Bombay Foodie

I first discovered chestnuts as they were roasting in a British christmas market on a cold, snowy day. The warm bag of chestnuts went all over with me over the next hour; a comforting feeling as we walked across aisles of Christmas trinkets, games arena and a meeting with Santa. It occurred to me then how strange it was that we never ate chestnuts back in India. Didn't we have all the chestnuts trees up in the Himalayas. Back home, when Big Basket put chestnuts on their menu a couple of years back, I naturally assumed these were an imported variety. Turns out I was wrong. Chestnuts arrived early on Big Basket this year and they have clarified that these are the homegrown Himalayan chestnuts. The first time I bought them, I spent hours figuring out the right way to oven roast my stash. For this season's purchase though, I reckoned I will try a completely Indian manner of cooking and put them in a pressure cooker. Turns out it makes the chestnuts a pleasure to cook. Firs...

Every time I fly Indigo Airlines, I make it a point to buy a tin of their smoked almonds. Salted, roasted and with an intense smoky flavour, these are some of the best almonds I've tasted. Now, it does seem kinda silly to pick which flight to book based on what snacks they sell onboard, so I felt this was high time I made my own smoked almonds. Smoking, if you haven't looked at it before, is a cool way to add charred flavour to everything from tea to meats. You do it by exposing food to smoke from burning wood, a technique favoured in most of US, Europe and Australia. India has its own smoking tradition - the whole school of dum cooking based on exposing food to smoke from red hot pieces of charcoal. If getting access to wood and charcoal and burning stuff in a typical Bombay flat sounds complicated, fear not. This smoked almonds recipe is based not on any of the traditional smoking techniques but on smoke you can buy in a bottle. I use liquid smoke to give smoky flavour...

Garam Masala is the cornerstone of Punjabi cooking. It's a mixed spice that gets tossed into every curry, every lentil dish, pretty much every thing we cook at home. My family even tosses some on top of a toast. Not surprising then, that every Punjabi household has their own garam masala recipe. I still use my mum's - not her recipe but the actual spice mix. I bring a batch back with me every time I go home to use until the next trip. Part of the reason I don't venture into making my own garam masala is because it was so hard to get my mum's recipe. But finally, after much guesswork and prodding to measure things just one time, we have the official Sareen family garam masala recipe. Ingredients 100 grams cumin seeds (jeera) 50 grams coriander seeds (dhania) 20-25 nos. black peppercorns 8-10 nos. cloves 5 nos. black cardamom Heat a pan. Switch the heat to medium, pop in the cumin seeds and roast, stirring continuously, until toasty and fragrant. You are onl...

Inspired by a dessert that's currently being served in Indian Accent in New York, and featuring my three favourite mango varieties, here comes a study in mango: - Aamras (made with Dashehri mangoes) - Mango slices (langda and chausa) - Aam papad; sweet and sour - Basil shrikhand - Basil meringue - Basil leaves to garnish

For the longest time, I debated on whether to share this recipe. After all, this is not your good looking Thai Red Curry or Green Curry. It's in fact, a very boring shade of brown. But then, this is brown for a reason. The red color in the traditional curry comes from a mix of dried red and fresh bird eye chillis. If you are a chilli wimp like me, the brown curry is the one for you. It's got all the flavour of the red curry but much, much less heat. This version's also adapted for my vegetarian tastes, and has no fish sauce or shrimp paste. So go ahead, make this piping hot bowl of comfort for a rainy day lunch. Ingredients For spice paste 1 tsp coriander seeds, toasted on a dry pan 1lemongrass stalk, without the woody end - finely chopped 1/2 tsp whole peppercorns 1 inch piece of galangal, peeled and roughly chopped 2 shallots, peeled and roughly chopped 4 garlic cloves, peeled 2 kaffir lime leaves 2-3 cilantro stems, roughly chopped (don't use the le...

