Nandita Godbole – The Ingredients of a Woman

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author, cookbook, inspiration, woman

Nandita Godbole

The first thing you should know about Nandita Godbole is how to pronounce her name, the right way, the given way, the Mumbai way—Mumbai being where she was born. It’s “nun-dee-tah goad-bow-lay.” Of course, if you were from India, you’d know because there are several famous actresses with the same first name.

In Atlanta, the city Nandita now calls home, she may not be a household name—not yet. Maybe soon though. Nandita is best known here as a cookbook author and frequent speaker around town.

We met at a local literary festival where I had the pleasure of moderating a panel of three local cookbook authors, including Nandita. Now, let me say, all three were fabulous cooks, authors, and entertainers. But, something about Nandita captured my attention.

Perhaps it was the exotic spices she described, cinnamon, nutmeg, turmeric, and mace. Even writing the words now brings those soft scents to my nose.

Perhaps it was the saree she wore for the event. A translucent aquamarine, sparkling with teardrop-shaped inlays of teal.

Perhaps it was her husband and daughter in the audience who snapped photos and beamed the entire time Nandita spoke, though they no doubt had heard Nandita say the same words before. Their pride in her and her achievements was obvious.

Whatever the reason, I took Nandita at her word. “The curry you think you know,” she said, “is nothing like any one of the dozens of curries available.” With that, I visited her recipe website (currycravingskitchen.com), “cracked” open a copy of Crack the Code—Nandita’s book whose cover proclaims the reader can “cook any Indian meal with confidence,”—and dove in. With Nandita’s spirit whispering encouragement over my shoulder I did manage to make Fish Cakes with Herb Butter, if not as lovely in its final presentation as her illustration, at least as tasty as I imagine hers would be. It was a matter of following the detailed instructions and mouth-watering illustrations in the book.

I would be remiss to portray Nandita as simply a cookbook author. Like the code in her book, Nandita is a layered and complex woman. She studied botany in India, came to the US to study landscape architecture and became a cookbook author and, with the release of her newest book, Not for You, a memoirist.

It’s in the writings of her memories of India and family and traditions that we can see some of what makes Nandita who she is and perhaps what intrigued me at our first meeting. In the book Not for You, over the course of the tale of three generations of her family, Nandita tells of the ingredients of her life, Love. Marriage. Denial. Crisis. Fear. Abandonment. Determination. Food. Comfort. Home.  It’s the “code” and explains how food became central to her life and her identity.

For more on Nandita, visit her websites and crack open your own copy of one of her books.
See https://www.currycravingskitchen.com for her recipes
See https://www.currycravings.com/home for posts on dining, travel, and her cooking classes
See http://currycravings.wixsite.com/turmericpress for how to purchase her books
And a list of her upcoming appearances around town is included at http://bit.ly/CC_TP_NFY1app

Linda Sands – A Woman Walks Into a Bar

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author, Linda Sands, woman

Linda Sands stands six feet tall in four inch silver stilettos when she’s strutting her stuff, five feet ten inches in her western-style boots zipping in and out of Nashville honky-tonks during the annual Killer Nashville conference, five feet eight barefoot on the beach in Florida, and ten feet off the ground in the cab of an eighteen wheeler (more about that later). And yes, she’s a blonde. But don’t think for a minute Linda is the stereotypical blonde on the wrong end of “did you hear the one about” fame.  You would be sorely mistaken.

Linda Sands is an Atlanta-based writer who earned her stripes the hard way, with gritty, determined writing and non-stop savvy promotion.  She’s the winner of the 2016 Georgia Writer of the Year Award and two Silver Falchion Judge’s Choice Awards from Killer Nashville for her noir mystery, 3 Women Walk Into a Bar.

Exuding confidence wherever she goes, Linda dares to use a numeral at the front of her title. Think how much less interesting “Three” Women Walk Into a Bar would be. And, just as you’re asking what kind of novel is it anyway, know that the three women in the title are dead on page one. That alone takes a lot of bravado. What are you going to do for the other 291 pages, some would ask.

Her readers answer. In quotes from a handful of reviews: weird and irreverent, peppered with humor, sexy, funny, multi-layered, spunk, as fresh and deliberate as a sucker punch in the face, a bit noir, a bit off-beat, and a heckuva good time. That’s what they say about the book, not Linda, or maybe it’s both.

Best of all, though her ratings run the gamut from great reviews from great writers to the “not for me’s,”  Linda keeps on smiling and keeps on writing. It’s just my opinion but I think that is one element of Linda’s secret sauce. She doesn’t look back and just keeps on rolling.

