Tuesday, August 31, 2010

10 ways of eating whole seeds


Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Indian Seafood Pickle Cheatsheet

Model Recipes

Sayantani's Bengali Prawn pickle uses mango as a souring agent and mustard paste as a preservative. Her use of water, green chillies and coconut would no doubt make the pickle tasty, but would dramatically shorten the shelf life of the pickle. If you cut out coconut, replace green chilies with chili powder and water with vinegar, the shelf life would greatly improve.

Ramana Dukkipati's prawn pickle uses lemon juice as a preservative. Though warming lemon juice ( he has the innovative technique of adding lemon juice to hot pickle to warm it !) increases the shelf life, the water content in lemon juice does not permit the pickles to be stored for long. Replace lemon juice with vinegar or citric acid crystals dissolved in vinegar for a longer shelf life. Instead of rinsing and simmering prawns in water, using vinegar would dramatically improve shelf life.

Nisha's Tuna Pickle demonstrates there is just a thin line between a curry and a pickle.


Yummy Team's fish pickle reduces water content of the fresh fish first by blotting it with a tissue and then by deep frying it. However, Fish, green chilies, garlic and ginger do retain some of their water content, even after cooking. This water would shorten the shelf life, but the generous addition of vinegar balances it out.

If I am to judge pickles by how long they last, the easy winner is
Addie's dry fish pickle. This would keep the longest as he only avoids using water in the recipe, but uses dry fish to ensure the recipe has virtually zero water. This pickle will easily last years in a refrigerator, getting better with age ! Remember, water is poison to pickles.

Think of any pickle as a really sour, really spicy curry, cooked with very little water ! In fact you can easily turn any curry into a pickle by adding a generous dose of souring agent & pickling spices.

Sunday, August 22, 2010

South Indian Sattu Mavu (Cereal based Energy Drink)

Model Recipes :

Seec’s Sattumavu with a cornucopia of cereals, lentils and flavourings shows how you can have all these powders as a sweet drink ( with milk and sugar) or as a savoury gruel ( with salt and buttermilk).

Ramya’s sattumavu uses the unusual medicinal rhizome, Vasambu (love flag).

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Indian Pickles Cheatsheet





Model recipes :

Indra’s red chili pickle, would last longer if vinegar is used to wash chilies instead of water, and the lemon juice is warmed before being added.

Divya’s Tomatillo pickle is a fine example of sticking true to the spirit of a recipe. Though her tomatillo pickle uses a ‘foreign’ ingredient, it will be no doubt accepted as an authentic Indian pickle.

Sireesha’s Andhra mango pickle. mixes the spices with the oil first and this paste is mixed in with the mangoes. The oil film would delay absorption of salt & spices by mango. A faster way would be to mix in salt with the mango pieces and wait for a couple of days so that the juices are drawn out and then mix in the spices, wait for a couple of days till they get absorbed and lastly to mix in the oil. Again, washing mango in vinegar instead of water would help getting a longer shelf life.

Friday, August 20, 2010

Instant Cereal Soup Powder Cheatsheet

Model Recipes :
Kamala's Kanji Podi with step by step pictures - but Oregano is not Omam ! It is the leaves of Oregano which are used and not its seeds.

Viji's gritty Kanji podi using healthy hand pounded rice demonstrates the large overlap soups and porridges have.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Powder anything - South Indian Style !


Model Recipes:
The simplest podi of them all – blend processed lentils with salt and chilies to a delicious powder ! Eat it mixed with rice or use it as a garnish for dry curries !

Swathi’s Kerala Style Coconut podi

Yummy team’s Dried prawn podi proving that the podis can accommodate any dried edibles. Their use of shallots would however shorten the life of the podi.

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Twecipies

Cooking is fun - Duplication is a pain !

"It is extraordinary to me that the idea of creating thousands of recipes by mixing building blocks takes immediately to people or it doesn’t take at all. .... If it doesn’t grab a person right away, ... you can talk to him for years and show him demos, and it doesn’t make any difference. They just don’t seem able to grasp the concept, simple as it is". ( Thanks Warren Buffett !)

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"Recipe purity is no different from racial purity or linguistic purity. It just does not exist. Cuisines are alive and change all the time. What is traditional today was esoteric just a few decades back. So being a 'foodist' is as bad as being a racist !

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Chennai, Tamilnadu, India
Okay, let me start from the very beginning. 1500 crore years ago, with a Big Bang, the Universe is born. It expands dramatically. Hydrogen forms, contracts under gravity and lights up, forming stars. Some stars explode, dusting space with the building blocks of life. These condense into planets, one of which is Earth. Over time, self replicating molecules appear, multiply and become more complex. They create elaborate survival machines (cells, plants, animals). A variety of lifeforms evolve. Soon, humans arise, discover fire, invent language, agriculture and religion. Civilisations rise and fall. Alexander marches into India. Moguls establish an empire. Britain follows. Independence. Partition. Bloodshed. The license raj is in full sway. I'm born. India struggles to find its place. Liberalisation. The Internet arrives! I move from Tirupur to Chennai. Start a company. Expand into Malaysia, Singapore and the Middle East. Poof! Dot com bust. Funding dries up. Struggle. Retire. Discover the joy of cooking, giving, friendships and the pleasures of a simple life. Life seems less complicated. Pizza Republic, Pita Bite and Bhojan Express bloom !

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