He decided to add some jaggery to it. Jaggery – well, there are some pretty good long explanations about it – I have discussed it at some length previously. See entries for September 05, November 06 & 11 2003. If ya want more or can’t remember or haven’t read them previously.
Jaggery is, basically speaking, a block of brown sugar made from kittul palm tree flower sap. Or something very close to that, anyway.
So we broke open the bag the jaggery was in – we hadn’t used any yet, and yes, it comes in a bag – took out the block and put it on the cutting board to take shavings off.
It felt basically like wet brown sugar that was pressed into a block.
And it crumbled basically like how I would imagine that wet brown sugar pressed into a block would crumble.
And it tasted pretty much like wet brown sugar pressed into a block – with a little something extra that was barely there.
That’s pretty much it.
Fahim, being the sugar addict that he is, had to have lots and lots of the shavings in his green gram. I added a little bit to my cereal. I’m still stunned that I actually married someone who is actually more of a sugar addict than me.
The comparison – I’m on the Richter scale at 1. Fahim’s at 8.
Okay, that’s an exaggeration – a very clear exaggeration.
Do you understand how the Richter scale works? Basically, it’s a logarithmic scale where 2 is ten times as big as 1, 3 is ten times as big as 2, four is ten times as big as three, and so on. So 8 compared to 1 is 10,000,000 times bigger.
Again, this is for the mathematically challenged in the crowd.
I sympathize with the mathematically challenged, but I don’t really understand. I’m not one of them, and clearly, I like to mock them, or at least poke fun where ever I can. Thank you for providing me with amusement. 🙂 You have now served your purpose in life. 🙂
Like I said, a clear exaggeration.
But writers, by definition, exaggerate. We have to. It’s our nature. And it’s the only way to make money by writing. 🙂
In reality, Fahim’s sugar addiction is probably closer to three or four times as much as mine. Richter scale – with me at a 1, that makes Fahim at about – let me see – I have to do this in my head – no calculator capable of doing log functions anywhere close by – so those of you who do have a calculator handy, ya ain’t allowed to laugh at me, ‘kay? Well, never mind. You can laugh. Just don’t tell me about it. I really am all for getting amusement where a person can, and if you get amusement value from me doing log functions in my head, then so be it. Okay, so with me at a 1 on the log scale, that would make Fahim at about a 1.7. I think. If I remember how to do this properly.
He adds three or four times as much sugar as I do to everything. And I like my stuff sweet. . He even adds sugar to things I’ve already sweetened. To my sweetness level, which is sweet.
When I comment on all of this to him, his only comment back is, "You sure have led a sheltered life, haven’t you?"
I guess in regards to sugar, I must have.
He eats all that sugar. And he’s still skinny
Life is not fair.
But then there are bugs that, in some small way, try to even the score.
See, as Fahim ate his mung beans, he encountered a few buggies that didn’t die and float away with the rest of their comrades.
He left them at the side of the bowl and of course had to make sure I saw them before he took the bowl away. Of course.
Back to reality. Of course if there were bugs in it today, there were bugs in it yesterday, and I ate it yesterday, so I probably ate a bug or two or something like that. The only solace I have from this is that, between yesterday and today, Fahim probably ate something in the neighborhood of five or six times as much as I did, so theoretically and statistically speaking, there is a high probability that he ate five or six times as many bugs as I did.
Like I said, sometimes life comes back and evens the score, even if it’s in small ways like this.
The mung beans are now gone, however, and so are the bugs. That were in the mung beans. There are still bugs in the samaposha. I cannot, however, try Michele’s trick of putting it out into the sun to watch the bugs crawl/walk/fly away – we’re overcast today.
