Panfusine

The Date: Sunday Sept 16 The Venue: Junoon , New York City The Event: The Junoon Indiblogger Meet-Up First things first.. For those of you who are wondering who or what on earth Indiblogger is, its the biggest blogger network for Indian bloggers from across the globe. They've been up and running for the past four years and in that period have done wonders in bringing together bloggers from all walks of life. Discussions span relevant topics of common interest to bloggers, including that all pervasive scourge that hangs over all of us, the threat of plagiarism. (they exposed one such scumbag and its amusing to read the thread of comments including those from the shamelessly unapologetic culprit). Back to the event. It was a varied group of bloggers, with graduate students, a lawyer, a photographer, a couple of graduates from the Culinary Institute of America (the other CIA), All of us with one thing in common, we all blog, about life, food, arts & craft.

Ganesha, the Lord of auspicious beginnings is indubitably the most cheerful god in the Hindu Pantheon.Short, rotund and pot-bellied with an elephants head, he is regarded as the governing deity of intellect and wisdom. Hindus the world over celebrate his 'birthday' . I'm incapable of explaining the details of the significance of this delightful god, so I'm just going to direct you to this link from Dr. Devdutt Pattanaiks website . Ganesha is depicted as holding a bowl of 'modaks' in his left hand. These sweet confections resemble little bags of money. These modaks are basically a sweet filling with either a fried wrapping made out of wheat flour or a steamed variety with a covering made of rice flour dough. The word modak is thought to be a corruption of the Sanskrit Madhu golaka (Madhu- sweet/ honey; golaka: sphere / ball). Getting ready to make the steamed version always induced a low level anxiety in my mother every year. She used

Last year at this time, I  bought (and fell head over heels in love with the idea of) a bushel of tomatoes (in two batches of about 25 lbs each). At this time of the year , my local farm sells these gorgeous plum tomatoes by the bushel,

September 5th.. every year.. The day is celebrated as Teacher's Day in India where I grew up and went to school. The day, we girls  (My Alma Mater, St. Anthony's Girls High School in Chembur, a suburb of Mumbai,  was an all girls convent run by the sisters of St. Joseph's Convent) would trip over ourselves to give our class teachers bouquets of flowers that we'd all bought from the lone florist 'Bhaiyya' who had a little set up of planks set up over the storm drain outside the compound walls of Saroj Hotel in Chembur Market. I vaguely remember he had 2 selections, a 5 rs. and a 10 Rs. A watchful eye ensured that the two rose buds in the bouquet were fresh and the there was a respectable amount of asters and chrysanthemums. And the cheaper goldenrods were kept to an optimum low!