The best onion dip...and the best baby shower!

It's pretty hard to believe that I'm due to be a mommy in 13 days! Even though I think that our little chipmunk might be a little late, I'm officially on maternity leave and enjoying all those pre-baby moments... watching Luis put together our cute, jungle-themed nursery, packing my hospital bag (this I should have done before!) and enjoying time with my mom who is spending several months in Bangkok to help us with the baby (thank heavens!). Yesterday, she and my friends here threw me a most amazing baby shower at our place. The theme was Alice in Wonderland, but they managed to merge that with the Tamil valaikaapu tradition and lots of other fun and cute touches to make for a truly wonderful afternoon. Here are some of the highlights:

Vegetable tajine

Hello, dear spice lovers! Apologies for the long silence around here. Other than approaching the end of my pregnancy and moving to a new (much bigger) apartment (with a HUGE kitchen by the way!), my domain name had expired, unbeknownst to me. Turned out that it was sold by the bad folks at GoDaddy.com, without any warning! Grrrrrrr. So I've reincarnated with a new domain (via a new host of course)....http://www.mistress-of-spices.net! Be sure to update your links and streams, and please do bare with me if some of the links on the page are broken...I'm working on fixing them all bit by bit! In the meanwhile, I wanted to share with you a wonderful recipe for a vegetable tajine. You've probably figured out by now that Luis and I are both huge fans of Moroccan and other North African food. In our years in Paris, food from this part of the world was a regular part of our repertoire. We've also traveled in Morocco and loved it there. So even though it's quite far removed from our lives here in Thailand, we still regularly make Moroccan food. Case in point...this delicious tajine!