A Brownian Walk Through Life...

At our home winter means lots and lots of soups and stews. One of the best perks of braving cold and rainy winter days is you can look forward to coming back to warm home and dig in through a bowl of your favorite hot comforting soup right in your PJs!  We make lots of soups and stews at our home, particularly in winter and mostly all vegetarian. And when we make soups, they are not starters or sides.. they get the place of the main dish! You can pair a hearty bowl of soup with nice crusty french bread broiled with olive oil and it can be a meal to remember. You can also pair with a protein or a salad if you wish, but I think bowl of hearty soup and bread can be a fine meal in it's own right. Here are our top 5 favorite winter vegetarian soups which often make appearance on our table. They all use seasonal vegetables and almost all of them are quite forgiving and adaptable so feel free to experiment and suite to your taste. One of the healthiest…

(recipe enhanced from this original post back in 2010!) Do you cook with a celery root (also called celeriac)? It's in season right about now.. along with other root vegetables like parsnip and rutbaga and it's divine! It has a unique mild lemony celery-ish taste. I find it to be an amazing starch to be working with in fall and quite fancy compared to the same old potatoes or parsnips. It can be quite daunting, and to be frank - unappealing, the very first time you are faced with picking one up... in it's unprocessed form it resembles a misshapen turnip with beards growing here and there. But once you get past the unfamiliarity of a new intimidating vegetable, it's actually quite a pleasure to cook with and very easy!  Just peel the outer skin using a knife and chop into bite sized pieces and then you can use it wherever you would use a potato or parsnip. I like this soup in particular because it let's the subtle taste of celery…

I love salads for lunch. A big bowl of salad with greens, grains, fruits, nuts and cheese can be just as filling as a big burger or a bowl of pasta - and on plus side a lot healthier for your body and soul. The trick is to add just enough variety - both in terms of texture and flavors. This is for my "lunch-for-one" salad. I make it on the days I am at home eating alone. Sometimes I skip the grains and keep the salad light as an accompaniment to half a sandwich. Other times I add grains (quinoa or couscous) and/or some rotisserie chicken and make it a full meal - either way it's delicious and I highly recommend you try it! My favorite way to enjoy this salad is to grab a large bowl full with a side of hot tea, perch myself on the patio with a good book and enjoy the lunch hour! While this salad may taste just as well with other greens like lettuce or kale, for me arugula in this salad is unswappable :) I love the tender bittery crunchy…

This is a new take on an old favorite . Our new house has a large vegetable patch solely dedicated to many varieties of kale. And while I have always wanted to be someone who eats a lot of kale, the truth is I barely cook with kale always finding it a little on the bitter side.  However now this flourishing vegetable patch is forcing me to find ways to add kale to our meals. The easiest way to get more of kale for newbees is to add it in your favorite soups or daals - paired with a little tartness from lemons, kale really shines in these preparations. This particular soup has black eyed peas - my favorite legume! It can be as thick or as soupy as you want. Mine is usually on the thick side. I love to serve this with a dollop of cream cheese or greek yogurt and some freshly chopped green onions or chives. No bread. But you could also make it a lot thinner (just add more water or stock) and serve with a crusty bread for dipping.  Recipe: Serves 6 …

If the soups were to have personalities, I think this leek and potato soup will be the simplest and the humblest of the once I cook. Yet, there is something so homely and deliciously satisfying about gulping bowls of this hot soup on cold wintry evenings that you will not feel like you are missing any fancy ingredients or embellishments! This soup has few ingredients and as long as I buy leek from farmer's market, all other ingredients are pantry staples which is a huge plus for weeknight dinners. It is also very quick cooking - about 20minutes. And the recipe is forgiving so no worries if you are multi-tasking in kitchen or playing with kids while a pot of this is bubbling away! (Incidentaly, I really need to spend more than the 5 secs I have gotten used to spending on my food photos. I went down from an SLR to a Canon decent mid-ranger to my Nexus5 phone for photos and the quality has relatively taken nose-dive too. And while this phone does an okay…

