Creamy Potato Salad With Bacon and Chives

When you want to rustle up a super fast delicious dish which never fails to please, here’s the thing for you. How could one go wrong with bacon and potatoes? Actually quite easily if you burn the bacon and overcook the potatoes making them feathery, but we won’t look at that. I’ve been making this dish for years now and love to put a…

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Chettinad Pepper Mutton

  Chettinad is a region in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and the Chettinad cuisine comes from the Nattukottai Chettiars of the region. The food preparations have been the result of an amalgam of spice trade between Vietnam, Malaysia, Laos, Myanmar, Srilanka and Indonesia and is characterised by freshly ground spices in their dishes. The food has piquancy, huge amount…

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Rice Pudding with Date Palm Jaggery (Nolen Gur’er Payesh)

  Nolen gur, or date palm jaggery is a delicacy in Bengali cuisine as it is available only in winter and gives the most heavenly flavour to desserts. So naturally, when winter comes, anyone making any Bengali desserts with this stuff available would be hard pressed to use anything else. Bongs, slang for Bengalis, are one of the most food-obsessed communities you…

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The Best Homemade Strawberry Jam

Jams are some of the easiest things to make but we don’t even think of it most of the time. It involves very few ingredients and pretty much comprises boiling the whole lot down. For the last two years I’ve been taking full advantage of strawberry season and making my own jam because then it can be made to my liking and…

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Bell Pepper Pasta with Broccoli and Mushrooms

Pasta, the flavourful dish from Italy has somehow become so popular in India, that it features in most dinner parties, kiddie birthday parties, buffets and multi cuisine restaurants in cities. It’s super easy to make, tastes wonderful and can be adapted in so many ways - and has - in so many countries to suit their own ingredient baskets that the Italians must…

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Alternative Piri Piri Sauce

This was such an easy recipe and the sauce is so versatile. I’ve used all local ingredients and was particularly thrilled at the jalapeño-type fat red peppers that are plentiful at the vegetable stalls these days, so gorgeous with their dazzling red colour. I bought a kilo of the darn things just because they looked so pretty and completely forgot about them…

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No Guilt Prawn Cocktail

This is a throwback to the good old days in Kolkata and the tea gardens of Assam where traditional English classic food was kept alive by cooks trained by British Memsahibs (wives of tea planters). I don’t know how much prawn cocktail is served any more, because nowadays most people above the age of 25 seem to be on a weight watching…

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