Krishna Das Retreat--extra place

I try to attend the Krishna Das summer retreat at Yogaville every year, but this year I can’t manage it. So if you are waiting for a spot to come up for this Memorial Day retreat at the Satchidananda Ashram-Yogaville in Virginia, you’re in luck. It’s May 25-28
The retreat is very fun, it’s all hanging out with the Sweet Creature. This is from his website:

Accommodations include 3 vegetarian meals a day, Meditation and Hatha Yoga class every morning offered by Yogaville, 3 nights kirtans and 3 workshops with KD, group chanting of Hanuman Chalisas, opportunity to attend pujas at the ashram temples, daily meditations, daily Hatha Yoga and delicious vegetarian buffet-style meals, all in the glorious natural setting of Yogaville in Virginia

It’s a private room. The food is great and almost all of it comes from the organic farm on-site.

If you are interested please email me asap. absolutetrygve(at)gmail(dot)com. It’s coming up soon, and I’ll pass it on to the first person who wants it.





KD Website info

New Classes & Events Website!

While I'm working on this distillery and generally occupied here in Salalah Oman, Enfleurage has not only moved into a new, happier and more elegant incarnation, but our classes are taking off!
Christina is our fabulous instructor, and she does classes on natural home beauty, including detoxification, and also pain relief, stress relief, therapeutic body oils, and how to make your home a wonderful haven of aromatic serenity.
Check out our new website, devoted entirely to classes and events at Enfleurage! Even as we slowly slog on with redoing our main web site, Christina has put this up and if you're in the New York area, or planning to be, have a look at our class schedule! We're also starting a series of blending labs, blending intensives, and more.
How blessed am I to have these great people at Enfleurage? Without Tom, Stacy, Christina and ken Enfleurage would be just another store.
Really I'm delighted about this.
Enfleurage Events and Classes

Movin on up

I have a ridiculously stupid habit. Really it’s too lame. When it comes to moving a household, I have to do it myself, except for the heavy furniture. No help please, thanks. Why? I think I always have. When my mother died, it took me 18 months to go through her stuff, moving some of it into storage, etc. I had to keep coming back from New York, just to finish it. Every time I’ve moved in Salalah, which now makes 4 times, I’ve done it myself. The first couple of times were no big deal, but this last one...! 5 different friends offered their help, yet stubbornly I made at least a trip a day, for who knows how many days, only to be slammed at the end, of course, shocked by how much remained in my little villa in Dahariz. I think it happens to everyone, being shocked at how much crap you collect.

So goodbye Dahariz, and my little villa by the sea. It was really super cute and I had a full 2 1/2 years in it. But I’ve got what I think might be the coolest place in Salalah. It’s in a neighborhood called Saa’da and even though it’s inland it’s nestled among the rustling coconut trees and manages to be extremely isolated, considering it’s in the middle of Saa’da. Huge garden, and I’ve been bustling about, planting jasmine, night queen, roses, mangoes, papayas, hibiscus, lime, sandalwood (those saplings I brought back from Mysore) and of course Frankincense. And there’s already a mature frankincense tree on the property. I’ve got bunches of agave from Santa Barbara too. All that schlepping cuttings, seedlings and succulent pups have finally come to roost. There are cows next door. A late afternoon breeze cools the entire structure, even in April. Love it. Oh yes, and private parking behind a gate, a real plus for Salalah, where everyone watches everything.

The house is divided in such a way that it seems it was made for me. My living space is probably the same size as I had before, which was perfect, and now I also have space for my little distillery, office and reception. By the time next years tourism season starts I should be able to host groups, much as I did in Dahariz, but this time with enough space! Trying to cram 14 Germans into my old kitchen to see the distillation and taste hydrosols was a bit of a tight squeeze. But in a short time visitors, both Omani and foreign guests, will be able to come and see the distillation, taste hydrosols from some of our local plants, and sample ice creams. And hopefully buy some frankincense souvenirs! Who knows, if the plants grow fast I might be able to offer delightful seating in the garden too!



And of course the house is cute. Jon will be along presently to finish it--and it’s already looking cool, well on the way to spectacular. Sometimes you just know someplace is right for you. I can sit in the living room with the double doors open wide to the garden, and the only thing I hear is the wind in the coconut palms. The only thing I see is the fronds waving lazily in the breeze.

