DesiPundit

I always thought that ‘fasting food’ tasted so much better than the usual food. Meera comes up with some innovations to the traditional upasachi bhaji using bell peppers. 

Smrti takes us through Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, a book by Lizzie Collingaham. She reviews the book that weaves a story around food and our history.

I like the discussion on tea the best. Collingaham reassures, as most of us have always believed, that the quintessentially Indian food is most often a foreign import, like Chilly or accidental inventions, like kebabs. Same is the case with tea. Now the largest producer and a good consumer of tea, India never heard about tea before the British. When tea was planted in Assam and labourers died out of Malaria and abuse from masters, tea was not an Indian thing at all. It took massive marketing strategies - which included distribution of tea in temples, movie screenings to distribute tea and special chinaware and apparently not contaminating and impure to caste – to make tea popular in India.

Jai and Bee list this month’s CLICK winners. CLICK is a monthly food photography event; this month’s theme was “au naturel” - food in its natural state. Do check out the collection of wonderful photos.

When I came to India for the first time in 1998, I bought my favorite game of all time to share with my friend and his family- pictionary. For one clue, I drew a banana shaped figure with a oval design in the middle with another banana on it! Of course, to me this was a banana- as in the U.S. all bananas are sold with stickers on them. It was that oval design with a banana on it that totally confused my friend’s brothers who have never seen bananas in the U.S. and so we lost that round! But maybe now a days with all the Spencer’s and Food World’s of India these foreign stickers are more common. But now, even small time street vendors selling their tender coconuts want to don similiar stickers on their produce as Shrinidhi discusses

Roadside sellers on the outskirts of Pondicherry have started slapping a sticker on tender coconuts and toddy palms that they sell on ECR (East Coast Road). The label, in Tamil, advertisers the brand name of the coconut, and has empty slots for date, weight, and price.

Click in to read the entire post as well as the lively discussion in the comments section!

Amardeep’s narration of Hot Breads made my mouth water…

Hot Breads specializes in stuffed croissants (tandoori chicken, paneer, etc.), but also offers a menu of other light foods (wraps, chaat, desi-style pizza) as well as dessert pastries.

While daydreaming about these tasty treats memories of frequenting a shop by the same name in Chennai came to mind. I was assured this must be of the same ‘chain’ after reading on the Hot Breads site:

Hot Breads, a unique bakery and cafe, started in Southern India and the fetish for stuffed croissants quickly spread around the world. Now with more than 80 locations around the world Hot Breads is more than just a name familiar to Indians.

Of course, they should update the last few words to say “familiar to Indians and other world citizens!’ Now that U.S. has Hot Breads, will we get Hot Chips, also?

Shrinidhi at eNidhi shares with us a delicacy of roadsides in some parts of South India. Personally, I love these kinds of posts because these parts of culture may be missed, and often are, by people living in cities and especially tourists to India, like me!

It is quite a common scene in Chennai roadside to see carts selling unpolished rice with its gravy. …Called KooLu or Kanji in tamil and Ganji in Kannada, they sell nearly 500 ml of this for Rs 5. Mixed with buttermilk and onion and served with fried chilli and raw mango slice, you might actually enjoy eating it.

Sandeepa continues with RCI Bengal and rounds-up more Bengali recipes, tried and tested by intrepid food-bloggers. This time around, they include snacks like muri and shingaras and of course, delicious Bengali sweets like rasgullas, sandesh and mishti doi!

If you’re ever in Kathmandu, check out the Korean restaurants in the Thamel neighborhood. Sirensongs describes some of her favorites and their menus.

My favourite is the little tiny Han Kook Sarang, in the same courtyard with Tamas Lounge and Pink Palace opposite the RoadHouse Restaurant. At Han Kook, I never fail to have the Tofu Kim Bab (Korean for sushi). For a mere 100NRs (less than $2.00), I get the sushi-veg roll, soup, kim chee (pickled cabbage) and two side vegetable dishes - usually red beans, potatos or spinach. 

Why am I up late into the night, browsing recipes, reading bloggers who have sent me entries and whom I have not yet chanced upon, jumping from their RCI posts to others which catch my fancy, categorizing hoards of recipes, why oh why then ?

And I realize it’s for the love all of them have shown in cooking for an event, for their enthusiasm in trying out something new which might not be to their liking, for their courage in buying unknown spices and giving them a place in their comfortable kitchen, for their effort in digging out authentic recipes and reliving memories.

Sandeepa is hosting RCI bengal and has a round-up of delicious Bengali recipes. Enjoy!

Bikerdude shares fond memories of Nilgiri’s, “the most celebrated cake shop in South India“.

By the time I was old enough to reach the top of the pastry counter, things had changed. The sweet little mountain-bakery had been replaced by Nilgiri’s Supermarket, the biggest ever shop I had ever seen. You could get everything you had ever read in an Enid Blyton there. Marzipans, gingerbread, licorice, cheeses, marshmallows, jellybeans, asparagus, easter eggs- everything. And at the cake shop below: pastries, puffs, pies, minces, pizzas, tarts, eclairs, macaroons- and of course, those slurpily delicious Danish pastries.

Mmm, I miss the “pastries” that were available back in India; I’d give anything for a slice of Birdy’s Chocolate Truffle cake! Pastries in the US means something else entirely - here they refer to flaky, crumbly bakes goods  … what we call “puffs” or “patties” back home I guess!