Potato & Broccoli in a Honey Mustard Custard

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Eggs, Broccoli, Cheese, Spring Onions, Potato, Dijon Mustard, Honey, Cheddar

Are you all wondering what happened to Rashmi? Why is she keeping us away from all the scrumptious goodness in her life. Surely, even if the posts have gotten infrequent, the eating can’t have, can it?

And you are absolutely right, it can’t. And it hasn’t. I’m one of those crazy people who can not give up good food. Indeed, a good part of my day is spent on food related activities – when I’m not eating or cooking, I’m reading, talking or even simply dreaming about food. I spend hours and hours drooling over food photographs. Watching Food Network is even more engrossing. Tanmoy says it is more entertaining to watch me watching cookery shows than the shows themselves, because I look like a greedy pig feasting (alas only visually) on a variety of foods far beyond its little piggy imagination and sometimes there’s even a maniacal glint in my eye. The situation, in short, is getting quite out of hand.

Fried Apples and Onions

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Apples, Spicy, Sweet

When I was a little girl, one of my cousins introduced me to the Little House series of books. She had just returned from a spell in the US and had brought along the entire set with her. I was completely and totally enthralled as I read about Laura Ingalls and her Pioneer family, about farm life for the small family while America’s wild west was still being settled.

My love affair with the Little House books started once again when I came to Toronto and browsing through the shelves of the public library, found one (I’ll tell you more of my library obsession in another post). The original books had all been written by Laura Ingalls Wilder about her own childhood in the 1930s. Other authors then took up her mantle and after much research, they enriched the Little House series further by writing books about Laura’s great-grandmother Martha’s childhood in Scotland, her grandmother Charlotte’s childhood near Boston, her mother Caroline’s childhood in Wisconsin and her daughter Rose’s childhood in the apple growing areas of Missouri. A total of 32 books.

Braised Mushroom Stew

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Carrots, Mushrooms, Olive oil, Spicy, Spring Onions, Tomatoes, Wine

It was Tanmoy’s birthday last week, so I was in a celebratory mood. After all, his birthday means that for the next 11 months, we can both quote the same age when asked (yes, I am whole month older than him… GASP!) Just to be contrary, he was in as non-celebratory a mood as anyone could possibly be for their own birthday. So I was having a tough time figuring out how to celebrate without really celebrating.

My Ma-in-law made the decision making slightly easier by saying I should make Payesh (a lip-smacking-spoon-licking-inducing rice pudding very well liked by the Bengalis and indeed by anyone who ever gets to eat it). Then Tanmoy asked for a Strawberry Cake (and warned me not to tell anyone because sweet pink cakes are for little girls but I am telling anyway because I think everyone has a right to like pink cakes), so the sweets were take care of. But I still needed to figure out what the main dish would be – it had to special and sumptuous, something that would warm your belly and make you smile for sometime after you’d finished eating, something that inherently made you feel good about being alive, something that would make even a husband in the most non-celebratory mood (silently) thank his stars that his wife was of a different opinion.

After rejecting many recipes already in my repertoire (I wasn’t experimenting for this occassion) I suddenly remembered this one.

Grated Beet & Methi Sabzi

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Beet, fenugreek seeds, methi seeds

I do believe that by now, you all must be pretty bored of me rhapsodizing about the elegance of simple recipes, ones that use few ingredients and have simple procedures. I can almost see the eyes being rolled – there she goes again. We get it, we get it. Simple recipes are God’s gift to mankind. Say something new, will ya?

But listen you people, I am no creative literary genius and as you must’ve figured by now, I’m no great chef either. I am just a simple girl who finds happiness in small mercies, and who while mad enough to labour over the hot stove once in a while for a special dish, is eternally thankful that everyday cooking need not be a herculean task. And I find such joy in finding new uses for old ingredients, new tastes lurking inside them which you never suspected, new combinations you never considered before.

Take, for instance, the beet. Don’t turn up your noses – this particular root has surprising tastes hidden behind its ugly knobby exterior. 

