Panfusine

The Holiday season is officially upon us. As the manic 'shopping' season get underway, I just got over clearing out all the dishes from my food coma inducing Thanksgiving feast. Thanksgiving must be the most festive non-denominational holiday in the US, irrespective of religion, social status, geographic location, Everyone gathers around as a family to celebrate and eat. and eat, and then fill up on dessert and coffee!  For me, Its an opportunity to shift to high gear and get cracking on experimenting with the flavors of Fall ingredients - Pumpkins, cranberries, apples. This year, I volunteered to test a 10 cup stack n'snap food processor from Hamilton Beach and I received a package last Monday. While my kids had a little spat over what the packaging carton would be converted into, (a cloning machine vs. a car), I took the opportunity to explore the new gadget..  My first food processor was a Hamilton Beach which was a perfect workhorse until a little pi...

Hysteresis - is the dependence of a system not only on its current environment but also on its past environment.  Turns out that the term does apply outside of physics. I like to define it as the intense craving that exists as long as two weeks after sampling a dish. You crave it so much that you simply must have more. Deep inside the  gyri that run though the cerebral cortex, are taste notes perfectly embedded and making connections to other memory cells to recreate the flavors & textures.

In the interest of full disclosure, I missed watching Food Networks special show 'The Big Waste' and am scrambling to catch it in bits and pieces via YouTube . . Its shameful the amount of food that is discarded in what can only be described as cavalier. I remember getting quite shocked when watching Rachael Ray's show 30 minute meals & seeing her rrriiiip out 2 layers of onion before dicing.  and Iron Chef America... don't even get me started! Blame it on my Indian sense of thrift, but I'd always seen the papery layer peeled out carefully to retain the fleshy parts and just the bare minimum of the root end gouged out. Ditto with a multitude of other produce put to completely full use, peels, seeds, shoots, even the occasional coconut 'going south',  you name it, there is quite possibly a wonderful dish centered around it. Given the shocking statistics regarding food waste, I was quite curious to find out how my local grocey store Wegmans dealt w...

Taiwanese white bitter melon Run this thought experiment in your head.. Ready? think of the first taste that you associate with the following word.. MELON Bitter Melon (Indian Variety) flower and fruit. If you said sweet you're probably in the majority. If you said bitter,  your brain process runs along the lines described by the C.J Peters of the the book 'The Virus Hunter' and, upon hearing hoofbeats, you think zebra instead of horses, & you would be absolutely on the dot..I'm referring to the fruit known scientifically as Mormodica charantia , the Bitter melon (a.k.a bitter gourd, karela, carilla, kugua). Growing up, I absolutely hated the days when this was made at home. After all, bitter is a taste confined to the back of ones tongue & indicative of toxic poisons. Acceptance became rapid after my first rotation at NYU school of medicine with Dr. Slyvia Lee-Huang . She was then working on discovering anti-HIV properties of compounds extracte...