Fanaa

Source: Pitaara.in

I was listening to my Bollywood mix, and my favorite soundtrack came up for Fanaa. The movie is about a blind Kashmiri girl who falls in love with someone who she thinks is a Indian tourist guide. He turns out to be a Kashmiri nationalist part of a larger terrorist plan. It gets even more star-crossed when she has one night with him, conceives a child, finds out he mysteriously disappeared, gets a revolutionary vision-gifting surgery, then gets a visit from her lover whom she doesn't know because she never saw his face. O__o

It's the only Bollywood movie I've ever seen in theaters, and while the ending leaves much to be desired, the cinematography and songs totally stole my heart.

Anyways, got me craving Indian food, but I'm stuck at home, and I don't really feel like calling for it (if any place around here delivers). So I made some. Chicken Tikka Masala using this recipe. It turned out uber spicy and really good, even if did I cheat with some subs.



My friend Sunyia always taught me to start with a minced ginger/garlic paste, then add sliced onions to create a fragrant base. So I did that. Plus, I didn't have tomato in a can, so I used V8. :D

Lemons galore!

Now that it's getting warm and happy in SF, I've really been craving happy summer food. Happy summer food like sorbet! So I went to my neighborhood market to see if anything jumped out at me and ta-da! Ginormous lemons at 3 for a dollar :)

These lemons were magical. Esther, remember the last time we made lemon sorbet? This was so much easier! Just one lemon had about 1/4 cup of juice!

And don't even get me started on how much zest you can get from just one of those lemons! Craziness!

The 'fruits' of my labor ;)

Just for size comparison, here are halves of lemons from my friend's tree next to a half of the crazy big ones from the market...

Even the juice came out different! The little lemons had darker, ever-so-slightly-more-orange flavored juice. The big lemons were light and tart, and produced about 1.5 cups of juice, so I used them for the sorbet.

There was even enough left over to try out Tracy's lemon butter cookies!

Next time the lemon sorbet needs a raspberry reduction sauce (and maybe a tiny bit less zest). Still, I loved both recipes...

And so did Ryan :)

If you want to try it out, you can see the recipe here! The only change that I made was to swap the carbonated mineral water for grapefruit/tangerine sparkling water... well, that and I added a healthy splash of rum. You know, to keep things from getting too icy. Worked like a charm :)