Our Guest Recipe Poster- Ranjana... and me.

A big thanks to our special guest recipe contributor on Bengfort.com- Ranjana Sharma. Ranjana, or Rani as we call her at school, is a classmate of mine at NDSU. Not only is she a skilled computer scientist, chemist, polymer-magician, teacher, and student, but she is also an amazing cook! This is probably due to the fact that she has over 90 graduate degrees, most of which are chemical related, and she can therefore explain the mysterious molecular magic of masala.

Born in Madhya Pradesh (Central India), she is an expert roti maker. However, as her father was in a transferable job, she didn’t grow up in one place in India. Even though she traveled all over India’s varying cuisine geography, she was delighted to find that our own Guyana Cookbook had such similar recipes to her own “home style” food.

I was super lucky to be assigned the same office as her, because as soon as she discovered the Guyana Cookbook, she was determined to feed me her distinct version of Indian cooking to see how well it compared. After a semester of mostly taco bell, subway, and absolutely nothing spicy in North Dakota, it came as a welcome relief to warm up my frozen, flooded self. For the rest of my time at North Dakota, my classmates and I were treated to feasts that could not be found anywhere else in the Midwest, feasts that were very reminiscent of home.

Shweta & I enjoying Ranjana's Cooking

It is purely my fault, that I haven’t yet asked Rani to contribute to our growing World Cookbook. I’m truly sorry that it has taken this long to get her recipes up. As Ranjana is a strict vegetarian, I’m sure that Jaci especially is going to enjoy these recipes! I’m sure the rest of you will also recognize them as you make them, either from Nanee’s cooking, from Indian restaurants, or from your friend’s Indian cooking. The one distinct thing about them, though, is that they are cooked in a home-style that you probably won’t get elsewhere, and while the dishes are recognizable, the recipes and taste is very unique.

So, Rani has already posted 9 recipes to the blog. They aren’t on the front page, because we posted them under the auspicious date December 19, 2009. However, you can find all her recipes, and future posts under her author page: http://www.bengfort.com/author/ranjana/. (Or by looking up the Indian Cooking Tag, or the World Recipes Category, etc. etc.) I’m pretty sure she is planning on gracing us with more (hopefully). But here are links to the first few:

• Chhole
• Gulab Jamun
• Halwa
• Khatta Aloo
• Masala
• Matar Paneer
• Pao Bhaji
• Rajma
• Shahi Paneer

I know the girls especially are going to be excited by the Gulab Jamun recipe! So these recipes are still a little bare, and are missing pictures and descriptions, but don’t worry, as Ranjana and I cook them, more content will be added. Enjoy!

Therefore I give you: A guide to identifying a graduate student working on a thesis during the summer in North Dakota:

Sweatshirt, yet FlipFlops

This pictures help identify how graduate students in the summer dress. The undergrads are mostly concerned about the opposite sex, so they dress in tight fitting or “cool” clothes. Graduate students don’t really care about too much except for temperature. ND Summer (at least this summer) is both warm and cold- frost in the morning, 80s during the day. Therefore, shorts and a sweatshirt- and flipflops!

Sleepless, Coffee, Work, Games

In the summer there is this false assumption that you can sleep in, therefore you stay up late working. Unfortunately, even though you don’t have to get up at 530, the day is pretty much shot unless you get up at 630.

Note the beard

Other identifying features: unshavenness (no time), coffee (no sleep), crazy eyed look (too much reading), and unkempt hair (no care).

Ben's Marathon Race Results

Beci's Marathon Race Results

Fargo, Grand Forks, and Bismarck remain safe and mostly dry- these are the major cities, and I suspect that is the reason for the lack of national news coming out of this state. However, the flood has mostly wiped out the town of Catherine (a small time near us), and caused a lot of trouble in Valley City and Lisbon… so pretty much I picked the worst place to live in North Dakota!The guard has been deployed in pretty much full force to the area. It is hard to go anywhere without seeing HUMVEEs, Black Hawks, Soldiers, or LAVs with dirt in the back of them. So pretty much, still a war zone out here.

