Love Like Salt, Part II

S. has been hinting (with much excitement) that I should learn to cook upma.

So I went to Namaste Grocery and bought myself a bag.

I didn't make it tonight (tonight was a salad night -- my roommate told me I could eat anything she left behind in the refrigerator, and there was half a bag of "Spring Mix" that needed to be consumed before it turned brown), but I will tomorrow.

There is, unfortunately, no recipe for upma in the copy of Southern Spice (Chandra Padmanabhan) that S. bought for me on one of our bookstore forages. So I went online.

And there I found, at the first link, that upma means "flour and salt." Intertwined, perhaps.

It seems that there could be a poem made out of this, with the idea of love like salt and the physicality of sifting and dropping and frying balls of upma. (Maybe not frying. I'm not very good at frying things; they always burn. But all the recipes seem to say that frying is what one does to upma, so I'll hold my thumbs that it turns out.)

We will see what I am capable of creating, tomorrow night.

On an unrelated note: S. also set me up with some sambar podi, and I am eager to try it out. But finding/creating idlis will be a problem. I have no method of grinding the rice and dal, but I could buy ready-made idli batter at Namaste Grocery. However, I have no idli rack. Dare I use a cupcake tin, or would it be better to lay them out on a cookie sheet... or should I just give up now before I make a mess of things? ^__^


(Note from the editor: She's just realized, through her internet searching, that upma and rava are the same thing. So Southern Spice has several recipes for upma after all. The recipes all require frying.)