A Balanced Diet is a Cookie in Each Hand

Oh, how we miss American desserts... Here desserts or sweet snacks are called sweets, and though I like them very much, they bear absolutely no resemblance to American dessert. For instance, there is a sweet here called burfi which is made by cooking condensed milk with sugar until it solidifies and is flavored with cashew, pistachio, coconut, mango, or whatever. It is normally coated with an edible layer of silver leaf and cut into squares sort of like fudge. It is really good, but I can't think of a single thing to compare it to from the US. Another popular dessert is gulab jamun, fried balls of dough (the dough is made mostly of solid condensed milk and a bit of flour), soaked in a sugary syrup flavored with rosewater or saffron. Gulab jamun happens to be Eric's favorite Indian sweet while mine is either gajar halva (the carrot dessert that I described in a previous post) or burfi. My point is that, while Indian sweets are yummy, they are not at all similar to those found in the good old USA. And when you get a craving for a cookie, trust me, gulab jamun just doesn't cut it. There are a few places where you can get cookies here, but they are very sad, sad specimens. They are often as thin as a sheet of paper and so hard and crunchy, certainly not moist or chewy, they way that I like them.



Luckily for us, we have friends who love us (or pity us, but if we get cookies out of it, who cares?). Our friends from home, Ericka and Mylan, are the best! They have a friend who was coming to Bangalore on business, and being the kind and generous people that they are asked if they could send something with him to deliver to us in India. The perfect opportunity for a cookie drop! They made of bunch of chocolate chip cookies (actually, I would be willing to bet that Ericka should get the lion's share of the credit, sorry Mylan, but I just can't see you slaving over an oven) and with some other candy, sent it on its way with Rob (the courier) to Bangalore. The perfect plan, I mean, how hard can it be to get fresh cookies from Chicago to Bangalore? Here our story begins...



We had planned on meeting up with Robert on Sunday for lunch, I had
e-mailed him Saturday morning with the details of where and when, etc.
We didn't hear back from him so we just went to the restaurant and
waited. Unfortunately, even two hours after the meeting time, no Rob.
On the upside, Eric and I enjoyed a very nice and relaxing lunch. I
was a bit worried though, as by the early evening we still hadn't
heard from Robert (I had sent him another e-mail asking if everything
was okay once we got home from lunch on Sunday). Well, Rob e-mailed
later Sunday night saying that the internet connection was down from
Friday night, and had only just come back on-line, so he never got the
message about where and when to meet since he couldn't check his mail!
Welcome to Bangalore. It seems that these problems always happen at
the most inopportune times. So we decided that the best course of
action was to have his driver come by our house and drop off the
package on Tuesday, and Eric would just work
from home. Well, Monday night/early Tuesday morning was interesting.
It started when our phone rang at 2 AM. By the time we made it to the
phone, the caller had hung up, but the caller ID showed that it was a
1-800 number. Great, telemarketers calling from the US... Anyway, of
course they called back at about 4 AM, and this time I got the call,
it was Chicago Public Radio calling and asking for a donation (I
donate every year). I asked them if they realized where they had just
called and then told them that it was 4 AM. I couldn't really be mad
at them, how could they know? The guy was totally shocked and so
apologetic. So then I went to bed again. Since it is starting to
warm up here, we have a ceiling fan on over our bed at night to keep
us cool, so when the power went out at 5:30 AM, the noise of the fan
shutting off woke us up again. I just went back to sleep and figured
that the power would be back on by the time I got up to take a shower
for work. Nope. By 6:50, still no power, so then we had to figure
out a way to wash up with no power, which meant heating a big pot of
water on the stove-top and washing up the old-fashioned way. We also
hadn't heard from Robert confirming that the package exchange would
actually happen on Tuesday, but without power we did not have internet
so I couldn't check my mail and find out if he was sending his driver
on Tuesday or not. So, Eric had to stay at home to "work" since we
thought the package might be delivered, but he couldn't really work as
there was no power... As it turned out, Robert had e-mailed which I
found out when I got into work, and he also called in the late morning
to say that his driver was on his way. The power came back on in the
late morning so Eric was able to work from home, but like I said,
power outages other systems failures happen here at seemingly the
worst times.



But we got the package, the cookies are delicious, and all is well with the world. I brought some of the cookies in to share with my lab (which took real effort to part with any of our precious cookies) so that they could sample American sweets, and I think that they liked them. But it sure doesn't compare to gulab jamun.... thankfully.