Saffron.

Since I've made a life out of going to class to learn a thing or two about having an opinion, I can't help but to notice that I've been making less and less trips in a week to Carrefour. There were times when I made three trips in a day just to get a lemon, and then to go back in the middle of an afternoon to get coriander leaves, and then one last trip in the evening to get me another bottle of liquid detergent because I don't feel too good if I'm down to only two bottles of liquid detergent in the house. World leaders can fight tooth and nail over issues like the price of oil, or they may decide to start World War III between them. Or the world may be in total chaos because of something like alien invasion, or ozone layer suddenly burst open. These can happen either in a series of events, or they may happen simultaneously. As far as I'm concerned I gotta have at least three bottles of liquid detergent in the house because I need clean plates, clean cups and saucers, clean pots and pans, clean forks and spoons, and clean knives. As long as I've got these cleaned, I believe I can take all the madness that the world has to give so you see, I won't last a day without liquid detergent.

Same thing with saffron. I gotta make sure I have to have at least 500 gm of it in the house at any given time of the year in order to feel safe within the comfort of my humble home. Saffron means security, peace of mind, and the will power to see through another day. That's why I gotta be a bit more careful with it compared with the way I use liquid detergent. I get my supply of saffron from Isketambola and since Isketambola isn't exactly on the South side of town, I gotta make sure that I only use it in dishes for special occasion. I started with about a kilo and half saffron about a year ago. You can imagine how much cooking I've done with dishes where saffron is an important ingredient. These days I try to resist the temptation of putting saffron in every meal I cook but sometimes it is hard since I'm used to having it even in non-Moroccan or non-Middle-Eastern dishes like ikan kembung goreng kunyit, or masak daging pindang.

A thief may break into my house to cart anything he wants but he'd better not touch my saffron which I've kept in a dark cool place together with extra virgin olive oil and sun-dried tomatoes. This compartment in my kitchen is out-of-bound even to myself that I have to have a special clearance if I need to open it. I fill in the application form, put it in an envelope addressed to myself and I then all I've gotta do is stamp approve it myself. It's nice when you are accountable only to yourself in matters such as this but I reckon this shouldn't be standard practice if you are the CEO of a company. You might put in the proposal for a bigger share option and then you put the recommendation letter in an envelope addressed to yourself and you ask your secretary to open it and then you stamp approve it the way I do with saffron. A lot of companies went belly up this way but in my case it is pardonable because all I got after a good meal with saffron in it is a filled up belly. Which is different from belly up.

Speaking of the belly, it has become quite trendy these days to organize charity dinner featuring belly dancers performed by members of the organizing committee so people who have bought a table may bid a dancer with whom you can have a picture taken in a dramitic pose like you are about to smack a kiss on her bosom. I left the room quietly when the bidding was going full swing and there was so much noise in the ballroom that a plane might belly land on the roof of this hotel and these people wouldn't know what hit them. So I left quietly for them to carry on what they were doing. No. That's not entirely honest. I left because I thought the belly dancing wasn't the kinda performance that I'd consider first class. I've seen the best so I reckon it's best that I not see one unless it is any good. Besides, the food they served had no saffron in it which I think is not right since the event was conceived as a Middle-Eastern experience. The only thing Middle-Eastern about it was supposed to be the belly dance but I thought they got it all wrong with the kinda clothes they put on. Let's not talk about it because you might think I'm trying to be smart commenting on something I know little about.

I started with saffron. How did I get from there to belly dancing?