The Chettinad Potato Roast is a perfect match of two very important things in my food experience – potatoes and aromatic balanced spices! I am a spice addict. Days when I have had long tiring experience I open my spice cupboard and stand in front of it. That is my home-grown therapy! Hence the natural…
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Continue ReadingBeyond all religious and cultural significance, festivals and food are personal diaries for most of us. We script our memories, likes and dislikes in them and revisit the well-thumbed pages year after year, while adding new pages to them. While growing up in Assam, we had no clue about any religious ritual that might…
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Continue ReadingI bought this seasons’ first radishes with their tender greens, with mulo shak pithali in mind. Mulo shak pithali is an heirloom recipe of tender radish greens cooked with ground red lentils (musoor/masoor dal). It is a very seasonal dish and tastes best when made with the season’s first radish greens. It is a Dhakaiya…
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Continue ReadingOff late I am realising that most food or recipes that make me nostalgic or I think of as comfort food are the one that as a child were forced down my throat by my mother or other enterprising members of the family. It wasn’t as if I disliked the taste of most of these…
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Continue ReadingThis recipe is from Renuka Debi Choudhurani’s cookbook – Rokomari Aamish Ranna. It is a treasure to have in any kitchen that loves Bengali cooking and food. It uniquely combines Hilsa and chana daal. It is beautiful to look at, it is rich, fragrant and one of the best Hilsa recipes I have tried. For me…
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Continue Reading“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet”, argued Shakespeare’s Juliet with her Romeo. I invoke Juliet not in my bid to defend young love but to put into context what has been going in my mind since I came across this recipe. I…
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Continue ReadingSummers and I seem to have come to an impasse this year – it refuses to let me go and I refuse to let go off my dislike for it! The saving grace is that it is still occasion for indulging in biulier daal (urad daal) – aloo posto, tok daal and doi maachh. Though…
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Continue ReadingThere is practically nothing called pakoda/pakodi in Bengali cooking but Bengalis must be one of the largest consumers of fried items to be had as snacks or as part of a meal. So what are these known as? These are the bhaja, bora and ‘ni/ji/ri’ of our world! Before all my Bengali friends start raking…