Back at Tim and Pat’s house- they have become an island- affectionately named Arrowhead Island. The Sheyenne has taken an oxbow that now goes over the road in front of the house and then back to the river through Grandma and Grandpa’s house. As a result, they and the neighbors are completely cut off from the road- and we have to take a boat to go back and forth one side to the other. Luckily, they managed to get most of the cars parked on the other side before the road became impassible (it is now a waterfall) so to get out you simply canoe or row to the other side, and grab your car to head out. The amount of mud is incredible!

The Sheyenne once again set a record, this time at 22.4 feet- a few feet above the previous record of 19.7 set a couple of weeks ago. As a result, the sandbag dike at the back of the house is now replaced with an earthen clay dike that completely surrounds the house thanks to the water coming in from all sides. The clay dike is at about 24 feet high- and the water is up against it, and leaking underneath slowly. Tim and Pat have been spending many sleepless nights checking on the water and resetting pumps to continually pump out the leakages that are occuring- I can’t imagine this has been any fun for them (or the dogs for that matter).

The water has started to go down- but not by much, and not very fast. We are hoping by the end of next week to have it down enough that the constant pumping can cease, but it is hard to tell when the road will come back or even when the water will be removed. It’s a pretty bad situation. Meanwhile, I have been working extremely hard for the end of the semester and have been spending most of my nights sleeping in my pickup because driving back to the flood is just unmanageable. Sleeping in the truck got tough after a while, and when Mike came for the weekend, at least I had a bed and a hotel room- and one of my classmates let me stay with him a night. Now I’m staying with Beci and Ben- the end of the semester is 3 weeks away, and it looks like I might be with them to the end!

And now, some pictures …

Winston is initially curious about truck driving.

Some of you may know that Tim is driving a fuel tanker now from ethanol plants in the south to gas pipelines here up north. Fuel prices have recently shot up thanks to the current events in this region, and the trucking company has been desperate for drivers- so as a result he is on the road today, even though the roads aren’t so good. Yesterday we decided that we should probably go to where the semi was parked and brush it off, warm it up, and generally prepare it for work; and since Winston has been getting cabin fever along with the rest of us, we decided to take him for a little puppy ride.

At first he was very interested in the Semi, and he really enjoys riding in the back seat of the pick up truck. I suspect watching out the window of a moving vehicle is akin to doggy TV. However, as the day drew on, Winston realized that being a trucker dog meant a lot of hard work and getting tossed about.

Pain number 1: Winston tries to get into the semi. As you can see from the above picture, the cab of the semi is probably about twice Winston’s height. That didn’t stop him. He jumped, he missed, he fell in the mud- and he was very displeased. Unfortunately we weren’t paying much notice to Winston because we had just discovered that the semi was stuck- really stuck, and we couldn’t get it out.

Pain number 2: In the last of our several attempts to free the semi from the mud, we tried to tow it out with the pickup. Unfortunately, Winston had to sit in the back seat for the duration of this indignity. And as we drove forward trying to jerk the semi out, he was tossed around the back because he couldn’t figure out the seatbelt. Needless to say, he isn’t so fond of the idea of a trucker dog anymore.

Gives driver dirty look after being tossed about in the back.

15 Inches of Snow Bury Us

It’s April- it’s spring… right? Well, the past three days wouldn’t make you think it was… we have been pummeled by a snowstorm that layed us down with around 15 inches of snow, and it hasn’t stopped yet! So, this is North Dakota, and it snows a lot- sure, but these unseasonable snow storms are part of the dramatic weather that is affecting this region, and all of us are wondering a few things:

1. When will it stop snowing?
2. How will this affect the floods?
3. Why the heck did I give up alcohol for lent?

The snow is heavy and wet snow- so flood management personnel are going back and forth on whether or not this will delay the next flood crests, or if it will make things horribly worse. What it depends on is the temperature, which isn’t suppossed to go above freezing until the weekend, and when it does melt- everything is going to rise. Right now we are hearing predicted crests of 22 feet on the Sheyenne here in Lisbon (the last crest was 20.1) sometime next week. Of course, when they predict 22 feet, that means it will either be 20 feet or 25 feet according to the stats from last week.

