What Lies Beneath

While I would love for this entry to be about our Indian excursion and nothing more, I'm afraid I can't do that. There were forces that evening plotting against us. Dark forces of which we were not aware.
First off, the dinner is over and done with. We survived it pretty much in one piece(if you just excuse one burned hand and a couple of cuts). There are a few flaws with the "greatest ever" Indian Cookbook that I feel are very necessary to point out. To begin with, the recipes, as indicated by the text, were most certainly not easy nor were they simple. I will admit that part of the fault lies with me, I should've throughly read each step of every recipe we were executing to see exactly what would be required of Annie and I, and I didn't. My neglecting to do so, resulted in a Chicken Tikka that only received a 20 minute marinade instead of the 3 hour minimum that was required. Oops. Also I would like to inform my readers that there is nothing simple and easy about using a mortar and pestle to grind onions, cilantro and chilis "into a paste". It is, in fact, a near impossible feat requiring the upper body strength of Hulk Hogan, instead of paste, we ended up with a fine salsa. Yes, we deviated, yes, we improvised, some of it being the fault of the cookbook some of it our own.

In one of the directions the cook was to "place ingredients into a pan", while the photo showed a pot, bad editing, translation issues, I just don't know. What I do know is that pretty much every recipe called for green chilis, both Annie and myself could never find anything titled "green chili" we found lots of chilis that were green, but they each had their own name, so we ended up using serrano, thai, and some HUGE chili that ended up tasting much more like a green pepper. Overall, FYI, we both agree that the thai chili, hands down was the most effective of the bunch.

The "greatest ever" book also led me to believe that cooking 2 main dishes and a few sides would not take up too much of our time, but it did, four hours of manual labor as well as Annie's "private reserve" of red wine. So, instead of eating at 6:30 food hit the table well after 8pm.

To sum up, nothing was horrible, some was bland, all was edible. It should be noted that we did receive an enthusiastic "thumbs up" on the chickpea curry from all the guests. However........

Unbeknownst to us, while we were all enjoying the fruits of our labor, the perfect storm(minus George Clooney) was brewing underneath the house. It all started of course, with a potato, not deep fried though, just a peel.

In the beginning of the evening, I peeled a slew of potatoes and slowly fed the scraps into the garbage disposable. All of a sudden, the sink(both sides) started filling with water, we had blockage people. It was an additional pain in the ass, to cook and use all these dishes with a sink that wouldn't drain, but manageable. I couldn't quite figure out the problem, the disposable was working just fine, so nothing was stuck there. At one point my husband, both hands pressed flat over the sink drain, performed something that looked an awful lot like CPR to no avail, perhaps he forgot the "breathe" part. Then he and a fellow guest got overly ambitious and pulled apart the pipes underneath the sink, no clogs there. Where ever the problem was, it was deep under the house, so deep that we had no access.

While we were all consumed with what was going on in the kitchen, the bathroom sink decided to join in on the blockage festivities. Now we had no where to wash our hands. What was next? The shower? Thankfully no. However, I had an entire counter filled with grease, guts and dirty dishes and there was nothing I could do about it.

The next day we called the plumber to come out and give us a hand. The appointment was for five so he shows up no earlier than six. Awesome. Of course it was a Harry Potter weekend on ABC Family. Which I'm beginning to believe that every weekend is, then during the week it becomes Harry Potter Weekday. If it happens to be a holiday then it is Harry Potter Halloween, Thanksgiving, Flag day, whatever fits the bill. The only movies they show are Harry Potter, do they have the rights to anything else? How many times can I watch The Prisoner of Azkaban?

So, while I'm watching Harry sneak out of Hogwarts via The Maurauder's Map, the plumbers are bringing the dreaded snake into the bathroom. I'm a little on edge, last time we had a plumbing issue, the snake caused a foul, disgusting, black sludge of an explosion in our bathroom, and without fail it happened again. Why do we pay you to make a horrid mess of our home Mister Plumber Man? Why? Sick, black ooze all over our bathroom, pools of stagnant, disgusting water under the sink, on the floor, and do they bring anything to clean it up with? Nope, wouldn't be prudent. The plumber walked out with my wood oil in his dirty, grubby hand and asked if he could use it to clean the floors. Seriously? How about you use the gallon of bleach I have sitting next to it, to keep my whites white and my floors sterile, perhaps that would work better than a little lemon oil? Or do you know something that I don't.

With the bathroom complete they tackeled the dual kitchen sinks. Apparently these were so far gone, along with all the pipes that there was nothing more they could do. Another appointment had to be made to replace all the corroded eighty year old metal under the house, the main pipes, the linking pipes, basically our entire habit trail was no longer "up to par". As if the initial sludge attack wasn't enough, we have to deal with it all over again this afternoon.

Meanwhile, I still have all those dishes to do.