Apparently, guests are the equivalent of Gods. And the one thing I have learnt over the years is that these categories of gods pay special attention to food and drink. You have dreamt of this perfect summer with you as the perfect host. One that is going to make the Gods happy. You wake up as early as possible; high chances are that an old aunt woke up earlier. So you rush to make her morning tea. By which time…
Our guest writer Achala Srivatsa loves to cook and ponder the finer points of what we eat. This is her thoughtful take on rasam, with a tadka of flavourful musings. The earliest memories I have of my childhood are of being sick with a sore throat and fever. Those days my food habits were, shall we say, not very refined in that I’d pretty much eat anything I was given, anything I found or otherwise came my way. A group…
this morning, a friend who had tracked me down after years, thanks to writersbrew (that thought makes me so happy i listened to a young girl and started writing here), sent me a lovely little video on whatsapp. it was an edited version of the one here. do take a look, bound to touch you. video credit uploader i saw the short video and grinned. so many memories, delightful tastes traipsing in my head, making me hungry. i have always…
It looks like an ordinary birthday cake, but it is hardly just a cake. It is the famous Guyanese Christmas Black Cake. The icing is also not just simple little whipped up frosting in white and pink. It is the famous Guyanese hard icing underlaid with expensive and delicious marzipan. Come on a fascinating trip of Guyana and Indo-Guyanese food as Writersbrew guest writer Lalita Arya returns to the land of her birth. It is called black cake because once…
Pesarattu, it’s been a personal favourite since my childhood. Pesarattu is a dosa made from moong dal where pesara means moong and attu means dosa. Yes, that is what a dosa is called in the local regions of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. In fact the regular dosa which is made from urad dal is called minappattu, where minapa is urad. Actually a festival involving the attus is also celebrated. It is called Atlataddi where young girls and women do Puja…
I have always dreaded day 2 or 3 of having house guests. I have already served them paneer or chole (substitute chicken curry if you are a non-vegetarian host), we have gone out to an expensive popular restaurant in town and we have approached what I fondly call the “home cooked food craving” day. These guests say things like, “My stomach is full” or “am feeling heavy” or “let’s have something simple“. Years of conditioning as a conscientious host doesn’t…
i was sitting in front of my computer, working and completely absorbed, when it came out of nowhere and spooked me. i suddenly had to make fish kochuri. i don’t know how to make these delicious pastries with fish stuffed in it. this was a fiend though that was hellbent on scaring me into submission. think the only time i’ve had fish kochuri or maachher kochuri, as we call it in bengali, was almost ten years ago. maybe more. it…
there are several tomato mahasha recipes on the net. they all sound pretty good. one of them particularly, since you stuff the tomatoes with raw rice and chicken and it just feels so complex and authentic. my mother in law would say once in a way as she went about getting the stuffing ready that the really good baghdadi jewish cooks never cooked what went into the mahasha beforehand. then she’d forget about all that and make it her way.…
that there could be a word for holud or haldi in english had never occurred to me. i was fourteen, not interested in cooking, and besides, why would people who didn’t use it in any of their cooking bother to find a word for the yellow powder or paste present in practically everything we make? we don’t have a word for parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. we don’t use those pretty sounding song-worthy herbs in our curries or ghontos or…
Whenever summer arrives, my mother starts worrying about getting things ready for the daunting task of making the mango pickle which is done once a year. It’s made in a large quantity so that it could last for the whole year. Making of the mango pickle, which in Telugu is called the Avakaya, is quite a family affair. The word avakaya is a combination of avalu, which means mustard seeds; and kaya, which in this case means vegetable. Essentially, avakaya…