
Thanksgiving by Govinda's
Good morning! Because I feel like speed of delivery is of the essence, I am going to keep this short and re-iterate the important dates for our service in the next few weeks. While writing up the menu descriptions this morning, I looked back at the newsletter from last Thanksgiving. Boy was it what I needed to hear, complete with a spontaneous mission/passion statement by me for Govinda's Catering. When times are tough, and you feel like a loser, it is important to remember t

Licensed to Serve
For those who missed the grand announcement on Instagram (@rangadevidasi) and Facebook, this past Friday Govinda's Catering passed our inspection from the NC Department of Agriculture. This is a hugely important step. It is one thing to sell meals as we have been doing, "among friends." Yet, I would not be able to approach any coffee house, tea house, farmers' market, or any other food establishment about carrying our delectables, without having that written piece of paper in

Keep Calm and Fail On
It was right about six months ago that I last did a menu with some of these Moroccan dishes on it. Since I am learning the fine art of not reinventing the wheel each time I do something, I re-use previous newsletters so that I only need to change the photos and links for the dishes which I am not repeating. Besides saving me a little bit of time, reusing old newsletters allows me to take a trip down memory lane and remember what it was that I was doing 6 months or a year ago.

Pilgrimage by Bus
Happy Sunday, everyone! This is going to be a very streamlined newsletter, as I have just returned from a whirlwind 39-hour bus trip (22 of which was travel time) to NYC. Thus I am lacking the time and presence of mind to bring you my usual obsessively crafted newsletter. ;-) One of the many benefits of the trip was that I used part of that long ride to figure out how to use Instagram. After years of hearing about how I should use it, I am finally on board! For those of you w

Unexpected Adventures in Communication
Adventures in writing. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say adventures caused by writing. That was the theme of my personal life this week. Twice I had the opportunity to deal in person with discussions stimulated by something I had written in this blog. The first was when the person who was the stimulus for my piece a couple weeks ago on anger, suddenly turned to me and asked, "So what was it that you were angry about in your blog?" "What blog?" Oh... Yeah... No, he hadn't

Rhythm Cycles
My weekend was wild and wacky and full of adventure. Fortunately it was the good kind of wacky and wild that includes a lot of singing. It is funny how even unconsciously, we operate in rhythm cycles. Exactly two months ago, I wrote this newsletter talking about how I had sung for two kirtan events in one weekend. Both weekends included a car trip, where I was lucky enough to be a passenger (let's go car nap!) to a city in Southern NC. I had even used the same photo at the b

A Mess with A Message
(photos radpix.ninja) No! Yes! No! That can't be why you are posting these action shots of a Vitamix explosion... Au contraire, it most definitely is... For those of you who can interpret Stream of Consciousness, this does in fact mean that I had a Vitamix explosion in my kitchen today. Not only did the most powerful blender on the planet get to thrust its contents all over every surface imagineable in my kitchen, there happened to be a wooden spoon in there at the time. Yep.

Make New Friends (but Keep the Old)
I truly hope all of you remained safe and warm over this snow weekend. As much as I intend to/fantasize about staying home and taking care of all those little homemaking projects, it only took about 3 hours on Friday morning before I had cabin fever. I can't say that I have come to a point of complete acceptance with who and how I am as a person; however, the level of guilt I feel for my non-domestic goddessry has gone down over time. So anyway embracing my need for adventure

Catering to the Divine
My holiday was wild and wacky and full of adventure. After the very full two days of cooking for Govinda's, Thursday was packed with work and then two different kirtan events. The second one, an evening of community kirtan at Triangle Yoga in Chapel Hill, was a magical, musical extravaganza that I am sure will be well-remembered by those who came. A full video of my band, Samadhi, performing a chant can be found here. Then the next day I had work, a quick but meaningful kirta

A (Damn Good) Side of Southern Surprise
It has been a while since I have done a review for you all. You might surmise that this means that it has been a while since I went out somewhere. That would be the correct thing to surmise. It is easy to get so caught up in cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry, that one day bleeds into another and before you know it, entire weeks have gone by. This is especially true when you cook for a living, and especially, especially true when you cook for a living out of your home. Has