Cinnamon toast—just your everyday bread slathered with butter, cinnamon, and sugar and baked until crunchy, golden, and downright delicious. Since these toasts can be made in bulk, and in advance, they make for a really good breakfast option, an evening snack with coffee or tea, or for just about any time of the day,… Read more »

     First things first, you need a food processor or a high-powered blender to make peanut butter at home. By high-powered I mean a blender that continues to run at full speed without heating up and turning off every 45 seconds. Mine did. EVERY 45 seconds. So making this took about fifteen minutes start to… Read more »

  I love making paneer. It makes me feel very competent. It’s one of the easiest—if not, the easiest—cheeses to make which makes it doubly worth it. Simple enough: bring milk to the boil, add acid of some kind (lemon, yogurt or vinegar) and let the curds separate from the whey. Strain in a cheesecloth,… Read more »

    A few years ago, a friend and I did a short stint at a café in Auroville. A café that served wholesome food using local and seasonal ingredients. Popular on the menu were an array of fruit and flower concentrates (which we would serve with plain or soda water) : sarsaparilla, hibiscus, kumquat, ginger, and… Read more »

   The first time I made this dish, I decided to keep the bok choy raw. And the sauce was more like a dressing – the ingredients added to a screw-top jar, shaken, and poured over. It was a bok choy salad of sorts. I knew it was a good pairing—ginger and miso—but the sauce… Read more »

  I’ve always used the terms stock and broth interchangeably. It was only recently that I learned that while they both have some overlapping similarities and fall under the same premise of using meat, bones (or both), and water, herein lie their differences: stock is typically made with bones and contains a very small amount,… Read more »

   As someone who’s negatively biased about any dish on the menu that has the word ‘bowl’ in it, this feels slightly hypocritical. Unless it’s soup..and they tell me they serve it in a bowl. Which would make sense. Because how else would you eat soup. I’m talking rice bowls, veggie bowls, and my personal… Read more »

   Making jam at home is easier than it is made out to be. I’d come across recipes in the past that went into detailed instructions about canning equipment and sterilizing jars..it completely threw me off. You don’t need any heavy-duty ‘canning equipment’ here, and I realized that sterilizing jars is just a clinical term… Read more »

    A fresh head of lettuce is a thing of beauty. The iceberg is what my local grocer usually stocks—and this usually suits me just fine for all my salad and sandwich needs—but I was lucky to find some green leaf lettuce, red leaf, and romaine earlier this week. Also, snow peas! SNOW PEAS…. Read more »

   Thai curry pastes usually fall into three main categories based on colour: red, yellow, and green. While the basic set of ingredients—shallots, ginger, garlic, galangal, coriander root, lemongrass, and shrimp paste—remains the same across all three, a few key variations give them their quintessential Thai flavour and colour. Green curry paste is made with… Read more »

   Matcha seems to fit right into the polarizing foods category – something that’s often described to have an acquired taste for; a love-it or hate-it kind of ingredient. It’s bitter, smells like freshly cut grass, and has the texture of corn flour. Doesn’t sound too appealing, does it? I know, because I went from… Read more »

   Back in Uni, eggs for dinner was a standard end-of-the-month staple (as was cereal, but let’s not go there.) Hard-boiled and tossed with dried oregano, salt, and pepper, and piled high on what Nigella calls ‘plastic’ bread – the cheapest kind you can find. Needless to say, I can never eat eggs the same… Read more »

  I’ve been really looking forward to sharing this recipe with you. It featured in the Diwali edition of Better Homes and Gardens, India last month along with some really innovative dishes from other bloggers. If you haven’t bought a copy yet, the last I checked, it’s still out on stands! The addition of mango… Read more »

  Soups are a great way of getting your veggies in. But you knew that already. But some soups, especially like this one here, can really pack it away. I make this at least once a week—albeit with different variations of vegetables and spices— bung them all on a tray, roast, blend, soup for days…. Read more »

  I didn’t know what to call this recipe (as you may have noticed). I’ve seen it been called a salad before, but it somehow gives the impression that it is to be eaten alongside something else, a side dish. On the other hand, a noodle dish is almost always in a hot sauce or… Read more »