All posts filed under: Recipes

Strawberry Milkshake and My 100th Post

It’s my 100th post today. I can’t believe I had enough material to go this far (apparently I do!) Bloggers say that lasting the 2 years is the biggest challenge. You need to be interested in what you blog about and let’s face it, people need to be interested in what you write about. You might say that you give a rat’s ass about what people think…but that’s not true. You need an audience to appreciate art. (Ok, in my case … the art of blabbering!) If nothing else, I have at least 100 failsafe recipes that I can always fall back on! I’ve also come to realize that I care as much,  (if not more) about my pictures that accompany each blog post. So the journey for me has been about taking baby steps to produce pics that I am proud of. (Here’s the link to my first post and picture. (Click Here) No, am not ashamed, it’s a learning curve right?) 😛 Talking of learning curves, was I going to put up some …

Easy Vanilla Cupcakes with Nutella Frosting

Once you get the basics right then everything else is a breeze. My first cupcake was a vanilla cupcake. Somehow adding the chocolate as an additional step made it feel like advanced baking! Now here’s the best part. I made my first cupcake (in my whole life) in March last year! After which I’ve been stuck with the cupcake bug and been driven to try all kinds of mini joys. So now you know that I wasn’t born with a ladle in my hand nor did I have supreme baking talent. The key to success is the 3P’s – Practice, Practice, Practice! (Like the joke – Rumor is that a pedestrian on Fifty-seventh Street, Manhattan, stopped Jascha Heifetz (the greatest violinist of our time) and inquired, “Could you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?” “Yes,” said Heifetz. “Practice, Practice, Practice!” So there you go … if I can bake, so can you. And starting you off is this Basic Vanilla Cupcake Recipe. And just to add some pizzazz, we have a nice and …

Ham, Bacon and Green Apple Quiche

So today has been a frustrating day. I made a cheese cake which did not set and made a Mexican Chicken Mole which had too much cinnamon! And on a hot day tempers can flare everywhere! Clearly some days are not for culinary adventure or rather just any culinary venture. Every woman who rushes home from work and still wants to whip up a fancy meal a la Nigella, is living in a dream world if she doesn’t have failsafe recipes to fall back on! It’s times like these that I have even more reverence for a good recipe, a blogger who tests the recipe and finally a book that publishes only tried and tested recipes. That is why you can be rest assured I am not putting up dubious recipes on my blog. I don’t want to inflict the pain of failure on anyone. (No, seriously, that’s how it feels when a recipe screws up!) So it’s with supreme confidence that I am posting the Ham, Bacon and Green Apple recipe. It worked liked …

Cafe Frappe with Bailey’s

I am not a coffee drinker. (Phew! That was almost as difficult as admitting that you have an alcohol problem!) Coming from the state of coffee growers – Karnataka, (my brother-in-law even owns a coffee plantation), I am quite an anomaly. When I go to visit my relatives or friends and they offer me a cup of coffee, I’d rather say I just had a meal, than admit I don’t drink coffee. On the rare occasion that I do tell someone, they look at me like I am some sort of space alien and repeat the question till I give in. There… now their world is sane again! So why don’t I drink coffee? I like to believe that I already have so much energy, that I don’t need the buzz from coffee. I also never appreciated the bitter taste of coffee and sweetened it till it started to taste like sugar syrup! Now coming to the big question, If I don’t like coffee, why do I have a recipe for Café Frappe on my …

Sun Dried Tomato Pita-Pizza

Featured in Tastespotting.com – 19th Mar 2012 I know I have a penchant for extremely long, all-encompassing titles to the post. But trust me this one is the modified version of the original title, which was – Sun Dried Tomato Pita-Pizza with Ham, Mozzarella and Basil. When I read that, it struck me that the entire recipe was in the title itself. Wow! My job is done right? Just chuck whatever I told you onto the pita and bake it in an oven. No really, Pizza making is that simple! (If you’re not kneading the dough that is – which I am not. I don’t have the arms for it!) I also am not rich enough to invest in a Kitchen Aid, so I will be cheap and buy some readymade pizza bases and get the job done. No one has to know! I know the true blue Italians are turning in their graves, but honestly who has the time to appease everyone these days?! My motto is to ‘get the job done’. I’m pretty …

Simple Chicken Curry for Complicated Days

There are days that are easy, breezy and simple. And there are days that can grate on your nerves that burrowing your head deep into a pillow seems like the only way out. Unfortunately, even that option is but a distant dream when you have to finish gazillion things in the limited span of 24 hours. It’s not every day that I spin through life in a haze. I actually like my little routines of measured slowness. (Now the definition of slow for an Aries can be very different from the rest of the world, but nonetheless!). And there have been more days than I can count on my fingers, that ordering takeaway is the norm. But when everything seems to be spinning out of control, I crave desperately for a home cooked meal. (Mommy…can I come home?). Oh wait, driving there is going to take me a good part of an hour, eating there another, and driving back another hour! I can’t spare three hours in a time strapped continuum. Famished, cranky and hungry …

Cherry Chocolate Muffins and Love as I know it…

Yes, we all know Valentine’s Day is around the corner. And though I personally don’t do cart wheels because of it (overrated to say the least!), it does make me think about Love. It’s a bit like this Muffin. Don’t give up on me yet… I know not everything is about food, but the comparison makes it easy for me to rationalize the subject in my head! I started out with a recipe for this muffin from a completely trusty source. The recipe seemed simple and the pictures were gorgeous enough to make me want to try it right away. So I dived headlong into it. The results were ‘nice’ but I felt sorely cheated. Not because it din’t taste good or look divine, it just din’t hit the spot like how I pictured it in my overly imaginative mind. So did I mope around whilst eating it, knowing all well that this is not what I wanted? Hell no! I knew the ingredients were right but the quantities didn’t add up. So I rolled …

Anda Raita and the Art of Perfect Hard Boiled Eggs

Two opposites do not make a whole or so said some really intellectual dude. The reason why that strikes me when I made this was because I could never see a dish with eggs and yoghurt as the only star ingredients. (Unless… it was a face mask!) But there are always certain days in the calendar when the same old same old bore you to death and you want to try something radical  different! In my life those days are most days and I am willing to throw down the gauntlet of doubt in the face of strange culinary pursuits. (I know that’s dramatic but it’s a Sunday so allow me my self expression!) My guise was, I’ll keep the yoghurt separate and just ease one boiled egg into it to check for taste. Prototype A. If that passes quality check (i.e. my tongue) the rest of the eggs can join the party. So was the experiment successful? Let’s make that rhetorical. Would I post on the blog if the experiment was not successful? 😛 …