Given that I am such a big foodie, it's surprising that there's hardly any - probably NO reference to food in my blog! Surprising.
I donno how I got addicted to food. In my childhood I remember liking chole, rasam, aloo fry, naan, paneer butter masala, barotta, basundi, cakes, bread jam and fryums.
Then came a phase when I started cooking. I don't remember anything great coming out then.. But by 2005 or so, I was making a few good dishes - my aam panna, cranberry iced tea, kiwi iced tea became famous.
Then slowly my cooking improved. Now, I am a decent cook. I cannot cook south indian dishes. I lack patience. I get pretty heated up near the stove. Oil fumes choke me. Too much butter nauseates me. I hate making payasam. Last week 3 hours of my effort went up in fumes when I forgot to stir the payasam at the 3rd hour.
But, I have a fine taste for food - or so I'd like to believe. I can smell fresh ingredients. I love fresh food and cakes. I choose my food with care. I despise restaurants which charge a bomb and offer me nothing great. If a Darshini does that, I am ok, coz I am losing only 30 bucks. But if a Novotel dishes stale fare and withering lettuce, I will not take it. My food affair in Bangalore nosedived after a series of terrible food experiences which robbed me of my hard earned money. Caperberry, Fava, Olive Beach, Novotel, Taj Vivanta, Spaghetti Kitchen, Toscano, Little Italy etc. I used to subscribe to The Food Lovers magazine and their card. I hardly used the card. All the places they recommended seemed fake.. Not even the famous Abhijit Saha or Manu Chandra served me great food. Somehow the whole magazine, their reviews - seem like paid promotions. It eroded my confidence in others a lot. I was pretty depressed at these things. I even wrote a long mail to them which was never acknowledged. Nowadays I use peer reviews like Zomato, Bangalore burrp and gastronomical blogspot's advice to choose my place.
The smaller but good ones were Herbs and Spices, Ragi ootta at Kamat, Sanjeevanam, Mast Kalandar, Good Luck, Kund, Cafe Masala, world cafe, Chuntney chang and Bistro Claytopia.
Most of these are unpretentious unlike the above list. They don't claim to serve X and end up serving Y. You have average expectations and they surpass the expectations. The best thing is - being unpretentious and serving honest food with fresh ingredients and a certain quality. Out of 5 dishes if 3 make it I am more than happy. Some dishes will not be tuned well or fine tuned. That's ok. Even chef's have moods.. and the ingredients may play spoil sport. I let go of that. When it can happen in my kitchen, it can happen at the Oberoi kitchen too. Your own kitchen will be of the highest standard.
My favourite dessert joints are Spoonful of Sugar, Daddy's Deli, Sunnys and sometimes Lavonne and Berry'd Alive.
Somehow I loved food in Hyderabad. It was reasonable and the fare was delicious. It is possible that I was not so much of a food connoisseur back then.
Now the expected standards for food is very high.
I wonder, how many people enter the restaurant business due to passion for food? Is it the lure of money that tempts them? There are innumerable restaurants in Bangalore. The quality and reliability is questionable. A few weeks after opening all of them serve very average, careless fare. Still - food sells. People in bangalore eat out like anything. The fast pace of life coupled with endless traffic jams drains people. They have no time to cook at home. So, any food sells.
I'd like a world where people only invested in what they're passionate about. That would rule out the wannabes and average and below average guys and leave us with the best!
Back to food, today I was wondering what to cook for lunch. I had some french beans. I was thinking - I should have 2-3 standard recipes for each vegetable. That would make life easy.
On the other hand you can decide a dish and then go buy vegetables around the dish.
There are 1000 ways to cooking things.. start with the raw material or the final dish.. change the cooking method - stew, boil, stir fry, fry... change the masalas... change the accompaniments... there are many tricks to achieve a certain consistency, a certain taste in the final product. Many women who cook for the mandatory 10000 hours to become experts, know these stuff. No wonder your garndma makes awesome sambhar or mixed veg sabzi while you can never recreate the same, despite best efforts and using the same ingredients and the technique.
Cooking involves lots of creativity. That's why your mom cooks new stuff for you always. She will make tur dal in a 100 different ways so that you don't get bored. How many of us acknowledge the effort that goes into daily cooking? The effort taken by the cook to get the ingredients, clean, sort, cut and decide what dish to make and then finally make it... is a long process...It involves patience, creativity and care.
Women who take lots of efforts to feed good food at home are investing in their family's health and also cutting costs down for the family. I salute them.
I have a list of dishes to try.. a list of ingredients which I'd love to hold and smell...a list of dishes I want to become an expert in... but the effort, the fear of wastage and sheer laziness stops me from achieving my food goals. In a wasted effort to learn multiple cuisines, I lost my concentration. I was everywhere, doing everything and mastering nothing. I think, this disease has plkagued many women of our generation. In our parents times, they only had to learn the traditional food of their society, cooked in their respective home styles. Let's say its 50 dishes in all.. They repeat the same and become masters. We, on the other hand pick so many dishes from the internet - we donno which recipe we used.. we don't make notes.. we don't repeat,... we jump from one link to another and lose everything. We donno what we cooked last year. We cook Italian today, chinese tomorrow, mediterranean the next month.. We end up being jack of all trades. Atleast this jumping did me no good. Also, believe me, the best recipes come from cookbooks not the internet.
Having realized my mistaks, today, I want to pick 10 dishes a year, repeat them atleast 5-6 times each and make notes for each and add it to a list of dishes I can confidently serve to my guests. I also want to learn more about traditional Tamil food.. secrets from my grandma and aunts so that they are not lost in time.. to McDonalds and pizzas who have conquered the imagination of a whole nation.
