Back to our normal programming....

Okay, I'm done asking for money now ;-) You can come back...it's safe! I swear. haha.

So, I went running on Saturday - a quick 4 miles, which hurt like hell.  It's been hot and muggy here lately - As the guards tell me, "Yes madam, we are upon the season of the short rain". 
When I go running here I take some additional things with me..I seriously almost need a purse to go running. But Sergio got me a trendy runners belt..it's basically a glorified stretchable fanny pack.

Emergency phone, pepper spray, keys, IPOD.

All of that has to fit in HERE:

Anyways, somehow, and I knew it would happen because the road is soooo torn up where I ran, I ended up rolling my ankle on a huge rock and it was bad. I mean full force weight right on my sideways bent ankle. It was early in my run so I sort of made the stupid decision to just keep running since I was in a state of numbness and my dad taught me from a young age that Neat's eat nails..so yeah..just kept going.  I had to jump in the shower and run off to my Indian cooking class after I got back in ...which was 3.5 hours on my feet. Needless to say, my ankle slowly blew up this this big painful mess by the time I got home Saturday night after being on my feet the entire day. The pain was bad - I mean, pain like I thought it was gangrene and broken and with frost bite all together..okay maybe that's exaggerating but I still couldn't move it or the pain was just nuts. Somehow it miraculously 90%  healed overnight..to go from that much pain to not much pain made me feel like a new woman when i woke up. Although I went to work today and my ankle and foot is ginormous today..not much pain but it's HUGE and my shoe began to get increasingly tight. I showed my co-worker - she asked me if I was born with a cankle (just one). I told her it's a temporary cankle and that my ankles are the one area of my body that is thin and I don't appreciate her saying things about my one perfect part(s).  
So I came home a bit early today and did this:

Frozen strawberry ice-pack. Really bad photo. I just realized it looks like I have one of those Guinness book of world record long curly toe  nails..but that is not my toe nail haha, that is long horn Horn sitting on a table.

Now, back to Indian cooking class. I had been looking for an Indian cooking class for a while - Finally found a woman that gives classes in her house so I set it up. I had a really good turnout - 8 people signed up and the instructor was this cute older Indian woman that is like Iron Chef India.  Her style of cooking reminded me a lot of my mom and my aunt amal - very estimated and by taste. Her only measurement units were a "small bowl", "small spoon", or "big spoon".  For larger measurements she uses "large old tennis shoe" and "garden shovel"..kidding.   Anyways somehow we made 7 Indian dishes in like 3 hours. Pretty amazing. The food was um, okay. For some reason I thought it was great when I was there, but we packaged it all up and brought it home and I really didn't like any of it back at my house. It didn't quite taste like the restaurants around here but we certainly didn't do any slow cooking so I think that would have make a difference. There just wasn't a lot of time to make a lot of dishes that usually cook for a longer time. It was still fun and interesting to learn the methods and ingredients that go into some of these dishes..and the naan was really good!
Two  interesting tid-bits from cooking class:

• she actually cooks ANTI-FLATULENCE powder INTO the lentils. Awesome right? haha. Love that.  Two different ingredients will do the deed -Thyme seeds or something called Hing.

• And, instead of baking soda, as a rising agent for the naan, she uses like alcaseltzer powder. It's called something different here but same stuff. Good to know in general.

Oh lastly, she claims that food allergies are bullshit and she can cure your food allergy in 15 days through healing foods. Let me know if you want her contacts ;-)))

Love the colors in this. From the top dark spice: mustard seed, salt, tumeric,coriander, spanish paprika or chili powder, cumin seeds, and in the middle is coriander and cumin mixed.

Making the naan was surprisingly easy

Palak Paneer - my favorite. Just didn't turn out as thick and delish as Anghiti's here.

I think I'll still just go to restaurants for all my indian fixes since it's inexpensive here. But once I move home, I may have to learn to perfect the palak paneer and chicken tikka masala. Two of my faves.\

A couple of the ladies mentioned that maybe I should do a Lebanese cooking class...I'm thinking about putting one together as a fund raiser for something but first I have to learn how to cook without making a complete disaster out of the kitchen and how to do it all in 3 hours. It's harder than it looks.

The end.