Happy Holi Everyone! Holi is a Hindu holiday, known as the Festival of Colors, held in the Spring. It is yet another celebration of the triumph of good over evil, in which communities come together to share food and friendship and good times. It is particularly known as a time where people throw colored powers at each other to recognize the colors of a new season and to promote fertility and fun and fellowship in Spring, the season of rebirth.

Holi is kind of a big deal in our area. Asian Americans are the largest minority in Cary, and we tend towards more Asian Indian Americans. In our neighboring town, Morrisville, about 40% of residents are Asian Indian Americans, whereas only around 37% are White. So there are multiple celebrations scheduled with the multiple Hindu temples in our neighborhoods.

Holi this year was actually March 3 and 4. However, I was teaching a lot that week and had a cold and so no energy for making special meals. Plus, the temples were having their celebrations this weekend or next weekend, so I figured I could delay our holiday meal until the weekend. True Confession: I actually made and ate this on Sunday, not Monday. But I’m posting it today, so that counts, right? Plus we will be having some of the leftovers for dinner tonight.

I knew I was going to make some Indian food for our celebration, but I wanted to think of something different. Then last week, I went to our local library to turn in some books and to check out my books on hold. Going by the YA section, I saw this book:

The novel is about an Indian American girl who is struggling with balancing her Indian identification with her American life. I didn’t read it, but there was a recipe for pizza at the end of the book that was mostly just American pizza but with paneer cheese as a topping.

But it got me to thinking…. Could I create a pizza-like dish that was more Indian than American/Italian?

So I came up wth an idea of Naan instead of pizza dough, Indian sauce instead of tomato sauce, and paneer as the topping, along with bell peppers and red onions. And that is what we did. I used commercially-made sauces to make them as Indian-tasting as possible. The ones with the yellow peppers on the left were a Spicy Butter Sauce and the ones with the orange peppers on the right were Tikka Masala. I ususally prefer Tikka Masala to Butter Sauce, but in this case, I liked the spicier sauce better.

I had no idea how to cook it since I was just making this all up. The naan was already baked. It occurred to me too late that I probably should have bought frozen naan dough and cook it like pizza dough…oh well, there’s an idea for next time. But I decided to cook it at 450 degrees (the highest temperature my oven has) like I cook my homemade pizzas. I thought the high temperature would give it a kind of pizza-like char. My concern was that the naan would burn before the raw vegetables cooked and the paneer browned a bit, so I kept a close eye on them in the oven. But it actually turned out really well. This is what they looked like after cooking at 450 degrees for 20 minutes:

It turned out just like I had imagined and was a big hit with me and my son.

I also made a fruit salad because there are so many colors of fruits so that seemed appropriate for the holiday. Other than apples and citrus, I mostly eat frozen fruit from late fall through early spring. The fresh berries and other fruits are grown in the southern hemisphere, so their carbon footprint is so big I try to make do with frozen until our local fruits come in. However, that didn’t seem appropriate for Holi. So I bought an assortment of fresh foods based on price and how relatively close to us they were grown while trying to get as many different colors as possible. Because I’m allergic to tropical fruits and melons, I couldn’t eat half of the fruits. But my son had a treat eating the tropical fruits he loves that I rarely buy.

We had one other dish to round out our meal. The Cary Downtown Farmers Market has some WONDERFUL bakers among our vendors. One of the businesses is Breadwaala (https://www.breadwaala.com/home), a company run by a lovely Indian-American family. In a twist of things, the dad is the tech consultant by day and baker by night, while his wife apparently runs the business end of things. Their daughter is, I believe, in middle school now, but we’ve watched her learn from an early age how to operate the calculator and collect our money. The son is in high school and is in a technology competition team that meets Saturday mornings, so we don’t see him as much any more. But he has spent plenty of time there in the past. Sometimes the grandparents are there as well in traditional Indian clothes, whereas the family chooses to mostly wear American-style outfits. I buy my Girl Scout cookies from the daughter every year when her troop joins the Farmers Market for one Saturday to meet our cookie needs.

Anyway, Ashwani (the dad/baker) specializes in sourdough breads, all using organic, unbleached, local ingredients without commercial yeast or additives. He also makes focaccia, both traditional and Indian-seasoned. Lately he has been branching out to include rye bread. It’s all healthy and delicious and tastes like bread is meant to taste. Bottom line is that if you live in the area and haven’t come out to get some of his baked goods, you are seriously missing out. And, according to his website, he does ship things as well.

But, back to Holi–I told him I was making a special Holi meal and asked if there was any food that was particularly associated with Holi. He said not really, that is mostly just general Indian holiday food. Except, he said, for one thing–a dessert item called Gujiya. It’s a half-moon shaped pastry filled with a sweet mixture of condensed milk, nuts, and cardamom, then deep-fried. And while he doesn’t make those, he did have a sweet baked cardamom bun that he said was kind of his version of a treat along those lines. Non-deep fat fried and without nuts sounded great to me, so I got one of his cardamom pastries to finish off our feast.

So there you have it! Our non-traditional Holi meal that I hope combines the best of India and the best of the US in a colorful celebration of Spring, the return of our crops, the fertility of our earth, and the magic that can happen when we reach outside our own culture and try combining different things.