Pho Ga 🍲 - Vietnamese chicken & noodle broth, garnished with spring onions, basil 🌿 , coriander, bird’s eye chillies and squeezed lime
Ps: the noodles are some old, demonetized Maggi
Tiffen sambar, roasted green tomato & black sesame chutney and dosa.
Ready for #FRAURU with fire roasted pineapple salsa and steamed parrot nose mango, ginger & red chilly pachadi. I used the Amaklamatic Chutney Recipe Generator docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…
A food science experiment based Chhole Bhature. Getting it to stay puffy using a bit of semolina (which retains moisture that becomes vapor when frying thus guaranteeing sustained puff up). Chick peas efficiently cooked with a pinch of soda + tea (acid to neutralize soda)
Red rice, Fish curry and Beetroot thoran. Putting the curry in a separate bowl would have made for a better social media picture but no one eats that way, so here’s 🥂 to #uglydelicious
Chilli onion kulcha made from high-hydration yeasted dough that results in a super-soft and flaky (from the use of butter in the dough as a shortener) finish
Misal Mickey Pav
Roti and Veg Makhani, a truly versatile gravy that you can actually make ahead and keep in the fridge for a while, and then add any combination of meat/veggies to get X Makhani/Makhanwala etc.
Masala Focaccia. I adapted this from the original Italian recipe for a garlic, tomato & rosemary focaccia. The basic formula is yeasted dough with herb and spice infused olive oil, topped with stuff & baked
90 min challenge for a full meal - Methi paratha (with baby methi that requires very little prep work), paneer makhani (with pre-made makhani gravy), mint raita, ivy gourd sabzi & kachumber salad
In the spirit of true culinary immersion, I accompanied the mother-in-law on her Sunday fish buying trip and learnt & made her Seerfish curry, Banana stem thoran while she fried the Paarai (horse mackerel) & pappadam
Kuzhi Paniyaaram & 🍅-onion-🌶 chutney (and for math buffs: calculate area of wood visible assuming that the plate is 2 parabolas that are y = x^2 + 1 intersecting)
Manaqish, a Levantine flatbread with 2 kinds of Za’atar toppings - the traditional one with dried oregano, sumac & sesame in olive oil and an indianized one that is kalonji (nigella seeds), roasted fennel & cumin, rock salt in ghee
Mexican Coffee Bun, more popularly known as the Rotiboy in Malaysia. A super fluffy semi-sweet bun with a frosting of coffee cream and a dollop of butter at its center.
Gobi sabzi, Carrot and Zucchini noodle salad with orange juice, orange zest & chaat masala dressing
Since there was a metric megaton of dosa batter in the fridge, the decision was to make Kuzhi Paniyaarams with an assortment of gourmet chutneys. From left 1. Capsicum & coconut 2. Roasted Urad, Almond & coconut 3. Coconut & Brazil nut 4. Beetroot, onion, scotch bonnet chilli
Back home after a week of travel, had a casual conversation with a desi restaurant chef on what makes stuff taste “restaurant style”, & tried out Bhindi do pyaaza & dal tadka and plated it Edvard Munch style because those “restaurant style” tips will indeed make you go 😱
Putting a new gadget to first time use - Sous vide chicken tikka, veg pulao, dal tadka and marinated onions. The hype is for real. This is the most reliable way to make juicy & succulent poultry. 69 C for 90 mins
Taco night. Black turtle beans, Sous vide lime & garlic chicken, roasted corn & chilly salad, salsa verde (with green tomatoes) and pickled onions with whole wheat tortillas
A 20 minute dinner. Masala egg sandwich - Coriander-mint-chilly chutney, cheese, scrambled egg, tomatoes & chaat masala on wheat toast.
