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...

                                   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'...

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...

Does your vegetable tray ever go beyond the okra, carrot, beans routine? Did you wonder how the menu never felt so repetitive back home? I did and that's when I realized that I've been picking the same vegetables and using the same turmeric-chilli powder-jeera-corainder grind Everytime and an occasional garam masala. To bring in vareity without going for expensive pastas and fancy ingredients, I went back to my roots- Kerala! Yes, it's true. They use coconut everywhere, but well, you'll discover that's where the magic lies! Olan is a coconut milk based dish that's almost always a part of the traditional feast, the 'Sadya'. However, it's not an all-exclusive fancy dish that does not make its way into daily meals. My mother used to pair it with sambar, pulinkari or mambazha pulissery. And the combination with rice is just out of this world! The vegetable vendor had two very conveniently cut quarters of pumpkin and ash-gourd, so I deci...

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...