Recipes From My Kitchen

On days when I'm really busy, I try to get past the cooking as fast as possible. I try not to make cooking an elaborate affair and keep it as simple as possible. The quickest thing to make on such days is a mixed vegetable rice or pulao. Its really something that you can fall back upon on days when you don't have too many vegetables or too much time! In Maharashtra, we make something called Masala Bhath , which is very similar to Khara Bhath in Karnataka. Offlate, eating out during my lunch time, I've taken a liking to the Khara Bhath served in Adigas. Diligently, I have tried to dissect the flavors so that whenever I get an opportunity I could make it taste like that. I made it last evening after a hectic day's work. Ingredients: 2 cups  rice , washed, drained, 1  carrot , chopped, 3-4 green   beans , chopped, 1/2 cup of cauliflower florets, 1  onion , chopped, 1  tomato , chopped, 1/4 cup  green   peas , pe...

I feel like a newbie all over again. I've not updated this blog for more than 2 years now. Its just that my schedule has become pretty hectic now. But I've made a promise to myself to update atleast 1 post per week. In this post, I'm sharing my Walnut Brownie recipe with you. Its the most amazing recipe I have and I have always received overwhelming response from all my customers for this one. Since its New Years, I decided to make Walnut Brownies instead of the regular cakes or cookies. Ingredients: 80 gms  cooking butter , 150 gms  dark cooking chocolate , broken into pieces, 3  eggs , 120 gms  castor sugar , 1 tsp  vanilla essence , 80 gms  flour , 20 gms  cocoa powder , 1/2 tsp  baking powder , 1/4 cup roasted walnuts , coarsely chopped, Method: 1.) Preheat the oven to 175 degrees, for 10 mins. 2.) Grease a baking tin ( 9 x 9 inch) with butter and line with butter paper. 3.) Stir the butter and choco...

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...