I donno how I got addicted to food. In my childhood I remember liking chole, rasam, aloo fry, naan, paneer butter masala, barotta, basundi, cakes, bread jam and fryums.
Then came a phase when I started cooking. I don't remember anything great coming out then.. But by 2005 or so, I was making a few good dishes - my aam panna, cranberry iced tea, kiwi iced tea became famous.
Then slowly my cooking improved. Now, I am a decent cook. I cannot cook south indian dishes. I lack patience. I get pretty heated up near the stove. Oil fumes choke me. Too much butter nauseates me. I hate making payasam. Last week 3 hours of my effort went up in fumes when I forgot to stir the payasam at the 3rd hour.
But, I have a fine taste for food - or so I'd like to believe. I can smell fresh ingredients. I love fresh food and cakes. I choose my food with care. I despise restaurants which charge a bomb and offer me nothing great. If a Darshini does that, I am ok, coz I am losing only 30 bucks. But if a Novotel dishes stale fare and withering lettuce, I will not take it. My food affair in Bangalore nosedived after a series of terrible food experiences which robbed me of my hard earned money. Caperberry, Fava, Olive Beach, Novotel, Taj Vivanta, Spaghetti Kitchen, Toscano, Little Italy etc. I used to subscribe to The Food Lovers magazine and their card. I hardly used the card. All the places they recommended seemed fake.. Not even the famous Abhijit Saha or Manu Chandra served me great food. Somehow the whole magazine, their reviews - seem like paid promotions. It eroded my confidence in others a lot. I was pretty depressed at these things. I even wrote a long mail to them which was never acknowledged. Nowadays I use peer reviews like Zomato, Bangalore burrp and gastronomical blogspot's advice to choose my place.
The smaller but good ones were Herbs and Spices, Ragi ootta at Kamat, Sanjeevanam, Mast Kalandar, Good Luck, Kund, Cafe Masala, world cafe, Chuntney chang and Bistro Claytopia.
Most of these are unpretentious unlike the above list. They don't claim to serve X and end up serving Y. You have average expectations and they surpass the expectations. The best thing is - being unpretentious and serving honest food with fresh ingredients and a certain quality. Out of 5 dishes if 3 make it I am more than happy. Some dishes will not be tuned well or fine tuned. That's ok. Even chef's have moods.. and the ingredients may play spoil sport. I let go of that. When it can happen in my kitchen, it can happen at the Oberoi kitchen too. Your own kitchen will be of the highest standard.
My favourite dessert joints are Spoonful of Sugar, Daddy's Deli, Sunnys and sometimes Lavonne and Berry'd Alive.
Somehow I loved food in Hyderabad. It was reasonable and the fare was delicious. It is possible that I was not so much of a food connoisseur back then.
Now the expected standards for food is very high.
I wonder, how many people enter the restaurant business due to passion for food? Is it the lure of money that tempts them? There are innumerable restaurants in Bangalore. The quality and reliability is questionable. A few weeks after opening all of them serve very average, careless fare. Still - food sells. People in bangalore eat out like anything. The fast pace of life coupled with endless traffic jams drains people. They have no time to cook at home. So, any food sells.
I'd like a world where people only invested in what they're passionate about. That would rule out the wannabes and average and below average guys and leave us with the best!
Back to food, today I was wondering what to cook for lunch. I had some french beans. I was thinking - I should have 2-3 standard recipes for each vegetable. That would make life easy.
On the other hand you can decide a dish and then go buy vegetables around the dish.
There are 1000 ways to cooking things.. start with the raw material or the final dish.. change the cooking method - stew, boil, stir fry, fry... change the masalas... change the accompaniments... there are many tricks to achieve a certain consistency, a certain taste in the final product. Many women who cook for the mandatory 10000 hours to become experts, know these stuff. No wonder your garndma makes awesome sambhar or mixed veg sabzi while you can never recreate the same, despite best efforts and using the same ingredients and the technique.
Cooking involves lots of creativity. That's why your mom cooks new stuff for you always. She will make tur dal in a 100 different ways so that you don't get bored. How many of us acknowledge the effort that goes into daily cooking? The effort taken by the cook to get the ingredients, clean, sort, cut and decide what dish to make and then finally make it... is a long process...It involves patience, creativity and care.
Women who take lots of efforts to feed good food at home are investing in their family's health and also cutting costs down for the family. I salute them.
I have a list of dishes to try.. a list of ingredients which I'd love to hold and smell...a list of dishes I want to become an expert in... but the effort, the fear of wastage and sheer laziness stops me from achieving my food goals. In a wasted effort to learn multiple cuisines, I lost my concentration. I was everywhere, doing everything and mastering nothing. I think, this disease has plkagued many women of our generation. In our parents times, they only had to learn the traditional food of their society, cooked in their respective home styles. Let's say its 50 dishes in all.. They repeat the same and become masters. We, on the other hand pick so many dishes from the internet - we donno which recipe we used.. we don't make notes.. we don't repeat,... we jump from one link to another and lose everything. We donno what we cooked last year. We cook Italian today, chinese tomorrow, mediterranean the next month.. We end up being jack of all trades. Atleast this jumping did me no good. Also, believe me, the best recipes come from cookbooks not the internet.
Having realized my mistaks, today, I want to pick 10 dishes a year, repeat them atleast 5-6 times each and make notes for each and add it to a list of dishes I can confidently serve to my guests. I also want to learn more about traditional Tamil food.. secrets from my grandma and aunts so that they are not lost in time.. to McDonalds and pizzas who have conquered the imagination of a whole nation.
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