Ladled

Magnolia Table: A Collection of Recipes for Gathering by Joanna Gaines has an interesting introduction. Most people get serious about cooking when they have to feed someone else. One of the time, which this happens is when you are married. I used to think I knew how to cook some vegetables, but after eating them with my husband, I realise I should have scraped those ridge gourds and fuzzy opo before cooking them, so they would cook faster and would go down easy. Gaines share their  spaghetti story  My husband recalls the first meal I made for him which had two curries both learned from recipes online. He regales friends on how long it took me to make it.

eighty six in restaurant Chicharron salad Joe Bastianich  marathon

Author:  Amy Atlas .  Meringues  are supposed to be hard to make. Tray liners where you stare at the ray instead of the food on it. While some believe that taste matters, some believe that appearance matters. In this book, both matter when it comes to food and not just the food but the things around.

Today I had two new spices.  and  Javitri  or mace. I tried to bite into the black cardamom. It looked like the cover of a baby  Coconut .  When faced with the hundred spices in  Biryani  that are never had and stay in the plate aside until trashed. Making a  Bouquet garni  is a good idea. Its the spices that add flavour to the dish ' adds a friend. This is at a lunch at a friends place. She made  Mirchi ka salan  for the first time. The first time I had it was hundreds of miles from where the dish originated. That was the first time I had crab too. The chef was nervous about the dish. I liked the tang of it. She would have made  Sprouts Biryani  for the first time had her husband not dissuaded her to make it for a potluck and thus minimise the experiment effect. We were all ears when we learnt of the sprouts biryani. We want to know all the sprouts that go in and how is it made. This is what happens when gustato...

la tartine gourmande While just going through the recipes, I find that it uses rice flour.  Tonka beans  (from S America, the place where all food started from) are Tahini in chocolate cookies, wonder what that tastes like. Lemongrass and blackberry tea cakes, going along with the recipe, you can almost walk into the grocery store, pick the lemon grass stick and chop it and make the whole thing in a dream. I have been meaning to know what a  noisette  is. And Frangelico, does hazelnut have more vocabulary associated with it? Another  noisette I am going to make the brown butter pistachio and poppy seed financiers. Brown rice flour. I have never imagined that. It takes so long to cook, I thought humanity would have given up on using it in any other form. In a reverse situation, my friend gave me some wheat berries and I hear it takes a long time to cook. At home, we always got the wheat berries ground to make rotis. The long list of ingredients mak...

What america spends on groceries . We are trailing close with a close 8% and this does not include the 10% on restaurant. In Telugu, there's a saying 'koti vidyalu kuti korake'. A crore of knowledge/skills are for feeding your stomach. But we dont just work for food. In my  Halcyon Days  (but I mean youth), I used to think I could survive on bread and how much will bread cost? But now I know, its hard enough to eat even a palak aloo curry if we have to eat it continuously like  Groundhog Day  torture. What a beautiful  myth of Alcyone ! And the colours of the  Halcyon bird.

I suppose that a person's first spectacular failure in the kitchen is a kind of coming of age. You could call it a rite of passage. -  T Susan Chang She talks of 'amorally delectable' meals. Involucre Trying to capture the 'green' of the mint in mint icecream without using food coloring, the author makes us realise how when we try to create a dish, sometimes we succeed, sometimes we fail. When we succed we are open to more experiments. When we dont we appreciate the irreproducible. Turkish Yoghurt pastry soul cakes When the buttercream doesnt turn out fine, she dreams of it, asks for advice, finally cuts down the recipe and turns out successful. Regarding goose, she says that chilling the poached goose for a day and two afterward helps to crisp the skin and that potatoes roasted in that released goose fat are delicious. If a woman has to feed children, her cooking skills ramp up. Making sure they get their eggs and veggies. eatyourbooks Cha...