A New Spice

"Darling, you smell of Worcestershire sauce!"

Garbage research is adding spice to my life.

Yesterday at Trader J's, I was just about to put some prepared Indian food in my cart when my brain began to flash 
Red Alert: Foil Packets Last Until the End of Time
and I couldn't do it.

This is a good thing, really--I love Indian food, and it's cheap and easy to make. The spices do all the work: just choose three and add them to lentils and veg, and you've pretty much made something good to eat.

Today I'll go to the co-op and buy in bulk Indian spices I've let run out, or dry up--cardamom, cinnamon, coriander, cumin, garam masala, ginger, mustard seed, turmeric.

For fun, I'm going to buy asafoetida, finally, too––a spice I've never used but know from a line in a poem by Catullus (7) in which he says he wants as many kisses from his lover as the Libyan sands

that lay at asafoetida-bearing Cyrene ...

This drove me crazy, trying to translate it when I was studying Latin [quam magnus numerus Libyssae harenae lasarpiciferis iacet Cyrenis].
(For a while after I got my B.A. (in Religions in Antiquity, minor in Latin) (at 35!), I wrote like that too. My English was all twisted up, as if it were translated from Latin, badly. It took writing nonfiction for kids for a couple years for me to straighten it out again.)

Anyway, looking "asafoetida" up, I see it tastes something like leeks and is rumored to give Worcestershire sauce its distinctive aroma. 
Oh dear, its name looks like it'd smell like ass-feet... looked it up and--close--it means "fetid resin"--also nicknamed devil's dung. 

I like leeks.
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* * * Krista comments (hi! Krista) that Mr. Husband recommends Majula's Kitchen for Indian recipes.

Here's also Indian Vegan Recipes--of course, you don't have to remove anything from a lot of Indian recipes to make them vegan.
Though sometimes I add butter so they're not...

The blogger provides an Indian Grocery Shopping List. Asafoetida is optional. The nice thing about buying spices in bulk is, you  can just buy a little.
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Painting: "Nudes", Paul Delvaux, 1946