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...

The bus stopped for a tea break just 30 minutes before my destination: Tezpur, Assam. It was only six in the evening but it was already dark. I clambered down with the other passengers, found a corner table to sit at and watched the others order. Tea, a savoury snack and rasgullas! I signalled to the guy bringing a round of tea to give me a glass too. I asked him in Hindi what the people at the other table were getting. “Nimki?” he asked. It sounded like it might be the savoury fried snack I wanted. Nodding my head vigorously to that is how I managed to get my first bite, and learned my first word, of Assamese. It was a short trip in Assam and thanks to my lovely hosts- my friend, Bhanu and his wife, Panchali  (isn't it such a beautiful name?) - I managed to get a good look into life and ways of the Assamese. The Assamese love their fish, so it is hard for them to imagine what I, a vegetarian, could possibly explore in their cuisine. But if you look closely enough, you ca...

"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...

"Look at them all you want for free but touch them and you'll have to pay", warned the man at the small apple-stall next to the roadside orchard. The apple trees stood neatly in rows, laden with small green apples in bunches at arm's reach, validating the sellers' concerns. My friends and I took a few selfies with the famed Kashmiri apples before we resumed our journey to Sonmarg. It was July. We had started from Srinagar and were headed to our base camp from where we would begin a 7-day trek in the Himalayas. And it was amazing how much I had learnt about the local produce and exotic foods of Kashmir already.  Kahwa, the Kashmiri elixir: The day we landed in Srinagar, we shopped for papier-mache boxes and kurtis with kashida embroidery. But our most-anticipated buy was a bottle of kahwa mix. Kahwa is a green tea flavoured with spices like cardamom, cinnamon and saffron and topped with crushed pista and almonds. A Kashmiri favourite, and it follow...

Did you ever learn something about a colleague or a friend, something new about someone you've known forever, and suddenly realize that they actually have a whole life that you didn't know about, that you just never cared to think about? That is what happened with me just now. With peanuts! When I learned that peanuts grow underground! I always knew they had brown skins. Then I learnt that they come in shells. Now, I find that they grow on the roots! Should I have taken the hint when some called them groundnuts? Maybe. But then, are groundnuts and peanuts the same? Or like cookies and biscuits, are peanuts just the American way of saying groundnuts? If you grew up in Kerala, at some point of time, you learnt that 'kappalandi', the inexpensive treat on your visit to the park or beach, was called 'groundnuts' in English. Just the word 'kappalandi' brings to mind either the image of it getting roasting in the heat of the sand in the push-ca...

                                   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'...