Gori Girl

Indianfied Chicken Pot Pie

You may have noticed that, unlike many intercultural blogs, I don’t post any recipes of new Indian dishes I’ve learned to cook. Partially that’s because, well, I don’t cook much Indian food, really. And partially because I figure that all of you are intelligent to google your way to the thousands (or, at least, dozens) of cooking blogs that feature great recipes of traditional Indian dishes. There’s a few blogs I particularly like listed in the sidebar under Odds & Ends, if you haven’t seen this blogging niche before.

However, at least in the food blogs I follow, I’ve seen an untapped segment in the market – there aren’t any recipes of Indianfied traditional American dishes! This sort of fusion food, along with stir frys, is the majority of what I cook – just simple dishes that you ate growing up mixed with an Indian sense of spices. They’re the best of both worlds: quick, easy recipes that I know like the back of my hand adjusted so that Aditya won’t complain about “blandness” when we eat.

So, today I’ll share with you my recipe for Quick Indianfied Chicken Pot Pie. This is the dish that got amazed raves from Aditya’s parents when I served it to them. (I think that prior to my cooking it, they hadn’t realized I knew how to cook at all, so perhaps they were just glad I hadn’t accidentally poisoned them.) It’s a very simple, quick, filling dish, so even if you’re not much of a cook, you should be able to manage just fine. Besides the text below, I’ve loaded a bunch of images on my flickr site to show you how to do it step-by-step too.

Intertwined Utility Functions – the Economics of Relationships

The study of economics screws up your brain. Or, at least, that’s what people outside the field who haven’t drunk the econ kool-aid tell me. (Like most potentially insane people, I, of course, wouldn’t know if I were in fact insane. That’s the fun of it!)

Anyway, I’m informed that most people don’t think about romantic relationships in terms of intertwined, interdependent utility functions. But I do. And I think you should consider the idea too. Think of it as practice in learning how a subculture (a geeky, mathematically-inclined subculture) thinks about love and romance.

Words on Hindostan – Part One

There is no nation that has so many gods as the Hindoos. What do you think of three hundred and thirty millions! There are not so many people in Hindostan as that. No one person can know the names of all these gods; and who would wish to know them? Some of them are snakes, and some are monkeys!

Monkey gods!!?! Snake gods? And people call me a heathen!

Of course, I’m sure that I would be in for a few more choice names from Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer, the Victorian children’s author who wrote the choice quote above. Mrs. Mortimer published a trilogy of geography/travel books for young missionaries-in-training, covering all of the world that Victorian England cared about in the 1850s — a truly amazing accomplishment, given that the lady had only traveled to Scotland and France during her life. Of course, accuracy and detail were not exactly Mrs. Mortimer’s aims: she does not claim “completeness, nor comprehensiveness, nor depth of research, nor splendour of description ; but the very reverse… simple, superficial, desultory character, as better adapted to the volatile beings for whom it is designed.”

Ah, how I miss my days as a volatile being!

Anyways, I found the book which covers Asian nations, Far off, in GoogleBooks this weekend, and thought to share some of the chapter on “Hindostan” with everyone. However, if you don’t have a taste for black humor – or can’t handle her rather venomous style of writing -, then feel free to skip this one. I do think it is very informative & thought-provoking, though – both for what she gets wrong about India, and what she manages to get right. Colonialism at its very best, of course:

Wearing Sindoor as a White Woman

Aditya loves, loves, loves it when I wear sindoor. For him it is the epitome of beauty. (There’s also probably an element of husbandly pride and maybe something oedipal going on, but, hey, you can’t win them all.) When I reach over to open to the medicine cabinet while brushing my teeth in the mornings, his face lights up in the hope that I’m grabbing out my container of vermilion powder:

“Are you going to wear sindoor today?” You should! – you look so beautiful when you wear it!”

And, almost always, I mumble something that amounts to “no, not today.”

Interracial Marriage in the US: Some Simple South Asian Demographics

Want to settle the debate on how much interracial marriage there is in the US? I know I’m tired of hearing the occasional uninformed comment on how South Asians just don’t marry people outside their ethnicity, and isn’t it downright odd that my supposedly proud-of-his-Indian-heritage husband would do so?

(Hmm, well, he is an odd, odd dude. But not because he’s married to me. Or, I mean, not ’cause he’s married to a white woman – I’ll admit you might have to be odd to voluntarily marry me. We brought matching crazy to the marriage table as dowry.)

Well, the statistics on interracial marriages in America are now here, courtesy the US Census, so we can put this baby to rest. Actually, the statistics have always been “here” since the 2000 Census information was released, but I’m not such a numbers nerd that I felt like crunching the raw data myself with SAS or STATA. Luckily for me, a pair of sociologists have already done the dirty work, and their results have been made available at Dr. C.N. Le’s Asian Nation website. I’m going to only present the South Asian related statistics here, but Dr. Le has the same sort of information available on all Asian ethnicities, and you can tease out information about other ethnicities as well.

Indian Wedding Story, Part Five

This is Part Five of a continuing series on my Indian wedding adventure. If you’re new to Gori Girl, try checking out Part One, where the story starts.
When I left off on the story of my Arya Samaj wedding to Aditya (see part four here), we had just exchanged garlands at the start of our wedding ceremony. Heavy, massive garlands that took my original concept of flower necklaces – Hawaiin leis – and kicked it up a notch or ten.