I have written before that my love language is feeding. Now that my family does not care for the food I cook, I cook for my coworkers. On Wednesday night after work, I chopped onions, pureed tomatoes, made ginger garlic paste and soaked vatana (dried green peas) to make ghugni, a popular street food of Bengal, for my coworkers.

On Thursday morning I woke up energized. I was ready to cook all morning before work. I had also picked up a beautiful eggplant from the farmer’s market. I planned to make baingan bharta as well. I had my morning coffee, rinsed the dried peas and transferred them to an instant pot to boil. I set the timer at 10 minutes. While the peas boiled, I peeled the roasted eggplant and then picked up the vacuum to clean. When I opened the instant pot lid, I discovered the peas were overboiled and completely useless for the dish I had planned to make. Fortunately, I had cans of garbanzo beans in the pantry and I substituted.

As I was doing the dishes and drying them, I knocked down a glass jar which broke in pieces scattering glass everywhere on my kitchen floor. That involved picking up glass, sweeping the floor and then mopping it too so that no stray glass could sneakily cut our feet.

Work day went as usual without any angry customers. My friends enjoyed the food. My coworker and I brainstormed for class ideas. The conversation went like this “And we could do….”. “YES!! And then we could do….!” It was quite funny.

I came home after 9 pm thinking, “alright the morning was bad but the rest of the day turned out fine.” And then Sahana exclaimed, “What is this?” She was pointing to the kitchen sink. It was filled with dirty water. The water would not drain. There was clearly some blockage. I spent the next half hour emptying dirty water from the sink and pouring it in a bucket to throw outside. Then I called the plumber. Sahana canceled her plans to stay home for the plumber so I could go to work on time. Ryan was not helpful at all. He went to bed because of his practice at an ungodly hour in the morning.

It is Friday morning, I am waiting for the plumber. And of course, Sean is traveling. Things happen when he travels. On top of all that, I did not hear from Sean the whole day!

But here is a picture of the ghugni and baingan bharta. I will have you know, I cracked a real coconut for the first time in my life after watching You Tube video on “how to crack a coconut” and used fresh coconut meat for this dish. I felt very “from the scratch”.