I was watching Julie and Julia (Meryl Streep and Amy Adams) a story about 2 women and their love for cooking. Julia’s husband said the only place where he could meet his wife was if he sat in the kitchen, in short that’s me. My husband would have the same thing to say. The other main character in the movie is Julie who is trying to learn cooking with the help of a book written by Julia and posting her cooking experiences online. That’s when the idea of starting a blog struck me. I eat, sleep, drink, walk, and talk food. I wake up thinking of it and go to sleep thinking about it. The only thing running through my head all day is what interesting dish can I whip up for the next meal and make mealtime as interesting as possible. I cannot fathom my family having the same dish for 2 meals in a row or even repeating it over a span of two days or as a matter of fact even repeating it in a week’s time. Let me you in on a small secret – my husband is absolutely fine with having the same dish for a couple of meals. He is a no fuss man, loves good food and yes, I am lucky to have him. Its me who wants different dishes in each meal. I am always on the lookout for new recipes and recreating dishes found in a restaurant at home. Being a vegetarian makes it even more challenging. Always trying to make a vegetarian version of the non-veg counterpart wherever possible. So here I am writing to you for the first time with recipes gathered from here and there with my own little twist and tweak to make them my own.
My love for cooking started at a very young age of about 10, watching my neighbor Shobha aunty dishing out scrumptious dishes from her kitchen. I used to sit on her kitchen slab and watch her cooking for hours and chatting with her. During the 90s there was no Google baba (as I call it) and the only way one could try new recipes was the good old fashioned way- if you ate at some ones house and liked the food ask for recipe (if they were generous they would share it with you), recipes which had been passed down to you through generations, which you could access through your mom who was a phone call away or rummage your way through your collection of recipes books, lastly if you were a great cook go by your institution. Shobha aunty was one who cooked by the intuition, cookbooks and through recipes passed on through generations. Almost every day I would watch her carefully baking and cooking in her tiny kitchen and that’s when I started to dream of having my own kitchen and cooking delicious meals. That’s when I realized my love for food. This dream came true once I got married in 2011 and I had my very own kitchen. It was my sanctuary where I could cook whatever I wanted to with whatever ingredients without any intervention from anybody. I am blessed to have a husband who never pokes his nose in the kitchen. Since it was 2011 and we all were blessed with Google, my tryst with cooking started. I ended up spending hours looking up for recipes over the internet, combining 2-3 recipes adding my own tweak to it to make it perfect to suit my family and my taste. Cooking is like meditation to me, it’s my stress buster and stress reliever. When you see me irritated just send me to the kitchen and ask me to cook and see my nerves calm down as I work my way through the kitchen and finally see happy smiles on people’s faces after eating food cooked by me. I absolutely love love love feeding people. One of my favourite quotes-The best people in the world are people who love to eat. And I love to cook.
So here I am sharing with you all the recipes that I have come up with over the years and perfected through trial and error. My recipes are unique as they are simple and can be cooked with ease with all the ingredients being readily available. These recipes are simplicity at it best.