It’s been a long time that I’ve been here, making frankincense oil in my kitchens, since 2008. Almost 4 years since I knew I wanted to stay. But even though i make this oil, I can’t make it every day, and with only one still my output was barely enough to supply Enfleurage, or local sales. Now, at last, I can make enough (I think.) And while I’m on the subject, let me just say that I have all necessary licenses and permissions. Sometimes people email to ask me how Gary Young, from Young Living Oils, who also has a distillery in Salalah, can say he is the only foreign company allowed to make frankincense oil and export it too. Well, people say things all the time, don’t they? Doesn’t make them true. No need to pretend. He does have a distillery here, but he is not the only American and he was not the first either. That would be yours truly. He was just the loudest. So don’t believe the hype.

Salalah is a strange place to live, I won’t deny it. And I love it. The trees lured me here, and one thing or another made me stay, and now I’m ensconced like a tick. From being a New York City girl, I’ve gone to 4 wheel drives, camping, hanging out with trees, and I’m a good shot too. Still a pesco-vegetarian though. Salalah is no end of fun and interesting, and very comfortable, and always new to me. I’m wrong much of the time, as usual, thank heavens. And wherever else I am in the world, I always want to come home to Oman, to Salalah. Some of my Dhofari friends just shake their heads at this. And my Muscateer friends can’t understand why I haven’t gotten Salalah out of my system and moved north like a normal person. But I’ll be here, making fabulous frankincense, for a long time I think. Wallah.

For Shame!!

A couple of posts ago I wrote about my visit to the Sandalwood Distillery, the State Sandalwood Distillery. You may recall that I mentioned that the pure sandalwood oil was no longer available at the kiosk next door to that distillery......

Used to be, you could buy 5 ml bottles of it, all certified, agmarked, and stamped by the Karnataka government, guaranteed to be 100% pure and unadulterated Mysore Sandalwood Oil. The largest size bottle you could take out of the country was this 5 ml.

I mentioned that the oil is now available at the Karnataka Kauvery Silk Shops, which are “Arts and Crafts Emporiums” and has “Govt of India” on their receipts, leading one to believe that they are Govt certified. Maybe they are , in which case this is even more disgraceful.



I went in and asked for sandalwood oil. I was prepared to buy as many 5 ml bottle as I could. But when I tried the oil, it smelled weird, with a spiky note that doesn’t belong in sandalwood. The clerk assured me it was the real thing, all pure, blah blah blah, the usual crap. I couldn’t buy a bunch of bottles, since it didn’t smell right, but I figured maybe my nose was having some kind of fit. But it didn’t help that the clerk kept trying to make excuses for the oil, I had to rub it on my arm vigorously, I had to wait a specific amount of time, etc. Like you need to do something special to appreciate sandalwood. It was a very insulting idea.

I couldn’t open the bottle back at my hotel, nor could I open it in Coimbatore or Bombay. It wasn’t until I attacked it with my good scissors here in salalah that I managed to get the cap off. I don’t wonder why. All the bottles felt light to me (remember, I am extremely familiar with bottles of essential oil) and didn’t sound full, but that’s not proof of anything.

But as you can see in the accompanying photo, the bottle was short by 2 ml. That’s a lot to be short! And it wasn’t just this bottle, because, as I just said, I picked up several; they all felt short.

So damning proof 1
the bottle was short 1/5th!!

And damning proof 2
as I’m sure you’ve realized,
it’s not sandalwood.

There may be some sandalwood in it, but I doubt it. It’s a perfume compound and it has some sandaly dry-down, but it’s all soft sickly powder shit and spiky crap, like someone decided that’s what the foreigners like. Maybe someone actually thought they could improve on sandalwood. Insane, but maybe. However, I suspect it’s about money, and maybe the real sandalwood is being sold on the side??

Infuriating? You bet. Yes, I’m speculating criminal intent here. But the fact is that I bought what was represented to me as 10 ml of real, pure, legal, sandalwood oil, and I paid accordingly.
What I was sold is not only short, but it smells like garbage.
It’s pseudo-sandalwood lite.

If you are visiting India, and want to buy sandalwood oil, don’t do it! Better to buy from an illegal still than be duped by a government store.
It’s really unbelievable. Even for India.

So, can you answer this? Does anyone out there have the huevos to answer this accusation?

Can someone really be adulterating the oil and then even shorting the bottles?

This should reflect badly on the distillery, the kauvery, the KSST.....who is doing this? Sandalwood is one on India’s most exquisite treasures, that is already “managed” into disaster. Now this???

Wallah I hope some people get caught for this.

Sambac Sea

Even though I had every intention of going to visit our usual flower guy, and dance and cavort in some blossoms, I had the unexpected pleasure of visiting another absolute maker nestled in the back roads and fields of Tamilnadu. Yes, not one but two. In one day!

