Nature's Basket Bandra tempted me yesterday with a rather expensive salmon steak. It was all frozen and plasticwrapped, but it reminded me of some very nice dinners in the USA. Salmon was one of the things I learned to make well, out of my hours of watching Food TV on my (then very new) HD... Continue Reading →
I was up in the hills drinking in the scenery, but of course food needed to be on the agenda too.Himachal Pradesh, the land of apples and mushrooms, is a dramatically beautiful state. After a few hours of the flat Punjab plains, twisty roads started spiralling into the heavens pretty much from the instant we... Continue Reading →
In the last two years, I've really learned to make use of ginger-garlic paste. Though books repeatedly tell you of the wonderful properties of ginger, specially the use of its thickening effects in Indian cooking, its only recently that I practically stumbled upon what exactly they mean. Ginger-garlic paste, added to hot oil or ghee... Continue Reading →
I've just learned about more things that you can freeze. Freezing, of course extends shelf-life by weeks over normal refrigeration, which is specially useful for someone like me who's always cooking more than can be eaten. Bongs love multi-course meals, and its really tough to cook small helpings of each of the courses. The most... Continue Reading →
My fridge is full of rotting vegetables. These are usually invaluable leftovers from my shopping trips; unique veggies that are essential to one recipe or the other, but not available at Jubilee Market next door. Or the next three hundred doors for that matter.Hence lies a problem with cooking Indian in New York - how... Continue Reading →
One of my biggest challenges to cooking Indian food, surprisingly enough, has been to do with grinding spices. Wet or dry grinding is a staple with Indian spieces. This may not sound like much of a challenge but it's huge. To start with, the quantity problem; most appliances (such as coffee grinders) are suited for... Continue Reading →
Vegetables often have these inconvenient biological barriers that need to be removed using advanced devices called peelers. There's obviously quite some tachnology involved, given the wide variety of different kinds of peelers in the market, but they all serve the same basic purpose - to strip certain kinds of veggies naked and fill up garbage... Continue Reading →
Steaming is a time-honored way of cooking fishes, mostly because the results are so good. Microwaves aren't exactly time-honored, but they seem to be a great way to steam fishes without ...well... steaming them. The exotic Bengali word for steam is bhapa, and the most famous of the bhapa varieties are undoubtedly the one where... Continue Reading →
A friend of mine wanted me to cook for her, but had no spices at home. We made a pact; I'd cook something truly Indian with only what's available at her local supermarket - which sounded like a huge challenge till I discovered her 'local' was a WholeFoods with neary every kind of spice there... Continue Reading →
A friend of mine recounts with much amusement how I once gave a long speech on cooking rice to some hapless woman at a grocery store. Here's the shortened version Rice is the staple of Indian cooking, so one should not treat it lightly. Basmati is the king, but making it as fragrant as the... Continue Reading →
The Well Fed Bong 