I spent the later afternoon and early evening making butter chicken, or murgh makhani, from scratch. It involved trimming excess fat and skin off the bone-in chicken thighs, marinating the meat in a yogurt-lemon juice-spice mixture, chopping up tomatoes, onions, garlic, and ginger, and assembling even more spices for the actual cooking. Even though the marinating time was not as long as I wanted it, the chicken curry came out really well.

I get antsy when I don’t cook for a while. I certainly can’t complain about not cooking because it’s not like I’ve been leading on a miserable life the last several weeks. We’ve been traveling through Japan, socializing with friends, and last Sunday, went to a free U2 concert. That’s when you know that you really love cooking — when even when you are enjoying great things and activities and moments in your life, in the back of your head, you still want to be cooking, even if just for a few hours. And even when those few hours are in the tiniest Manhattan kitchen, it still makes you really happy.