Basil For The Soul

Travel lets you explore food. But nothing beats exploring new lands through food! Last month, my fellow food adventurer Badhri and I had lunch at Teburu, a Japanese restaurant in Kalyan Nagar, Bangalore. It was my first experience with Japanese cuisine and I was quite excited.  The ambience was welcoming, with artificial cherry blossoms all around the room easing us into the very Japanese menu. (I would lose the 90's pop music, though, in favour of some Japanese instrumentals for the feels.) Miso soup Ever since I played the card game, Sushi Go!, I'd been curious to try Miso soup. So that was our first order. Miso is a paste made from fermented soybeans and it is added to vegetable stock to make the soup. Here, in Teburu, they served it with tofu and seaweed in it. The Miso Soup is unlike anything I've had before. In fact, that can be said for most dishes I tried that day. The flavours and textures are so foreign that I would be careful about whom I recommend it t...

"More important than the food pairing is the person with whom you drink the wine", said Christian Moueix, a famous winemaker.   Christian isn't wrong but if you love playing host and chef, like I do, the challenge more often is to figure out  what dishes you can put together for a memorable meal for your lovely guests. It's enough if you can pull off a lip-smacking biriyani for all but I  love pushing myself to try and do more than one dish. Googling 'Vegetarian recipes for a dinner party' sure gives direction, but I am yet to find a website that tells me how to make great vegetarian dishes AND tells me which ones to put together. That's partly the inspiration for this post. Yesterday, I put together a special dinner for a friend before her last day of work. This was the fancy menu description: grapefruit salad, pomodoro and mushroom bruschetta, and Thai green curry served with fragrant rice. A lot of inaccuracies in that description, as you sh...

                                   I think fancy fine-dine restaurants should have pictures of their food on their menu cards. If you walk into a Shanti Sagar or an Udupi hotel, you know what the items in the menu are, what they look and taste like. But in fine dining, the chefs are introducing you to dishes whose names you barely know to pronounce. I think it's only fair that they give you some idea about what to expect when you ask for a 'farfalle con formaggio' or a 'bruschetta al pomodoro'.  This is where I come in- your friendly neighbourhood guide through the confusing maze of Italian food terminology!  Of course, this post is not for everyone. Take this quick test- can you tell the difference between mozzarella and parmesan? Do you know your pasta shapes? If it's a yes to both, skip the line, go over to the recipe below or the next post! Others, read on! When you'...