House-warming dinner

Wanted to make this house-warming dinner at the first week in my new apartment. Quite timely, though, realized there is not point to reinforce the happening: house-warming is a great concept, but if everything you can offer to your guests is bare marble floors to sit on it is not a terrific idea.

After the major furniture shopping undertaken by the proud team of the flatmates our living room obtained some features of a living room.



Hence, it became inevitable – time to call friends! Only the closest ones outnumbered 20. Cooking for twenty people sounded insane to people at the market I was buying vegetables from, my neighbor who borrowed me 5 pots for cooking (including working-wonders pressure cooker), to my flatmates who wanted to be mentally prepared for this invasion. Not for me… I truly love cooking – I really fulfill myself through improvisation at the kitchen. And I believe that cooking for the friends is one of the greatest pleasures in this life. However much I am reluctant to mix different friends together (referring to the different nature of relations I would have with different people) this cooking cause becomes a place where people would mix. I would just invite all the dear people without thinking much about getting the right mix. This time I’d leave it up for the people to figure that mix out. I would be improvising with the ingredients, receiving people, setting up the table, taking care of the music. The dinner would flow on humming top principle – once it gets momentum it starts spinning and carries on by its own. I’ll get happy if people I know well will get along with each other while being very different, I’ll get excited when I hear the buzz of mixed backgrounds, languages, stories and opinions. I’ll get pleased if people enjoy my food. I’ll get happy if my friends find sweet ways to help me out without interfering. I’ll get satisfied if . …. This also teaches me some important lessons about hosting people and being a guest, about friends and people I just happened to meet. This is also by your various friends how people judge you.. so I hope I got a bit better understood by my friends who met my other friends of quite different sort…



I was so happy that Nivathee and Anoop, Vishnu, Naven and Neelima came over – so that I could at least to a small extent give something back to the astonishing hospitality of their both families. Nivanthee and Neelima were so willing to help me out in any way and I was teasing them that no way as I need to take revenge for them not letting me even lift my hand to help when I am in their houses. Vishnu drives me to the market nearby to get 50 (yes, five-zero) roties I ordered before and being so concerned he wonders if he should get water for the guests and actually gets 5-L bottle. He plays very nice classic music in the car – this drive was just those 10-15 minutes of piece I needed in between running around the kitchen and receiving arriving guests. This is what friends do for us – those small things that are not measured by the amount of effort, but rather by the amount of attention.

And… I cooked Indian stuff. I do not know now what the best praise was – complements from Indians or words from westerns saying that my food was the best Indian food they ever had in this country ;o)