Cooking for Religions of the East

Picture this: there’s an entire stick of butter melting in a pan, and as you watch the thing (the huge chunk of pure fat) slowly disintegrate, you realize that you will soon be eating it, and it will taste really, really good. Just to clarify, my friends and I put more in the pan than just butter; there were chicken and tomatoes and curry and spices and such.

On Wednesday night, all four of the girls in my discussion group for REL-R153 (Religions of the East) gathered at my friend Adrienne’s apartment to cook several religious dishes from different Eastern traditions. It was for a class project we have been working on all semester about the applications of ahimsa in Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. For our presentation on Thursday, we were going to let the class taste-test dishes from each of the four religions.

We ended up cooking for almost five hours, but the meal we prepared was definitely worth it. It started out with a cucumber ribbon salad (my dish—it’s Buddhist) drizzled with a nice vinegar/sesame dressing. Next we served Hindu hot twists (they’re similar to pancakes) and a Jain yogurt and cucumber concoction. The toppers were the Sikh dishes: a tomato chicken curry (yes, it really had an entire stick of butter in it) and, for dessert, a carrot halwa, which, besides carrots and nuts, called for . . . a stick of butter. Mmmm . . . there’s nothing like the taste of pure, unadulterated fat!