Planning ahead

Christmas is coming, you'd think it would be a good idea to plan ahead. It would be a good idea, but in India, planning ahead isn't always easy. We want to go to one of the hotels to have Christmas lunch. One because we think it would be lovely. Two because I have no idea where to get a turkey. And three, because even if I knew where to get a turkey, there's no way I'm cooking it in my kitchen. I have an oven and a roasting tin. And I have a three ring hob. The hob's so small (compact and bijou, peut-etre?), I can only use two of the burners at once. Depending upon the size of the pans, it's generally the medium fast burner, which at it's lowest has flames dancing up the sides of the pan, and the fast burner, which surprisingly (not!), is even faster. In the middle of these two is my slow burner. When I put a pan on that one I can't get pans to balance on the other two. So I stick to simple recipes. This suits me just fine, because it means my kitchen's not rostered on for Christmas lunch.

So on the weekend we tried to book somewhere. More than one of the hotels told us we were too early and they hadn't decided what they were doing yet. I'm thinking, come on...it's 11 days to Christmas, what do you mean you haven't decided yet! So I asked my new quilting group. Except for our leader, Anju, they're all expats. Lots of Australians, some Americans, a Canadian, a Venezuelan, a Sri Lankan and a handful of Belgians, Swiss and Germans. The Delhi long-timers said the hotels do Christmas lunch every year, so we needn't worry. Anju thought we shouldn't try to firm anything up before Dec 23rd. I told her if we'd left booking Christmas lunch until December 14 in Britain they'd say "Christmas 2009? No madam, we booked the last table, the one next to the kitchen door, in October". In Australia they'd just laugh at us. Loudly. For quite a long time.