February 23, 2012 Lunch – Taj Mahal, Shopping - Alpine Sausage Factory and Book Club

February 23, 2012 Lunch – Taj Mahal, Shopping - Alpine Sausage Factory

 I met my friend Mike Verhagen for lunch at Taj Mahal Restaurant on Carlisle for lunch at 11:30 a.m..  I have been dining at Taj Mahal for over twenty years and during that time have helped the owners with their Beer and Wine licenses, and love their food because it is so clean and authentic.  For example, Shamiz, the owner who manages the restaurant, told me that the Taj is the only restaurant in the area that does not adulterate its Saag Paneer with other ingredients than the traditional greens, cilantro, garlic, and the paneer cheese and I believe him.  Taj always serves a tandoori dish on the lunch buffet an on Thursday I was pleasantly surprised to find a beef sausage shish kabob roll instead of the usual chicken.  

After lunch, I went by Alpine Sausage Kitchen at

2800 Indian School Rd.

to replenish the meat drawer in the fridge.  I bought gelbwurst (veal bologna), Genoa Salami, chunky braunswieger, a pound of veal stew meat, and a bottle of Marinated Rollmops (5 whole herring filets wrapped around a gherkin in a pickling solution of salt, sugar, onion, mustard seed and pickling spices, for $4.59).  I enjoyed trading stories with the owners, who also vacation on Mexico’s Pacific coast in the Puerto Vallarta, Sayulita, Don Pancho area of Mexico.

Then, on my way home, I stopped at the Flying Star and picked up nine osr ten copies of the February 15 –March 15, 2012 issue of ABQ BITE, our new food magazine in Albuquerque, because it featured a two page spread on this blog and Suzette’ restaurant, the Greenhouse Bistro and Bakery, located on the campus of the  Center for Ageless Living.  How fun to see our “Shop, Cook, Eat” logo and website in print.  I realize that there are joys and creative moments involving all stages of the food process; from growing it, to shopping for it, to cooking it, to eating it and to writing about it.  But seeing your words in print always is special for me, perhaps because those events merge several levels of experience that somehow amplifies the magnitude of the emotional content for me.

 

Instead of cooking dinner, I went to my monthly meeting of the Last Thursday Book Club, The lively intelligent discussion about this month’s selection, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, accompanied by snacks ended with this month’s host, Jack Ferrell, who grew up in Ohio, serving us homemade apple pie, coffee, and a lovely white wine from Ohio.     

One of the comments during the discussion blew me away.  As the token Buddhist, I was asked to compare the concept of “nothingness” in Buddhism to the seemingly meaningless lives of some of the characters in the novel and as I attempted to describe my experience of all inclusiveness of the direct contact with awareness that is at the heart of Buddhist practice, Joel Nash commented, “It is like the Allegory of the Cave”.  It has been almost 50 years since I read the Allegory of the Cave by Plato, so I babbled for a moment incoherently and the conversation passed on to other topics.

The next morning I googled the “Allegory of the Cave” and drafted a belated and a hopefully coherent answer to Joel’s comment.  In summary, I think Joel’s analogy of the Buddhist Principle of nothingness to the “Allegory of the Cave” is exactly correct and brilliant and that Joel put his finger on exactly the correct example in Western thought for the confusion between reality and cognition as created by human thought processes that forms one of the central pillars of Buddhism.  If anyone wants to receive a copy of my analysis, please send me an e mail address and I will send my analysis to you in pdf format.

Some days can be fun even though there is no cooking.

    

Bon Appètit