I have a recipe for oven-dried tomatoes on here which in hindsight seems a bit silly. When you live in a city like Chennai and have the sun at your disposal all year round, I can’t imagine why you’d need to even turn the oven on or need any form of gadgetry for this task…. Read more »

Let’s address what sounds like that unnecessary first step: macerating strawberries. Maceration is a process by which fruits are tossed in sugar, lemon and flavourings—in the case of strawberries it’s usually rum, balsamic vinegar or vanilla. Maceration does two things: 1) Added sugar draws out the natural sugars from the strawberries, as a consequence intensifying… Read more »

Right off the bat, let me put it out there that this Bircher muesli is not traditional in any sense. I’ve taken the liberty to use what suits my convenience and palette and by all means, please feel free to do the same here with my recipe — I personally love this combination but it’s… Read more »

If you’ve been following along on Instagram, you will have noticed that this is my second batch of molasses in the past month. I had no complaints about the first batch except that it yielded a mere ¼ cup of molasses (I got up to a ½ cup thereabouts on the second run). I wanted… Read more »

This recipe is part muhammara (roasted peppers + garlic + walnuts) and part pesto (basil + garlic + Parmesan). A few things that influenced my decision to go down this eclectic route – I wanted something that would keep for a while: seven large peppers would make a bigger batch than we would be able… Read more »

  Let’s face it, most recipes that substitute white flour with other options almost always turn out dodgy at best. At least for me they do. Processed-the-heck-out-of flour provides that aerated, light quality that its whole-wheat counterpart or other gluten-free options just cannot seem to compete with. Buckwheat tart shells, rice flour cakes, amaranth flour… Read more »

This is a plum torte. The plum torte. Not my claim (actually now mine also), but here’s the backstory to its considerable fame. This recipe was originally submitted to the New York Times by Marion Burros in 1983. Every year since then—due to popular demand—the paper re-published the recipe in September during plum season. Not… 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 »

These peanut balls teetered precariously on the edge of turning into peanut butter but the desiccated coconut salvaged them. Not that peanut butter could ever be a bad thing, but I had my mind set on these. Peanuts, when blended, will eventually become peanut butter. These balls follow the same blending process, only, you don’t… Read more »

This is a satisfying process: collecting enough coconut pulp—the bi-product or ‘waste’ from squeezing out coconut milk—drying it out (in the sun, no less) and blending it up to make your own flour! I don’t know about you but this is as up my alley as it gets. (Also another recipe to add to my… Read more »

Contrary to popular belief, ghee is not clarified butter. Let me clarify. Bad puns aside, here’s what I’ve learned about this: butter, unlike oils, is not 100% fat. It is—in an approximate sense since you would have to factor in the quality of your butter—about 80 – 90% fat and 10 – 20% water. Butter… Read more »

Finger millet (ragi) porridge has an infamous reputation for being dull, bland, and—especially if you went to my boarding school—a stodgy mass that you’d be forced to eat at breakfast every morning. Although I could always tolerate it, it definitely was not something that I particularly enjoyed eating. Fast forward a decade, and here I… Read more »