Here's the second strip of the second Comic Konga!. Click on the image to see the full strip.

This was actually the first strip drawn but I wanted to post it after the single panel from yesterday. Tomorrow's strip has been penciled; I only have to ink and scan it, perhaps shade it in like this one. Like I said yesterday I think I'm not going to do full colour versions (Today's strip is done in shades of desaturated blue). For no other reason than, like most Indians, I have a bit of a lenient hand with colour and it always ends up gaudier than I would like (strangely this is only a problem with my illustration work; my colour sense works fine when I'm doing design).

V

Modern Indians have never heard of slow food.

In the great 20th century drive for ever more urgent instant gratification, India developed demands of food and its providers that would stump even the cleverest American fast food giant. We want any dish off a menu of 200 items, and we want it here within five minutes. An Indian waiter will very reluctantly inform you that a special dish will take fifteen minutes to arrive, with good reason: most people will both complain about the time as they place the order, and then precisely five minutes later they’ll yell at the waiter for their food being ‘late’.

We also want it to taste like it was slowly cooked over a coal fire for two hours, and we will not settle for anything less. The second most common outburst from the Indian restaurant patron is that the plate of baingan bharta that has just arrived does not -- horror of horrors! -- taste exactly like the baingan bharta he’s had in every restaurant across the country for the past forty years.

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Burji is an Indian Railway Station institution. Throughout the country, stands with sizzling cast iron griddles serve up plate after plate of this stuff with soft, butter-seared pillows of pav bread late into the night. You shovel it off steel plates, sopping up every last bit with the spongy bread, and perhaps contemplating another serving (or even eyeing the tray of sheep's brains which the stall also prepares in a similar way.).

It's hard to say which came first; the silky, creamy Continental version of scrambled eggs, or this spicy Indian one (anda bhurji). It's fair to say that both could have cropped up independently, and I'm certain that scrambled eggs were invented before the omelet (everyone tries to pass off a failed omelet as scrambled eggs when they're learning).

I like both versions; they each have their purpose. The Indian, for instance, wouldn't be the best match with buttered white toast and ketchup, and the Continental would not take to chapattis very well. They're both easy and quick to make (though this one requires a few more ingredients), and are equally scrumptious.

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Just before I went on vacation last January, I realised that there were still a couple of potatoes left in the house. They had already been around for a while and had started to sprout eyes. I decided on a whim to just leave them out and see what grew. When I came backthey were still there, shriveled, and the eyes had grown into weird clusters of purple and green tendrils. I could have probably taken pictures of them right then and there, but decided to wait.

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While scouring the pasta aisle at the hypermarket the other day, I came across a range of flavoured pastas. Now, these aren’t like instant ramen which are regular noodles with a flavour sachet of some kind, nor were they the usual coloured varieties of pasta (green and red, which are supposedly spinach and tomato or beetroot coloured).

This particular brand of pasta, Catelli Bistro (it’s made in Canada by Ronzoni Foods, Montreal) comes in flavours like ‘sundried tomato and basil spaghettini’ (which I'd tried before) and ‘lemon pepper linguine' which is what I prepared today.

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I made a quick fritatta for lunch today. I say quick because I used potato crisps instead of fresh potatoes (that version requires slicing them thin and soaking them in the egg mix).

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The Sin City team of Frank Miller and Robert Rodrigues are set to bring Will Eisner's The Spirit to the screen. Miller categorically states that the film 'won't be nostalgic'. Great!

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If you're Indian and you're more than 20 years old, chances are your family didn't have an oven at home growing up, and all baked goods were bought from the local Irani or -- on a special occasion -- Monginis.

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