I am never home and my fridge looks like a "bachelor's fridge" with lots of condiments. But there is one difference between my fridge and the typical bachelor's fridge, it is that in my fridge what was original designed as a vegetable drawer is full of East Indian spices, lentils and beans. Today I woke up to -10C and since I am just back from a southern African summer I am finding it a bit rough so I decided to make myself some sort of lentil soup to warm up.
I have put ual dall, black ural dall, white ural dall, massor dall and moong dall with some regular split peas to soak and now I have a few hours to decide if I should go the "fenugreg", "cumin and tumeric or "tomatoes and shitake" way. Though I may try something totally different and let the Lentil and lime soup receipe from Nami-Nami inspire me into a different flavour.
I love fenugreg it reminds me of Yemen. "Tumeric and cumin" is maybe too obvious and "Tomato and shitake" is too wintery I think so I ill probably try some version of a spicy lime soup today.
The black pot I included in the photo is a new small pot I bought in South Africa.
I found a woman who makes pots. The photo does not show well but there is an interesting but simple design around the rim. I think I will go and see her buy more pots and ask her to make some more for me. This one is one of the medium size one she had. She also make small round pots which fit exactly into cups hands. The trouble of course is always to bring them back without breaking them. I travel with a big duffel bag which I seldom fill and whenever I carry pottery or anything fragile, as I did coming back from Ethiopia, I just buy one or two plastic buckets, put everything in with clothes as packing material and I close them with shrink wrap. So far nearly everything has survived the trips. A few coffee cups did break coming back from Ethiopia. In this case the bucket was actually more expensive than the pot. I also threw in a few metal animals made of recycled cans.
Here is a better picture of the pot with some of the metal animals. I particularly like the lion. The guys who make those have such a fabulous sense of 3D!