Hi Everyone --

We had an exciting new adventure this week. My friend Debi's landlady invited all us ladies over to learn to cook Indian food and stay for lunch and visit on the terrace. This is the producer of the movie we went to the premier of. Of course, she has 2 kitchens (one for her and one for the people who really cook in her house), and a number of cooks. These women cook for the entire household -- family, extended family, maids, houseboys, gardeners, drivers, themselves, and anyone else who shows up. They probably feed 20-25 people three times a day when the family is in residence.

We learned how to make dahl mahkani, hummus, and chapati. It was really fun and really nice of her to have her cooks show us how it's done. I took a lot of pictures so you could begin to understand Indian cooking. All the ingredients are fresh -- freshly ground spices, wheat flour, vegetables, chicken -- and it's all done by hand. She has recently purchased a wheat grinder which cuts down the kitchen helper's work immensely, but while we were there and grinding the wheat, the electricity went out and that was that!

The ladies making the chapati were doing it as we ate, so every couple of minutes, the one gal would bring in hot chapati or paratha and give it to whoever needed it. It was really good! The menu was byriani, gobi and aloo, dahl, chipati and the yogurt mixture to cool the hot spices. So in English, that would be rice with chicken, cauliflower and potatoes, lentils and beans, and whole wheat tortillas. It was excellent! Then she asked what kind of ice cream we wanted -- she was calling out to Baskin Robbins to have it delivered! We had a nice day and afternoon visiting about India and our experiences here.

Wednesday and Thursday were holidays for John Deere. Wednesday was for Id -- the Muslim end of Ramadan (or Ramazan as they call it here), and Thursday was for Gandhi's birthday. Doug worked the first day and is going to take it as comp time later. He took Thursday off. Our driver is Muslim, so he took off work and we had substitute drivers for W, T, F, Sat. It worked out ok and hopefully we will be back to normal on Monday.

Hannah was able to finish all her assignments in all her classes this week. I called about a French tutor to come to the house and help her out, and the guy was supposed to call me on Saturday, but he didn't call. I wonder how the BYU teacher would take Hannah's accent -- French with an Indian accent. Craig says it's lots of fun to listen to the Indians speak Spanish. I think this would be about the same.

We were able to watch the first session of conference today. Very good! There were only 4 of us.

We hope everyone is doing well!
Love, Lucinda