1006 posts since 2008

Tag: South Indian Cooking Tour

Welcome! Sharing my reflections on the spiritual path.
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Feb 25, 2012

At the Ayyanar temple

Ayyanar is a village god, loosely affiliated with Hinduism, but emerging from a folk tradition of protective deities that keep disease and misfortune away from small rural villages. In one area of Tamil Nadu, the Ayyanar cult is particularly strong and many villages have Ayyanar shrines on the outskirts of town, where, for hundreds of years, villagers have offered terracotta horses to Ayyanar as t...

Feb 25, 2012 Spiritual Adventures

Learning Chettinad Cooking

Our spiritual and culinary adventure is coming to a conclusion and today we had our last cooking class. It was on two Chettinad style dishes. The first was "Mint Chutney" and the second "Kola Urundai Kolambu". Here's the recipe for the "Mint Chutney" that we learned today. Ingr
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Feb 25, 2012 Spiritual Adventures

Fire ceremony at Pillayarpatti

Today we went to the small town of Pillayarpatti in the heartland of Chettinad to an ancient Ganesha temple. The priests in the temple come from the best priest training school in South India and the ceremonies are conducted with incredible rigor and to the highest standard. Anci
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Feb 24, 2012 Spiritual Adventures

Bathing the Elephant

Driving down the road to Thanjavur, we crossed a river where a temple elephant was about to get one of her two daily baths. We leapt from the bus and hurried down to the river side to watch. Olga led the charge and quickly developed a special affinity with Shamala the eleph
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Feb 22, 2012 Spiritual Adventures

Lunch with a priest's family

The only way to taste true Tamil cuisine is to be fortunate enough to be invited for lunch with a family. We had that pleasure yesterday when we dined at the home of Kailas Deeksitar, a priest at the spectacular Chidambaram temple. We were greeted by his wife, son and daughter.
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Feb 22, 2012 Spiritual Adventures

Inside the sanctum of Chidambaram

Through our close connections with the priests of Chidambaram, we were able to go into parts of the vast temple that are rarely seen by outsiders. From an elevated balcony, we can look directly onto the golden roof that covers the inner sanctum where Shiva Nataraja is worship
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Feb 20, 2012 Spiritual Adventures

Relaxed cows of Pondicherry

Pondicherry is a beautiful seaside French colonial town. Beautiful 19th century architecture and contented cows (although maybe not as Ben and Jerry envisioned them.)
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