Rolling, literally. Her latest novel Grand Theft Cargo takes us into the world of eighteen wheelers. Research for the novel included face-to-face and in-the-cab interviews with long-haul truckers. At the outset, Linda wanted to create a coffee-table photography book in partnership with a friend and photographer, but the stories kept growing and the idea for her novel featuring trucker Jojo Boudreaux and her co-driver Tyler Boone was born. What? You thought maybe a trucker named Sally or Jane?  Not in Linda’s book.  Prepare yourself as the cover says for “a secretive highwayman, explosive house bombs, singing telegrams, flaming mice,” and more…

What a romp ahead!

In Linda’s words, “There’s more to come.”

Read more about Linda Sands on her website: lindasands.com

Still Life With Quilt

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artist, memoir, mother, quilting, relationship, sister, woman, women

In the months before she died, my mother obsessed over a single event from her early life—a time when she scrawled an image on the kitchen wall, displaying her skill and testing the bounds of parental authority.  Why she returned to that event, telling the story over and over despite the fog of dementia, no one can ever say.  But I speculate her passion for creative expression had a lot to do with how she lived her life, what she chose to remember about it, and what she was proud to pass on.

Over the years, I’ve marveled at how her talent, one microscopic gene on a tiny strand of DNA manifested itself in each of her children.  In my younger sister’s case, it’s at the surface —sometimes in physical appearance, when the light is right and she holds her head at a certain angle.  She paints and sculpts, meeting the technical definition of an artist, but labels her work “completely mixed media.”

Artist.

Not the word my older sister would likely use to describe herself, and yet, she too has a good dollop of my mother’s legacy.  In her case, the inheritance is more a liberal sprinkling of creative dust, like a first winter snow across the landscape.

Recently, she took up the almost forgotten art of quilting.  While our grandmother taught us to knit and crochet so many years ago now, my sister’s quilting is self-taught.  Quilting is a process she describes as creating pattern out of chaos.  Though influenced by available colors and patterns, she says the quilt comes together only after experimenting with myriad arrangements of pieces of fabric.  Her “quilt in progress” is a compilation of hexagons in a dozen ice cream colors, sure to delight a three-year-old granddaughter in her pink phase.  Assembled on a spare wall where she can arrange and rearrange the pieces, the effect is more free-flowing than a series of straight-edged hexagons might suggest.  Still as she contemplates the design, my sister wonders if she’s made chaos out of pattern rather than the other way around.

My mother’s batting three for three, so to speak.

As I consider her endowment, however, I realize how much or little I know about my siblings.  I know, of course, they are wives and mothers and grandmothers and aunts (or in my brother’s case a husband and father and uncle).  But, if asked, I couldn’t say how each would describe their life’s work and their legacy.

From the perspective of a writer (the creativity manifestation I’ll claim), I challenged myself.  I’d explore my sister’s psyche from a distance.  The effort, familiar, like breathing life into a fictional character.

Let’s call her “Liz” and say she is five feet three inches tall with blond hair and blue eyes, though the sterile description offers little insight.  Instead, I could say, she has my mother’s hands, slender fingers with nails in perfect ovals compared with my flat and stunted ones, or she wears her hair in close-cropped curls that conceal gray more effectively than any salon’s dye.  Still, these are barely more than physical attributes.  And I want to give my character more flesh, more color, more life.

As we’re separated by considerable distance, we see each other only once or twice a year.  So what I have to complete the exercise are bits and pieces of a life, images and memories of her logged away in my head.  They’re like little hexagons and squares and rectangles I have to arrange to reveal the woman, or, in quilting terms, make pattern out of chaos.

In her role as mother, and endowed with another family trait, a love of food, my sister cooked countless family dinners.  Occasionally, she shared recipes she’d borrowed, tweaked, worked and reworked, and perfected.  While I experiment in the kitchen, and sometimes relegate an entire meal to the garbage disposal, a few of Liz’s recipes are family lore.  If her thanksgiving specialty, caramelized pecans and sweet potatoes, is absent from the table, everyone is disappointed.

And, while I am on the subject of mothers, let me not overlook the art of motherhood.  Liz is mother to three—all adults, all gainfully employed and all with families of their own.  Not one has robbed a bank, dealt in drugs, or run off to join Ringling Brothers, at least, not that I know.  It’s an achievement deserving of the word “art” in capital letters.

Liz also has a facility with words, this perhaps inherited from my father’s side.  She’s a wordsmith, someone I would not want to tangle with in a game of Scrabble, or “Words with Friends”.  She’s fluent in French, a language we both learned as children.  I long ago forgot all but a token tourist phrase or two, but somehow the language stayed lodged in her brain and on the tip of her tongue.  She’s worked as an editor and copy writer and authored a children’s book.  She’s a voracious reader and devours two or three books a week.  And, as far as the more traditional visual arts go, she’s painted landscapes and still lifes, even sold a few.

As I reflect, I realize how many pieces and shapes I’ve unearthed from memory.  Perhaps, if I tack them to the wall, step back, and squint my eyes, I’ll see my sister as a whole woman.  Sister, daughter, wife, mother, aunt, grandmother, and artist.

One you can expect to see in disguise in a future novel.