Winter has finally made it's appearance loud and clear. Temperatures have been steadily dropping last few days, evenings are chilly, mornings are frosty and my hot cup of cocoa is just that much more warming to body and soul - and that means one thing in our household, lots and lots of soups! On many winter weekend our quick lunch is a pot of soup with some thick crusted sourdough bread brushed with olive oil and broiled at high temperature with just a rub of a fresh garlic clove. Throw in some salad (my favorites are  couscous with butternut squash and dried cranberries salad  or  quinoa salad  or a simple greens salad topped with some fruits and nuts dressed with an easy olive oil red wine vinegerate) and it's my perfect meal any time of day any season of the year.. This soup is my favorite and there are endless variations I keep trying on it. The recipe below is a slight adaptation of an old recipe I had posted earlier (but no new photos this ti…

Winter has finally made it's appearance loud and clear. For last few days temperatures have been steadily dropping, evenings are chilly, mornings are frosty, my hot cup of chocolate is just that much more warming to body and soul - and that means one thing in our household, lots and lots of soups! On many winter days our quick lunch is a pot of soup with some thick crusted sourdough bread brushed with olive oil and broiled at high temperature with just a rub of a fresh garlic clove. Throw in some salad (my favorites are couscous with butternut squash and dried cranberries salad or quinoa salad  or a simple greens salad topped with some fruits and nuts dressed with an easy olive oil red wine vinegerate) and it's a perfect meal any time of day.. The recipe below is a slight adaptation of an old recipe I had posted earlier (but no new photos this time - what with a warm aroma of soup and garlic bread wafting your way sometimes all you can do is eat!)…

It is such a tick-off when you start feeling under the weather right on the eve of a long weekend... not to mention the _ last _ long weekend of the summer and the one where you had plans for beach picnic and doing tourist-y things in San Francisco. But that is exactly what happened - right around Friday afternoon was when I started feeling some early onset of cough and sore throat. Not very surprising considering the little one was coughing on and off sporadically last few days. Before I became a Mom I used to wonder how grown-ups can have cold and cough multiple times a year, unfortunately now I know only too well how the chain of germ breeding ground moves from sharing toys to hugging Mommy & Daddy :) Anyway, after my third cup of coffee on Saturday morning (all to sooth an itchy throat), I decided to make a large pot of hot soup - and that too my favorite soup, the one I always turn to  for comfort on cold winter nights or whenever someone in family ha…

Have you ever cooked with a celery root or a celeriac before? It resembles the shape of misshapen turnip with beards growing here and there. At first glance to be frank it is not very appealing, particularly when seated next to the rows and rows of beautiful pink perfect red carrots of the season; but since I had heard so much about the delicate celery like flavors of these root vegetables, I could not pass up the chance to pick one up in the farmer's market yesterday. Celeriac is a root vegetable in celery family. For a long time I thought celeriac is the root bulb of celery but that is not quite the case! The stalks and leaves attached to a celeriac are _not_ actually celery; I was planning to use them up in my soup but a bit of Googling told me that they may not be edible so I skipped them and used regular celery instead. In texture celeriac is simlar to the Mexican Jicama with a dominant celery flavor with a slight bit of sweetness like an apple! Preparin…

I have always been the one (shamelessly so you might add!) who sneaks in a new untested recipe on unsuspecting guests. It always scares my Mom whenever I tell her I am 'experimenting' on a new recipe when there are guests in-house. But really, for me, trying out a new recipe is like a cook's reward, something that keeps me going. Sure, there have been a few mishaps and last minute runs to Safeway to activate backups, but more than often the new dish has been a great hit and has kept the fun going for me in entertaining! So we had an unplanned visit from a few close friends last night. As luck would have it all I had on hand was pumpkins - two small sugar pie pumpkins which I had picked up on my morning TJ's visit. Together we brain-stormed a lot about what to cook and finally decided to be brave enough to make it a pumpkin night.. afterall isn't Halloween just around the corner! I made the traditional Marathi lal-bhoplyachi bhaji (red pumpkin s…

