A Brownian Walk Through Life...

If there is one meal which defines my good old college days back in India, it would be this fried maggie recipe. Nights used to be super cold at my residential college campus and since our girls hostel had a 10pm curfew, the kitchen staff used to host a post-curfew canteen every weeknight to fuel all the eager students for their late night studying.  The canteen didn't have too many options, but it served us just fine! I remember braving the chilly nights wrapped in multiple shawls to get to the canteen for the pleasure of a steaming hot mugful of tea and a hot snack - which on cold nights would almost always be this plate of freshly prepared steaming hot fried maggie. The recipe is super simple and I know it by heart because the cooks used to prepare to order right in front of us. I highly recommend using Maggie Masala packets (available at Indian grocery stores) and no substitutions - as much as possible to retain the authentic taste. To make fried maggie, bo…

One of the things we miss the most in this stay-at-home phase is going out to our favorite local restaurants. Sure, we can always do takeout, but it just doesn't feel the same without the anticipation of the evening out or the ambiance. So instead we have been cooking at home, a lot - but we also crave a few of our go-to restaurant dishes, like this sauteed kale with garlic from Din Tai Fung or the spaghetti pomodoro from Campo de Bocce.  Campo de Bocce is a lovely Italian restaurant chain in Norther California combining scrumptious family style Italian food with the appeal of outdoor bocce courts to play a few games! It's a lot of fun with a large group of family or friends, where you can combine fun of playing a few bocche rounds and nibbling on their amazing appetizers or enjoying a relaxed brunch! Anyhow, my favorite dish of their menu is the humble spaghetti pomodoro. I have been attempting to re-create it at home for a while now, but my att…

We love our noodle fix at our house! Noodles make a weeknight dinner appearance atleast once every other week for us.  I load them up with lots of vegetables for a heart healthy dinner and they cook so fast - what's not there to love about this weeknight dinner! This is another one of my busy working mom's 20minutes or less dinners. The trick, as always, is a well stocked fridge and pantry. Can't emphasize this enough. Spend that hour on Saturday to make it a priority to visit farmer's markets (if in your area) or any fresh local grocer/CSA and your tummy will thank you for it for the whole week to come! My two favorite noodles to cook with are Soba and Lo Mein. I love them both. Soba tends get slightly stickier if you overcook them even for a minute -- Lo Mein have the advantage of being more unforgiving when it comes to texture. I buy them at Whole Foods but they are available at any asian grocery stores. I have this trick to…

Do you cook with soba noodles? If not, I definitely recommend giving them a try! You won't be disappointed. Soba noodles are native Japanese noodles. They are made of buckwheat flour and are about as thick as spaghetti. Buckwheat is an ancient and a very healthy grain - but more importantly for me it just tastes awesome and cooks in 4 minutes! You can't beat that on a busy weeknight! These noodles when properly cooked have a really good bite to it and can withstand sharper flavors of soya, chili-garlic paste etc with commendable integrity :) Buckwheat noodles can be served cold or hot - this preparation I am sharing with you today is best eaten while the noodles are hot. This dish rotates almost every week at our home. The little one loves noodles and tofu and is always happy to munch along picking noodles one by one :) We try many ingredient variation from tofu, broccoli, carrots, yellow papers, mushrooms, babycorns, water chestnuts to chicken. I…

Aloha! We had a wonderful week at Hawaii during thanksgiving. It was also my daughter's first birthday. There is so much pressure on parents now a days to make your kids birthday special - don't you think? There are all these theme based parties to host, games and entertainment to provide during the party, theme based tablewares, buy perfect gift to the birthday kid, favors to trade for her friends and cakes to order..... the list of chores is endless. And for a kid who goes to daycare, repeat all of that for a daycare party - phew, just thinking about it was taxing enough. But still, we wanted to make it special being her first - something she will look back years later through the pictures and fondly cherish, so after days of mulling over we decided that a quiet beach-side cake cutting in the beautiful islands of Hawaii with Mommy-Daddy was a perfect plan for the special day! Not to mention Mommy-Daddy also needed a celebration for surviving the first y…

It is amazing how good a simple dish can taste when all the ingredients are fresh and the preparation is minimal. This simple pasta primavera was a big hit with us yesterday and a lot of credit goes to the discovery of lemon basil in addition to all the other fresh ingredients. Did I tell you I have found my new best herb-friend in this lemon basil ;) I have read about a few bloggers who grow and cook with lemon basil. I am always curious when I read about a new vegetables or a new herb, so lemon basil was sure something in my to-try list. Needless to say I was so excited when I happened to stumble across this lemony herb yesterday at the farmer's market. Usually my Saturday morning lunch menu is decided right when I am doing the groceries. I pick up whatever looks good that day and then cook something around it. A lot of fresh tomatoes are adorning the markets these days I suppose as a sure sign of approaching summer. I picked some up and settled on mak…

I have always had a love-hate relationship with pad thai. I ate pad thai for the very first time at a Thai restaurant in San Diego. An evening dinner out on a student budget used to be a huge treat then! A group of us had once visited a decently good Thai place which was bus-accessible (bus-accessibility was a must for any outing!). As it was our very first Thai experience, we had pretty much asked the waitress to order the menu for us and she had suggested a spicy pad thai followed by some sweet coconut ice-cream! I absolutely loved the flat rice noodles drenched in a tangy, hot and sweet sauce and crunchy peanuts on top. Over the time though I realized that a good pad thai is not easy to come by. Many times either the sauce is too strong or the whole dish is soggy or oily! After a few unfortunate encounters with pad thai I eventually changed my thai restaurant go-to dish from pad thai to a green curry dish which probabilistically is always decent. But the cravi…

The weather God has been quite unpredictable recently. It seems it can not quite decide between whether to shower us with bright sunny spring days or to go back into the cold rainy lapse. I do not mind either. Rainy days like this weekend is just another excuse to finish up the ever pilling indoor work -- like say doing taxes! I spent the whole of yesterday afternoon sitting on the dining table finishing up my taxes (phew, done finally!). The weather was getting cloudier by the hour but once in a while sun would shine through the tiny pockets between the clouds basking the surrounding foggy green hills with a warm glow. It was so easy to just give up the laptop and take a nap for a while or just stare outside mindlessly. I lost count of how many times I refilled my coffee cup after three. Just as I was finishing up the last of the state taxes I thought wouldn't it be nice to have some chinese takeout for dinner today? Telling you, its the weather making you cr…