Lest you think I have been sitting around on my hands all week or have simply evaporated off this earth, I wanted to let you know that I am, in fact, still alive, and quite well, even. However, what concerns my blog cooking (and yes, I do call it that sometimes), it has been an abysmal week. I made no less than three (3!) recipes only to have them all be rather middling to faintly offensive and I simply haven't had the stomach to tell you about them.

My mother was in town and when I wasn't trying on wedding dresses and attempting not to dissolve in a fit of giggles at seeing myself in some floor-length (with train!) gown, I was spending an alarming amount of time here and here and oh, what the hell, here. I can't seem to think about anything - anything - else and no amount of Concord grape flat bread, parsnip soup with mustard or curried fish will change that until after next Tuesday.

On the plus side, my father brought a bag of basmati rice, chana dal and tamarind paste when he came to visit us this weekend and I'm anticipating lots of good things to come out of those three new additions to our kitchen cabinets. Particularly with regards to the last two, do you have any recipes you'd like to tell me about?

So that's the state of things right now: my cuticles, not to mention my nerves, are in shambles thanks to the election, I'm trying to distract myself with Indian lentils to no great success, I am definitely not wearing a floor-length gown to my wedding, I'm toying with the madness that is committing to posting every day in November (yay or nay, readers?) and I have no recipe to give you tonight. Forgive me! I'm agitating for a new world next week.