Recipes From My Kitchen

Tea drinking is an elaborate affair today. I am ardent coffee drinker and am in love with anything coffee. An ex-colleague suggested we meet up at Cha Bar to catch up on some business initiatives we were trying to put in place. I walked into Leela Galleria and looked for the Cha Bar. Parked in the basement of Leela Galleria, it is seamlessly attached to the Oxford Bookstore hosting itself in a quiet corner. The book store houses a great variety of books and stationery. The ambience of Cha Bar is contemporary with shades of white, black and silver. The mood is intantly set to pick up your favourite book and settle down in one corner with your favourite tea and something to bite along. They have an elaborate ten page menu (I think, maybe more) of different teas that you can choose from, one page for coffee and a section called Other drinks. Funnily, I didn't look at the coffee section. I was so amazed at the varities of tea and decided to order Earl Grey Tea. Something cau...

I love to experiment with dal's as I feel its that one thing without which your meal is incomplete. It goes hand-in-hand with roti or rice. But sometimes having the same type of dal brings in monotony and I'm always in the look out for different variations to it. I've had Dal Pachranga in restaurants and weddings before and found it quite interesting. I have this book by Sanjeev Kapoor, Dal-Roti which has come to my rescue many times. I've tried out Dal Pachranga from this book a couple of times before and its quite good. Its called Pachranga because 5 differnt dal's are used in this recipe and all the flavors come together very well. Its a gloomy day today..its been raining and haven't seen the sun since morning...Filter coffee was on my mind and made myself a hot cup.. Its the weather which reflects on my mood..dull, gloomy, and all I did was swap the channels to see if something interesting caught my attention..Was very lazy to cook myself a meal for...

Breakfast is an important meal for all and especially considering at home we have only the breakfast and dinner together, its even more important to make sure that I make something which is liked by everyone. Its really difficult to come up with something new for breakfast everyday. I myself don't like to repeat the same dishes, leave apart the weird faces my hubby and son make :( Yesterday, I bought a loaf of triangle shaped sandwich bread thinking I'd make sandwich's for breakfast today. I had decided to make a vegetable sandwich but as luck would have it..I got up a little late and everything just got delayed. I decided to switch over to a faster option of Instant Garlic Bread.. Here's how I made it... Ingredients: Bread slices , 4 tbsps salted butter , 7-8 garlic cloves , crushed or very finely chopped, Oregano seasonings , (I've used the one's you get from Pizza Hut/Domino's) Chilli flakes , (optional), (I've not used it here) Salt as p...

A few months back, for Christmas, I had a small tea party. I had decided to make an Orange Cake from a paper cutting I had resevered for sometime. Shortly, after the tea party, I went off on a vacation and this post just did not get published. When Aparna announced the FIC-Orange this month, I knew what I had to do :-) Food themes like this, inspire you to get your posts out however lazy you might feel..:-0) I had never made an Orange Cake before and this recipe was fairly simple. Thought of giving it a try. Good quality oranges are available during winter here (though nowadays oranges are available all round the year)especially the imported ones. The orange glaze is the best part about the whole cake which I realized only after eating it!!! This cake makes a perfect tea time cake, if you have some oranges handy.. Ingredients for the basic Orange Cake: 2 cups flour , 1 cup powdered sugar , 1/2 cup unsalted butter , softened, 2 eggs , 1/2 tsp salt , 2 tsps baking powder , ...

A genuine problem faced across the culinary world is the conversion aspect. We love to try out recipes from various parts of the world..but a look at the recipe and there you go again...pounds, ounces, grams, cups...Gosh! that looks complicated...Lets try the recipe some other time.... Tired of this..one day I went to the local market and got myself a kitchen weighing machine with a maximum capacity of 5 kgs. If you don't have one already, try and get one here ..trust me its quite something!!! The weighing machine helped me to have a common platform to work on..GRAMS/KILOGRAMS! I always prefer to convert the recipe to grams because that way I cannot go wrong with the measurement. When measuring using cups, there is always a possibility to "add more" or "add less" than what the actual recipe calls for. For example, when a recipe calls for 1 cup of flour, we don't know whether it should be 1 leveled cup or 1 heaped cup. Adding more or adding less, drastica...

I was introduced to something known as a Swiss Roll when I had been to a baking course few years ago.. Years later, after having forgotten and also lost the recipes given by that teacher, I joined another crash course in baking few months ago, where I was introduced to Swiss Rolls again. Well, the teacher taught us a very simple one with jam which was not something that I would jump in the first instance to make. Few weeks back, we went to a restaurant for Sunday Buffet Lunch where they had a huge spread of sweet dishes apart from the starters and main course menu. They had this beautiful, little, Strawberry Swiss Rolls which were out of the world!!! I kept looking at them, wondering why it never occurred to me that I could enhance a simple Swiss Roll to something as delicious as this... Swiss roll is a type of sponge cake baked in a very shallow rectangular baking tray, and then usually filled with jam or buttercream, rolled up, and served in circular slices. The origins of the...

Happy Makar Sankranti & Pongal to all!!! Makar Sankranti is perhaps the only Indian festival whose date always falls on the same day every year i.e. the 14th of January. Can you guess why? This is because the festival of Sankranti is based on the solar calendar unlike the rest of Indian festivals, which are based on the lunar calendar. Makar literally means "Capricorn" and Sankranti is the day when the Sun changes it's position from one sign of the Zodiac to the other. Even though Sankranti comes every month, in the month of Magha (January) it is considered especially auspicious as it coincides with the harvest season and marks the end of the winter season. (Info: Google) Being a South Indian, I've relived the happiness and joy of Pongal every year... Though I did make chakara pongal which is customary in our house, I also decided to make Til Ke Laddu or tilgul . The sesame seed or til is given a lot of importance because in this season it is considered ...