Panfusine

Ever heard of this joke? Wife: I bought a spoon today & they gave me a 4 place dinner set for free!! Husband: Really?? that's great.. & how much did the spoon cost? Wife: $ 249.99... Lets face it, all of us have sneaky stories like these that we will never share, (or .. we may brag about it on FB assuming that the ones closest to us will not notice). Well on a foodie note, yesterdays healthy light salad lunch was kind of built up on those lines. I remember an episode of last seasons 'The next food network star' which catapulted Aarti Sequeira to Food network stardom and brought in a much needed Indian influence to the channel, one of the episodes featured a dish which called for pomegranate molasses . Now Indian cuisine puts the hallowed pomegranate to full use in the form of anardaana,  the dried version, and its powdered form, but one seldom sees it being used as a thick syrup in Indian cuisine. OK.. the word molasses conjures up the image of somethi...

Sometimes, all you seek is good ol' vanilla ice cream... or strawberry jam over toast. My other half is convinced that I'm on the path to make my five year old into a chef... he already is a foodie with a sharp sense of taste and aroma. Last friday, he was a very happy boy when I made him this fabulous Feta, pine nut & mint pesto   by coffeefoodwritergirl that was posted on Food52. with a little necessary tweaking , (the Pine nuts that I got were labeled 'chilgoza' from the Indian store, were probably harvested last century, they tasted quite old!, so)  necessity being the mother of invention, and my teensy greed for a spectacularly green pesto, I made do with some handy pistachio. & yes, my pepper grinder was nowhere to be seen either (I suspect, it will surface under the entertainment cabinet tomorrow, courtesy my 2 year old, who seems to be on a mission to transfer the entire contents of my kitchen to the 'green pillow' room (a.k.a the fami...

(Linking this post to the Dec 10th 2011 Terra Madre event hosted by Pritya Books) Memories of my mother making this exquisite snack abound. She'd whip it up as a treat hoping to surprise me after I woke up from my afternoon nap as a child, but somehow the hum from the coffee grinder always ensured that I'd be up & awake to watch her making it., she'd freshly powder the special garbanzo flour, followed by the sugar & cardamom, melt the ghee & simultaneously toast a generous handful of broken cashews as it melted. She would then combine the sugar, flour, cashews and the hot ghee, and immediately scoop up a fistful of the scalding hot mixture to shape into a ball, There would be a momentary wince of pain flashing across her eyes as she laid down this glorious cream colored ping pong ball of pure love on a plate. When I asked her why she had to go through the pain of making it, her answer would always be, "it transfers my love ont...

I had made this pie last year during thanksgiving, but it never saw the light of day on this blog, Well, what better time than the 4th of July!  Thanks Ria Mary Matthew & Shauna Ahern for this fabulous opportunity to be a part of the 'Pie Party' event. The term apple pie tends to elicit memories of the Cooks Source plagiarism brouhaha from last year & not very positive ones at that. The take home message of that incident is that, irrespective of the simplicity of any recipe that may be posted on the blogosphere & elsewhere, it seems just the right thing & way more simpler to give credit where due. This is my very first foray into baking from scratch, I've tried making pies with puff pastry & graham cracker crusts, but one really does not get complete satisfaction knowing that there was a component in your dish that you've no clue about. & at the end of the day, while I made up a batch of pie dough I had to scrap the idea of...