So we have been pretty much burried here. There has been no travel (nor the ability to travel) since Sunday. I-29: the interstate I take to Fargo is still closed because of a frozen snowey lake on the roadway, but really there is not much other news- we are all just getting a little bit of cabin fever and trying to dig our way out.

On Friday, NDSU closed for the entirety of next week. The administration is still discussing how the academics will be handled when we return, but they couldn’t justify opening the university when so many folks have evacuated. This leaves me in a precarious position both as a student and as an instructor- I have no idea how my school work is going to be affected, nor how I am going to handle missing 2 weeks of school for my own class! For instance, this Wednesday I had my seminar presentation scheduled- a presentation that each of us have only once a semester. It will be difficult to make this up since there are just as many students in the seminar as there are weeks of the school year; and my entire grade is based on that presentation!  Rumors abound that in the flood of ’97 NDSU simply canceled the rest of the semester, giving students whatever grade they had when the school closed. However, in ’97, the flooding happened much later (middle of April, not the end of March), and frankley, I can’t imagine that happening again without a major disaster occurring.

Minor disasters have been occurring around the area. Today a fixed damn around a school broke, and even after two hours of fighting the water, it simply couldn’t be stopped. As you might imagine, one crack in a dike quickly becomes a big one. Other people have literally lost loved ones (as in misplaced) because of the medical evacuations out of Fargo. A fellow parishioner at our church struggled to find his wife over the weekend because he was told she was medevaced to Minneapolis when in fact she was transferred to Bismarck. So the after affects of even the amount of flooding we have had so far are going to be far reaching.

As always, here are more pictures taken today during our lookey-lou, which are probably more interesting to you than my reporting! (Leave comments!)

The dike that protects our farm is at 19 feet- so you might imagine that we are overflowing right now- strangely enough, we aren’t. This morning we started moving sandbags into the garage of a neighbor and turned the heat up (to defrost them, they were frozen solid)- and we walked down to the river bank, and to our surprise the water was a foot below the dike! We suspect that this is because of an ice jam farther upriver, which means that when that jam looses we are going to get it. So as soon as our bags are defrosted we are going to raise the backup dike a few feet to try to protect ourselves that way. So far it is hard to know what is going to happen- the NOAA predictions keep showing that the river is supposed to decrease in height, but actual measurements have been going up– they have revised the forecast in light of that several times, but have still been inaccurate. Track the river heights for: Lisbon and Fargo at the NOAA Advanced Hydrologic Prediction service.

Fargo is definitely getting the worst of it, and NDSU has been closed for the entire week. No word if the campus has been closed or not, but hospitals and a few neighborhoods are being evacuated over there. Even if I wanted to get to Fargo, I can’t because the roads between us and Fargo are closed by floods over the roads that have frozen and won’t release. (I guess I could just say they are covered in ice, but that really doesn’t describe why they are closed!) So that is my update- if you have any specific questions, I recommend not listening to CNN- they tend to over-dramatize and underplay actual facts- so leave me a comment and I will do my best to answer more scientifically!

I’ll leave you with a few more pictures of the flood for your interest!

1. The river and the overpour over the dike has frozen- stopping the water from encroaching towards the house, and actually retreating it a little.
2. Created a new ice block farther upstream that has lowered the river levels here.
3. Delayed the crest- the predicted river heights have dropped significantly, only to rise again next week.

What this has given us is a respite, although an unwelcome one. If we had rain, we would have been in a world of hurt, but thanks to the snow, we have a delay before this melts to cause us the problems, but it has in essence slowed down the current problems. So now, instead of a nice balmy 50 degrees to do our flood prevention work in, we have to do it in below freezing weather with killer wind and frozen sandbags!

I have no idea what this means for school- which is now closed for pretty much the entire week. I’m getting further and further behind on school work, and I have comprehensive exam coming up. So if you notice any mental breakdowns in the future- you’ll know why!

Just to be copyright-correct, I am providing a link to the WDAY 6 Fargo website where the video is embedded: http://www.wday.com/