Panfusine

This was an experiment done on a wing and a prayer, tried to satiate my deep craving for 'kadugu mangai' (baby mangoes in a mustard brine), a classic South Indian pickle that is a staple in my kitchen. Up until this year, these baby mangoes were simply unavailable. Sooo, instead of the mangoes, I decided to look outside the crisper drawer and before I knew it, I was stuffing an entire head of Napa cabbage liberally sprinkled with kosher salt and turmeric into a large glass jar. A month later, poured out the brine, combined it with raw mustard seeds, asafetida and arbol chiles, and gave it a whirl in the smoothie blender. The net result, a delicious kimchi (a tad salty though), that paired well with the tambrahm favorite - Yogurt rice!

T'was just another Summer afternoon, The kids were home for the summer holidays, getting bored, there's only so much summer reading you can force them to do, and the Indian mommy in me could no longer caution them against going out in the afternoon  (I've solemnly refused to use that horrid excuse of 'You'll get a dark tan if you stay out in the mid day sun'), and so we decided to head out to Terhune orchards for the blueberry picking. The kids never say no to outings to the orchard, they LOVE the trip there, the cute yellow dogs and the cats,  the chocolate crinkle and Snickerdoodle cookies, and they positively trip over grabbing buckets and heading joyfully towards the berry bushes... ... And there it ends, the younger one loses herself in her delightful imaginary worlds where she probably thinks she's hacking her way through virgin Amazon jungle, sighing at every branch that brushes against her legs, picks 2 or 3 berries as if they were a new as ...

 What in the world am I doing? Cranberry season went out 6 weeks ago, as soon as the Black Friday sales swept into each and every retail establishment in the country. Yeah well, looks like I've misplaced that memo. I'm still rejoicing in the availability of those gorgeous crimson berries. A good recipe is one that you want to make repeatedly, a GREAT recipe inspires many other creations that become favorites. In this context, I owe a big vote of thanks to David Leite & that awesome  recipe for cranberry sauce posted by Renee Schettler Rossi . When the first batch of cranberry sauce got used up as is, the next batch made for some delicious craisins that went into Christmas time chocolate bark.   A tweak to the original recipe gave rise to this weeks post. A 'chunda' - a sweet & hot lip smacking relish that is native to the Western Indian state of Gujarat. The classic version is made with shredded raw mangoes that are set out to 'cook' un...

 Got your attention with that sacrilegious sounding title on this post, didn't I? Well, I'm as spiritual as the next person out there, and never in my life will I ever commit that variety of Blasphemy, so nothing to fret about. I still wonder why these curious looking citrus entities (other than the obvious visual reason) were called such. It turns out that these fruits are used as a religious offering to the Buddha. My neighboring Whole Foods Market (which is quite some distance away, in Princeton) had a stock of these weird looking citrus and I must have been the oddball customer who immediately went cuckoo on spotting them. Since I had never seen one before, I immediately went for the biggest fruit with the most tentacles (since they were sold as individual units rather than by weight) The first three 'tentacles' were peeled off for their zest, dried in the oven and went into making a citrus salt for my Food52 Secret Santa .     Making ...

 Slipping through my fingers all the time... Hearing this Classic ballad from ABBA never fails to put me into a wistful mood, get transported to happier  carefree times. As I watch my son getting ready to shed his first tooth and getting excited about a visit from the  tooth fairy, a part of me realizes how I have to helplessly watch time race on and think back to a generation ago about my own experience of that evening when I first discovered that I was about to lose my first tooth. Amma consoling me about how this was a part of growing up and me, with a gargantuan lump in my throat, trying hard not to cry. It wasn't all about that loose tooth. Even at that age, it was a feeling of loss of that cocooned part of life, of an innocent childhood, slipping away to be replaced by life's ever increasing burden of heartaches & stress, with patches of thankless existence, endured solely for the sake of your own  children, who also provide you with some of th...

The Shiva Temple in the village of Kalakkad Note to self: repeat Note to self:    When traveling within Rural India, Its waaay better to drive than take the train!! This is what happens when you base yourself in the US of A & miss out on whats been happening back in the home country. They have great national highways that get you from point A to point B in great time with decent enough gas station rest rooms en route. Still accustomed to the old ways of traveling by train, we went on to book tickets on the Nellai express (yeah yeah AC 1 the highest class possible on the train, still). Kids loved it, didn't mind the griminess too much and the berths made for a great monkey bar substitute to climb up and down. but its hard for grown ups to get reused to something one has merrily gotten unused to! So here we were on a hot & dry late August morning , at Tirunelveli Junction picked up by a pre-arranged car (an air conditioned Toyota SUV)  & dr...

On a visit to the Oriental grocery around chinese new year, I happened to pick up a rather large container ( the only size available) of Kumquats. These miniature oranges are so cute to look at & sniff, but can be quite challenging when trying to decide what or how to cook with them. For one thing, this egg shaped citrus is quite reversed in its flavor profile. The peel is sweet & redolent of citrussy orange flavor, but once you peel it, you can barely make out 4 tiny segments bloated with inedible seeds. To top it all, the teeny bit of pulp is extremely lip puckering sour. And so, these fruits sat on my kitchen counter for about 3 weeks. I kept weeding out the occasional rotten bad eggs from the rest, until i decided to use some of the peel for last weeks recipe. (yes folks, the pannacotta was garnished with candied kumquat peel, not orange) Cut to my umpteenth sweep of Mrs. Ammini Ramachandrans book 'Grains, Greens & grated coconuts' ( I j...

In India, along with the pongal season arrives a slew of rhizomes in the market that are associated with this festival. Fresh Ginger & turmeric are found everywhere, whole plants with the rhizomes still caked in fresh muddy earth. The aroma is incomparable. At home, invariably after the festivities were over there would be plenty of the fresh turmeric & ginger left over after some had been replanted in pots (Its quite another story that we needed to eventually buy more next year!)  for the next season, my dad would dice these finely, add finely minced green chilli, salt & a dash of lime to make this yummy relish/salad.. (it was a bit too spicy to load up by the ladleful, but mild & piquant enough to scarf down generously for an 'achar' (pickle/relish), so in later years I took to calling this a salsa). My mother in her characteristic southie tradition would add a tadka of mustard & a pinch of asafetida. This was one of my late father...