Panfusine

Whenever the craving strikes for deep fried food, I always try and maximize by trying out new ingredients to fry up, and whatever is sitting in my pantry/ fridge is fair game. This time around it was Fava beans freshly shucked from the pod, mixed with a chickpea batter infused generously with fresh thyme, and fried up.

When I was about 6 years old,  I once remember asking my mother for fried rice. It must have around 1975,  the first time I heard about new dishes  such as Falafel (which my dad, fresh from a 2 month posting to Kuwait, pronounced as 'Filafil' ) and Fried rice. Amma's repertoire of recipes at the time was restricted to traditional South Indian dishes with the odd Punjabi choley & Alu Mutter thrown in.

 I'm actually breaking into song as I write this up. Albeit in my head, Frank Sinatra is crooning his timeless classic.. My Way.. Jan 1st 2012, Siri Pulipaka , the author of cookingwithsiri.com was just winding up her own daily blog ( of everyday events) and was encouraging others to experiment with similar projects. On a pure whim, I got myself a blogger page, with nary a thought about how I was to complete 366 dishes. It was never my intention to add recipes for classic day to day fare, just links  if a particular dish was made using a recipe from other sites. But, just as a new mother forgets everything about the intensity of her labor pain after seeing her infants face, I cannot recall anything hard or negative about this annual project. In fact, the support I received from everyone of you simply increased my motivation to kick back any lethargy and support every dish I could with recipes. The effort has paid off in terms of a repository of recipes that I...

The flip side of festive days such as thanksgiving is this terrible sense of withdrawal symptoms that invariably strikes after the festivities are over.. Once the cleaning is done, the nice plates are put away and the last wine cork is located in the far corners of the kitchen counter & tossed out, a feeling of 'now what do I do?' sets in and no dish that the head conjures is ever good enough to beat. and no recipe that has been tried, tested & waiting to be posted seems to fit the bill ( Take home message: Its not worth making & banking good recipes way  too ahead of time ) When that happens I regress back to comfort foods that I know I'll regret stuffing my face with.. This time around it was deep fried 'Bhajia',  and a large mug of Masala Chai... at 10.00 am in the morning (doing this ought to rank with hitting the booze at 9.00 am, in terms of socio-culinary blasphemy), but it was delicious while it lasted. Weight watchers just got relegated to ...