Basil For The Soul

"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...

Here's one for the days you wake up late and hungry. Or a one-pot recipe for when you don't want to wash a ton of dishes later. The champion among upmas- gothambu rava upma. I would say upma actually refers to a basic preparation of just about any key ingredient cooked with a tempering of mustard, urad dal and curry leaves, a spoon of grated coconut and a dash of salt. Because besides your typical gothambu (wheat rava) upma, semiya/vermicelli upma etc, we also make 'kappa upma' with tapioca, 'bread upma' and even 'idli upma'! Yup! They're all super easy, maybe I will share the recipes with you in upcoming posts. So today, I will share with you the most basic wheat rava/ Bombay rava upma recipe, as taught to me by my Mom. It's one of the first dishes I learnt to make when I started living alone. And as any novice will agree, if you are not taught right, there are a million ways to get even boiling water wrong! So I will share 2-3 p...

Don't have spare time to cook an elaborate meal? Or got hungry before you could decide what to order? Here's a quick and healthy oats dosai recipe I came across when I couldn't bother waiting for food delivery. A quick scan through the fridge told me I had no veggies and no curd. Just some almost wilted coriander looking to be salvaged. So I'll share here first the no-curd recipe I found at that point at antoskitchen.com : For 4 servings: 1 cup oats 1/2 cup wheat flour 1/2 cup rice flour Salt to taste Soak the oats for five minutes. Blend in a mixer. Add the other ingredients to the puree, add water and your batter is ready! Yup, as simple as that! Now come the fun additions. Here's what I did. I had some leftover 'poduthool/podithooval' powder from the previous day. Translated to common speak, that's a  dry roasted and powdered mix of rice, urad dal, peppercorns and Curry leaves. And it just made so much sense to add this to th...