I usually don’t hold back on posting recipes here that use ingredients like fish sauce and dried shrimp. They’re easy to get a hold of, inexpensive, and will last an age in your pantry. Basically ticks all my boxes. (Most grocery stores stock fish sauce and there’s a whole street dedicated to dried fish in… Read more »
Here’s a quick lowdown on this mysterious salad vegetable: chayote is a native Mexican plant and is a member of the squash family. (Chayote is called chow chow only in India; chayote seems to be the more commonly used name for it the world over). I’m going to unabashedly give myself full credit for this,… Read more »
It’s pretty incredible that what is essentially a shallow-fried vegetable disc takes on so many different forms: pancakes, latkes, fritters, hash browns, cutlets, boxties, patties. And this is just me naming a few off the top of my head. It gets a bit mind boggling especially when within each of those broad categories, there are… Read more »
I should probably preface this recipe by saying that I’ve used chilli oil in this dish and I’m afraid it might be an integral component here. Since there are so few ingredients that go into it—oyster sauce, ginger, garlic, soy and chilli oil—I’m not sure it’ll taste the same without it. I’ve made this dish… Read more »
My only real grief with gobi manchurian is that it’s fried. Not that I won’t eat it, it’s quite the opposite actually—I love it so much that I’ll eat it, and I’ll want to eat it every time I think about it. Oven-baking makes these a healthier option not to mention far easier and hassle-free… Read more »
When I was photographing this raitha earlier today, my husband came into the room and said “I can’t believe you don’t have this one up yet.” I make this so often during the week, sometimes as a side that we eat alongside rice, and sometimes—I’m a weirdo if you didn’t get the memo—as a snack… Read more »
I have recipes on here for oven-roasted sweet potato, taro, and now elephant foot yam. (Slowing inching closer to exhausting all the tuber options available to me.) Potatoes of course do very well in the oven: wedges, fries, baked potatoes, cubed and roasted, whole-roasted baby spuds – your imagination is your only limitation. And even… Read more »
Blue cheese, pears, walnuts and honey are a match made in heaven – that’s no revelation. But most recipes that combine these ingredients have other components alongside: lettuce or arugula in a salad, baked into a tart, sprinkled over pizzas, mounded atop crackers. They all taste great, I mean give me this combo in any… Read more »
Admittedly a boring photograph. In the (hypercritical) eyes of someone trying to make food look as good as it tastes, it falls short. Way short. A herb for contrast would’ve been great for this but nothing worked with the flavours here – mint, basil, coriander, parsley, nothing. My biggest food related pet peeve is… Read more »
Hate to break it to you, but baked beans are not baked and black-eyed peas are not peas. Baked beans are made on the stove-top with no baking or oven involved. The name came about because Heinz—one of the oldest and largest manufacturers of tinned baked beans—used to follow a method of filling cans with… Read more »
If oyster mushrooms are hard to come by where you live, button mushrooms are not a great substitute but they will still work. We find oyster mushrooms year round in Coimbatore but unfortunately not in Chennai, so I have, albeit begrudgingly, accepted the button mushroom as a half-decent substitute. As is the case with any… Read more »
Taro/taro root or colocasia as it’s sometimes called is a starchy vegetable of the taro plant. Native to India and South-East Asia, taro also forms a staple in diets in Hawaii, the Caribbean and Africa. Taro ‘root’ is actually the corm—swollen underground stem—of the plant, so technically not a root. Just some casual food semantics… Read more »
Brussels sprouts in a South-Indian style recipe might sound terribly inauthentic. It is, and it’s probably why it comes as a surprise to most people when I tell them about this poriyal (as well as ones using oyster mushrooms, broccoli and lettuce). Growing up though, this was pretty normal. When I was at boarding school… Read more »
My love for Dijon mustard runs deep. It was never an acquired taste—I didn’t even know it fell under that category of foods—and I was sold from the first lick of the spoon. Sold to the point where we go through a minimum of one, sometimes two jars a month. Brussels sprouts on… Read more »
Salads that double up as main course are the best kinds of salads. Load it up with vegetables—fresh as well as roasted —lots of herbs and a punchy dressing and Bob’s your uncle, that’s a meal! Use any vegetables you have on hand: root veggies like potatoes, sweet potatoes, beets and carrots hold their… Read more »
