My sidequests for this week involved trying a new food or drink, learning to make something with origami, and spending time out in nature.

So, Friday night I decided to doordash some food from a local Indian restaurant. The extent of my forray into Indian food has mostly just been curries, which I love, but there’s a lot that I’ve simply never tried. I ordered samosas, korma, and a few different desserts, gulab jamun, rasmalai, and kheer.

I’ve heard of samosas before but have never had them. The website describes them as lightly spiced turnovers stuffed with potatoes and green peas. They were bigger than I had expected, and came with two different dipping sauces – one kind of sweet, and the other a spicy green sauce. Whatever spices they used inside the samosas made everything look green, and was kind of similar to the green sauce. It was really good.

The korma was described as being cooked with exotic spices, herbs, cashew, almonds, and raisins in mild cream sauce. It came with rice, and I chose lamb for the meat (the option said lamb or goat, and I was thinking I might try goat as part of “something new” but then it didn’t present it as an option and the description says lamb. I have had lamb before, but only a few times – so new’ish?). It had a bit of a kick, but was still fairly mild – the first impression once it was inside my mouth was that it was very fragrant, so I’m a bit curious what the spice combination is. It was also really good, even though I’m not the biggest fan of lamb or the style of rice they use (being half-Korean, I definitely prefer my rice stickier).

And then there were the desserts. Rasmalai is made of cheese patties cooked in condensed milk with pistachios and rose water. It also had raisins and rice. My first impression of the texture of the cheese was kind of coconut’y because it was rough and crumbly. Kheer is a rice pudding flavored with cardamoms and garnished with pistachios. It was actually very similar to what the rasmalai was soaked in, and despite being described as a pudding it wasn’t very thick. Both were sweet without being too overwhelmingly sweet. The gulab jamun was described as condensed milk and homemade cheese balls deep fried in butter and dipped in sugar syrup. For something that was described as deep fried, it was very soft textured. I also would not have guessed it or the rasmalai were cheeses. They were all good, but I wouldn’t seek them out as my new favorite desserts.

This wasn’t a very hard task for me because I don’t mind trying the occasional new food.

The origami one was a little harder because I wanted to try to find something that could be made with lucky star paper strips. I bought a whole bunch years ago when I was really into folding the little bastards, but I never got around to using all of them. There was an intriguing rose design that someone had, but it was so intricate and tiny that in my ripe old age of almost 40, my hands are just arthritic enough to go, “Ha, fuck that.” So I decided to make lucky hearts – the only downside being that apparently you have to cut the round edges on them, so it was going to be very annoying to do.

Also wondered if I could cheat and just make more lucky stars because I forget how to make them easily and have to look up the instructions each time? It doesn’t say to learn to make something new with origami – just learn to make something with origami. If you know but forget, and re-learn… does it count?

So I did initially start with hearts, but the strips I have are too thin and long to make nice looking ones, so I opted to cheat and re-learn the stars. Once I followed the directions the first time it came back really easily. I decided to go ahead and make 100 and put them in a jar, for one small wish. But I didn’t really keep count and made 210.

I decided to use the nature card as an excuse to visit the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge, which I don’t do very often despite living quite near it. Unforunately I did so on Saturday, which had some nice weather, so the result was that everyone else was out there too and every parking spot for every hiking trail and picnic space was packed. In fact, I’m pretty sure I drove in on someone’s family reunion. So I didn’t find a spot to actually get out of the vehicle and enjoy anything up close. Still, I did spend a good couple of hours simply driving around and enjoying the view, which was nice.

The Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma aren’t very impressive as far as mountains go – there are many ranges that have taller mountains, and you don’t have to travel far before they’re out of sight. But it is a very very old mountain range. So old that it is more accurately described as the skeletal granite remains of a mountain range. As such, they mostly look like clumps of crumbling rock formations dropped on top of each other. A lot of people like to visit the Wildlife Refuge to fish or hang out at some of the ponds or campsites, or to go hiking along some of the trails there. They’ve also got bison, longhorn cattle, deer and elk, and a prairie dog city.