Monday, December 27, 2010

Chikki cannot cross the world

In India, I LOVED Chikki! The first time I had it was from this shop:

I don't know the name of that very dinky village. It was "in Velhe," which (I guess) is a district, and it was past the only real village of any size (which might itself have been named "Velhe" but I don't know). http://maps.thefullwiki.org/Velhe If anyone who was there that day can name me names, I'd appreciate it.

I ate chikki several times in India, and then I brought three kinds home. But... it was hard as a rock. We don't have the low elevation and the humidity it needs to live its long life.

I went to check the elevation of Pune:
560 m (1,840 ft) above sea level ... with its tallest hill, Vetal Hill, rising to 800 m (2,600 ft) above sea level
Albuquerque is
4,900 feet (1,490 m) above sea level near the Rio Grande (in the Valley) to over 6,700 feet (1,950 m) in the foothill areas
I'm in the foothills. Chikki doesn't like that.

Chikki is made of ground nuts and jaggery. We have ground nuts. Peanuts, we call them. We don't have jaggery. I think it's a cousin of molasses but it looks nothing on earth like molasses.

While I was in there, I see the temperatures by season:
Winter begins in November; November in particular is referred to as the Rosy Cold (literal translation) (Marathi: गुलाबी थंडी). The daytime temperature hovers around 28 °C (82 °F) while night temperature is below 10 °C (50 °F) for most of December and January, often dropping to 5 to 6 °C (41 to 43 °F). The lowest temperature ever recorded was 1.7 °C on January 17, 1935.
So it hasn't frozen in the city ever!?

Well.... chikki freezes when it goes from Pune to Albuquerque. I'm just sayin'...
(Haven't attempted microwaving it to see if it will soften it up a little, temporarily.)

Source of stats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pune