Cooking Queen and Halal Food

So tonight was a cooking night for me. Sometimes, usually once or twice a week I will get the bug to actually cook something. Poor M, otherwise he suffers through and eats Ramen noodles or soup or whatever else I can warm up on the stove in 5 minutes. So I get this urge to cook and whenever I do it is usually desi food, which is really funny. I didn't know how to cook at all before I met him, so I basically learned since we've been together and all I know is desi food. So I made Rogan Josh curry with chicken and daal and bootleg roti (I call it bootleg because I buy tortillas from Wal-mart and heat them in the chappati pan, that is so lame, lol).

On a random side note, I read a case last year in criminal law about a kid who killed a Pakistani guy by hitting him in the head with a chappati pan. The man was trying to make sexual advances on him, it was something along the lines of whether it was manslaughter or murder because of the mitigating circumstances. I just remember thinking how bizarre it was to read about chappati pans in law school.

Anyways, back to my mad culinary skills, I also made yellow cake with chocolate icing which was a really bad idea because that means that we are going to eat it. We are always trying to diet and then I go and do things like buy donuts or bake cake and ooops, there we go again.

So on to my second topic for today, halal food. When I first reverted to Islam we were living in Birmingham. I decided that I wanted to only eat zabiha food. There were two halal stores in the entire city and they only stocked frozen chicken and ground beef...every other week. So I was eating fish and veggies non-stop. My mouth watered when I passed Chic-fil-A and Eddie's, whose philly cheese steaks I miss desperately. I literally had a break down in the grocery store one day and started crying because I wanted to eat chicken and brocoli hot pockets so bad. It was pretty hard, but now I am used to it and we have come to Atlanta, which has halal butchers with fresh meat! I mean you can get filets, lunch meat, fresh chicken and beef. Its great! And we have a kosher Publix here, pretty unbelievable, I live in the middle of an orthodox Jewish neighborhood, but Kosher is waaaaaay more expensive than halal, so I try to avoid it if I can.

Funny thing is that I have been mistaken for an orthodox Jew in the grocery store many times. The worst was when I went to the Kosher deli because I had a total craving for a turkey sub. So I go to order it and the deli guy gives me this really weird look and says "um, we don't make subs during Passover." I was so embarassed, I said "I'm sorry I didn't realize its still Passover" which made him look at me even weirder. So I kind of forgot that Jews don't eat leavened bread during Passover, duh. He must have thought I was some kind of horrible Jew. Ah, well.

Its late and time for bed so goodnight.