, that we can take liberties with each other without having to worry about the effect on each other-which I think is something Indian women sorely lack-there is a certain superficiality to conversations, like people are constantly sizing each other up!
Anyway we had a great time finalizing recipes and then we spent three hours converting quantities to match the 350 meals we had to make-90 lb. of chicken, which we had cooked a 5 lb. sample of-which meant we had to convert everything to 18 times what we used-add to this the fact the Indian stores carried spices in grams, the recipes used teaspoons, tablespoons and sometimes cups and no ounces and pints-so we had to constantly shift between Standard and American units(We NEED to change to how most of the world operates, besides the decimal system is very convenient!!).and that was just the beginning! We were making rice, butter chicken, Veg.kolhapuri and Raita. I did not want to look at a measuring cup for a few days after that!!More in the next post!!