My World of Food and Travel

Every time I log onto blogger to publish a post, I wince with guilt. My inner voice looks at me accusingly, arms akimbo, and says “I thought your blog was about food as well.” I slink away with a pacifying “I know, I know…I will write something next time.” But then, like we all know, there is nothing as ‘next time’. So, finally, after a long time, I hauled myself by the ears and sat down to write. About food, for a welcome change.  Since the time my parents have come, I have been making my dad’s favourite dishes but not clicked any pictures of them. He is still the foodie that he had been, though my mom has kind of lost her appetite and interest. Unfortunately, both of them being diabetics, they could not taste the one thing that I made for the first time in my life – fruit jam! I grew up watching Ma make luscious jams, jellies and marmalades from the fruit growing in our backyard. I especially remember the bottles of rich, crystalline guava jelly – their delicious dar...

I have never been the baking sort. Baking as in cakes and breads and muffins and other stuff barring meat and fish. Those I love. Baking meat and fish, that is. Maybe my lack of sweet tooth is responsible behind my apathy towards baking cakes. And my inability towards following recipes to the T. Baking for me brings forth a scary picture of carefully measuring out things in ‘mils’ and ‘oz’ and ‘grams’, while I am only capable of ‘spooning’ my ingredients or describing them at best in ‘a small bunch’ and ‘a pinch’. No sire, I no bake. And thus, my recipe list will forever languish in the absence of even a single cake. Or maybe not. When my sis sent me a photo of the cake she baked this morning, I decided to up my game and use it on my blog. So clever, I am. She tells me it was really scrumptious and it actually does look like that. It is kind of sad that now she has to mail me whatever she makes. Earlier, I could just run to her house and sample her cooking. Now, I can’t run to t...

I used to be a voracious doodler in my childhood. The margins of the first books that I read, Mahabharata and Ramayana, were filled with my own depictions of the events. While at school (3rd/4th standard), we were told that if we accompanied our answers with pictorial representations, it would fetch us better marks. It tickled the artist in me and I would fill the pages with various food images to illustrate sources of vitamins. I wonder now if the teacher laughed softly or really hard looking at them. A few days back I came upon this contest that required us to doodle our way through a recipe. It made me stop in my tracks and ponder if that doodler still resided inside me. Rather, should I unleash that doodler upon unsuspecting readers (if at all anybody stumbles onto my page)? I decided to prod out the child of yore and make her doodle about the food she had enjoyed most during her childhood. The recipe that you see here is what we had concocted as children at our grandparents’ pl...

Sundays afternoon siestas are so divine. A happy tummy, the nip in the weather and an obliging baby who sleeps without throwing any tantrum is my idea of a perfect prologue to a siesta these days. Our household stirs out of this solemn ritual at around 5 pm. I always wake up with the feeling of wanting to snack on something. Well, gone are the days when I used to lazily loll out of the bed and ask mom what she was making for tea. But I am not complaining, I love experimenting in my kitchen and I love the fact that whatever I make shall be accepted, no matter how inedible that is! So today was one of those Sundays when my mind was debating on whether to go for sweet or savoury for tea. I opened the fridge and caught myself staring at the packet of brown bread that the husband had bought for our birding trip. Again I was assailed by the thought of ways to cook with bread. A number of recipes came to my mind. But I was still in that just-out-of-sleep mode and did not want to mak...