With the gazillion cookbook’s I own, it would be a shame to let them collect dust. I do pick up my favorites and rummage through the pages greedily for some ‘flashbulb’ recipes, but the rest of them are read once and relegated to the back shelf. Samar’s book runs the ambiguous path of a cross between ramblings of one’s life and recipes that relate to that phase, scribbled onto pages of a scrummy diary. As he states in the preface to the book – he is a glutton. And if he needed to feed his rambunctious appetite without upsetting the balance at home (his wife is a vegetarian), he had to learn how to cook. Years of living away from home, coupled with hosting innumerable impromptu parties has given him the ammunition to be creative with his cooking techniques. The book is a result of him documenting his attempts to create palatable meals through a blog in the Hindustan Times and a column in the Mint.