cooking tips

The holiday season is already here and I am feeling very festive. I took a leave for two weeks and wanted to really have a laid back end of the year. Movies, baking, cooking, shopping and decorating are the major activities I am indulging into. I never knew baking could be so much fun despite being messy :P.  Yes I am quite messy with the kitchen when I am baking. Still need to get the hang of the stuffs and do things systematically. Its usually the recipe sheet lying on one corner, newspaper laid out for straining the flour, mixing bowl, chopping board and ladles and whiskers , well the list is never ending. But still I'm in love with baking. From the time I got the microwave I was planning on baking something savory, muffins to be precise. I wanted to bake something with my favorite veggies, but getting a good recipe was the main task. Then one i really liked which had mushrooms. Read it here . But then I tweaked it and added all the veggies I wanted or had in pant...

Winter is here and everything is already so beautiful. Winter is a time for going on a gastronomic frenzy as the produce you get at this time of the year are simply so fresh, flavorful and tasty.  I am having a gala time in my kitchen exploring many new dishes, adding new dimensions to existing traditional dishes, creating fusion of Bengali and Marathi cuisine, its just too much fun!  When I am alone I usually avoid preparing leafy vegetables as its a hell lot of hard work to clean them. At the same time I just love the greens. Give me any leafy vegetables and I am a happy person. But the amount of hard work deters me every time. This time since mom is visiting me, I dared to try out a number of leafy vegetables. Chola shaak or Chole ka saag or Harbhara is such a thing. Mom says, I have had chola shaak as a kid. But by seeing the shaag I couldn't recollect. Only when I tasted it did I remember that I indeed had tasted it earlier. Usually other years we get the whole bush of Ch...

My Journey with Pasta has been a bitter sweet one and dates back to the time when we were kids. Pasta wasnt a fad back then. I remember we used to call them simple macaroni. And whenever mom would prepare it or mention it I would go meh! Rubbery white things with no taste what so ever and looking like a snail, how appetizing can it be to a 5 year old. That impression of pasta had stayed back in the mind somewhere. So when the world was going ga ga over pastas I hardly had any interest. Then came the time when I finally decided to give the Sunfeast ready to cook pasta a try. I was told the white sauce one was good. And guess what I was greeted with the same macaroni shaped pasta. After staring at them for a whole minute I thought fine lets give it a try. And I loved the result. Creamy, buttery soft pasta. Thats probably the first time I felt good about this particular dish. A lot of time passed in between, and my pasta pangs were only limited to the ready to cook pasta. Until recently w...

Hello Readers, I am back like more than a year after. Different commitments on personal and professional fronts kept me away from my blog which I missed so much. And what can be a better time to be back other than our very dear Durga Pujas. Just as Mahalaya was approaching the smell in the air also started changing. Especially in the mornings, one could distinctly smell the Shiuli, the signature smell of Durga Puja mornings. The place where I stay has a few Shiuli Trees on the way and passing them brings back a lot of childhood memories. During the Durga Pujas as a kid I visited my maternal grandparents house. We had a Shiuli tree in the garden. My dida used to wake very early in the morning and gather the flowers fallen on the ground for doing prayers. That earthy smell of morning mist and Shiuli is something I can only talk about but one has to experience it to understand. This time around Durga Puja is happening on all weekdays. Hence I decided to take two days off on Ashtami and Na...