Both visits were nice, and I got to see some interesting flowers with the first one, specifically tobacco flowers, and that’s an oil we haven’t had in years. Mind you, this isn’t the tobacco that we think of, the one we can buy in great big brown leaves or little cardboard cigarette packages. This is a whole different plant, and I don’t know any of these latin binominals, sorry. This one is grown for the flowers....For the flavor industry, not for smoking. I did also manage to see some of the local big leaved variety, but again not for smoking. It’s for chewing. And now, come to think of it, I haven’t seen many, if any people smoking the whole time I’ve been in India. I imagine if I smoked I would have seen them. I’ll try to pay more attention.

We spent the morning tooling around the small lanes and tiny farms of rural Tamilnadu, meeting farmers, and snapping photos of lush and expertly cultivated little plots of frangipani, jasmine grandiflorum, okra, guava, champa, and cow fodder.


But it was in the late afternoon that, you could say, the wiggle began, the main show, the headlining act, whatever!
2 extractions were planned, and flowers procured: champaka and jasmine sambac.

Now, Champaka first. It’s Michaelia champaka and it comes in white and red (even though the red is yellow) and it’s a magnolia. It’s actually quite close to the beginning of the champaka season--I guess it’s a little late this year. Only 13 kg of flowers found their way to the farm, one small bag! It takes about 13 tons of Champaka flowers to make a kilo of oil, and that is the main reason it’s so expensive, obviously.

These first three are champa










With such a small amount of flowers the usual extracting units were not used, and the two small drums were fllled with hexane and blossoms and left to do their magic as the Jasmine sambac truck came rumbling down the lane...with one and a half tons of sambac blossoms. That’s 9 million flowers, all picked before they opened for the night and all subsequently left on the matted reception floor to open over the next few hours.





All the sambac blossoms were bagged in burlap sacks weighing roughly 60-70 kilos each--there were about 25 of these bags and they were all lugged over to the scales, weight recorded in a ledger. Then these sacks were carried about the floor, split open at the top, and dropped with a soft thud, flowers bursting out in a creamy aromatic tongue. Once all the bags were weighed and disbursed about, they were upended and all the blossoms turned out into piles--so they all had more or less the same starting time to open. After this, the mountains of flowers were smoothed and evened, and, later, turned, so that all flowers had a chance to open in the air. 6 enormous fans buzzed and cooled.
















I helped, in my small way, pushing mounds of jasmine about, trying to stay out of te way, mostly. And that was that. I lay down at the edge of the sambac sea, and my friend, the extractor, kept bringing me tea, coffee, water. I am his only little client--he makes floral absolutes for some big fragrance houses---but I am the only one who comes and plays in the blossoms. And Enfleurage is the only client to make our own products with his oils. We were both so happy about it that he took me out to dinner a the new Taj Coimbatore, and it just so happened to be my birthday! So what began as an ok but not remarkable day, turned into meeting new flowers, rolling in jasmine, and trying some really nice Indian wines.


Please excuse the haphazard posting--it's the best I could do

Revisiting the Sandalwood Distillery in Mysore

I have good and bad to say. My last visit there was fantastic. This time, they tried to co-opt me with the other tourists, and the guide gave us the usual, boring tour, totally lacking in what I consider to be interesting and useful information. And I was a complete bitch about it. Absolutely horrible. But really they will tell you nothing, There is even an area where a guy is working, They said he was chipping away at some pieces--I suspect he was removing the heartwood. And he’s doing it behind a barricade and you are not allowed to see. You can only see the top of his head when he sits upright. And they tell you he is working the wood. And he waves over the sacks and machinery. It’s complete bullshit. And of course no photos.



Anyone who knows me can guess how long I’ll last with this. I’ve never been able to accept senseless authority and this was no exception. No way you’re going to fob me off with that. Even if you’re the Indian Government. No way.

I broke away from the group twice and they called the security guards. I really didn’t care. It’s the Mysore Sandalwood Factory. Doesn’t get holier for me. I didn’t try to get into any place that was actually important, ie locked. I just wanted to see what was going on there. Thank God they weren’t American guards or I’d be in prison! Or worse.
But in India, even though you might have to fight, they understand a pilgrimage. And so it was here.



They tried very hard to get me to go sit in my rickshaw, to wait for the manager to come out, but I wouldn’t go, and kept them all worried by pacing around the front of the distillery until they started to get tired and then made a beeline for a group of outbuildings, where I found someone with three stars on his uniform. Complete shock and they asked what I wanted. So of course I wanted in! What could they do? In I went, to the GM’s office. Complete shock again. He asked what I wanted. So of course I wanted in more! What could they do? In I went.