A simple Thai style noodles and cucumber salad (dressed in rice wine vinegar, chillies & sesame oil)
Luchi and Aloo’r Dum. A small food science tip: many recipes call for the potatoes to be fried before dunking in the gravy. That actually reduces the ability for the potato to absorb the spices in the gravy. Better to add them just boiled for a more flavour aloo
Trinidadian Pepper Roti - essentially 2 super flaky laccha parathas stuffed with a mix of vegetables, scotch bonnet chillies🌶 & cheese 🧀 served with radioactive green chutney
Methi laccha paratha, paneer butter masala and pickled onions. I used a few drops of liquid smoke in the gravy and it imparts an amazing smoky/barbecue flavour
Jeera pulao and veg handi with mint and coriander raita and pickled kandhaari chillies
Kandhaari chillies, when sent to vinegar prison, is the kind of resourceful prisoner who sneaks in a lock picking device and breaks out (the heat) even after a fair bit of soaking.
There are 2 kinds of people who dislike coriander. The first, who are genetically predisposed to find the flavour distasteful and the second, people who buy limp, industrially grown coriander from the grocery store. For the second kind, growing your own will change your life
The flavour of freshly plucked coriander will make you realize that you’ve been eating bovine fodder all this while. It might even convert the apostate @saliltripathi to the church of cilantrology
Apparently, some ~14% of the population possess a gene that makes their tastebuds particularly sensitive to aldehydes, which coriander has, and that makes it taste like bath soap (which also has aldehydes) for them.
Another example of genetic predisposition to find certain foods inedible is broccoli, where a particular gene is said to make it taste insanely bitter while the rest of the population perceive little or no bitterness
Also, this is my all time favourite home gardening YouTube channel (hat tip: @saffrontrail) here are his instructions on growing coriander at home (did you know that the coriander seed is actually 2 seeds fused into one?)
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This year, there’s a good chance that (some of) your parents or grandparents have been furiously reaching out to “experts” on WhatsApp, YouTube and TV to find out if Pongal/Makar Sankranti was to be celebrated on Jan 14 or Jan 15.
The confusion stems from the fact that this year, the Sun enters the zodiac sign of Capricorn in the afternoon of the 14th, and since people like to celebrate their festivals in the morning, some “experts” have been recommending celebrating Pongal on the 15th
At this point, people who believed that they were born with the sun sign of Capricorn are going “Eh? What do you mean the sun is casually ambling into Capricorn on Jan 14th afternoon? I was born on Jan 4 and was told I’m Capricorn!"
If it wasn’t already evident, the south and east are largely meat eating while the north and west are significantly vegetarian
Rice + Meat is the most common dish pattern, not surprising because it’s either easy to make at scale (biriyani) or with great speed (fried rice) and packs a full meal in a single dish
I’ve done my fair share of business negotiations, but nothing could have prepared me to parlay with a thuggish rhesus monkey who stole my spectacles at the Jakhoo temple in Shimla earlier today. I was, rather fortuitously, helped by an imposing alpha male monkey
If you are wondering how on earth I managed to enlist the services of a large monkey to retrieve my spectacles, I will have to tell you the whole story, but since I’m currently trekking to see the Chadwick falls, this will have to wait till my phone gets connectivity
It all started with this guy. More precisely, because I was not able to reach this guy. Vodafone’s service in Shimla is best described as the exact opposite of the Shammi Kapoor song “bar bar dekho” because no bars are to be seen in most parts of the city.
What connects the customary late afternoon/early evening rain in Bengaluru and the Nepenthes fly-trapping pitcher plant? It’s Madagascar. Intrigued? Thread...
Around 120 million years ago, the Indian landmass parted ways with the Antarctic and Australian landmass. And around 88 million years ago, a giant underwater volcanic eruption called the Marion hotspot occurred, and it went on for 2 million years.
What is today the Western Ghats in India was originally a wider mountain range that literally split down the middle like a zipper during this eruption and this is how Madagascar separated from the Indian landmass.
Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher and accomplished orator who was amputated and beheaded on the orders of Mark Antony for his scathing criticism and opposition against the man.
But before his hands and head were non-consensually separated from his body, he authored a work on ethics titled "De finibus bonorum et malorum" ("On the ends of good and evil”) in 45 BCE.
"There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..." is the English translation of an excerpt from that work.