The Many Desserts of My Mother

So the rest of the travels were wonderful and are too hard to capture in blurbs, but just know that we visited a ton of really wonderful NGOs and met some inspiring, progressive people. Upon returning home, my host family was all buzzed to see me and of course fed me a monstrous meal. Then my mom whipped our her homemade barfi, which sounds really, well nauseating, but is actually sort of like soft toffee with pistachios on top. I’m of course obsessed with toffee, so I could barfi for all my meals. This is not, however, the most eventful of the desserts that she’s made. At first, she was really impressing me with her apple-pie creation and a chocolatey rum cake thing. Then she started making more “hereditary” desserts as she calls them. One of which was flour, butter, sugar, and almonds, not cooked, rolled into balls. Yes, they have enough butter in them to hold that ball. My first bite made me a little sick, but I smile, say “delicious!” and finish it. So of course, she spoons me two more and says “Take! You like sweets!” So I pick up another butter/sugar ball and chase it with a glass of water. “You should try another!” Damnit. I try to say no, which is literally impossible here, so I smile and eat it. I’m out of water, so I immediately excuse myself and go lay in my bed and fall into a sleep/food coma. The next day is my host dad’s birthday, so my mom makes her favorite desert: sweet potatoes. I’m thinking that sounds okay until she brings out a plate of cooked potatoes doused in honey. “Take! Take!”  It was quite repulsive. A couple days later, we have that similar flour ball dessert, but we’re out of butter, so it’s just a bowl of raw flour, sugar, and nuts. Eating it with a spoon though is sacrilegious; food tastes better when you eat it with your hands. Please picture eating floor, sugar, and pistachio flakes with your hands. Somehow they can do it quite gracefully and I am the big Neanderthal at the end of the table trying to catch all the pistachio pieces with my tongue. They didn’t tell me to take more that night.