cooking tips

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...