I've often wondered about the benefits of peeling teeny tiny potatoes to make dum aloo. Apart from the cuteness factor, there didn't seem to be much taste uptick versus a regular potato curry. Or so I thought. But then, a couple of weeks back, I went to this cooking competition where I was to cook a Bengali menu and got handed the recipe for aloor dum. Punchy and totally full of flavour, it's a dish I've been thinking of ever since. But I didn't bring back the recipe and I sort of forgot what all went in there so this is my own version. Think of it as the Punjabi curry counterpart of the aloor dum I made the other day. It's delicious nevertheless. Ingredients 15-20 baby potatoes 3 tbsp ghee 1 bay leaf 2 whole red chillies 2 tbsp ginger paste 1/2 tsp hing powder 1 tsp cumin seeds 1 tsp mustard seeds 1 tsp coriander seeds 1 tsp chilli powder 1/2 tsp turmeric powder 1 small onion, pureed 2 small tomatoes, chopped finely 1 tbsp tomato puree 1 t...

May is my favourite month of the year for fresh produce. That's when all my favourite fruits - cherries, lychees, peaches, apricots and green almonds - come into season at the same time. Which means that every time I make a trip out to the fruit store, I come back with way too much. I love eating these fruits as is, often times instead of meals. But today we are going to do something different and make a salsa out of peaches. It's pretty much like a tomato salsa except it's sweeter, which makes it a great combination for salted nacho chips. Plus, it's a breeze to put together, something I really appreciate in dinner ideas in summer. Ingredients 1 large peach 1 small tomato 1 small onion handful of cilantro leaves 1 lime salt smoked chipotle powder (or a fresh jalepeno) Halve the peach and remove the pit. Peel each halve - if your peach is ripe enough, you can just pull the peel from one corner and it will come right out. You can also leave it unpeeled if i...

I discovered the joys of misal pao way too late in life. Maybe I didn't move in the right circles when I first came to Bombay, or I didn't have the right friends but it took me several years to find this little snack food delight that's native to Maharashtra. So what's misal, you ask? It's a curry made with sprouted lentils, which is then topped with fried savoury snacks called farsan and garnished with raw onions and cilantro. Pretty much always served with a dash of lemon juice and a side of soft buns native to Mumbai - the pao. It's a race against time eating your misal once it is assembled because you want to gobble it all down before the crispy farsan melts into the gravy and gets all soggy. On a recent trip down the Konkan coast, I ordered misal at every stop on the way and discovered a range of flavours. Some misal paos were spicy, the others delightfully sour. I would caution though against ordering misal if you are headed to Kohlapur - I'm tol...

A few years back, I went on a Matunga food trail organised by the now shut MumbaiBoss. Among the flurry of dosas and filter coffee we had that day, the standout dish for me was Jackfruit Sheera at Ramashraya. Sheera, for the uninitiated, is a thick porridge like dessert made with semolina. It's one of the easiest Indian desserts to make, and a classic comfort food. At Ramashraya, they excel in making different variations each day. Their most popular variety seems to be pineapple sheera but on the day we visited, they had a jackfruit sheera on offer. Now jackfruit, specially the sweet, ripe, variety used in the sheera, can be quite an acquired taste. I only tasted it for the first time a few years back and it took me a while getting used to its rather overwhelming smell. I enjoy it now and with jackfruit now in season, I decided to try making the sheera at home. The first step in making the sheera is, of course, getting jackfruit pieces. It's a difficult fruit to handle ...

A few weeks back, I got a call from JW Marriott in Mumbai Sahar. Their chefs were planning to go on an exploratory trip to the Konkan coast to discover the Konkanastha Brahmin cuisine, they said, and they wanted to take a few bloggers along. Was I interested? That is hardly a question, is it! I'd enjoyed my trip to Dapoli a few years back and the Marriott crew was now headed to nearby beach towns of Diveagar and Guhagar. Plus the Konkan Brahmin cuisine, with its completely vegetarian teetotaller bent so close to the coast, has always intrigued me. The thing about driving down the Konkan coast is - you spend an awful amount of time on the road. Which is why it is important to have likeminded companions. We were all foodies on this trip so the food talk never really stopped. Once we got off the road, we spent a night at Guhagar and another at Diveagar, both times at homestays and within walking distance of some gorgeous beaches. And all three days, womenfolk who run dining halls...