Diwali Celebration and Banana Sushi

We celebrated Diwali at our home over the weekend. This Hindu festival has been widely adopted by Buddhists and ranks up there with the Christian Christmas holiday, except that it’s been spared the feverish and flat-out insane consumerism that Christmas can brag about. I wonder what Jesus what do if he came back and saw what was being done in his name. I envision him hiring a lawyer and suing to have his name forever removed from the whole ghastly mess.

Our own Diwali celebration is low-key: the outdoor shrine is decorated with lights and bathed in incense for two days, candles burn at our indoor shrine, and I cook traditional food. I made big pots of chhole (chana) curry and rice that lasted two days, and an easy vegan mandaka with lots of molasses. It was an understated celebration, just how I like it. May the light forever defeat darkness.

I put a lot of time into seed saving Sunday. The rudebeckia seed heads were dry and ready for the seeds to be removed. Rudebeckia seeds are incredibly tiny and difficult to remove and round up. It’s hard to tell what’s chaff and what’s seed. It took forever to pick apart the seed heads and sift out the miniscule seeds. But we have a lot of seeds now, and I see many friends getting free seeds and seedlings next spring.

Sunflowers were next. We hung the seed heads upside down about a month ago and let them dry. Pulling sunflower seeds from dried husks is also challenging. Today, the tips of my fingers are chapped and sore from picking into the sharp parts of the dried sunflower heads to extract the seeds. Here's a photo of one of the dried seed heads: it looks a little like a heart.

I also collected more morning glory seeds. The vines are still producing ripe seed capsules, and I intend to collect as many as possible before the first snow flies. We have an impressive amount of these seeds too, and I’ll share them come spring.

I’m still drinking lots of chai, but this weekend, I made it using a green matcha powder I bought at my favorite health food store several months ago. It’s a pricey Japanese matcha and I didn’t want to burn through it fast, but it’s foolish to wait for tomorrow what can be enjoyed today. So, I brewed up several bowls of matcha, chai spices, and ground cardamom in simmering water, then added oat milk and agave, and frothed it all. Matcha chai latte. It was yummy with our homemade mandaka. Matcha chai is going to be a new thing for me.

Tonight’s dinner is my banana sushi: I’ll post the recipe on this blog later today. It will contain one garden-fresh component – some of the Italian parsley that’s still going strong in our greens garden. I love that we’re still eating something wholesome and homegrown, even if it’s just parsley - on October 23.

Barbie xo