They were all actually just darling, once we all understood each other. They even unlocked the inner sanctum, and let me try some oil. But now the whole factory is riven by surveillance cameras, and the time when you slip into the beating heart of this delightful place has passed. I can’t imagine what the management thinks they’re protecting. The equipment comes from the early 20th century and they have all the sandalwood. All of it. You could show us every single permutation and detail and it would make no difference because even if you are growing Santalum album.......you’re not in Mysore. Just before I burst into tears (again) from the sweetness of that sandalwood heart room I explained that I buy Indonesian oil, and it’s album and it’s nice, yes, but this.......this is another being entirely. They understood.

There was a lot of wood sitting around, all of it outer wood, no heartwood, and most of it waiting to be sold as fodder for funeral pyres. I scored two saplings to plant in my garden!



I suspect this distillery has changed hands. Don’t know if I’m right or wrong but they no longer sell the oil in the little kiosk next door. In fact, you can’t get it through Karnataka Soaps and Detergents any more. You get it through Kauvery State stores, which specialize in silks. I went, stuffed with money, to buy as much oil as possible. And it didn’t smell right. There was a sharp spiky note in the head, a note I’ve never smelled in sandalwood which is now available in 5ml, 10 ml and 30 ml. And there is no guarantee of purity on the bottle. I think this is very important. It used to be agmarked, and have the label of 100% pure and natural label, certified by the govt. Now......? just “sandal oil.” It could be anything. The clerk tried to tell me it was pure, undiluted, etc. Of course he did. And he said that since the receipt says ”Govt of India”, that’s the same as the explicit written guarantee seen before. To my skepticism, he tried to explain that you have to rub it on your skin this way, and wait for this amount of time, like sandalwood needs to be applied in a certain way, or that it needs an excuse. I bought one bottle, just to check later and tell if I’m wrong. Maybe my nose is hallucinating. Oh, and you can take any of those size bottles out, even though you could only take 5 ml bottle before.



I smell a rat.

My advice? If you have any Mysore Sandalwood, keep it. If you are selling it, and it’s real, take it off your shelves. Hoard it, gentle readers, and let it go slowly. Unless you need some money and want to sell it. I’ll certainly buy it.

More Ice Cream??

Wallah, how much fun was that?
Just finished a really great, super fun week making gelato here in Dubai. Even though I did that very respectable and thorough ice cream school at Penn State, it didn’t inspire me as much as this one did.

We just made gelato, and more gelato, and more gelato, and sorbettos, and granitas, and inclusions, additions, stracciatelli, cakes, infusions, and pastes.

For anyone who doesn’t know, gelato is Italian ice cream. Compared to regular American style ice cream, It’s lower in fat, made to be eaten right away (not stored,) tastier, fresher, healthier, prettier and more delightful and delicious. Sorbetto is water based gelato, usually made with fruit. To put it in essential oil terms, American ice cream is lavender 40/42 and gelato is French population Lavender. Clear? Ok, how about this: American Ice Cream is lemongrass (citratus) and gelato is lemon verbena or even melissa!




The whole time I was at Penn State, I learned a ton, but I didn’t get to actually make anything. And I’m not that inspired by calculations even though I recognize the need for them. But we just did hands on and more hands on. Aprons, hats, and race you to the kitchen! This Gelato week made me realize that everything is still within my reach. I was a bit crushed in January seeing those giant pasteurizers, pipes shrieking through the walls. I’m not a dairy, and there were issues with cream......

Here we were on a human scale.
Such a relief.

And it was a fun group! We were from Kuwait, Saudi, Bahrain, UAE, India, Nigeria, Uzbekistan, Morocco, Egypt and Palestine. And Oman of course. I was the only one. The only American too. No surprise there. Most of us were two country people.



Our fabulous Maestro was gracious and funny, filling us relentlessly with gelato knowledge while keeping the atmosphere exciting and light and all of us laughing.

I think there is a bit of eye rolling that goes on between ice cream and gelato people--and you probably shouldn’t use those terms interchangeably.....but I probably still will. “Gelato” is not a recognized concept yet in Dhofar.

I was gonna write more about this, but really now what can I say? I’m just learning, and its great to learn something new, and meet new people to go along with it. And what now? Well, again, maybe not what you think.

We sure did have 5 fun days, culminating in graduation, with press coverage and a visit from the Italian ambassador, who congratulated us on our achievement, and our new abilities to bring joy and happiness to so many people, because to sit down and enjoy a gelato, without thinking about other things, this is the meaning of life!



Anyway, happy and inspired and already off on the next stage of this marching through March--am already in India. Time to do a follow-up on the 2010 trip, without Assam, and without the Diwan distraction this time. Methinks there’s some flowers about.