Nothing screams fall like the rows and rows of neatly arranged pumpkins and squashes! The pumpkin display in front of our local Trader Joe's stores is so adorable that no visit to the groceries is complete for me now a days without picking up a new squash to try. Last weekend I bought a small sugar pie pumpkin for a pumpkin pie. I halved the pumpkin and roasted it for an hour and half until sweet and moist. Just when I was mashing up the pumpkin I realized I had no eggs at hand. A last minute change of plans and some scavenger hunt later, I thought why not try some pumpkin kheer instead... All I had was non-fat milk at hand but the kheer was still extremely creamy and wonderful tasting due to the freshly roasted and mashed pumpkins. Trust me, I am not a person with much sweet tooth, but this kheer was so simple and tasty that I gobbled half of it myself for dinner and next day breakfast! Afterall it is the festivities and what better way to celebrate than so…

Fall has finally arrived! Leaves are turning red, evenings are just a tiny bit chilly, Starbucks is serving its pumpkin latte and what all that means for me is one things.. time to make lots and lots of soups again! I bought a butternut squash on sale at Trade Joe's. I was thinking of making the curried butternut squash soup I had made earlier but feeling a bit adventurous with extra extra pumpkin caffeine, this time I decided to try a long lost Cooking Light recipe that I vaguely remembered reading a few years back at a dentist's office (have you noticed how you never forget a recipe that you read at dentists's office, guess its the pain of whats coming ahead or something...) The recipe is very simple. Original one called for chopping the squash into cubes and then cooking with stock and then slightly spicing it up with nutmeg. When it comes to butternut squash I always prefer roasting rather than chopping (the squash is way too tough to cut using a…

My work weeks have been so hectic now-a-days that every Saturday morning's farmer's market has become sort of like an unwinding kick-start-into-the-weekend ritual. Sipping a hot cuppa coffee and idly strolling through the stalls overflowing with fresh produce, fruits and flowers is meditating and exactly what I need to melt away the stresses of the week to get into my lazy relaxing weekend mode!  Have you seen how all the markets now a days are overflowing with summer squashes and zucchinis? I can never resist staring at those mounds and mounds of neatly arranged zucchinis and colorful squashes. This weekend I couldn't resist but buy a few fresh zucchinis, some leeks and a nice fresh celery. Once I reached home I googled for zucchini recipes and finally settled on this zucchini soup from Kalyn. This soup had one more thing going for itself, it used rosemary; ever since I saw that bushel of rosemary growing in the backyard I have been itching to try it…

Life has been crazy recently.. well, more specifically, work has been crazy recently. If it felt like I have abandoned you all, that was because of the crazy work schedules for the past few weeks. I have even started batch cooking and freezing on Sundays. Always a sign of crazy times ahead. I don't know though, I have still quite not gotten used to the idea of eating defrosted food. I freeze ~4 different portion size dishes for two on Sundays and defrost a new dish everyday morning before leaving for work. The plan goes well for may be till Thursday; somehow by Thursday I always start feeling that I am eating stale food. May be its just a mental block; it is still freshly defrosted food, right! Do you eat frozen foods much? Do you feel the same way? What do you do to liven up defrosted food? Anyway, so coming back to the point, last Thursday my mental block came back in full-swing and we finally decided to dinner out to this nearby salad & soup place where…

Simplicity itself.. thats how Julia Child had described this soup - in one of her b&w television episodes which had aired on PBS a while back. And then I picked up the book 'Julie and Julia' and heard Julie Powell rave about this simple few ingredient soup all over again. Now I have never been a minimalist at heart.. I mean, okay, I don't regularly sweat cooking recipes with 20+ ingredients (or may be only rarely when I am crazy enough) but making a soup with mere 5 ingredients (potatoes, leeks, salt, pepper, butter) as a main-dish for dinner needed guts from my part. But then, when you see a great chef like Julia Child convince you in her commanding voice calling this soup 'simplicity itself' and then you hear Julie rave about it in the book, this recipe just becomes too difficult to pass by! There was a problem though; I am one of those people (aptly described in the book as 'wimpy') who cringe when adding generous quantities of …

