Just because something works doesn't mean it cannot be improved - Letitia Wright (Shuri) , The Black Panther The iconic Idli has and always will be a signature Indian dish. As a child, I'd watch my mother seat herself in front of the grinding stone (attukal in Tamil) and spend the next couple of hours making two different batters - one with parboiled soaked rice and the other - with hydrated Urad dal. The starch batter usually went first, and was done relatively quick. the next one - with the lentils for some reason, took over an hour. By the time I grew up, the old grinding stone had been replaced with a blender. and my mother would ever so often wax nostalgic about the old stone ground batter and how the blender heated up the batter and made the idlies lumpy instead of the fluffy spongy ones she'd eaten as a child growing up in rural Tamil Nadu. As a teenager I once had the chance to make batter the traditional way and it was one serious workout bu...
I seriously feel like this scene from the movie 3 idiots .. remember this one? The way I kept racking up drafts and eventually stopped doing that as well. Lulled into complacence by the quick high from Instagram posts. Recipe measurements hastily scribbled into a Moleskine notebook faithfully depending upon my moods. The truth is that I keep over thinking the backstories needed to make the post more interesting while in reality the truth is that ideas and inspirations just occur spontaneously (like little itches , sneezes or twitches) whenever the opportunity happens to strike. Some really cool ideas that scare the beejeezus out of me and yet prove to be utterly delightful and simple in the end. Others, that seem so trivial that I feel it wouldn't be worth crowing about -- even if there are enough other recipes in that genre that get so much publicity simply because the author happens to have the right marketing knack. So in the past 4 years that I've been...