Nariyal Kofta a.k.a. Javai Rassa

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Besan, Chickpea flour, Coconut, family traditions, Spicy, Tomatoes

So I am back. I was on a soul-recharging trip to India for a few weeks and while I had made grand plans of blogging from there, who’re we kidding?! I was so busy meeting people and travelling and eating that I did not even once think of posting. I did however make a couple of my recipes for my family – they’re an awfully suspicious lot, very hard to fool and wouldn’t take the blog on its face value. Prove that you actually can make all these things, they said, and I had no choice but to establish my credibility. Thankfully, my mom as well as my mom-in-law were on personal missions of their own – namely, to fatten up Tanmoy and me on a year’s worth of delicacies and I only entered the kitchen a handful of times.

 

Now that I am back in Canada, it all seems like a wonderful dream and (at least) another year of cooking my own meals stretches before me. Sigh. Not willing to let go of home so soon though, I am still cooking recipes from home. The Nariyal Koftas I am sharing with you today are my Granny’s speciality.

Citrusy Salmon on a bed of Semolina & Veggies

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Beans, Bell Peppers, Fish, Olive oil, one dish meals, Rava, Salmon, Semolina, Wine

This is one dish I am proud of. I mean, really proud of. Considering its me we are talking about, I usually feel proud of every single dish that I manage to cook, simply because I got off my lazy bum and cooked something. But if I were to disregard these rock bottom expectations that I have from myself, and actually start feeling proud only for real achievements, then this dish is at the top of the short list. Why, you ask? Because it is my creation, that’s why. That’s right, you heard me. No kidding, better believe it all you disbelievers.

I’ll tell you how it came about. I read somewhere about one-dish meals – where the one dish contains everything that a meal should, and as you will have guessed by now, the idea totally caught my attention.

Tilache Laadu or Sweet Sesame Balls

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family traditions, makar sankranti, Sesame, sesame seeds, Sweet

Nothing makes me more homesick than a festival. I wouldn’t say I come from a particularly traditional family, but we celebrate a host of festivals and there are some very particular family traditions revolving around each. And mind you, when I say traditions, I don’t mean religious traditions. Whatever day was being celebrated simply wouldn’t be deemed complete without having done the things that were part of its tradition. These traditions have given me a wonderful sense of ‘home’, of knowing where I come from, of where I will always belong.

Mushroom Olive Strata

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Bread, Cheese, Eggs, Feta, Milk, Mushrooms, Olives

Tanmoy and I love to go out for brunch once in a while, and spend a lazy couple of hours at some nice little cafe which is not in a hurry to shoo us out the moment we put the knife and fork down. And then there are those weekend mornings when it would take a crisis to make us get ready and out of the house. It is these latter, on which I try my hand at brunch recipes I have collected.

The recipes which get precedence are, you guessed it, the minimum-effort-maximum-result kind. Ever since I have discovered that things other than cakes can be baked, it is as if a whole new world has opened up for me. The concept simply fascinates me. All one has to do is assemble all the ingredients together, dump them in a baking dish and pop it into the oven. Then while your meal makes itself, you are free to go back to your book (or whatever your thing is). What could be more liberating than that, short of employing a cook?

Strawberry Cake

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Eggs, Strawberry, Sweet

You know what they say about birds of a feather. The people I really connect with are those who are passionate about books and reading or are foodies – those whose eyes sparkle whenever food is so much as mentioned. I implicitly trust these people’s recommendations – whether about books or food. When Aditi, who is such a friend to me, mentioned a certain heavenly strawberry cake on facebook, it stayed in my mind for weeks and I knew I had to, had to try it. But I still kept putting it off, waiting for a special occasion for a special cake. Actually, this cake classifies as an every-day cake, so I needn’t have, really. But then, I (ahem) shouldn’t be eating cake everyday!

Shrimp and Broccoli Alfredo Pasta

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Broccoli, Cheese, Milk, Parmesan, Pasta, Shrimp, Sour Cream

We all have our lazy days. Some of us more than others, and I guess my name must be pretty high on the lazy people database. On most days, I am in no mood to cook dinner. Summer offers many options to eat out, but with winter setting in in earnest now, its so  much effort to bundle up and go out in the cold to eat (and if its snowing, there’s the added job of scraping the snow from the windshield) that suddenly staying in starts to look very tempting. But alas, eat we must. And tasty it must be (there is absolutely no compromise on that).