Rita’s Spice Cabinet

This is Rita’s spice cabinet. Clockwise from top left:

• Red Spicy Chili powder. Confusing Rita’s chili powder with the regular chili powder sold in grocery stores would be just as deadly as confusing rocket fuel with regular ole’ unleaded.
• Methi (fenugreek seeds)
• Jira (cumin seed)
• Haldi (tumeric)
• Rai (black mustard seed)
• Daran Jiru (a mixture of coriander, cardamon and cumin)
• And in the center: Ajmo or ajwai. (Rita couldn’t remember the English name for it.)

Rita tried to teach me how to cook Gujarati style, but I kept cutting off little pieces of my fingers while chopping vegetables. This is a bad thing, especially since Rita’s family is vegetarian.

She has lots of scary little devices to help her chop veggies up quickly, including something I call a guillotine, but she calls a mandoline. (That one took the biggest chunk of finger.)

There’s also a machine that looks just like a coffee bean grinder. It needs about 2 seconds to turn garlic cloves, habanero peppers and cilantro into a paste that’s pretty much guaranteed to blow your head off if you aren’t used to it.

I can work the grinder well enough, but otherwise I am a useless addition to her kitchen. Except as a taster. Or when she needs me to, say, scarf down a bunch of samosas .