I am the sort of person who gets an irrational amount of fun and excitement when I can whip up a healthy and filling dinner with an almost empty fridge. A bit weird, isn't it. It gives me the satisfaction of saving a last-minute restaurant trip and of my pantry keeping efforts. See, all those times when I am buying pantry staples my husband occasionally says, why do we need all this; but a meal entirely out of pantry is exactly the ticket to convince him of all its goodness.  Yesterday I came back home late after visiting the new gym (so many things change when you change a place, isn't it, like driving to a new gym rather than walking a few steps to the apartment gym). Fridge barely had anything and even my freezer was running low. My long scavenger hunt ended with 3 bread slices, an onion, few last bits of a celery and a very oldish looking carrot. Whenever I see the onion-celery-carrot trio, soups always jump to my mind.. but I did not have limes or lem…

Ti me flies by so fast, doesn't it! It seems hardly a few weeks ago when the leaves started turning red and the chilly fall winds were blowing and now, look, end of winter is already in-sight (well, a bit distant sight.. but in sight neverthless, right!)! I know, I know, many of you particularly on the east coast are battered with snow storms after snow storms, but hey, look at the brighter side, there are just ten some weeks for us to endure these wintry days... I thought of this while on my morning stroll on a chilli Saturday morning (dreaming of the hot cup of coffee waiting for me at home - goes without saying :D). If a mere thought can make you warmer, happier then this was it...  but the next moment I was like what about all those winter vegetables that I planned to try this season? Back in November it seemed there was forever to try the winters bounty but with February halfway gone it sure feels like looking from the 'other' side of the winter :…

You know I almost don't want to admit it but just a few weeks ago I was a self-proclaimed most ardent orange lover who had hardly tested any other orange varieties other than pure old navel oranges! All this changed when while browsing one day I came across this Mark Bittman winter citrus column .. listening to it somehow motivated me to go out and explore and experience the world of those 'other' citruses. Luckily for me being in California exploring citrus varieties is not much of a trouble. I just kept buying a new citrus every time I visited my farmers market. I talked to the vendor about its properties, growing seasons, hybrids and also got some samples in return for my curiosity! Sure, me and my husband we both have our favorites at the end of these citrus tasting weeks but in these weeks I learnt so much about these various relatively lesser-known (to me atleast) citruses that I thought I'll do a post noting each one I tested. Mind you thoug…

Have you ever had it happen to you that you are roaming in a grocery store picking up your onions, chilis and potatoes and all-of-a-sudden a packet of an unknown vegetable or a spice jumps into your cart and won't take no for an answer :D Well, that happens to me a lot! My husband calls it 'impulse-buy' but tchk-tchk I know better than that.. see, its a divine intervention! Okay, okay, I know I am an addict for buying new (to me) fruits and vegetables that seem to be in season without having any idea of what I am going to do with it. Then they sit in the fridge patiently waiting to be used up. A week goes by, no super-great cooking idea strikes me, and at the end of the week, I end up using them in my sure-fire way: by soupifying them! Parsnips were my last week's impulse buy. They are in season now. I have tasted parsnips long back but this time they looked so fresh and crunchy that I had to have it! To be honest a parsnip soup was not on my mind…

Last few weeks have been a sweet overdose for me.. You know what I mean, right? Cakes and cookies and chocolates and truffles and sweet breads: you name it and this holiday season I have ate it! Since I am one of those minority people who are low on a sweet-tooth, a sweet overdose of this magnitude is likely to take me off sweets for a while.. or may be just for a few days, we'll see, depends on how hard the box of cookies and chocolates sitting on my dining table stares at me (like that Geico add where the money stares at people!) :D Anyway, today morning I just wanted to eat a simple and light lunch to make up for all the desserts that I have had last few weeks (and particularly yesterday!). I looked in the pantry and saw a bunch of golden and red beets that I had bought from farmer's market last week. I instantly thought of my favorite beet salad! I started making this recipe a year or so ago; the origin of which comes from one of my most treasured coo…