A wild goose chase is what life is, too

Every single dish that my neighbors had on the menu at dinner last night at their home was simply delicious, as always.  "The best food at the best restaurant in town" is how I, yet again, referred to the delightful dishes they put together.

One was a new item on the menu that I hadn't ever had in all these years of neighborly exchanges.  It was an eggplant dish.  The aroma from that as I walked towards the kitchen made me drool even before I had laid my eyes on it.  If the brain is the most important sex organ, the nose is perhaps the most important food organ for the all important sense of smell it provides us.

As we sat down to eat, they thanked the lord for for the food and remembered the fallen soldiers.  I thanked them for the food and friendship.  A friendship over a decade, despite our ages, and different perspectives on religion and politics, leave alone our respective cultural backgrounds.

As I greedily took my second, and a third, helping, I asked them if they could guess the geographic home of eggplants.  And then I pointed to myself.

"Oh, India."

It was damn tasty.  I was curious, as ever: "How did you make this eggplant dish?"

The response was a simple one with which I am all too familiar: "Oh, I made it up as I went along."

"Yes, the best kind of cooking" I said.

We agreed that one needs to know a bit before we get to making up things as we go about in the cooking.  A certain idea of the terrain.  When I don't know, I stay away from experimenting.  Cooking is no wild goose chase.

With a sense of contentment, I picked up the latest issue of the New Yorker for my bed-time reading.  The photo-essay on the Central Asian rivers appealed to me as the right kind of soothing read before drifting off to sleep.  I was wrong; it provided way more intellectual stimulation than I would have guessed.

The caption by the side of a photograph of a wild goose said:

A "wild goose chase" was originally a horse race with no fixed course: the rider in the lead improvised the route, until someone passed him.

How fascinating!

Something new every day.  Yesterday, it was more than one new thing.  An eggplant dish for the nose and tongue, and the "wild goose chase" for the most important sex organ!

The salad at the dinner. I forgot to take a photo of the eggplant dish!