My
birthday happened to coincide with the Hindu holiday of Shivratri, the
anniversary of Shiva and Parvarti’s marriage according to Hindu mythology.
Because of this, I had off from school and got to spend the whole day
celebrating festivities for both my birthday and Sri Shiva.
I must admit that the beginning part of my day was kind of boring. I cleaned my room and went for a run at BHU (the local university) with Caleb, followed by lunch at Flavours Café (a coffee place with good American food and cakes that are like cakes that you can get in the US). I visited some Shivalingas (shrines to Shiva) to check out Shivratri festivities, but most of the day I had dinner on my mind. You see, I had promised my group that I would make panko chicken for them for my birthday. Panko chicken is basically just fried chicken except you use dried bread crumbs to crust it and it’s really crispy and delicious. In the US it’s easy to go out and buy meat. After all, it’s cleanly packaged in air-tight containers and you can barely imagine how the pristine cuts of meat came from an animal at all. In Banaras, buying meat is a whole other ball game – you go to a butcher shop and order fresh meat.
Ben P and I biked to the Muslim quarter where meat is readily available (unlike in the Hindu-centric communities where we live) and found a butcher with a chicken coup outside. I asked for 2 kilos of boneless meat and so the guy working there picked out two chickens for me. At this point Ben decided he wouldn’t be able to watch the killing, so he kindly left to go get some ice cream for the two of us. Killing chickens is a lot less traumatizing that I thought it would be. I have always had weird notions of it from the saying “running around like a chicken with its head cut off,” but in practice it wasn’t so dramatic. They drained the blood, feathered, and removed the bones for me, leaving me a plastic bag full of all sorts of different cuts of meat to pick through. After finishing our ice cream and buying 5 eggs from the butcher, we set off to the program house where we were meeting Caleb and Rachel to cook all of the food (Caleb and Rachel had bought the vegetables for the meal).
The day before my birthday I had gone to the local import store to buy bread crumbs. Instead of having bread crumbs, though, they just had loaves of dried bread. I purchased the one recommended to me by the store owner and didn’t think much of it until the next day when Rachel was crushing the loaf into bread crumbs and decided to try a piece. “It’s sweet!” she exclaimed, and I was surprised. Why was it sweet? We looked at the package and found that the very first ingredient was sugar! How can you even make bread that has more sugar in it than flour??? Panko chicken is a savory dish and definitely should not be sweet, so we had to add spoonfuls of salt to it to make it taste like normal breadcrumbs. In the meantime I had been carefully cutting the meat (still warm from when it had been alive an hour previously) into usable pieces and Caleb had been slicing zucchini and eggplant for the vegetarians among us (namely Rachel and Ben T since Shivratri is a day when Hindus are supposed to fast, eating nothing but milk products and fruit).
After a few hours of preparing all of the chicken and veggies, we had a feast of panko chicken, panko eggplant/zucchini, and steamed vegetables (it was more epic in real life than how it sounds in writing). Dolly-ji arrived with the cake from Flavours Café and they locked me in the bathroom while they put candles in the cake and brought out my present. When I came out, Chase strapped a Happy Birthday cone-hat to my head and everyone sang. I got a cookbook called Mastering the Art of Indian Cooking from the group and many notes wishing me a happy and fun-filled birthday. My favorite note was from Shiv, Dolly-ji’s son, which was written in broken English but had “I LOVE YOU” written at the end. We even got to cap off the night with a Shivratri parade that was processing through Assi when we left the party!
I must admit that the beginning part of my day was kind of boring. I cleaned my room and went for a run at BHU (the local university) with Caleb, followed by lunch at Flavours Café (a coffee place with good American food and cakes that are like cakes that you can get in the US). I visited some Shivalingas (shrines to Shiva) to check out Shivratri festivities, but most of the day I had dinner on my mind. You see, I had promised my group that I would make panko chicken for them for my birthday. Panko chicken is basically just fried chicken except you use dried bread crumbs to crust it and it’s really crispy and delicious. In the US it’s easy to go out and buy meat. After all, it’s cleanly packaged in air-tight containers and you can barely imagine how the pristine cuts of meat came from an animal at all. In Banaras, buying meat is a whole other ball game – you go to a butcher shop and order fresh meat.
Ben P and I biked to the Muslim quarter where meat is readily available (unlike in the Hindu-centric communities where we live) and found a butcher with a chicken coup outside. I asked for 2 kilos of boneless meat and so the guy working there picked out two chickens for me. At this point Ben decided he wouldn’t be able to watch the killing, so he kindly left to go get some ice cream for the two of us. Killing chickens is a lot less traumatizing that I thought it would be. I have always had weird notions of it from the saying “running around like a chicken with its head cut off,” but in practice it wasn’t so dramatic. They drained the blood, feathered, and removed the bones for me, leaving me a plastic bag full of all sorts of different cuts of meat to pick through. After finishing our ice cream and buying 5 eggs from the butcher, we set off to the program house where we were meeting Caleb and Rachel to cook all of the food (Caleb and Rachel had bought the vegetables for the meal).
The day before my birthday I had gone to the local import store to buy bread crumbs. Instead of having bread crumbs, though, they just had loaves of dried bread. I purchased the one recommended to me by the store owner and didn’t think much of it until the next day when Rachel was crushing the loaf into bread crumbs and decided to try a piece. “It’s sweet!” she exclaimed, and I was surprised. Why was it sweet? We looked at the package and found that the very first ingredient was sugar! How can you even make bread that has more sugar in it than flour??? Panko chicken is a savory dish and definitely should not be sweet, so we had to add spoonfuls of salt to it to make it taste like normal breadcrumbs. In the meantime I had been carefully cutting the meat (still warm from when it had been alive an hour previously) into usable pieces and Caleb had been slicing zucchini and eggplant for the vegetarians among us (namely Rachel and Ben T since Shivratri is a day when Hindus are supposed to fast, eating nothing but milk products and fruit).
After a few hours of preparing all of the chicken and veggies, we had a feast of panko chicken, panko eggplant/zucchini, and steamed vegetables (it was more epic in real life than how it sounds in writing). Dolly-ji arrived with the cake from Flavours Café and they locked me in the bathroom while they put candles in the cake and brought out my present. When I came out, Chase strapped a Happy Birthday cone-hat to my head and everyone sang. I got a cookbook called Mastering the Art of Indian Cooking from the group and many notes wishing me a happy and fun-filled birthday. My favorite note was from Shiv, Dolly-ji’s son, which was written in broken English but had “I LOVE YOU” written at the end. We even got to cap off the night with a Shivratri parade that was processing through Assi when we left the party!
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