My World of Food and Travel

One of the key highlights of my Kuala Lumpur trip was its delicious food.  On second thoughts, perhaps I should re-phrase the sentence as “the key objective of my Kuala Lumpur trip was to gorge on its delicious food.” There, my confession is out. *grin*  I absolutely loved the lip-smacking, finger-licking Malaysian cuisine and would look forward to the gastronomic delight that awaited me every day. I promise to write more about my food adventures (oh, there were many) in a separate post. But till then, I just could not resist the desire to re-create one of my favourite chicken dishes in Kuala Lumpur, and share its recipe with you. Back in the Renaissance hotel where I was staying, the breakfast spread was a huge one where you could choose to partake anything from dimsums and seafood noodles to our very own dosas and idlis. I deliberately decided to steer clear of Indian food and stick to the other cuisines they had on offer. After all, it is not every day that I get to...

My father is averse to anything sour in his food. Not surprisingly, that trait passed on to me as well, though not so much my sister. I have taken more after our father and she is more like Ma. Deta’ apathy towards sourness is a quite an oddity since Assamese are known for their tenga (tart and tangy) dishes. He has such sensitive taste buds that you just have to add one tomato or just a squeeze of lime to see his face turn all ‘twisty’ and announce that the food is quite inedible. An upset Ma would then remark that maybe Deta was a descendent of Ghurabaak (or simply Baak ), a very popular ghost/creature of Assamese myths. Apparently, this Baak was a fish-loving personality that would accost unsuspecting fishing people at night. I have grown up listening to innumerable stories about the Baak pestering villagers to part with their catch of the evening. One of the stories goes that once a Baak decided to take the form of a man and gatecrash a wedding to partake of the feast, since...

It never occurred to me to put up a recipe for this dish. I mean, this is what we have every other day! I had clicked the photographs suddenly on a whim one day long time back and then thought “What? Really?” And then decided not to post them.  Now that I had been sick for so long, I hardly cooked anything new (left that to my Ma) and hence there has been no food updates on the blog. I went through my folders, scouring for any recipe that I may have overlooked and true enough – there lay my neglected, abandoned pictures of Jika Maas or fish and ridge gourd curry. So, that’s it then, we shall be making a very common Assamese fish curry today.  I am sure every household has their own way of making it, but I only know of two ways. You can either add tomatoes to the dish for the requisite sourness or you can add a generous dash of lime juice at the end. My in-laws prefer it the tomato way while I have had it more with lime juice at my maternal home (maybe because we gro...

This fish curry reminds me so much about home and Ma’s cooking. While growing up I never realized that as a daughter I shall have to move out of my parents’ home one day. I took Ma for granted and did not pay much attention to her cooking. I guess we were a heartless lot - neither my sis nor I, or even Deta for that matter, ever complimented her on any dish. And she is such a fabulous cook! Today, I wait for the husband’s appreciation on any little thing that I come up with. So, I can imagine how it would have felt like on not getting any word of encouragement from the family.  Coming back to the fish curry, it is a much-loved Assamese dish. Almost every household has (had?) a kitchen garden where there would be herbs, vegetables and fruit of various kinds. One just had to step out to the kitchen garden, pick out the choice of herbs and vegetables and come up with a delicious lunch/dinner. At our Guwahati home, we have a nice, big noroxingho (curry leaves) plant which would ...

I had a lot of palak (spinach) leaves left over the other day, even after making my favourite fish curry with them . In a way, I was glad to see them as these greens are so versatile and one can make a number of dishes. Packs in the nutrients as well.  My first thought was to make palak paneer, but realized that there was no paneer (cottage chese) at home. But there was an unopened packet of sweet corn kernels in the fridge and that caught my eye. I remembered that we used to be served corn palak in my first office as part of the free (vegetarian) lunch there. The palak part seemed to be the same as the one in palak paneer. Since my original plan was to make palak paneer anyways, I decided to add corn instead of paneer and turn it into corn palak. Let’s get on with the recipe then. Corn palak (sweet corn in spinach gravy) Ingredients: A bunch of spinach leaves, washed 1 carrot, chopped 1 cup of sweet corn kernels 2 onions, grated 2 tomatoes, blanched and mas...

I first tasted crab in Goa when I was well into my mid-twenties. It was actually a stuffed crab where you just had to lift the ‘lid’ (shell) and eat the shredded crab meat. “Then you have not tasted a real crab,” said whoever came to know of it. Apparently, you had to break the shell with a cracker, scoop out the meat with a long thin instrument and then savour it. That is how you should eat a crab in the real sense (in a civilized manner).  I remember sitting at Mahesh Lunch Home in Juhu (Mumbai) with my sis when we saw a waiter carrying two huge crabs, their pincers tied with twine, going up to another table. He presented them to the guests for size approval and went back to the kitchen after they had made their choice. We had stared goggle-eyed at the process. “Eww! How can anyone have those things?” Sis and I had shuddered. Crabs looked so menacing then! Circa 2011, I am to be found sitting at the dining table, concentrating hard at breaking open the crab shell with my...

I cheated! Yes, I did! I used Thai Green Curry paste instead of making the paste out of scratch. Please don’t kill me! There, I am done with my confession. Now, we shall move on. Seriously, I have become such a ‘short-cut’ girl. I scour the supermarket stores for various ready-made pastes and sauces, although I admit that I have not been able to bring myself up to buying them. I think I am more comfortable buying ginger-garlic paste, tamarind paste and Thai curry pastes than other stuff such as Ragu sauce.  In all fairness, I had tried to make Thai green curry once when I was living in Mumbai, at my cousin’s place. My cousin and I had got hold of this sure-fire recipe in a Sunday Times of India issue and rushed off to the newly opened Godrej Nature’s Basket in Lokhandwala. We had bought all the ingredients – lemon grass, galangal, Thai bird’s eye chillies, basil and the rest from the outlet and set off earnestly to making the curry. Somehow, the end product did not taste lik...

We are a family of mutton/goat meat lovers. Unfortunately, all the doctors in the world have conspired against us in enjoying this delectable meat. They say it is red meat and hence bad for cholesterol, bad for uric acid, bad for everything that you know. And since we do listen to the doctors quite reverently, mutton has disappeared from our lives and we rarely see them on our plates. A sad world, this is. Anyways, this weekend when we were on our monthly shopping expedition (eh?) for groceries and other household items, we came upon a small package of happiness in the ‘Meat, Fish and Poultry’ section of the supermarket. It was a packet of mutton bones, the meat removed to make keema (minced meat) most probably. I have been making paya soup (soup made out of goat trotters) for some time, but this was the first time I had come across mutton bones which were marketed as ‘mutton soup-cut’.   It seemed to be an interesting prospect and I thought that maybe I could make these soup-...

  We were in Coorg (Kodava district) last week and the region’s beauty just blew our minds away. As did its amazing cuisine – especially, the spicy Pandi Curry. It was a pork curry like no other I had tasted.  I should mention that my initiation to pork took place only after my marriage some 3 years back. In my life prior to marriage, I was brought up to believe that the pig was not a nice animal to have as food. All thanks to my dad whose favourite expletive was ‘ Suwar ka bachha’ (Son of a Pig).   The word pig, thus, would evoke in my mind visions of fat, grunting pigs wallowing in filthy water.   No, not a nice animal to eat, for sure. I had built up such a mental block against it that even when my friends and cousins spoke of pork with drooling mouths, I was not a bit tempted. People who knew I was from North East India would be surprised at my aversion to pork. “What? You don’t eat pork?” was the common refrain. All that changed after I got mar...