Kitchen Chemistry

We lived in Trieste, Italy in the nineties for seven long years, where we had our first taste of Italian Pizza. There were not many pizza houses in Chennai or Bangalore before 1995 and therefore we had never tasted it in our lives! It was love at first bite and we took to the thin-crust pizza topped with vegetables and cheese like fish to water! Then began our monthly ritual of visiting a pizzeria to devour delicious hot brick oven cooked Italian pizzas of different flavors. Pizza Margarita, Pizza Vegitariana, Pizza Alla Roucola, Pizza Quatro Formaggi were some of our favorites.  I could devour a 12-inch pizza all by myself assisted by generous refills of Coca-Cola!  Well! Sigh! Those were the golden days when I was young and muscular with little care about my waistline which I watch out for a lot now! 😞 Tired of eating the local store ordered pizzas we decided to make fresh pizzas from scratch. We pored through multiple youtube videos searching for authentic Italian pizza re...

This dosa batter recipe is a hand down by Neela paati to Anandvalli maami, her only daughter. Neela paati was a gentle soul and an excellent cook as is Anandavalli maami. Now Sumathi, Anandvalli maami's 2nd daughter who has been making excellent dosas for years carries on the tradition and is recording the batter recipe for future generations.  Sumathi fondly recounts that when Neela paati made the dosa in her Tiruchirapalli house, you could smell the aroma of the menthya dosa made with gingelly oil along the whole street. Ingredients: Boiled Rice (Puzungal Arisi) - 2 & 1/2 cups Raw Rice - 1/2 cup Udad Dal (Black Gram) - 3/4 cups Menthya (Fenugreek)- 3 tablespoons Salt - 2 tablespoons Preparation Method: Soak all the ingredients except menthya together for about 5 hours. Soak menthya separately. Grind menthaya along with the soaked water in a wet grinder first for about 5 mins. Sieve the water and add the rest of the soaked ingredients into the wet grinder. Grind for approximat...

     This recipe is dedicated to Devayani maami who shared it over the phone with me a few months back before she passed on. Devayani maami's specialties were pickles, podis, and chutneys.  Ingredients: Fresh Ginger - 250gm Tamarind - 125gm Gingeley(sesame) oil - 250ml Chilli Powder - 150gm Salt - 125gm Methi seeds - 1 teaspoon Jaggery - 200gm [optional] Mustard & Hing (asafoetida) for seasoning Preparation Method: Wash the ginger thoroughly, dry, remove the skin, and again while clean of moisture. Cut into small pieces and grind it into a paste in a dry mixie (food processor).  Make tamarind paste with clean boiled and cooled water. Grind the tamarind paste and ginger paste together. Heat the 250ml of gingelly oil until it starts smoking slightly and cold it down. Dry fry the methi seeds until brown and powder it.  Heat a bit of the gingelly oil in a kadai (pan) and fry mustard seeds and add to it ging for seasoning.  Add the chili powder, salt, m...

This post is dedicated to Devayani maami who recently passed on. Sridhar, her son was kind enough to share this recipe from maami's cookbook. We fondly remember maami, for her dishes that we used to savor whenever we visited their home.    Maami, we seek your blessings from your heavenly abode. The following is the recipe. I have made minimal changes to the recipe from her cookbook as I want to retain maami's way of narrating the recipe. This dish is called Iru(two)  Puli(sour) - two ingredients to instill a taste of sourness of the dish. The ingredients that are usually used to incorporate the sourness are tamarind and sour curd. The dish can also be prepared with one sour ingredient. With this definition of the dish out of our way, we may jump straight away into the preparation of this dish! Cook vegetables – sweet pumpkin, white pumpkin, 1 potato, 1capsicum, 1, brinjal, ladies finger, Bangalore badanekai (chayote), sorrekai (bottle gourd), (etc. with tur...